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The answer to this is sports. War is competition through violence. When you remove the violence you get peaceful competition. It satisfies the tribal urge to fight things different than you, but also encourages healthy behaviors. Respect for your opponent. Accepting loss. Recognizing your weaknesses and working to improve them.
I've always thought of Wall Street and what goes on there to be our substitute for war.
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| It's an aberration. It's common enough to disprove the statement "Human nature is inherently violent". It shows that understanding humanity is simply too complex to boil down to pat remarks like that. | I'm not actually aware Anthropology has documented plenty. The Kung! come to mind. And this is not the early-days "noble savage" anthropology, the perspective that there have been many civilizations that operate thr…
> It's common enough to disprove the statement "Human nature is inherently violent". It shows that understanding humanity is simply too complex to boil down to pat remarks like that. If we accept every aberration as disproving human nature, then there is no such thing as human nature. There are exceptions to any possible definition of it. Suicide disproves self-preservation, childless adults disprove reproduction, la…
At this point, it's not worth continuing the conversation here. You'd be best served engaging with anthropological sources themselves since your perspective has been well addressed by the field. "Humankind: A Hopeful History" by Rutger Bregman was suggested below. I haven't read it myself, but I've heard good things and it's sources might serve as a good jumping-off point. "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" by David Graeber I have read and it is a light read and works well as a starting point, despite it's issues.
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I don't understand why that's toxic. Striving, struggle, and violence are critical for any living thing to survive. Short of reaching post-scarcity, this can't change. If we define toxic as harmful, then violence is the opposite. It's the only reason we have civilization.
Cooperation, not violence, is the reason for civilization.
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I'm with you in the abstract, but where I live there's toxic culture around sports that made it unpalatable for me as a kid. Back then what turned me off was belligerent parents on the sidelines yelling at the children, but the symptoms actually go way beyond that one little thing. (Conflating excellence with dominance is another example.)
I have noticed team sports tend to be vastly more toxic than solo sports. Climbing for example has a wildly different atmosphere. Just listen to the crowd in this or read the YouTube comments, people are supportive when several women have disappointing results. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfhGW6Bwyks People will complain about the route setting or camerawork not the athletes, that’s a shocking amount of empathy I…
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A big part of early 20th-c. sociology was specifically concerned with their equivalent of "elite overproduction". The problem as they saw it was not so much "losers" in anything like an objective sense, but aspiring elites who viewed themselves as oppressed losers out of a misguided sense of entitlement.
> aspiring elites who viewed themselves as oppressed losers out of a misguided sense of entitlement. Yep, sounds like the disaffected white males who kill others or themselves in droves, despite often having better conditions than (less aspirant/entitled) non-white males.
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Do people regularly mass murder each other over sports? Because that's the stakes we're talking about here in context. Brawling and screaming over a sport is much preferred to bombing and poisoning.
No (though it does happen, see Constantinople's chariot teams). But expansionist and militaristic societies are often obsessed with sport, for example imperial Britain, Germany at the 1936 Olympics, and arguably the modern US.
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The answer to this is sports. War is competition through violence. When you remove the violence you get peaceful competition. It satisfies the tribal urge to fight things different than you, but also encourages healthy behaviors. Respect for your opponent. Accepting loss. Recognizing your weaknesses and working to improve them.
> The answer to this is sports. War is competition through violence. Absolutely not. Sports is competition through violence, as well. Watch a game of American football, or ice hockey, or basketball for that matter and be able to say otherwise with a straight face. The answer is cooperative, not competitive, activities.
Orwell omitted a few details: Hitler never had a majority in the Reichstag/german parliament - he benefited from the enmity between the Social democrats and the Communist. I mean a popular front, like in France of 1936 would have stopped them. The German soial dems and communist were mortal enemies, because the social dems shot a lot of communists in the aftermath of the Kapp putsch. Also Hitler had the massive suppo…
I think that if you want to attack legitimacy of that election, going through the street violence and voter intimidation Nazi party produced is closer to mark.
Also communists were actual communists alien with Russian communist party. And news of purges going on Russia previously were available in Germany. Socialist party was the pro-democracy party on Germany. That is not compatible with party that takes their instructions from Stalin as communists were.
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> Humans are not peaceful by nature I also believed this until recently when I finished reading "Humankind: A Hopeful History" by Rutger Bregman. What an amazing book ... Bregman analyzes why we commonly believe that humans are not peaceful and that this assumption turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy. But there is surprisingly little evidence that being aggressive or violent is in our nature, pretty much the opposi…
I mean peaceful societies only exist because of the threat of violence to anyone who attacks them.