Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm fascinated by both how far humans have come, and how peaceful we've become. If you told an ancient human about, say, genocide, do you think they even be capable of reactions as cold as, say, these: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18102401 ? We live in a world were wars of aggression are still sanctified, and phrases like "fun sized terrorist" are still invented. Playing nice with murderers is not peaceful,…
You mean the same ancient humans that forced their slaves to become gladiators so that their populations could fill their lust for blood, the same ancient humans that viciously persecuted those who refused to worship their emperor as a god, the same ancient humans that would capture religious minorities, cover them in oil, and line them up along the roads to burn? Humans both ancient and modern are not peaceful creat…
I was thinking more along the lines of hunters and gatherers. Ancient Humans, not Ancient Romans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator
I know you can find loads of cruel things elsewhere, too. Can you find them before cities?
And even for Ancient Romans I wouldn't be so sure, they kinda prided themselves in arguing coherently. Even just changing the subject like that, whether from genocide or not, doesn't strike me as something the super legalistic and literal Romans would have been so prone to do. And at any rate, they're much, much closer to us than to ancient humans.
> so that their populations could fill their lust for blood
There is no such thing as an inherent lust for blood. This kinda sounds like Freud's drive to death and all that.
> the same ancient humans that would capture religious minorities, cover them in oil, and line them up along the roads to burn
Napalm.. Agent Orange.. depleted uranium.. not even to punish for something they considered sacrilege, but just to get rid of people.
> Humans both ancient and modern are not peaceful creatures
I'm not talking about peaceful, I'm talking about sadism and cruelty and greed for their own sake, and about being numbed to it. If you say humans have a lust for blood, that doesn't convince me at all, but it's proof positive that in 2019 (not still, since hundreds of thousands of years, but by now, since a few ten thousand maybe) we live in a world where that claim goes mostly uncontested.
In my books, very sick people have a lust for blood because they need to destroy persons, because they haven't developed into a person. Other people probably have stuff like, for example, a desire for vengeance that gets created alongside the crime to be avenged, or a strong desire to push back when they are threatened, which gets created when they are threatened, but doesn't exist before or after. But just some kind of lingering dark thing that needs to be fed, some spooky "lust for blood"? I doubt you can find that without a form of abuse being somewhere in the equation, systematic or otherwise.
> [Humans] have been genetically programmed through hunting behavior: cooperation and sharing. Cooperation between members of the same band was a practical necessity for most hunting societies; so was the sharing of food. Since meat is perishable in most climates except that of the Arctic, it could not be preserved. Luck in hunting was not equally divided among all hunters; hence the practical outcome was that those who had luck today would share their food with those who would be lucky tomorrow. Assuming hunting behavior led to genetic changes, the conclusion would be that modern man has an innate impulse for cooperation and sharing, rather than for killing and cruelty.
-- Erich Fromm, "The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness"