Call it anyway you want, lizard brain, flyers (Castaneda), Yaldabaoth (agnostics), this force that pushes evolution on earth at great speed through predatorial behavior like competition and flight or fight.
We humans are the most intelligent species and still can't overcome it, as a civilization whatever political system or religion we tried no matter how hard we try we can't seem to overcome it, we still have wars and violence.
When few succeed to inspire people to overcome it and fight without violence like Mahatma Gandhi did they inspire humanity and are called saints by their nation.
When an individual can control his own feelings to such an extent that violence or anger feelings can no longer touch him we call him enlightened.
Maybe this force is not only trying to help us evolve but wants to teach us something marvelous if we overcome it.
First, I'm not sure how we can anthropomorphize an evolutionary force like that.
Second, evolutionary forces have made us value nonviolence in the first place. If they hadn't, we wouldn't have any notion of the reason or means to overcome what we see as a never-ending cycle. If we are able to even conceive of violence as something negative then it means we are already able to "overcome" it to some extent, but then we find that the question itself is circular.
Essentially, to be able to think that the world is shitty you already need a framework in place where members of your species are influenced by a widespread desire to make it less shitty according to criteria determined by their biological needs.
I don't know who thinks that humans value nonviolence but they clearly don't read the news.
Species act to adapt to their environment and provide for their needs. Nature necessitates violence for adaptation and survival. In species with no natural predators, an abundance of natural resources, and no problems with genetic propagation, violence might not be necessary for survival. But in many species, even ones with no natural predators (or very little risk of predation), they may commit violence upon themselves, usually to enforce a social order, or eventually pass on their own genetic material. Or they may commit violence for fun, I believe as a sort of practice for real-life predation.
And violence isn't negative. You're ascribing with morality (a human construct) or are diminishing (it's actually constructive) a natural and productive act that supports virtually all life on the planet. To escape it we would need to escape nature itself.
>You're ascribing with morality (a human construct) or are diminishing (it's actually constructive) a natural and productive act that supports virtually all life on the planet.
I'm not sure what you thought I wrote but it's the opposite of what I outlined. My whole argument is indeed that morals are indeed a human construct, so that if someone laments the amount of violence, they should realize that to be able to make such a complaint you already need to have arrived to a point where avoiding violence has granted you evolutionary advantages and thus been selected for to some extent, hence making the question a closed loop. Otherwise, the question would not even be conceivable to our minds.
>I don't know who thinks that humans value nonviolence but they clearly don't read the news.
Just because we engage in violence very frequently doesn't mean it is not valued. There are many different evolutionary pressures coexisting together. At the largest end of the scale, having a less violent society is very much an evolutionary advantage, otherwise we would not have an ingrained sense of fairness, the notion of morality, or as you mentioned the desire to inflict normative violence if that standard of fairness is violated by another individual. These emotions and constructs exist because they bring an advantage, and they do ironically bring on a state of lesser violence through the applied threat of violence.
>a natural and productive act that supports virtually all life on the planet. To escape it we would need to escape nature itself.
Violence doesn't have a special status in the sense that it will be productive in any environment. Just like any other trait, if the conditions change to a sufficient extent, it will become obsolete. It's only positive due to the way things are currently working. We're by definition part of nature so we can't escape it, but that doesn't mean nature will necessarily remain the way it has been in the past.
> having a less violent society is very much an evolutionary advantage
I don't see how this is the case. We have a lot more violence than is necessary for adaptation or survival. I don't think our 'ingrained sense of fairness' is an advantage, I think it is similar to what already exists in nature, but is then broken down by our fragile emotional state and confused by our higher brain functions clashing with our evolutionary simple heuristics. It's like running a web app in AWS to control a shopping list and it's source code consists solely of algebraic expressions. It's cumbersome and problematic. I'm sure developing our higher brain functions was useful in our survival, but it clearly conflicts with our instinctual survival traits.
Well, if you look at the human brain, it's just a larger cortex on top of the primitive brain stem. So I think, simply looking at our brain architecture, we are will always be impacted by the emotional low level impulses that were the main drivers of behaviors of our ancestors.
Exactly this, although it's more a useful mental model / philosophy than a concrete nullifiable bit of science IMO.
In the meditation style I prefer, it's useful to think of the subconscious/primitive brain as an elephant that is somewhat under control of the driver (the modern brain).
> The problem is more distribution more than abundance.
This. Not because scarcity isn't present, but because it is fundamental and inevitable; distribution isn't he thing that can be addressed, and scarcity is not.
This is demonstrably false. You need only look at the actions of our government (e.g. The CIA) to discern that the United States has gone to war (or "military conflicts" or whatever they call them these days) for reasons such as A) financial gain for private persons and companies B) financial gain for politicians C) financial gain for the country D) political gain for individuals E) extending a miltary based hegemony F) moral agendas (e.g the War on Drugs) etc, etc. The United States is by no means some perfect rational actor which engages in war solely for economic reasons or for "self-defense".
Those were the declared reasons, yes. But exactly what would you say are the resource and humanitarian gains and to what degree forgivable-due-to-provocation-in-retrospect is, say, the US-Vietnam War?
I recall from primatology lectures that a majority of violence is not triggered by a scarcity of resources but by friction in social ranking. I also recall a lecture by Sapolsky where he talk about this successful peace negotiator which focused on mutual respect, understanding and a feeling of kinship rather than negotiating about borders and resources.
In a book called The Happiness Hypothesis, the author made the interesting claim that violence is often cause by an attack on a person's self-image, and that it was indeed thus heavily linked to social friction.
Not really. Most people on most developed countries don't have scarcity for water, food, clothes, transport... It wasn't always like that. Things do become more abundant and people will dot not always change expectation on the same amount.
> Most people on most developed countries don't have scarcity for water, food, clothes, transport
Yes, they do. They may not have what you view as critical shortages, but if thode things weren't scarce, in economic terms, they would be free of cost.
We humans are the most intelligent species and still can't overcome it, as a civilization whatever political system or religion we tried no matter how hard we try we can't seem to overcome it, we still have wars and violence.
When few succeed to inspire people to overcome it and fight without violence like Mahatma Gandhi did they inspire humanity and are called saints by their nation.
When an individual can control his own feelings to such an extent that violence or anger feelings can no longer touch him we call him enlightened.
Maybe this force is not only trying to help us evolve but wants to teach us something marvelous if we overcome it.