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Yes—evidence, not interpretation. I do not deny history. I merely dispute the conclusions you draw from it.

I have never disputed this. In fact, I have confirmed it several times. But just because war is always a possibility does not mean that war is the defining feature of human existence.

Just over 100 years ago, it was foolish to think people could fly, or that women could vote, or that you and I could argue about war over the internet. What is foolish is to imagine that we understand all that’s possible for humanity—especially when 95%of our history is largely unknown to us.

Once again, I have never disputed the need for basic readiness. That doesn’t mean we can’t prevent war in other ways.

SOME men crave war. Not all, or even most men.

A small group of intelligent, ambitious, and brutal people can most certainly fool or intimidate a large number of others into obedience. But a tyrant isn’t always needed—sometimes mere groupthink can be the problem. There’s no magic to it in either case; it’s just social inertia.

Most people want to get along—so much so that the famous Milgram and Zimbardo experiments showed how most people will even act against their own better judgement (perhaps brutally) simply to preserve their social connections. Society is so important to us that it sometimes overrides our morals—but the key factor here is that we try to preserve good social relations, even if we fail when one social concern conflicts with another.

A tyrant can certainly take advantage of this; but even well-meaning people can instigate all kinds of strife simply because they were in power and made an error in judgement—it can become an “emperor has no clothes” scenario. Power structures make us stupid.

But none of this means people are naturally bloodthirsty.

All it takes is one anomaly to disprove the absolute claim that humanity is inherently selfish & brutal, and I have provided several “anomalies” from both outside and within Western culture.

The article you linked disagrees with you: “!Kung women provide the majority of the food, spending two to three days a week foraging.” Richard Lee places the figure at about 3 hours a day, which works out to roughly the same thing. That’s considerably less than we spend engaged in subsistence activity in North America. And the !Kung ate a much better diet than us, too. This does not mean life was always easy. Their environment was indeed hostile, but they knew how to stay in balance with it and lived reasonably well. They had plenty of time to fight if they’d wanted to, but they spent most of their time building and maintaining social relationships instead.

The idea that they literally spent all their time simply trying to survive is just not true.

Isn’t it interesting that in conditions of such scarcity, people are the most hospitable and least competitive with each other. The complete opposite of traditional Western economic thinking, but there you have it.

The facts, as outlined above, simply do not support that conclusion.

Here, take a look at this site on the anthropology of Warfare

You’ll note at the top it says: “Many behavioral scientists are convinced that people are by nature aggressive animals,” in support of your argument. However, later on it also says “Warfare as defined here is not universal. It mostly occurs between large-scale farming or industrial societies.”

So, while I do not dispute that aggressive behaviour is certainly part of the human condition, I indeed deny that it is the primary or defining feature of humanity; or that it cannot be overcome to a very large degree (and without reliance on tyrannical forms of social control). Warfare is as much a product of how we organize ourselves as anything else. Some social systems favour aggression, and others do not.

The reason the !Kung and Aborigines could overcome it was because they recognized the finite nature of their world, and that conflict endangered their survival. Now, at the dawn of the 21st century, the entire species can recognize the finite nature of the world and take conscious steps to avoiding future conflicts.

You might argue that this is not possible. I claim that it is. I’ll go further, too—because if you are right, and we can’t overcome our aggressive tendencies (regardless of whether or not they are primary), then we’re all pretty much screwed—because our military and economic conflicts are rapidly destroying the ecosystem we depend on.

Anyway, check out the rest of the site, too; you may find some surprising information. The main site is Here, and there’s good articles on Non-state economies and State Societies, too.

No, the reason both systems work better than a feudal or communist system is that both capitalism and representative democracy allow people to make a few of their own decisions; allowing the system to be much more responsive to changing conditions; not because they’ve stumbled on any great insight into the human condition.

It is a feedback system, which is why it works, but it’s a feedback system that works in the wrong direction—it concentrates power instead of distributing it. This will be it’s undoing unless it is changed, because if power and wealth get too concentrated, the system will become rigid again (just like a feudal or communist system).

Capitalism assumes that man is essentially greedy, based on the wholly unscientific views of a few 18th and 19th century social commentators. These views have been adjusted slightly in more recent times, but the basic arguments about human rationality, scarcity, and competition remain intact. Modern economists, applying statistical methods to test these theories could not help but have them proven correct—society had already been living according to those theories for over a century!

Even still, more recent work, such as Daniel Kahneman’s studies of rationality and choice, indicate that human reasoning does not work at all the way economists have always assumed they did, except in very unusual conditions (such as when they retrain themselves after hearing from economists that this is how they’re supposed to function).

Some competition is undoubtedly a good thing. But a society founded on it, to the exclusion of all other tendencies, will grind itself into the dust in a perpetual arms race—which is just what we’re doing.

If man is naturally greedy, then capitalism is indeed the best way to mitigate it. But if man is not naturally greedy, then all capitalism does is keep us chained to greed. In order to succeed in the system, everyone must behave in a greedy way, even if many or most people’s natural inclinations may be different.

The system actually reinforces greed. It makes itself true. This says nothing of our capacity to live in other ways.

There’s a difference between recognizing a “will to power” and realizing that power itself should never be concentrated. Even a well-meaning and generous person can cause serious harm if they have too much power. That doesn’t mean we all crave power, it just means that power itself can be troublesome.

No it doesn’t. The vast majority of wealth is still concentrated in a very small number of hands. All it has done is transform a feudal system in which the weak & poor were directly oppressed by the wealthy & powerful into a slightly more palatable situation. No one is a slave any more, but the invisible hand does tend to limit a lot of people’s options. It is still a system that concentrates wealth.

You are positing capitalism as an optimal system; making it utopian. Once you say one system is better than another, you’re talking about a utopia. Capitalism IS more flexible than other systems; but it still remains quite rigid in certain ways, limiting our potential. The world is imperfect, but it isn’t broken unless we think it is.

I believe in democracy. But I do not believe capitalism is the optimal economic system to go with it. It may have been a necessary stage in leaving feudalism behind, but now it is time for it to develop into something new.

> It is likewise fallacious to throw out history based on certain attitudes that have existed throughout that history.
You’re saying, in short, that because the past is not a perfect predictor of the future we should cast aside the whole endeavor.

I did not suggest we throw out history. I simply suggest that we need not repeat it (or at least, not so often).

Exactly my point. The view that “man is essentially selfish and brutal” does not invalidate other possibilities—particularly when further scientific inquiry calls that view into question.

If you want to talk science; from a scientific perspective, historical evidence is entirely anecdotal, and therefore the weakest possible kind of evidence. This is particularly true when making sweeping generalizations about human nature itself. Even psychologists are extremely hesitant to make such claims, and they’ve studied people very closely, under controlled conditions using rigorous statistical and experimental methods.

History can make no such claims to scientific rigor. All it can tell us is that certain events occurred, and suggest that they may occur again. It can’t tell us much about why, and to generalize those events to absolute claims about human psychology is not at all scientific.

The world is not fallen. The sooner we recognize that, the sooner we can get on with really living. Life is never perfect. That doesn’t make us all brutish and nasty, doomed to suffer under the yoke of our own aggression.

I find it interesting that you seem not to have thought about the question: “Why did Jesus catch on?” but immediately jumped to conclusions about my motivations for asking the question.

I never said he did. Why do you continually react to things I did not say? However, Jesus did preach brotherhood and generosity. And for some reason, people liked that idea and figured it was possible, otherwise they’d never have followed him.

These are questions for a whole other discussion. Personally, I figure it like this: Goodness can come from outside or from within—and in fact is a kind of feedback between the two. To put it in Christian terms: God offers us grace, but also helps those who help themselves. Why would he give us paradise if we have not learned how to keep from destroying it? Whatever fate awaits us, it seems to me that believing in and trying to create a better world is far preferable to embracing the nasty and brutish parts of our natures and simply hoping for deliverance. God wants us to grow up, not give up. But that’s only my own take on it. I certainly have no evidence for this.

We’re talking about a whole way of life and the fundamental assumptions it is based on, so it’s not surprising that it’s a huge and troublesome debate.

I have stated several times that I believe readiness for war is necessary and prudent. The argument lies how and why this can be accomplished.

To “secure” peace is to create war. Peace can be cultivated, and occasionally, defended—but attempts to guarantee it are often what leads to war in the first place. It’s important to be ready in case you’re attacked, but if you’re always expecting attack, you’ll never see peace when it’s staring you in the face. You certainly won’t feel at peace.

It’s like a glass of muddy water. You can’t get the water to go clear by stirring it more. We can never have peace if we assume we’re naturally brutal with no hope of change. Such a thing dooms us all to a horrible self-esteem problem that can only force us to be even more nasty and brutal.

It would be equally silly to assume man is always kind and friendly, holding hands in the garden of peace with rainbows shooting out our asses while the benevolent vampire kings kindly look on and protect us… which, for whatever reason of your own, is what you seem to think I am saying. But I am not.

We can only have peace by realizing that humanity is many things—sometimes brutal, sometimes extremely generous… this frees us up to decide which one we want to be and work toward that goal.

Markmcb put it right in the “philosophical attempt” thread:

The point of my argument is: assume nothing. Man is neither good nor evil, but some mixture of the two—and the balance of that mixture is largely within our control if only we’d stop viewing ourselves so fatalistically.