> The general thesis still holds: man is not truly content without conflict and challenge. Well, a reader of fiction is not truly content without conflict and

> The general thesis still holds: man is not truly content without conflict and challenge. Well, a reader of fiction is not truly content without conflict and challenge. But I’m not sure it’s fair to extrapolate from that to a principle about how real societies can operate. After all, fiction always pumps conflict and challenge up to 11 compared to the real world. Pick a popular book or movie at random: what’s the chance that somewhere in its plot, some character tries to murder another character? I’d say pretty high. In real life, the vast majority of people go through their lives without anyone ever trying to kill them, and that’s probably been true for most or all of human history. But that doesn’t make life incurably boring.