The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years.
From Steven Pinker
The more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs.
Violence and religion have often gone together, but it's not a perfect correlation, and it doesn't have to be a permanent connection, because religions themselves change.
Though as a psychologist I like to think that nothing human is foreign to me, I admit to having been repeatedly flabbergasted by the insouciance, and sometimes relish, with which our ancestors carried out and witnessed unspeakable cruelties.
You don't like to be lied to, by your friends or in your business dealings. So why would you want to be lied to when it comes to the origin of life or the fate of the planet?
I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless you identify the learning mechanisms. And these have some genetic basis.
All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain.
Everywhere you look for comparisons of life under anarchy and life under government, life under government is less violent.
As women are empowered, violence can come down, for a number of reasons. By all measures, men are the more violent gender.
We know about every massacre that has taken place close to the present, but the ones in the distant past are like trees falling in the forest with no one to hear them.
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