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Totally agree. Have you ever seen the movie The Imitation Game? There's a great quote from Turing's character when he is talking about being picked on and bea

Totally agree. Have you ever seen the movie The Imitation Game? There's a great quote from Turing's character when he is talking about being picked on and beaten up by bullies at school - "Do you know why people like violence? It is because it feels good. Humans find violence deeply satisfying" It's that simple, really. It is in our nature, just like sex. We like it. It feels good. The only reason we try to eschew and condemn such violence in modern society is because it is in our best interests and more productive to society as a whole to not be like that. No other reason. If we all lived in fear and were huddled in our homes in small communities we wouldn't have even half the modern luxuries we do today. Plus, on the larger scale, if it's war you are talking about - well, they cost a lot of money/resources. So they are tough to maintain for the long haul without noticeable economic harm. People like to say that love is stronger than anger and hate. I have always disagreed. Hate and anger run deeper than most imagine. And they motivate people like nothing else in this world, except perhaps fear. The one and only reason people aren't butchering each other in the streets is because we have figured out a way that we can all survive. If that were to crumble, you can be damn sure society would look a lot closer to The Walking Dead or Children of Men than Star Trek.

foolrush 10y ago
> It's that simple, really. It is in our nature, just like sex. We like it. It feels good. See antihumanism. “For Althusser, Marx viewed the human individual as a product of society. His or her beliefs, desires, preferences, judgements are inculcated in him/her by society and its ideological, political and economic practices. A person's view of him-/herself as a subject whose actions can be explained by his or her beliefs and thought is not innate; rather the role of a subject is imposed upon him or her by society and its ideologies.”[1] [1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Antihumanism http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Antihumanism
ooqr 10y ago
Fear is the emotion which most leads us from our own control.
namaemuta 10y ago
> "Do you know why people like violence? It is because it feels good. Humans find violence deeply satisfying" That's an incredibly simplification of what originates violence. People can become violent because of their frustration towards something and their lack of tools to manage their emotions, because of their past and what they have been taught, as an easy way to subjugate most of the people...
- qntty 10y ago
  I remember reading something by John Searle about how the means that people have of expressing themselves will determine what they express. If you don't give people good alternative ways of expressing anger, what can you expect them to do really?
eeeuiyyy 10y ago
I'm a grown-up man and I've never played a violent game and I still look away from violent scenes in movies and tv. I've been exposed to some very violent imagery by accident in movies and I didn't like it and I didn't want to see it ever again. Is it genetic ? Is it because I was raised a Christian and only allowed to watch tv after the age of 8 ? I'm atheist now, but maybe my Christian upbringing was a factor. Or maybe my parents were Christians because they genetically don't like violence. None of my friends like violence either. They're all really nice people with kind loving hearts. And it's not like I was born seething with violent imagery in my growing mind and had to be taught it was bad and not to be violent. I never had any bad thoughts about other kids. I did bad things like lying and stealing but never violence. Just saying, there are many people who don't think violent thoughts, don't want to do anything nasty, who are nice people who don't need laws to stop them from doing things.
- internaut 10y ago
  Christianity is a mixed bag. Had Roman and Greek values triumphed we might be in a better world. Perhaps we wouldn't have needed monks on lonely islands copying ancient texts had we not had a Dark Age. > There are many people who don't think violent thoughts, don't want to do anything nasty, who are nice people who don't need laws to stop them from doing things. And you shall curse those same people as weak if the enemy comes to town to slaughter everybody. As you would also were the Army to round up members of your faith for the deathcamps. Surely you see the irony of a powerful God ruling the Earth being a necessity in order for the meek to inherit it.
ewzimm 10y ago
I think you might misunderstand just how love is stronger than anger and hate. Love is reinforced by interaction with all types of others. Anger and hate can be socially reinforced but usually at most tribally against another group. It has a more limited virality because eventually it hits a limit. Feelings are heavily interpreted. Some people find sexual stimulation painful, not just physically, but emotionally. In the end, all feelings exist as an interpretation inside the mind, and we know for sure that we can reinforce them through conditioning and other methods so that the full stack of causes which might initially cause a feeling aren't necessary to recreate it. Just a scent or a memory can be enough to evoke the full force of an emotion. Violence isn't enjoyable for everyone, even simulated in movies or games. For a lot of people, putting it inside a safe context is a way to address something terrible and cope with the realities of violence, what causes it, and even find some common ground to empathize with the people who choose violence in real life. Love is stronger than violence because we've seen the benefits and chosen to make it stronger. It's infinitely reinforcable and non-destructive. A system built around love can survive better than a system built on hate. As thinking beings, we don't just reactively respond to emotion. We build reinforcement systems into family, friends, culture, work, play and more, and all of these systems feed back into our behavior. Feeling good is just the beginning.
- vkou 10y ago
  Anger and hate is socially reinforced just fine inside a group - no tribalism is required. Just look at the cycle of physical and emotional abuse in any broken household.
  - ewzimm 10y ago
    Yes, it's reinforced at small scales too. I said usually it's reinforced at most tribally against another group, meaning that this is about the largest scale you can take anger and hatred as a social force. At that point, you're on the edge of war. These kinds of emotions can be very easy to exploit to build a movement, and they scale very quickly, but at some scale, they inevitably sabotage the cause and turn it against itself. Building a movement based on love and empathy does not hit these same limits.
77pt77 10y ago
>It's that simple, really. It is in our nature, just like sex Actually sex, violence and dominance are intimately connected. More so than most people would like to admit.
Noos 10y ago
No. If anything you have to radically desensitize the average person to be even able to commit violence, and in general when they can, people flee it. The whole point of boot camp and military training is to make sure the individual recruit is dehumanized enough and identified with the unit enough to be able to commit violence as needed. Even then, desertion usually is epidemic in non-volunteer armies, and even in volunteer ones. And if violence is so good, we wouldn't see so many soldiers or police officers suffering from severe psychological trauma over committing it. The issue with the kinds of pagan societies described in the article is that the society has successful and mass dehumanization programs in place for their elite. They select for people to commit violence and encourage people to dehumanize the act through their religious grounding. It doesn't have to be religious...gangs can create dehumanization, or secular ideology. But in general people really are peaceable, and societies like the Mexica tend to be aberrations over the long term.
noobermin 10y ago
If it "[i]s in our nature, just like sex" then why wouldn't violence be in our best interest? Why wouldn't we be more productive just doing what we want? If it really is our nature, then how is our "modern luxur[y]?" It has been established that while violence is the human condition, altruism also has an evolutionary origin[0]. I feel like the "sweet water/bitter water" dichotomy that the Christian tradition left us[1] has been so damaging because it has formed this perspective that we can only be bad and we can only be good, rather than we can be both. I do believe some people might have different tendencies than others and some may be prone to violence or prone to love but to assume your inclinations extend to everyone else is stupid. [0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/prefrontal-nudity/201307/the-origin-altruism https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/prefrontal-nudity/20130... [1] http://biblehub.com/james/3-11.htm http://biblehub.com/james/3-11.htm
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- projektir 10y ago
  Because our best interest is not the same as evolution's interest. We, or, at least, some of us, have figured out, after a long time, that violence is not a good thing. But violence is what evolution runs on, because it wants the weak to die and the strong to reproduce. Altruism happened because groups of people ended up stronger than individual people, so there needed to be mechanisms to override violence impulses to enable groups. But the groups of people were still supposed to kill each other over and over to make stronger groups of people. The altruism is not universal. Hence all the ingroup biases. And much of that still remains to this day. All of us are violent directly or by proxy towards animals. Even if people are not violent, many are mean, they create pecking orders, they measure status, they compete, etc. They are executing adaptations developed to categorize people or groups of people as "should not be selected". The old programming is still there. Except our combination of intelligence, empathy, sympathy, altruism, and strength "backfired" and resulted in us slowly deciding, for ourselves, that maybe we don't want to live like that. I believe Christianity was designed to oppose this programming (original sin), but it's a 2k old religion, what do you expect? So much has changed since then, our methods in many places got better; Christianity is out of date and has too many dependencies. I also don't think your characterization is fair, anyway. Christianity doesn't say we can only be bad or only good, it says that goodness demands complete purity, and through that, it says we're all bad, due to an influence inside of us, as well as an influence outside. While there are people more prone to violence and those more prone to love, there's nobody completely free from the programming or the situation.
otakucode 10y ago
Modern research suggests that you are utterly wrong when it comes to violence. Violence damages people (those who commit it I mean), and they have many built-in impediments to it. Military training is not simple. It is difficult to take an average person and make them willing to kill. Ability isn't the sticking point, humans are really quite easy to kill, we're pretty fragile. One big reason people aren't butchering each other in the streets is because those who butcher, by and large, are crippled by the trauma of it. Having a rational justification for violence (protecting ones self, protecting ones family, protecting ones nation) does nothing to assuage the deep-rooted trauma that inflicting violence on another human being causes. PTSD is a neurological malady, not a psychological one.
vmorgulis 10y ago
> People like to say that love is stronger than anger and hate. I have always disagreed. Because we are 7 billions. A least, we have enough love to take care of the children.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
rokhayakebe 10y ago
It's that simple, really. It is in our nature, just like sex. We like it. It feels good. Untrue. Whatever humans do has a purpose. If this was in our nature, men will kill and leave their victim behind and move on to the next target. However what we've observed over thousands of years is different. Men kill for a purpose, be it land, safety, women, rain, or whatever idiotic reason. Where men saw no purpose for killing, they did not. Therefore it is not part of our nature just like sex. If you leave one man and one woman together for enough time, they will have sex together. If you left two men together most likely they will cooperate and not kill each other. What's more. If it were in our nature to kill one another, then it would have been a trait shared with women as well. So far it appears Male are more likely to shed blood.

foolrush 10y ago

> It's that simple, really. It is in our nature, just like sex. We like it. It feels good. See antihumanism. “For Althusser, Marx viewed the human individual as a product of society. His or her beliefs, desires, preferences, judgements are inculcated in him/her by society and its ideological, political and economic practices. A person's view of him-/herself as a subject whose actions can be explained by his or her beliefs and thought is not innate; rather the role of a subject is imposed upon him or her by society and its ideologies.”[1] [1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Antihumanism http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Antihumanism

ooqr 10y ago

Fear is the emotion which most leads us from our own control.

namaemuta 10y ago

> "Do you know why people like violence? It is because it feels good. Humans find violence deeply satisfying" That's an incredibly simplification of what originates violence. People can become violent because of their frustration towards something and their lack of tools to manage their emotions, because of their past and what they have been taught, as an easy way to subjugate most of the people...

qntty 10y ago
I remember reading something by John Searle about how the means that people have of expressing themselves will determine what they express. If you don't give people good alternative ways of expressing anger, what can you expect them to do really?

eeeuiyyy 10y ago

I'm a grown-up man and I've never played a violent game and I still look away from violent scenes in movies and tv. I've been exposed to some very violent imagery by accident in movies and I didn't like it and I didn't want to see it ever again. Is it genetic ? Is it because I was raised a Christian and only allowed to watch tv after the age of 8 ? I'm atheist now, but maybe my Christian upbringing was a factor. Or maybe my parents were Christians because they genetically don't like violence. None of my friends like violence either. They're all really nice people with kind loving hearts. And it's not like I was born seething with violent imagery in my growing mind and had to be taught it was bad and not to be violent. I never had any bad thoughts about other kids. I did bad things like lying and stealing but never violence. Just saying, there are many people who don't think violent thoughts, don't want to do anything nasty, who are nice people who don't need laws to stop them from doing things.

internaut 10y ago
Christianity is a mixed bag. Had Roman and Greek values triumphed we might be in a better world. Perhaps we wouldn't have needed monks on lonely islands copying ancient texts had we not had a Dark Age. > There are many people who don't think violent thoughts, don't want to do anything nasty, who are nice people who don't need laws to stop them from doing things. And you shall curse those same people as weak if the enemy comes to town to slaughter everybody. As you would also were the Army to round up members of your faith for the deathcamps. Surely you see the irony of a powerful God ruling the Earth being a necessity in order for the meek to inherit it.

ewzimm 10y ago

I think you might misunderstand just how love is stronger than anger and hate. Love is reinforced by interaction with all types of others. Anger and hate can be socially reinforced but usually at most tribally against another group. It has a more limited virality because eventually it hits a limit. Feelings are heavily interpreted. Some people find sexual stimulation painful, not just physically, but emotionally. In the end, all feelings exist as an interpretation inside the mind, and we know for sure that we can reinforce them through conditioning and other methods so that the full stack of causes which might initially cause a feeling aren't necessary to recreate it. Just a scent or a memory can be enough to evoke the full force of an emotion. Violence isn't enjoyable for everyone, even simulated in movies or games. For a lot of people, putting it inside a safe context is a way to address something terrible and cope with the realities of violence, what causes it, and even find some common ground to empathize with the people who choose violence in real life. Love is stronger than violence because we've seen the benefits and chosen to make it stronger. It's infinitely reinforcable and non-destructive. A system built around love can survive better than a system built on hate. As thinking beings, we don't just reactively respond to emotion. We build reinforcement systems into family, friends, culture, work, play and more, and all of these systems feed back into our behavior. Feeling good is just the beginning.

vkou 10y ago
Anger and hate is socially reinforced just fine inside a group - no tribalism is required. Just look at the cycle of physical and emotional abuse in any broken household.
- ewzimm 10y ago
  Yes, it's reinforced at small scales too. I said usually it's reinforced at most tribally against another group, meaning that this is about the largest scale you can take anger and hatred as a social force. At that point, you're on the edge of war. These kinds of emotions can be very easy to exploit to build a movement, and they scale very quickly, but at some scale, they inevitably sabotage the cause and turn it against itself. Building a movement based on love and empathy does not hit these same limits.

77pt77 10y ago

>It's that simple, really. It is in our nature, just like sex Actually sex, violence and dominance are intimately connected. More so than most people would like to admit.

Noos 10y ago

No. If anything you have to radically desensitize the average person to be even able to commit violence, and in general when they can, people flee it. The whole point of boot camp and military training is to make sure the individual recruit is dehumanized enough and identified with the unit enough to be able to commit violence as needed. Even then, desertion usually is epidemic in non-volunteer armies, and even in volunteer ones. And if violence is so good, we wouldn't see so many soldiers or police officers suffering from severe psychological trauma over committing it. The issue with the kinds of pagan societies described in the article is that the society has successful and mass dehumanization programs in place for their elite. They select for people to commit violence and encourage people to dehumanize the act through their religious grounding. It doesn't have to be religious...gangs can create dehumanization, or secular ideology. But in general people really are peaceable, and societies like the Mexica tend to be aberrations over the long term.

noobermin 10y ago

If it "[i]s in our nature, just like sex" then why wouldn't violence be in our best interest? Why wouldn't we be more productive just doing what we want? If it really is our nature, then how is our "modern luxur[y]?" It has been established that while violence is the human condition, altruism also has an evolutionary origin[0]. I feel like the "sweet water/bitter water" dichotomy that the Christian tradition left us[1] has been so damaging because it has formed this perspective that we can only be bad and we can only be good, rather than we can be both. I do believe some people might have different tendencies than others and some may be prone to violence or prone to love but to assume your inclinations extend to everyone else is stupid. [0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/prefrontal-nudity/201307/the-origin-altruism https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/prefrontal-nudity/20130... [1] http://biblehub.com/james/3-11.htm http://biblehub.com/james/3-11.htm

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
projektir 10y ago
Because our best interest is not the same as evolution's interest. We, or, at least, some of us, have figured out, after a long time, that violence is not a good thing. But violence is what evolution runs on, because it wants the weak to die and the strong to reproduce. Altruism happened because groups of people ended up stronger than individual people, so there needed to be mechanisms to override violence impulses to enable groups. But the groups of people were still supposed to kill each other over and over to make stronger groups of people. The altruism is not universal. Hence all the ingroup biases. And much of that still remains to this day. All of us are violent directly or by proxy towards animals. Even if people are not violent, many are mean, they create pecking orders, they measure status, they compete, etc. They are executing adaptations developed to categorize people or groups of people as "should not be selected". The old programming is still there. Except our combination of intelligence, empathy, sympathy, altruism, and strength "backfired" and resulted in us slowly deciding, for ourselves, that maybe we don't want to live like that. I believe Christianity was designed to oppose this programming (original sin), but it's a 2k old religion, what do you expect? So much has changed since then, our methods in many places got better; Christianity is out of date and has too many dependencies. I also don't think your characterization is fair, anyway. Christianity doesn't say we can only be bad or only good, it says that goodness demands complete purity, and through that, it says we're all bad, due to an influence inside of us, as well as an influence outside. While there are people more prone to violence and those more prone to love, there's nobody completely free from the programming or the situation.

otakucode 10y ago

Modern research suggests that you are utterly wrong when it comes to violence. Violence damages people (those who commit it I mean), and they have many built-in impediments to it. Military training is not simple. It is difficult to take an average person and make them willing to kill. Ability isn't the sticking point, humans are really quite easy to kill, we're pretty fragile. One big reason people aren't butchering each other in the streets is because those who butcher, by and large, are crippled by the trauma of it. Having a rational justification for violence (protecting ones self, protecting ones family, protecting ones nation) does nothing to assuage the deep-rooted trauma that inflicting violence on another human being causes. PTSD is a neurological malady, not a psychological one.

vmorgulis 10y ago

> People like to say that love is stronger than anger and hate. I have always disagreed. Because we are 7 billions. A least, we have enough love to take care of the children.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

rokhayakebe 10y ago

It's that simple, really. It is in our nature, just like sex. We like it. It feels good. Untrue. Whatever humans do has a purpose. If this was in our nature, men will kill and leave their victim behind and move on to the next target. However what we've observed over thousands of years is different. Men kill for a purpose, be it land, safety, women, rain, or whatever idiotic reason. Where men saw no purpose for killing, they did not. Therefore it is not part of our nature just like sex. If you leave one man and one woman together for enough time, they will have sex together. If you left two men together most likely they will cooperate and not kill each other. What's more. If it were in our nature to kill one another, then it would have been a trait shared with women as well. So far it appears Male are more likely to shed blood.