War and Human Nature

There is an current academic debate about this:https://medium.com/bull-market/violent-warfare-is-on-the-wan...

You're assuming that war is the only way humans can hurt each other at large scale.

Yes the world has been brutal and violent for a long time. Fortunately there has been a trend towards less violence per capita over time. To me suggesting that we should regress in this dimension in order to deal with the problems being generated by the current economic and political system seems completely unacceptable. I think as long as all labor can be automated and we as a society do not try to keep humans alive, power will just keep concentrating in the hands of fewer and fewer regardless

War and conflict and the resulting devastation is part of human nature, as it has been for all of our species' history. Why would you expect that to have changed in the last 20 years?

More fundamentally, I tend to roll my eyes at anyone who blames our wars on one simple thing. Humans have been fighting and killing since there was more than one of us. Only the rationalizations, tools, and scale have changed.

Perhaps, but a more optimistic read might be that we are a violent species slowly learning to restrain that tendency. Many primitive societies lived in a state of more or less continual war; today war is the exception rather than the rule. Certain types of wars, like wars of conquest and wars of genocide, are much less common today than they once were. Concepts like "war crimes" have emerged to restrict battlefield behaviors that a thousand years ago would have been considered unremark

Mankind's natural resting state is peace, not violence. The extreme majority of all humans throughout history have been peaceful, not violent 'savages.' Violence by any given individual person against another is the extreme outlier, not the common.Historically death from war is the result of a very small percentage of the global population acting violently. It is not the result of a majority of people acting violently.Simple proof: what percentage of the world population bel

> War is deeply in human nature, it is not going awayThis is:* Not a consensus view* Impossible to prove with regard to the future nature of humanity* Not the working assumption for those of us innovating around peacetime tech

War, or use of force to take or defend territory, is part of human nature. You cannot look at history and deny this. There is nothing fundamentally different about humans in "this day and age" than there was 100 or 1,000 years ago.

There are fewer wars than there used to be. The percentage of the population for whom violence is not a regular part of daily life is much greater than it has been for most of history. OTOH, when violence does happen, the weapons available are far greater, able to cause far more death and destruction, than in the past.