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06/23/2016

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Dan

"when humans get a good start in life, when everyone is functioning within the same social group, humans can be friendly and cooperative."

This may be a little off topic but something I found interesting, and weaves into your post a little. In his latest book "Ultrasociety, how 10,000 years of war made us the greatest cooperators on earth," Peter Turchin makes the argument that warfare was the leading factor at selecting for larger and larger states that exhibit greater cooperation between individuals. In a nutshell, societies that cooperate better out-compete others that do not. It is an interesting, if not very well written, book and brings up some pretty good ideas about state formation, but ultimately dives into the idea that all this cooperation will ultimately lead to the elimination of war in society, a very overt myth of progress mentality.

His argument obviously lacks any comment on fundamental human nature, such as inherent biases, defenses, filtering, etc., that is systemic to the human brain on the individual level and also how these traits manifest and perpetuate themselves in social groups. I am sure many would say that the manifestation of war between groups is some sort of breakdown of between-group interaction; cooperation going haywire if you will. I am sure progressives would easily take this view. Or you could take the nuanced view that causal factors of war are not readily understood, and it depends on the groups in question, the state of their societies, their past histories and interactions with other societies, environmental conditions, etc. But as you have stated, using the flatland model, it is actually easy to explain how these things happen. Tragic mass killings on the individual level, or tragic, industrial scale mass killings on the group level. It all boils down to the unconscious brain directing human behavior.

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