| > why would an animal risk their life and waste energy to protect something they don't need? To displace its competition and further secure its dominance of the local area. Too much is always better than not enough. Even animals who occupy enormous territories will seek to expand them further at any opportunity. Bands of chimps will murder neighbouring bands over territory, despite neither group being remotely close to starving. Coalitions of male lions will seek to take possession of a pride of females by killing the existing males and all of their juvenile offspring. Many groups of human hunter-gatherers, ignorant of the modern world, will kill strangers in their territories on sight. Nature evolves these behaviours simply because animals who display them have a greater chance of passing on their genes. Anything but hostility to direct competition is usually suboptimal. Human dominance evolved through cooperation in small familial groups numbering less than 100. That is what our social biology is equipped to handle. There are many examples of company culture fragmenting past ~150 headcount. Past that group size, we're no longer able to cooperate based on shared in-group status and mutual trust. The mechanism of civilization is bureaucracy, but the interactions are still between small tribes of people each competing for their own interests, and in practice totally apathetic to outcomes outside their group. We've managed to put some rails around the process, but legal and corporate interactions are the civilized equivalent to war. The same language is even used. We're still the same apes, with the same limitations regarding, frankly, how many other people we are capable of giving a damn about. > It takes a lot less energy to kill the farmers and take their crop than it does to actually grow the crop. Not really sustainable over a generation though, is it? Your strategy has function long enough for your offspring to reach maturity, and their offspring, etc. The winning strategy is to take as much from the farmers as they will tolerate and funnel it into extravagant displays of power and social status that further cement your position. All we've done is put some rules around the taking, mandating (in civil society) that it be voluntary and not under the threat of violence. This way, you invent iPhones, sell them at huge margins to all the farmers, become absurdly wealthy, and no one need die. It's a winning system. > It is dramatically cheaper and easier to prevent that by just preventing starvation. I'm not actually sure that's true. Shocking escalation of violence is also effective, and very cheap. In places where amputation is a common punishment for theft, wouldn't you know it, people don't steal as much. In places where punishment for crimes is severe, and police are effective, crime rates are low. Japan being a great example. |