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by discoball
2775 days ago
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Sarcastically speaking, it all started with the division of labor between hunters and gatherers. If hunters had to gather too they wouldn't have had developed a specialization for killing other beings, and many of them would have preferred gathering to hunting due to the risk involved in the latter, so hunting would have been a fringe activity, not an institutionalized part of society (aka armies) Also, women and men who are not so driven by testosterone most likely gravitated toward gathering rather than killing, and so there we have the roots of sexism and machoism, with the assholes doing the killing and normal human beings relegated to "less strong" gatherers. And I believe natural hormones in meat affected the hunters own hormonal balance and pushed them toward more aggression, and the act of killing became normalized. Then we have technology being developed to increase the efficiency of killing other beings and eventually to increase the efficiency of killing other people. The tribes that engaged less in killing and more in gathering got wiped out by the ones that engaged more in killing than gathering. The End. |
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Combined with the fact that resources are limited, self-preservation and tribal-preservation is embedded, populations want to expand (as part of tribal-preservation) and we actually have some capacity to harm one another, combat is pretty much inevitable. Given a pacifist vegetarian clan, and a non-aggressive predatory one, in trying times, the pacifist must build up their defenses or perish. If they’ve built up their defenses, they will undoubtedly be capable of waging war, (humans are quite versatile in that) and in trying times, they likely must wage war, or perish.
A purely pacifist stance is only viable if no one does anything; that is, a standstill. The possibility of killing is always there: I’m sure you could convince rabbits to murder one-another if you take enough from them. It is normal, because death, by any means, is normal.
Pacifism is the normalization, not aggression. That we can, through research and technology, better resolve resource contention through more efficient production, than seizing the resource from one another. That, and the realization that we’ve long reached a point where it’s near impossible to wage war without heavy (or even heavier) repercussion from challenging even a weak opponent. The world wars were to an extent a result of failing to make that realization. The cold wars was a direct result of making it.
(Outright) War is no longer as viable an option because peace is intrinsically better, but because its become difficult to successfully do. War was not engaged because it was “ingrained” upon us, but because it was viable strategy (or even defense against passive invasion).
Hunters and gatherers merely allowed us to better engage in war; it did not open the possibility (it was always there), and its absence would not have closed it. Rabbits simply don’t have the intelligence to realize the option (or coordinate it, or even the tools to effectively engage), even when it's clearly their best option. But they would have reached the same conclusion as we did, were they capable enough toolmakers to resolve those weaknesses.
Also notably, almost every given collection of humans spends far more time at relative peace than engaging in war (the US today is capable of engaging continously in small wars, but it rarely engages in significant ones). It’s difficult to ascribe a “tendency” for war to such a species, except by skipping over the peaceful periods.