To be perfectly clear, I am not in any way intending to advocate for the position that we should feel catharsis from injuring or killing people. But it's there

To be perfectly clear, I am not in any way intending to advocate for the position that we should feel catharsis from injuring or killing people. But it's there. We are all descended from violent predators that got by in the world by killing other animals. A lot of people still do that for sport. Even just with human sport, perhaps you've never played a contact or combat sport where you directly hit other people. Whether or not it's right that it should be this way, I can assure you that it feels really good. I used to be a tank commander, and I guess I was lucky as hell to never have to kill someone myself, but I'll never quite forget my first commander at the armor school who would get us pumped up talking about when he graduated, he'd gone straight to Ramadi to replace a platoon leader who'd just been killed in action and how it made his dick hard to think about blowing up hospitals. The man was an absolute psychopath, but there is no denying a lot of people like that exist. The commander of my lead 2 tank had once shredded a man with a .50 cal from less than a hundred feet away and found it the most addictive thing he'd ever done. As the war started to wind down and normal units no longer got real combat assignments, he was determined to move into the Special Forces to stay in the game. That guy was never going to be normal again. Whether it is sports, actual combat, sexual dominance and sado-masochism, or even just extreme endurance athletes and alpine mountaineers putting their own bodies through hell, pain inflicted on others and pain inflicted on yourself can be quite addictive, and it is definitely better for society if we can find some way to do this ritually rather than by actually starting wars. Ideally not via human sacrifice, but you know, somehow.