Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamp and I'm Christian Segar. Robert,
Speaker 1: you and I both play pretty violent video games and
Speaker 1: enjoy them, but none of us are violent men. And
Speaker 1: I'm kind of curious about this. I mean, I spend
Speaker 1: a good thirty to forty minutes a day just chilling
Speaker 1: out playing titan Fall and shooting a bunch of stuff,
Speaker 1: you know, and I find it relaxing. It's totally predicated
Speaker 1: on war and violence, and like the mechanics of the
Speaker 1: game like have like there's like kill executions and stuff
Speaker 1: that are you know, supposed to make it more thrilling
Speaker 1: or whatever. But like I get like a sort of
Speaker 1: zen quality of like clearing my mind from doing it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's interesting to take it apart. I mean it's true.
Speaker 1: I I've never thrown or taken a punch in my life.
Speaker 1: I've never had like a true interest in personal martial arts,
Speaker 1: except you know, maybe it's just a possible way of
Speaker 1: like exploring your body awareness. I could see the appeal there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: violent media has always been present in my life. I
Speaker 1: write violent things from time to time. I've always been
Speaker 1: a fan of of the simulated yet impactful theater violence
Speaker 1: of professional wrestling. Uh, and it does make me wonder
Speaker 1: to what it's extent is there like this innate violent
Speaker 1: aspect of of of humanity that finds its way out
Speaker 1: in these forms. I mean, I also ask these questions
Speaker 1: when I observed my my five year old son. I'm
Speaker 1: around him all the time. I don't know to what
Speaker 1: extent the influences of other children play into his uh,
Speaker 1: his uh, his demeanor, but but I know that he
Speaker 1: digs mostly sweet things at his age. He like the animals,
Speaker 1: he likes totorow and yet he easily took to dinosaur violence. Uh.
Speaker 1: And he likes to climb on me in a manner
Speaker 1: that feels kind of wrestling esque, and he's taken to
Speaker 1: sort of punching me, but he's not. He doesn't call
Speaker 1: him punches. He's he pretends that his fists are dinosaur
Speaker 1: eradicating asteroids and he'll go asteroids falling, and then he uh,
Speaker 1: he's sort of like that. Your kid is acting out
Speaker 1: like mass extinction level genocide with a punch. That's pretty amazing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like the first time you watched Panio, another Miyazaki film.
Speaker 1: He was a little upset because Panio's dad was a
Speaker 1: little too serious. Granted he's voiced by Liam Neeson in
Speaker 1: the version he's watching, but he got upset over that
Speaker 1: and had to grow to where he could watch Panio.
Speaker 1: But and but yet dinosaur eradication via extinction of it,
Speaker 1: he's totally on board. Yeah. Oh, I imagine, like he's
Speaker 1: seen skeletons and museums and stuff like that of dinosaurs,
Speaker 1: so he's got a firm grasp on that. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, I've been thinking a lot about this lately,
Speaker 1: not just your son and and like the progression of violence,
Speaker 1: but just violence in general. It's been in the news lately.
Speaker 1: And I'm saying that now, and I suppose you could
Speaker 1: say that at any period of time, right, there's been
Speaker 1: violence in the news recently. It just feels like it's
Speaker 1: it's it's omnipresent, and it it's been kind of disturbing me.
Speaker 1: So a friend suggested that I read Stephen Pinker's The
Speaker 1: Better Angels of Our Nature for reassurance, because essentially the
Speaker 1: premise of this book is that the world is actually
Speaker 1: less violent than it used to be and things are
Speaker 1: getting better in terms of violence, but slowly. It doesn't
Speaker 1: seem like it in the present because the media's attention
Speaker 1: is very much on the sort of like it bleeds,
Speaker 1: it leads news, right, So of course, like there's constantly
Speaker 1: going to be stories about shootings or bombings or fires
Speaker 1: or knife attacks, right, And this kind of stuff is
Speaker 1: pretty disturbing and upsetting, and I think in a cynical
Speaker 1: worldview makes you think like, oh gosh, like we are
Speaker 1: just you know, bent on utter self destruction. But Ker's
Speaker 1: book actually makes a really good point that we're not,
Speaker 1: and that there are a lot of ways in which
Speaker 1: we're rising up out of that. Now you're probably asking
Speaker 1: you some of you may be asking yourself. Who is
Speaker 1: Stephen pinker Well. He's a Canadian born American cognitive scientist, psychologist, linguist,
Speaker 1: and popular science writer. His name has come at a
Speaker 1: time or two on the podcast. I think, uh, what
Speaker 1: was it? Euphanisms? I think we're one of the recent
Speaker 1: things we're discussing euphanisms and Pinker's writing he talks about
Speaker 1: euphemisms and here in relation to ideology, So we'll touch
Speaker 1: on that a little bit. And actually this episode. This
Speaker 1: is like a meta stuff to blow your mind episode,
Speaker 1: because I feel like we're really zooming up big picture,
Speaker 1: looking at human biology, evolution, philosophy, and very specifically neuroscience
Speaker 1: in a lot of cases. But it touches on many
Speaker 1: episodes that you and Joe and I have have done
Speaker 1: in the past, so we'll be bringing in stuff from
Speaker 1: that as well. Yeah, we're gonna be zipping down the
Speaker 1: high way here, and along the way, they're gonna be
Speaker 1: some exits to look very interesting. In some cases, those
Speaker 1: are avenues we've explored before. In other cases are avenues
Speaker 1: that we can explore in the future. So let us
Speaker 1: know and we'll either direct you in the right direction
Speaker 1: or accord a new episode that lines up with that area.
Speaker 1: So just up front, I should establish that this book,
Speaker 1: The Better Angels of Our Nature is massive. It's like
Speaker 1: eight hundred nine hundred pages long. So there's no way
Speaker 1: we could do an episode that would be of like
Speaker 1: normal length for you to listen to where Robert and
Speaker 1: I had discussed this entire book. It's just too big
Speaker 1: to do that. So for this episode, we're really honing
Speaker 1: in on a section that he refers to as inner Demons,
Speaker 1: and this is where he explains why human beings are violent,
Speaker 1: and he does a really good job of doing it
Speaker 1: by doing this massive literature review of of human existence
Speaker 1: and sort of how we've applied violence over time, but
Speaker 1: also what we've learned about violence through various research methods. Uh,
Speaker 1: we're gonna touch the other stuff that's in the book,
Speaker 1: and like Robert said, like if if some of it
Speaker 1: comes up and you say, like, oh, I would like
Speaker 1: a full episode on that, you know, we may gloss
Speaker 1: over it here, but talk to us and maybe we'll
Speaker 1: be able to do something in the future. So he
Speaker 1: starts off with doing this overall huge data analysis. Basically,
Speaker 1: I think it's like the first six chapters of the
Speaker 1: book where he essentially looks at the course of human
Speaker 1: history and says, yeah, violence is a major part of it,
Speaker 1: and it seems to be very specific to our species.
Speaker 1: But it doesn't have a fixed rate. So violence isn't
Speaker 1: like a human urge in the way that sexes or
Speaker 1: hunger or sleep. And he says, in fact, if you
Speaker 1: look at the data presented, violence has actually declined over time,
Speaker 1: and there's plenty of evidence that human beings are in
Speaker 1: fact averse to violence. So for instance, uh, this is
Speaker 1: something we've talked about on the show before it comes
Speaker 1: up in the office a little bit too, that there's
Speaker 1: an example that most soldiers in war don't actually fire
Speaker 1: with the tent to kill during wartime. This observation comes
Speaker 1: from the Second World War and from historian and US
Speaker 1: Army bridgetier General S. L. A. Marshal, and he reported
Speaker 1: the firing way it was fifteen and out of every
Speaker 1: hundred men engaged in a firefight, only fifteen to twenty
Speaker 1: actually use their weapon. And then in Vietnam, for every
Speaker 1: enemy soldiers killed, more than fifty thousand bullets were fired.
Speaker 1: But we have to point out that some critics have
Speaker 1: charged that Marshall's observations were more observational than a true
Speaker 1: science scientific study, and others have been less kind. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's I mean, you can you can look at
Speaker 1: that and maybe, like, if you're worried about the amount
Speaker 1: of human violence that's going on in the world, you
Speaker 1: can say, well, that's an encouraging sign, right right, And
Speaker 1: and I and I should also point out that this
Speaker 1: is just one of the many examples that Pinker draws upon,
Speaker 1: and so he's not basing everything just on this on
Speaker 1: this thing about to kill stats. Uh, and in general,
Speaker 1: when we're talking about Pinker's argument that violence is going
Speaker 1: going down, he is talking about over arching statistical evidence
Speaker 1: and just in the broad picture of human culture, obviously
Speaker 1: an individual human is still capable of staggering cruelty and violence.
Speaker 1: We know the examples. We preserve the examples in our
Speaker 1: cultures like specimens on a shelf. But again we have
Speaker 1: to come back to what does the larger pictures say,
Speaker 1: What are the larger trends for humanity itself? And so
Speaker 1: for evidence of human violence. Pinker actually at first turns
Speaker 1: to one of the an unlikely area that I would
Speaker 1: think of, But actually, when you brought up your son earlier,
Speaker 1: it makes sense. He looks at two year olds as
Speaker 1: being the most violent stage of humanity, basically talking about
Speaker 1: and you would know better than I do, but you
Speaker 1: know that like at that age, we're thrashing around a lot,
Speaker 1: We're more likely to get angry at the drop of
Speaker 1: a hat or burst into tears and and really like uh,
Speaker 1: kind of exert like dominance and revenge kind of tactics
Speaker 1: over small petty things. Yeah, I don't know, it's a
Speaker 1: difficult want to rule on because I just have the
Speaker 1: one child too to base my observations on, and then
Speaker 1: every kid is going to be a little different. Maybe
Speaker 1: Pinker just had some really rough kids. Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean when I guess one of the things is
Speaker 1: when emotional responses are coming online for young children, there
Speaker 1: are less filters, so when they feel mad over something,
Speaker 1: they feel it, and then when they feel happy about something,
Speaker 1: they just feel it. And so you observe these these
Speaker 1: for what what for an adult would be just crazy
Speaker 1: mood swings, but for a child, like that's the power
Speaker 1: they're they're painting with. But even when you look at
Speaker 1: the statistics related to adults, it gets a little bit
Speaker 1: scary in terms of how much we fantasize about violence.
Speaker 1: Seventy of men and fifty to eighty percent of women
Speaker 1: in a study, and these were all college students, admitted
Speaker 1: that they fantasized about killing someone. Uh. And this kind
Speaker 1: of gets into the sort of idea, like the general
Speaker 1: idea that bad people actually do what good people dream
Speaker 1: about doing. Right, and this is why we have this
Speaker 1: violent fiction and fun right like our video games where
Speaker 1: we're shooting everything or we're watching horror movies or action
Speaker 1: movies or whatever. I think I think that the language
Speaker 1: here is very important. Like when we use terms like
Speaker 1: fantasize that that makes it sound like you're like the
Speaker 1: revenge fantasy on my head. Here is just I'm really,
Speaker 1: I'm really getting off on this vision of me, uh,
Speaker 1: punching that guy in the face. Whereas and we'll get
Speaker 1: into this more later on, but if you view it
Speaker 1: as a sort of mental simulation, if you're thinking of
Speaker 1: the things that I could do in response to this uh,
Speaker 1: you know, this individual uh ticking me off or offending
Speaker 1: me in somewhat some fashion. Of all the possible things
Speaker 1: I can do, punching them is one of those things.
Speaker 1: And here is how it might play out in my mind.
Speaker 1: Here are the pros, here the cons. Here's how it
Speaker 1: might make me feel. But then here's how it might
Speaker 1: feel to to get arrested. So if you look at
Speaker 1: it from that point of view, it's like it's not
Speaker 1: it's not as creepy and weird as fantasizing about violence.
Speaker 1: It's more like, yeah, your brain knows that violence is
Speaker 1: always an option. It's just to what degree does your
Speaker 1: brain say that it's almost always never worth the effort. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and pinker later, you know, goes on to describe that
Speaker 1: as sort of one of our angels rather than our deanons,
Speaker 1: is the ability to rationalize risk assessment, essentially whether or
Speaker 1: not the risk and reward is worth it for violence.
Speaker 1: But where it gets really and it's really worth us
Speaker 1: zooming in on is the neuroscience, because neurosurgeons have described
Speaker 1: something that's referred to as the rage circuit in the
Speaker 1: mammalian brain. And I'm gonna walk you through this using
Speaker 1: a rat's brain as an example to start off, why
Speaker 1: did you bring that in in your pocket? Or you know, well,
Speaker 1: I've got the rat. I figured I might as well
Speaker 1: take the brain out. Uh. So, here we've got the
Speaker 1: rat brain. It has a pathway that connects three major
Speaker 1: structures in the lower parts of its brain, and these
Speaker 1: are similar to other mammalian brains like humans. A aller
Speaker 1: of tissue in there is called the para aqueductal gray
Speaker 1: and this is comprised of gray matter that is surrounded
Speaker 1: by a fluid filled canal that runs from the spinal
Speaker 1: cord to the brain. And this is essentially where this
Speaker 1: rage circuit lies. It contains all the inputs that create
Speaker 1: our irritation, things like pain and hunger and blood pressure
Speaker 1: and our heart rate and temperature and our hearing, and
Speaker 1: so the para aqueductal gray is partly under the control
Speaker 1: of our hypothalamus, and it's regulating emotional, motivational, and physiological states.
Speaker 1: It sits on the pituitary gland, which is pumping hormones
Speaker 1: into the bloodstream, regulating cortisol from our adrenal glands, and
Speaker 1: cortisol is pretty important here in terms of like the biochemistry.
Speaker 1: The hypothalamus itself then is regulated by the amygdala, which
Speaker 1: is applying our memory and our motivation, giving emotional coloring
Speaker 1: to our thoughts. So on top of all of this,
Speaker 1: this entire rage circuit is the cerebral cortex, and that
Speaker 1: patches into our eye sockets literally with the orbital cortex.
Speaker 1: These terms are going to be important later as we're
Speaker 1: going through sort of methods of rage turning into violence. Now,
Speaker 1: I'm going to step away from Pinker for just a
Speaker 1: second to discuss uh some ideas by neurobiologists Douglas Fields.
Speaker 1: These are not ideas that are contrary to Pinker's arguments.
Speaker 1: I think they line up rather nicely in fact, as
Speaker 1: as we continue on with the discussion, but Fields has
Speaker 1: written a great deal about the rage circuit as well,
Speaker 1: and he argues that violent behavior is often the result
Speaker 1: of the clash between the modern world and the evolutionary
Speaker 1: hardwiring of our brains. We all have triggers, he says,
Speaker 1: and we have to be aware of them in order
Speaker 1: to manage them. And uh, these are the triggers that
Speaker 1: he proposes. It spells out the word life morts, So
Speaker 1: that's I didn't know that was a real word. Yeah,
Speaker 1: life morts. There's so many great band ideas already, Rage circuit, life, more, life,
Speaker 1: more more. It's his L I F E M O
Speaker 1: r t s That L is for life and limb
Speaker 1: that's defensive aggression as a trigger for your violence. Then
Speaker 1: I for insult, F for family or maternal aggression. So
Speaker 1: you're protecting your family, protecting your your your child, or
Speaker 1: at least that's the argument in your brain. Then there's
Speaker 1: an environment to territorialism. Then M for mate, which does
Speaker 1: not refer to British pub brawls but rather made benheaviorimating aggression.
Speaker 1: Then there's oh for organization, the organization you're part of
Speaker 1: are for resources or lack of resources, T for tribe,
Speaker 1: an s for stop and this one refers to being trapped,
Speaker 1: constrained or cornered. Yeah, And as we'll discover with Pinker,
Speaker 1: that s part that being trapped, restrained, or cornered, that's
Speaker 1: when humans can be their most violent. Quick quote from Fields.
Speaker 1: This is from a National Geographic interview. He says, you're
Speaker 1: not going to engage in violence and risk life and
Speaker 1: limb for a trivial reason. There are very specific triggers.
Speaker 1: So that's the it's key here. The even though our
Speaker 1: violence within the modern framework is irrational in many cases,
Speaker 1: it's tied into evolved responses that makes sense in the
Speaker 1: in the like the long history of human evolution and
Speaker 1: sort of the the the the full temporal picture of
Speaker 1: the human being. Yeah, and Pinker makes this point and
Speaker 1: I'm gonna cap it at the end of our episode two.
Speaker 1: But that, like, the ability to define these things and
Speaker 1: recognize what's within ourselves that makes us capable of violence
Speaker 1: is sort of the first step towards stopping it from happening. Indeed. Uh,
Speaker 1: And so it's whether it's Fields model or it's Pinker's model,
Speaker 1: you know, that just depends on what sort of like
Speaker 1: linguistic thing you're applying on top of it. But both help. Now.
Speaker 1: Pinker also focuses on practicality of violence, and he says,
Speaker 1: when you move toward harming a fellow human, it must
Speaker 1: accomplish two things. It's got to be at least increase
Speaker 1: the chance at the target will come to harm, and
Speaker 1: it will give the your target and overriding goal of
Speaker 1: harming you before you harm them. This means we have
Speaker 1: to consider the consequences of our actions practically, like we're
Speaker 1: talking about earlier risk reward rationality. This is why most
Speaker 1: human violence is cowardly, stealthy, and preemptive. Right, so we
Speaker 1: tend to do it from afar, or you know, do
Speaker 1: it when somebody's not looking or or not be a
Speaker 1: part of it. Right. Um, it's very rare that like
Speaker 1: somebody will be so psychopathic that they will like, uh,
Speaker 1: just you know, murder hundreds of people face to face,
Speaker 1: because the human averseness to that violence is biological. I
Speaker 1: briest to mind all these examples as generally from our fiction,
Speaker 1: where like one character demands that the villain fight them
Speaker 1: fair and square, right, and but yeah, this is generally
Speaker 1: not what we do. We're all about taking advantage and
Speaker 1: having the upper hand. Oh yeah, and there's absolutely evolutionary
Speaker 1: reasons for that too. Another component of that that Pinker
Speaker 1: brings up is something that he refers to his forward panic,
Speaker 1: and this is when humans face an opponent in a
Speaker 1: long state of apprehension and fear, and then when they
Speaker 1: can catch that opponent in a moment of vulnerability, it
Speaker 1: leads to just utterly savage violence. This is human beings
Speaker 1: that they're worse. So going back to that model that
Speaker 1: Fields has earlier, that's when you're trapped or restrained or cornered, right,
Speaker 1: and you've got the opportunity to break free from that,
Speaker 1: and that you just see human beings just going to
Speaker 1: just utter carnage. Then, yeah, this is basically the whole
Speaker 1: idea of the Purge series, right, yeah, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I hadn't really thought of it before, but like those
Speaker 1: speak to sort of a real like inner uh quandary
Speaker 1: of human violence. So he also argues though, that the
Speaker 1: way that we get away with that in our own
Speaker 1: heads is because we have something called a moralization gap,
Speaker 1: and this is where we create narratives of victims and perpetrators,
Speaker 1: and they diverge, and only really a neutral party can
Speaker 1: see how they diverge from one another. So it's really
Speaker 1: kind of self serving thinking. That's a form of cognitive dissonance,
Speaker 1: and we develop all kinds of mental strategies of self
Speaker 1: deception to help support it. Subsequently, this quirk in psychology
Speaker 1: means no one thinks they're evil, right like you hear
Speaker 1: you think about that in the world, like people who
Speaker 1: are described as villains, No one sits around and thinks
Speaker 1: I'm evil, I'm doing evil right. They all think that
Speaker 1: what they're doing is innocent and that they themselves are
Speaker 1: long suffering victims within their own narratives, so they always
Speaker 1: think they're acting morally. And Pinker reminds us here of
Speaker 1: Hannah Errant's infamous term the banality of evil, when referring
Speaker 1: to the ordinariness of the Nazis atrocities during World War Two.
Speaker 1: It's worth remembering this when you're looking at our storytelling
Speaker 1: to write, Like whether you're making a story, you're watching
Speaker 1: a movie or reading a book, even the worst bad
Speaker 1: guy has justifications for why they think what they're doing
Speaker 1: is right, you know. And so when when we tend
Speaker 1: to watch fiction is just like, this guy is just
Speaker 1: evil for the sake of being evil. At least in
Speaker 1: this current day and age, that's not necessarily engaging for us,
Speaker 1: right right, Yeah, you need some idea of their motivations
Speaker 1: and why they view their actions as righteous. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: and again this all makes perfect sense if you look
Speaker 1: at things from a life morts standpoint. The triggers are
Speaker 1: they're they're evolved to enable survival, and what you can
Speaker 1: think of is the temporally average human, the tribal hunter gatherer,
Speaker 1: the hominid. All of this culture business is relatively new. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1: A couple other terms I want to establish upfront for
Speaker 1: Pinker before we get into what his quote unquote demons are.
Speaker 1: Another thing that he describes within the brain is the
Speaker 1: seeking system, and this runs from the fore brain through
Speaker 1: a bundle of fibers in the middle of the brain
Speaker 1: to the ventral striatum, which we call the reptilian brain.
Speaker 1: It was discovered in rats when psychologists realized that if
Speaker 1: they stimulated it with an electrode via a lever, the
Speaker 1: rats themselves they would at this lever it was stimulate
Speaker 1: the electrode in their own brain and what they would
Speaker 1: start doing is hitting the lever over and over and
Speaker 1: over against stimulating that part of their brain until they
Speaker 1: became utterly exhausted. And these connections are actually two way,
Speaker 1: they're not top down. So all these components in the brain,
Speaker 1: they're talking to each other. The neurons within are signaling
Speaker 1: each other with the neurotransmitter dopamine, and this motivates animals
Speaker 1: to achieve goals for instance, hunting. Uh. There's actually also
Speaker 1: a fear circuit that is theorized and it's connected to
Speaker 1: the rage circuit. Some extreme fear, so this goes back
Speaker 1: to what we were talking about about being you know,
Speaker 1: caught or trapped. Extreme fear will trigger an enraged, defensive
Speaker 1: attack or violence, So there you go. Likewise, there may
Speaker 1: be another motivational system that triggers violence that is referred
Speaker 1: to here as inter mail aggression or the dominance system. Basically,
Speaker 1: the idea here is that the seeking system in our
Speaker 1: brain leads males of a species to willingly seek out
Speaker 1: aggressive challenges with other males, and this sometimes also leads
Speaker 1: to blind rage. Now, the difference here between the rat
Speaker 1: brain that I've got here in my hand and our
Speaker 1: human brains is that these structures are enveloped by large
Speaker 1: bloated cerebrum. The for humans, we have this big cerebrum
Speaker 1: surrounding all of this stuff, and and it's taken up
Speaker 1: by the frontal lobes, which possibly contends with our rage
Speaker 1: and fear with things like restraint, prudence, and morality. And
Speaker 1: this is where Phineas Gauge comes up. Good old Phineas Gauge.
Speaker 1: I can't imagine how many episodes if you go back
Speaker 1: through the stuff to blow your mind catalog, he comes
Speaker 1: up as an example. Yeah, Phineas Gauge, it comes up.
Speaker 1: It comes up quite a bit. This was a nineteenth
Speaker 1: century individual. There was a freak railway accident that blasted
Speaker 1: a crowbar like tool called a tamping iron up through
Speaker 1: his skull. It entered under the left cheekbone and exit
Speaker 1: through the top of his head, and it basically gave
Speaker 1: him a frontal lobotomy. So when I was in high school, Uh,
Speaker 1: for dare they made t shirts for all of us
Speaker 1: that had Phineas Gauge's skull with the railway rod shooting
Speaker 1: through it. Dare you mean to keep a kid off drugs?
Speaker 1: Because it was a demonstration of what your head was
Speaker 1: like when you were drunk or when you were on
Speaker 1: certain kinds of drugs. So it's supposed to be these
Speaker 1: t shirts that would remind you like, if you drink
Speaker 1: and you drive, you're just gonna be like a guy
Speaker 1: with a with a rod through his his head. They
Speaker 1: were like, I thought it was kind of cool at
Speaker 1: the time, but like I look back on it's like
Speaker 1: this really morbid example to give kids. Yeah, like that's
Speaker 1: that's not what it's like kids. That It also makes
Speaker 1: me imagine like a you know, in a local evening
Speaker 1: news story, kids call it gauging. They're blasting tamping irons
Speaker 1: up through their skull in order to get high. Well,
Speaker 1: if they were doing that, they would have to make
Speaker 1: sure that they actually just droid the orbital cortex and
Speaker 1: the ventromedial cortex, because that was what is theorized to
Speaker 1: be destroyed in Phineas Gauge's brain, which led to these
Speaker 1: unchecked emotions he was experiencing. So the orbital cortex is
Speaker 1: actually adjacent to something called the insula, and that registers
Speaker 1: our physical gut feelings. This is when you say something
Speaker 1: like you've got a physical trigger, like my blood is
Speaker 1: boiling when you're angry. This is coming from the insula.
Speaker 1: But when you scan the brains of people who are
Speaker 1: prone to violence, especially those with antisocial personality disorder, the
Speaker 1: orbital regions, those are shrunken and less active. But when
Speaker 1: you compare this to somebody, somebody like an impulsive murderer,
Speaker 1: you find that their orbital cortex is actually malfunctioning. So
Speaker 1: it's not smaller, it's just not working the way it's
Speaker 1: supposed to be. And so it seems that this is
Speaker 1: our major inhibitor of violence, the orbital cortex, and certain
Speaker 1: acts of violence our weight as being justifiable by our brains. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, let me give you a scenario, Robert. What
Speaker 1: if there were five people on a train platform and
Speaker 1: you could see that they were going to be run
Speaker 1: over by the train. The only way you could stop
Speaker 1: the train was to push another person in front of
Speaker 1: the train and derail it. Oh well, this is this
Speaker 1: is a classic moral problem, right, Well, you have to
Speaker 1: choose whatever benefits the most people, right, Yeah, it's very
Speaker 1: spock right exactly. So you get into this quandary between
Speaker 1: the logic of it and the humanity of it, right,
Speaker 1: And we react against this with our amygdala and our
Speaker 1: orbital cortex, and you have like a more utilitarian motive thinking,
Speaker 1: like let's call it the Spock motive thinking. That's your
Speaker 1: dorso lateral cortex where our intellectual, abstract problem solving is done.
Speaker 1: All right, we got all that out of the way.
Speaker 1: We've covered the brain pretty thoroughly. Let's take a break,
Speaker 1: and when we get back, we're going to get into
Speaker 1: the actual demons that Pinker has defined here, the five
Speaker 1: things that make us violent. Alright, we're back. It's time
Speaker 1: to summon the five demons. Yeah, get get out your
Speaker 1: pentagrams and your your salt. No, they're not those kind
Speaker 1: of deal and then not the fun kind. But I
Speaker 1: guess we can imagine, we can imagine what their forms
Speaker 1: might look like. Yeah, it works very well within Pinker's
Speaker 1: format for this book, because you know the title The
Speaker 1: Better Angels of Our Nature. The idea is that after
Speaker 1: he presents these demons that we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: in this episode, then he presents the angels subsequently that
Speaker 1: we use to combat these demons that would keep us
Speaker 1: from being as violent as we could be. Yes, So
Speaker 1: the five demons argument, this is a rejection of the
Speaker 1: hydraulic theory of violence. And the hydraulic theory is basically
Speaker 1: what I was bringing up earlier when I was saying,
Speaker 1: oh do I do I play violent video games? Because
Speaker 1: there's an inherent violence in my body and this is
Speaker 1: the necessary escape vow. The hydraulic theory is simply that
Speaker 1: humans have an inner drive to violence, a blood lust
Speaker 1: that has to be satisfied one way or the other.
Speaker 1: And this is a this is a rejection of that argument. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's Pinker's main thing is that we are not there's
Speaker 1: no actual single psychological route that makes us violent. In fact,
Speaker 1: he says there's five things their predation, dominance, revenge, sadism,
Speaker 1: and ideology. We're gonna go through each of these and
Speaker 1: kind of touch upon Pinker's, you know, definitions for why
Speaker 1: these are the things that make us violent. Well, I'm
Speaker 1: envisioning this pack of demons right now with their grotesque
Speaker 1: body in there. That'd be a fun project for stuff
Speaker 1: to blow your mind fans, if you wanted to draw
Speaker 1: our five demons of violence for for Pinker's set up.
Speaker 1: There so predation, I'm imagining that's going to look something
Speaker 1: like a predator. Of course, it's gonna have like the
Speaker 1: dreadlocks and the weird uh spidermouth man thing. Right, Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: what Pinker means by this is that is a use
Speaker 1: of force as a means to an end, and it's
Speaker 1: usually deployed in pursuit of a goal that's set up
Speaker 1: by that seeking system part of the brain that we
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier. So, for instance, when you're hunting for food
Speaker 1: or sport, that's literal predation, right, you're preying upon another species.
Speaker 1: There's a certain amount of empathy that we have with
Speaker 1: prey as well in many cultures, right, Like a lot
Speaker 1: of cultures revere the animals that they kill for their food. Yeah,
Speaker 1: look no further than the ancient horned gods of chaos
Speaker 1: un predictability of the hunt. And you can look to
Speaker 1: to the deer stickers you see in the back of
Speaker 1: trucks that clearly belonged to deer hunters, the trophies they
Speaker 1: put in their homes. And perhaps this is kind of
Speaker 1: a stretch, but maybe even the weird anthropomorphized mascots of
Speaker 1: barbecue restaurants, you know, like the talking pigs and pots.
Speaker 1: You brought this up a couple of days ago in
Speaker 1: one of our company meetings, and you were a hundred
Speaker 1: percent right. Every time I drive past a barbecue place,
Speaker 1: I am confounded. The logos are either uh, pigs that
Speaker 1: look like they're like so excited to be about to
Speaker 1: be eaten, or like they're about to eat themselves. They're
Speaker 1: like eating ribs from their own body. Yeah, like they're
Speaker 1: they've gotten knives and forks pointed at their bellies and
Speaker 1: they're grinning. It's the strangest thing, but you're right, it's
Speaker 1: kind of like our modern version of sort of, you know,
Speaker 1: honoring the food that we're eating. But Pinker argues, when
Speaker 1: you've got this chasm between the perpetrator's perspective and the victim,
Speaker 1: so you don't have that kind of honoring, it makes
Speaker 1: it a lot easier to conduct predatory violence. And so
Speaker 1: this is when atrocities are committed and we say, how
Speaker 1: could they possibly do that? Right, our empathy is actually
Speaker 1: outweighing the predatory perspective, and this is why it helps
Speaker 1: for perpetrators themselves to be able to see their victims
Speaker 1: as quote unquote vermin or morally disgusting. Right, we talked
Speaker 1: about the immoralization gap before. That's where it comes into play,
Speaker 1: they basically convinced themselves, well, these people are less than
Speaker 1: me and they're deserving of this. Yeah, it's that it's
Speaker 1: the act of mothering it. We I mean we still
Speaker 1: see in many cases today, and I mean really we
Speaker 1: see it all over the place. Like, to whatever extent
Speaker 1: you can make the other party less human and and
Speaker 1: and more of an alien entity than than more becomes
Speaker 1: permissible towards them, tying back into pinker demonization, so turning
Speaker 1: them into demons. Now. He also talks about positive illusions
Speaker 1: as being this sense where we have we think, oh,
Speaker 1: well we're lucky, or we're super capable, or we can
Speaker 1: justify ways that make it easier for us to be predatory. Right,
Speaker 1: we usually exaggerate ourselves as a useful tool when we're
Speaker 1: facing a rival. And then you know the reason why
Speaker 1: is like, if the world didn't have these positive illusions,
Speaker 1: there might only be violence when two rivals were closely matched,
Speaker 1: because let's face it, they're not always matched equally. So
Speaker 1: an example of this works when you look at war, right,
Speaker 1: so perfect example, Napoleon and Hitler both trying to invade Russia,
Speaker 1: Like those were obviously difficult odds, but there were countries
Speaker 1: that initiated wars and ended up losing them. And here's
Speaker 1: what's interesting. When you look at the statistics, countries that
Speaker 1: initiate wars, they lose them twenty five to fifty percent
Speaker 1: of the time. So people and nation states get into
Speaker 1: fights that they can't win all the time. And this
Speaker 1: is based on their bravado, buying into their own height. Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now leaders can totally overestimate that bravado, and that's what
Speaker 1: leads us into this. Pinker also calls this the Lake
Speaker 1: Wobegon effect after a Prairie Home Companion and Garrison Keeler,
Speaker 1: because the idea here is that everyone assumes that they're
Speaker 1: better than average. So when you ask the you know,
Speaker 1: the general populace, and you say are you average, are
Speaker 1: you lower than average? Or you better than average? Everybody
Speaker 1: says they're better than average. Yeah, I mean, that's I mean,
Speaker 1: especially in America. That's the idea of American exceptionalism, right exactly,
Speaker 1: everybody's everybody has the potential for greatness. Nobody is law
Speaker 1: into a particular cast. So this leads us to the
Speaker 1: second demon on our shoulder, which is dominance. And this
Speaker 1: is essentially our drive for supremacy over our rivals. And
Speaker 1: it's tied back into that brain part that Pinker was
Speaker 1: talking about earlier, which is the inter male aggression. Here's
Speaker 1: the thing, though, it's easy to hear that and think, oh, well,
Speaker 1: men are only violent, but actually it's not gender exclusive.
Speaker 1: It's just that men tend to exhibit these qualities for
Speaker 1: biological reasons. Will get into yeah, I mean, and in
Speaker 1: the basic idea is that for the when you look
Speaker 1: at the broad history of the human species, you have
Speaker 1: a situation where the males, the males are the males
Speaker 1: of the body for violence, and then in turn, they
Speaker 1: have more of a brain for the violence. They're more
Speaker 1: wired for the for the physical violence. Right. So, if
Speaker 1: you look at homicides, the largest motive for them in
Speaker 1: all altercations is trivial in origin. It's usually things like
Speaker 1: somebody insulted me or they accidentally jostled me. But the
Speaker 1: participants they actually behave as if there's more at stake,
Speaker 1: which leads to murder. Uh. And this kind of violence
Speaker 1: it acts as a way to prove dominance so that you,
Speaker 1: as sort of like an alpha, are challenged less. Right.
Speaker 1: The goal here is actually a spreading of information by
Speaker 1: by showing that you're the stronger one. Hopefully the you know,
Speaker 1: the crowd will see this and they will spread it
Speaker 1: along so that you're challenged less often. Studies actually of
Speaker 1: American street violence show that young men who have a
Speaker 1: code of honor are more likely to perpetrate violence because
Speaker 1: that code of honor sort of helps them with the
Speaker 1: moralization gap. Likewise, if there's an audience presence, that doubles
Speaker 1: their likelihood that they're going to be violent because that
Speaker 1: audience will help spread that information. Now, this calls back
Speaker 1: to the episode that Joe and I did where we
Speaker 1: interviewed Franz da Wal where we talked about primates and
Speaker 1: how primates will fight with one another but then after
Speaker 1: they'll reconcile, and the Walls theory was that this is
Speaker 1: because their long term interests are bound together, so primates
Speaker 1: actually do their own version of rationalization, and with Bonobos
Speaker 1: that the reconciliation often takes a sexual form. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that came up as well, I believe. Now that's a
Speaker 1: good point to bring into the gender difference here, which
Speaker 1: is that Okay, men, yes, are far more violent and
Speaker 1: they are more likely to value their professional status and
Speaker 1: to take greater risks due to overconfidence. This is actually
Speaker 1: thought to be a product of evolution, as males can
Speaker 1: reproduce more quickly than females, so they're competing for sexual opportunities.
Speaker 1: In the male brain, there's a nucleus in the anterior
Speaker 1: pre optic portion of the hypothalamus that is twice the
Speaker 1: size of a female's And there are so many receptors
Speaker 1: in the system that are for testosterone, which is actually
Speaker 1: five to ten times more plentiful and men. That makes
Speaker 1: sense to us, But the fact that the receptors are
Speaker 1: for that leads you to understand why men can be
Speaker 1: more violent. Now, biologists aren't actually convinced that testosterone is
Speaker 1: fully to blame for male aggression. Instead, they think that
Speaker 1: what it does is it prepares men for the challenge
Speaker 1: of dominance. Getting back to this, this demon the secondary
Speaker 1: demon here of dominance. It's it's getting us ready for
Speaker 1: that challenge. Now, Fields he pretty much backs all of
Speaker 1: this up, and he also points out though that this
Speaker 1: is all a double edged sword because certainly nine of
Speaker 1: inmates are male, but nine of Carnegie Institute medals for
Speaker 1: heroism have gone to men as well. Now, there you can.
Speaker 1: You can tease that apart in various ways. But he said, again,
Speaker 1: you can attribute much of this evolution of male and
Speaker 1: female brains. That's how we evolve. Men have the body,
Speaker 1: greater strength size for violence, and then therefore they have
Speaker 1: the brains to use it. So Pinker actually argues that
Speaker 1: this is a bad scenario when you've convinced yourself of
Speaker 1: your sort of grandiosity, right, your bravado. If you have
Speaker 1: too much self esteem, you're more prone to violence. So
Speaker 1: people who are narcissistic and think well of themselves but
Speaker 1: out of proportion with their actual achievements, those are the
Speaker 1: people you should be worried about in terms of dominance
Speaker 1: and violence. Uh, this is a trio of symptoms that
Speaker 1: Pinker says can actually make for a political leader that
Speaker 1: is a tyrant. And he says these are grandiosity, the
Speaker 1: need for admiration, and a lack of empathy. But through
Speaker 1: our identities as members of social groups, we actually see
Speaker 1: our dominance play out in less violent ways, and this
Speaker 1: is one of the ways that we sort of defeat this. Right,
Speaker 1: we've got sports teams or political parties, for instance, and
Speaker 1: this can also lead to attitudes such as racism, and
Speaker 1: other discriminations. Right, the idea of hitting social groups in
Speaker 1: one way or another against each other people to varying
Speaker 1: degrees harbor ultimately a motive for social dominance. And the
Speaker 1: idea here is that the group that they belong to
Speaker 1: is part of a hierarchy and they want their group
Speaker 1: to always be on top in that hierarchy. So Pinker's
Speaker 1: arguing that maybe the social dominance itself, it might not
Speaker 1: be about race per se, but more about what he
Speaker 1: calls coalition, where groups have evolved together and they banned together.
Speaker 1: And he brings it back to that part of the
Speaker 1: brain again into male aggression, and he provides evidence that
Speaker 1: racism is actually more likely to target minority men that
Speaker 1: minority women. So he provides some studies in this book
Speaker 1: showing that that is actually the case. So racism is
Speaker 1: more likely to take place between men of different races
Speaker 1: than between a man and a woman of different races. Now,
Speaker 1: this becomes especially deadly when you combine it with nationalism.
Speaker 1: So that's basically a welding of tribalism. It's a cognitive
Speaker 1: conception of the group that you belong to, and it's
Speaker 1: the political apparatu us of the government that we belong to. Right.
Speaker 1: You combine all these things together, and this can lead
Speaker 1: to the conviction that one's nation has the right to greatness,
Speaker 1: that it deserves to be great, It deserves to be
Speaker 1: on top of the hierarchy. Any lowering of that status
Speaker 1: is explained away as malevolence, and it's applied to either
Speaker 1: an internal or an external foe. Now, Pinker it comes
Speaker 1: out with sort of like a positive take on this,
Speaker 1: and he hopes that dominance will actually be tempered by
Speaker 1: the civilized institutional systems that we exist within. So he
Speaker 1: actually says the governmental part. Hopefully that and laws and etcetera.
Speaker 1: Will will keep us sort of on track and keep
Speaker 1: us from being violent. He says in roads for women
Speaker 1: together with cosmopolitanism will help as well, and having a
Speaker 1: scientific understanding of these biological processes will hopefully make us
Speaker 1: more self aware about where are violent urges for dominance
Speaker 1: are coming from. So to a certain degree, it's the
Speaker 1: idea that that hopefully the thing that we will want
Speaker 1: dominant and the way the thing that we will will
Speaker 1: push all this longing for dominance into will be more
Speaker 1: positive international models or species wide models for what we
Speaker 1: can be Yeah, as the people. I think that's where
Speaker 1: he's going with it. And in the latter sections, which
Speaker 1: we'll touch on at the end of the episode, but
Speaker 1: the sort of angel sections, both feminization and cosmopolitanism are
Speaker 1: listed as being factors there. So let's cross our fingers
Speaker 1: and hope that's the case. And he definitely provides evidence
Speaker 1: throughout the book where you know that this episode isn't
Speaker 1: about that. We can't cover everything, but the steep drop
Speaker 1: in violence over the course of history is definitely on
Speaker 1: display in this book. It takes some good six chapters
Speaker 1: to show it, but there's a lot there. All right,
Speaker 1: Let's summon the revenge demon. The demon it's all about
Speaker 1: driving us to payback harm in kind fired up by
Speaker 1: the rage circuit, right, so this is the third demon.
Speaker 1: It is the urge for vengeance, and it's actually a
Speaker 1: major cause of violence. And what's kind of weird is
Speaker 1: we seem to celebrate it in our cultures, right, Like
Speaker 1: everybody loves a good revenge story. I haven't seen John
Speaker 1: Wick yet, but everybody talks about that movie is being
Speaker 1: like it's the ultimate revenge film and it feels good,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't know, it's the ultimate revenge picture,
Speaker 1: but it's fun and and of the revenge trope that
Speaker 1: the basic revenge pacing is something we can all easily
Speaker 1: hop on board with. Yeah, that's a narrative that we're
Speaker 1: familiar with and and as such, it's actually the motivation
Speaker 1: for ten to twenty of the homicides that occur in
Speaker 1: the entire world. When you take this to a macro scale,
Speaker 1: revenge is essentially the motive for things like terrorism when
Speaker 1: nations retaliate against it, and then subsequent wars we engage in. Right,
Speaker 1: So let's look at the neurobiology here, get back to
Speaker 1: that rage circuit that we describe before. Let's say an
Speaker 1: animal is hurt or frustrated and it wants to lash
Speaker 1: out at its nearest likely perpetrator. This is fed information
Speaker 1: from the temporo parietal junction, and that indicates whether the
Speaker 1: harm was intentional or accident. All. Then the rage circuit
Speaker 1: activates and it turns on the insular cortex, which gives
Speaker 1: us sensations of pain, disgust, and anger. And studies have
Speaker 1: also found that feelings of revenge actually light up the
Speaker 1: region of the brain that is associated with craving sweets,
Speaker 1: nicotine or cocaine. So when they weigh the pleasure of
Speaker 1: revenge over the pain it might cause, it actually lights
Speaker 1: up the orbital and ventromedial frontal cortex, which we talked
Speaker 1: about earlier. So those frontal areas seem to really be
Speaker 1: what's keeping us from just going into blind like wolverine
Speaker 1: hulk rage all the time. Uh. And that is interesting
Speaker 1: the idea of associating it with sweets, right, because we
Speaker 1: we'd speak of poetic language like the sweetness of revenge.
Speaker 1: Revenge is a dish beest or of cold like stuff
Speaker 1: like that. Yeah. Well, I mean we have a lot
Speaker 1: of other things about revenge too, right that there's the
Speaker 1: old Chinese proverb that if you set out on a
Speaker 1: course of revenge, be prepared to dig two graves exactly, yeah,
Speaker 1: which is thinking more with the front part of your brain, yeah,
Speaker 1: than the rage circuit. So this all leads to the
Speaker 1: function of risk, acceptsment, and deterrence, which you know is
Speaker 1: what Robert's talking about with that proverb. To convince your
Speaker 1: rivals that they have any attempt to advance their interests
Speaker 1: at your expense will lead to such severe penalties that
Speaker 1: their gambit will end with a net loss. So this
Speaker 1: is essentially like applying capitalism to revenge theory here, right,
Speaker 1: like it turns it into sort of a net gain
Speaker 1: kind of situation or risk reward situation. But that really
Speaker 1: is how our brains way the factors involved. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: when you start looking at um, let's say, you know,
Speaker 1: nuclear deterrence, Like that's basically the whole argument there. It
Speaker 1: basically like any nation's nuclear deterren exists to ensure that
Speaker 1: any nuclear attacker will have to dig two grades, right, yeah, exactly. Uh,
Speaker 1: And this brings up something that I think has come
Speaker 1: up on the show before, but I'm not sure. It's
Speaker 1: called the prisoners dilemma game. And we don't have time
Speaker 1: to go into the whole scenario here. Honestly, that would
Speaker 1: be a whole episode. But the result is essentially that
Speaker 1: people are more likely to selfishly defect from one another
Speaker 1: and get a greater punishment than they are for cooperating
Speaker 1: altruistically and getting a smaller punishment. So this is a
Speaker 1: game of studies that has been run on multiple people
Speaker 1: and every time it comes out the same. Theoretical models
Speaker 1: take that even further and they find out that over time,
Speaker 1: in iterations researchers can theorize that the long term effects
Speaker 1: of revenge on humanity are pretty complicated. Uh, and that
Speaker 1: might be fun for us to explore in another episode.
Speaker 1: But essentially, most people employ what are referred to as
Speaker 1: tit for tat strategies and enjoy cooperation over the threat
Speaker 1: of revenge. So that seems like a good thing right now.
Speaker 1: This made me think immediately, what's the most popular superhero
Speaker 1: team in the world right now? Suicide Squad. Oh, you're right,
Speaker 1: that's that's that's even worse the Avengers, right, and Avengers
Speaker 1: insinuates that their motive, their goal is all about revenge, right,
Speaker 1: and that revenge primarily works as a deterrent if the
Speaker 1: Avenger has a reputation for being able to carry it
Speaker 1: out right. So, subsequently, this is why most not Avengers
Speaker 1: like the superheroes, but just Avengers who are enacting revenge.
Speaker 1: They want the target to know that they met out
Speaker 1: the punishment. Right. Well, I have a serious comments question
Speaker 1: that how much avenging do the Avengers actually get up
Speaker 1: to and and is there like a ruling counsel that
Speaker 1: decides that the matter is vengeance worthy. I don't think so.
Speaker 1: I think that's just a cool name that they plucked
Speaker 1: out of the air. But remember in the in the
Speaker 1: Josh Weeden movie, I think he felt like he had
Speaker 1: to justify the name. And so it was like when
Speaker 1: one of their friends were killed, that was when they
Speaker 1: were like, Okay, now we're gonna have our revenge. Were
Speaker 1: the Avengers, we have to avenge somebody, but for the
Speaker 1: most part, we don't have an entire heroic or organization
Speaker 1: based around and this often vilified but but sometimes celebrated concept. No,
Speaker 1: but you know, that would be a really interesting take
Speaker 1: on doing the Avengers. I think that Marvel should hire
Speaker 1: you and get right on that. I like the idea
Speaker 1: of having like there's a council that's like the Hulk
Speaker 1: and Captain America and Iron Man and Black Widows sitting
Speaker 1: around and they were like, well, I don't know, does
Speaker 1: it really justify revenge? Now, revenge evolved to be a
Speaker 1: deterrent um, So then we have to ask ourselves why
Speaker 1: is it so common in the world if the idea
Speaker 1: is it's supposed to deter other violence. Pinker again points
Speaker 1: to that moralization gap because people consider the harms that
Speaker 1: they're inflicting to actually be justified. And subsequently law and
Speaker 1: government come into play as implements to keep our revenge
Speaker 1: in check. So maybe the Avengers need that uh, and
Speaker 1: hopefully we internalize this even when the rule of law
Speaker 1: isn't around to monitor us all the time in real
Speaker 1: quick He says. Other ways of trailing revenge include broadening
Speaker 1: your circle of empathy from those who you're close to outwards.
Speaker 1: So most of us are automatically empathetic with our family
Speaker 1: and our friends, but try being empathetic with people further
Speaker 1: out from you, or when your relationships are too valuable
Speaker 1: to sever. Also, he says, a sincere apology can go
Speaker 1: a long way politically. We've actually seen a huge spike
Speaker 1: in apologies and reconciliation since the nineteen eighties. It's really
Speaker 1: interesting when you look at the graph of this. Like
Speaker 1: nations or like big religious organizations didn't used to apologize
Speaker 1: to each other. It's a relatively new thing, and it's
Speaker 1: essentially to try to keep the whole revenge factor from
Speaker 1: getting out of control. All right, Well, the demons of say,
Speaker 1: of sadism and ideology are standing outside their medals, clinking
Speaker 1: their their chains and whips dangling. But we're gonna take
Speaker 1: a quick break before we let them into our hearts.
Speaker 1: Thank alright, we're back. What's that knocking on the door.
Speaker 1: Oh that's sadism. Demon hear it, and it is full
Speaker 1: of a joy for hurting. Uh. Now, here's the thing
Speaker 1: about sadism. Uh, it is inherent to human beings, but
Speaker 1: it might just be a psychological quirk. So let's go
Speaker 1: through this and hopefully we'll find out that we're not
Speaker 1: all inherently sadistic. Yeah, and this is definitely one of
Speaker 1: those areas where this could be a topic onto itself,
Speaker 1: but we're going to Uh, we're gonna run through it
Speaker 1: as best we can. Yeah. So too many of us,
Speaker 1: sadism is not just morally monstrous, but we're also baffled
Speaker 1: by it, right because there's no apparent benefit from sadism. Now,
Speaker 1: think about torture, for instance. Some people like to justify
Speaker 1: torture as being a method of sadism that's worthwhile. For instance,
Speaker 1: if you have a ticking bomb scenario, right, a bomb
Speaker 1: is about to go off. The only way you can
Speaker 1: find out is if you torture the suspect and they
Speaker 1: tell you where the bomb is. But we actually find
Speaker 1: that it's seldom instrumental because victims will really say anything
Speaker 1: to just make the torture stop. Now, you look at
Speaker 1: our past entertainment, right, it's full of sadistic acts. We've
Speaker 1: got the Roman Colosseum and other blood sports. And then
Speaker 1: you look at the history of serial killers. Now here's
Speaker 1: where I'm not a hundred percent on board with Pinker.
Speaker 1: He aligns serial killers in general with sexual gratification, and
Speaker 1: given what I know from researching the topic of serial
Speaker 1: killers for things here at work, that's not always the case.
Speaker 1: But maybe that's something we should go into in a
Speaker 1: different episode. Serial Killers, though they're they're not exactly new, right.
Speaker 1: They seem like they're a product of modern society. But
Speaker 1: it's been around for a long time. It's just taken
Speaker 1: other forms. Yeah, And I think it's it's one of
Speaker 1: those cases too where it's, uh, maybe it's it's become
Speaker 1: harder to be really good at it given advances in society.
Speaker 1: And likewise, I guess the ones who are really good
Speaker 1: at it are so good at it you never know that.
Speaker 1: That's the that the that's the scariest part. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: Pinker's argument about sadism is that, and you can check
Speaker 1: yourself on this and maybe you'll discover something about yourself
Speaker 1: and your sadistic or non statistic qualities. Is that it
Speaker 1: requires two things. The first thing is a motive to
Speaker 1: enjoy other suffering, and the second is the removal of
Speaker 1: restraints that allow people to act upon the motives to
Speaker 1: enjoy other people's suffering. So he boils this down to
Speaker 1: a couple of different things. First of all, the macab
Speaker 1: that's when we have this morbid fascination with the vulnerability
Speaker 1: of living things. This example here is when you're a
Speaker 1: little kid and you pull the legs off bugs, right,
Speaker 1: or you're driving by a car accident, you slow down
Speaker 1: so you can try to get a look at it.
Speaker 1: That leaves a lot of room for interpretation, because there
Speaker 1: are versions of that where you can say someone's a
Speaker 1: morbid artist and but they're not necessarily hurting bugs or
Speaker 1: even the whole slowing down for car rex. Anybody that's
Speaker 1: ever done any any amount of driving on on our interstates,
Speaker 1: like you know that people seem to be gauging in
Speaker 1: this to a considerable degree enough to you know, shut
Speaker 1: down traffic in in the lane that is not directly
Speaker 1: affected by the wreck. So yeah, I think there's a
Speaker 1: there's a big tempt there on that first category. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll throw this in just as like a qualifier about
Speaker 1: this book, which I really like this book. But there
Speaker 1: are points where Pinker supplies a lot of evidence, he
Speaker 1: cites sources, and then there's points where he just kind
Speaker 1: of throws things out where he's like, here's my take
Speaker 1: on the world, and I think this was one of them. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: he also pulls in two of the demons that we
Speaker 1: previously discussed as being part of sadism, dominance and revenge. Now,
Speaker 1: in the case of dominance, it's sort of a Shoden freita,
Speaker 1: right like, we like the idea of somebody we want
Speaker 1: to dominate falling down on a banana appeal, right Like,
Speaker 1: it fills us with glee. Uh. And likewise with revenge,
Speaker 1: there's this idea of justice, right, so vingeance has served
Speaker 1: and justice is exactly Yeah, you did a really good
Speaker 1: imitation of ghost Rider there. That's what I think. It's
Speaker 1: something along those lines. He's the spirit of vengeance now
Speaker 1: Pinker again. And I think sexuality isn't exactly pinker strung suit,
Speaker 1: but he gets into sexual sadism here too, and he
Speaker 1: argues that the circuits for sexuality and aggression are intertwined
Speaker 1: within the limbic system, and both of these respond to testosterone.
Speaker 1: So examples, for instance, include veterans who described killing in
Speaker 1: war and they say like it's an actual sexual release
Speaker 1: for them. Or the other example he gives is UH
Speaker 1: reports from SS concentration camps where commanders reportedly masturbated during
Speaker 1: floggings of prisoners. So he's making this argument that there's
Speaker 1: a there's an inherent connection between sexuality and aggression. He
Speaker 1: does it very briefly. I'm not a hundred percent convinced
Speaker 1: along the lines of also that like all serial killers
Speaker 1: are doing it for sexual reasons. Yeah, I mean, there's
Speaker 1: a there's a lot of room for UH for questioning
Speaker 1: and uh an elaboration there. I mean, for for instance,
Speaker 1: you can you can take into account the fact that
Speaker 1: many people's different kinks and fetishes involve essentially violent themes,
Speaker 1: but that doesn't mean that they're necessarily violent people. I
Speaker 1: feel like Pinker is maybe going a little just surface
Speaker 1: level on this. Yeah, and he there are points where
Speaker 1: he sort of like brushes up against sado masochism and bondage,
Speaker 1: but it's like I got the impression that it wasn't
Speaker 1: a topic he was like intimately familiar with, you know.
Speaker 1: Just I'm imagining pinker at like a dungeon literally brushing
Speaker 1: up against people in a bondage thing. Uh. And it's hilarious.
Speaker 1: So he actually says, all right, we've got all these
Speaker 1: possible sources for sadism, Why then is it less common
Speaker 1: than all of these other forms of violence that we
Speaker 1: we end up with. Well, his his reasons are empathy. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, like when he talks about empathy, is not
Speaker 1: just talking about feeling each other's pain or inhabiting their minds,
Speaker 1: but he's actually thinking about aligning your happiness with that
Speaker 1: of another being. And he says, this is more like
Speaker 1: sympathy or compassion. Yeah. And as we've explored in past
Speaker 1: discussions about psychopaths in particular, there's this argument that with
Speaker 1: most of us, the empathy switches default on, and with
Speaker 1: these individuals it's default off, but can be turned on,
Speaker 1: can be employed through the right you know sort of
Speaker 1: training and mental exercises in the same way that we can,
Speaker 1: we can and do find ways to tamper our empathy
Speaker 1: through you know, mothering and and uh, and the reducing
Speaker 1: of another person to something less than human. Right, So
Speaker 1: this is a perfect example of why it's important to
Speaker 1: be able to identify scientifically like what causes these things,
Speaker 1: so that we can then say, all right, we know
Speaker 1: what this is, we know the symptoms, let's look where
Speaker 1: we think it is in the brain. And then you
Speaker 1: have to ask YOURSELFLF is it morally right to turn
Speaker 1: that switch back on how to bring in And we're
Speaker 1: talking demons, And if I know anything from the Dungeons
Speaker 1: and Dragons Monster Manual, it's that knowing the true name
Speaker 1: of a demon could gives you power over it. You know,
Speaker 1: I think you just nailed the episode title. Another thing
Speaker 1: he says that curtails this is cultural taboo. Right, So
Speaker 1: mostly the world and its governments see torture as being immoral.
Speaker 1: That's why it's prohibited by the Eneva Conventions in the
Speaker 1: Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Humans also have a visceral
Speaker 1: revulsion and that inhibits us from hurting other people. Right, So, uh,
Speaker 1: just the sight or sound of seeing someone screaming in pain,
Speaker 1: it's enough to make primates averse to eating food. And
Speaker 1: this is a perfect point to bring up Stanley Milgram's
Speaker 1: experiment for evidence that participants were visibly distraught when they
Speaker 1: thought that they were electrocuting people they couldn't see, right.
Speaker 1: You know, this this brings up something. So so the
Speaker 1: primates in the study had trouble eating during this, And
Speaker 1: yet I was in the theater with you at the
Speaker 1: Alien Covenant, and I think people were eating popcorn the
Speaker 1: entire time. Man. I was like in some of the
Speaker 1: more grizzly scenes, like people's jaws being sliced off, and
Speaker 1: and I'm just like, how are you just still taking
Speaker 1: in palmful after palmful of that delicious popcorn there is?
Speaker 1: You know, for me, there are certain horror movies that
Speaker 1: I can't eat during Texas. Chainsaw Mascer is one of
Speaker 1: those that movie does something like somehow it taps into
Speaker 1: that visceral revulsion. Uh, And I don't know how it
Speaker 1: does it differently than Alien Covenant, But during Alien Covenant,
Speaker 1: I just felt like everything was obviously fake. Um. But
Speaker 1: there are horror movies that certainly do that for me. Well,
Speaker 1: I will say it's Alien Covenant was certainly very polished,
Speaker 1: and Chaw Masacre has that that that feel to it
Speaker 1: that you're almost watching documentary foe could be real. And
Speaker 1: yet I'm sure they're people out there who have like
Speaker 1: a regular ritual of eating barbecue during TCM. So yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that wouldn't surprise me. They probably do that at
Speaker 1: the Alamo draft. That sounds um And you're talking about
Speaker 1: psychopaths earlier. So they've got this disabled inhibition against sadism.
Speaker 1: That's because they're amygdala and their orbital cortex shows a
Speaker 1: blunted response to signs of distress, so if they see
Speaker 1: a person screaming, they're less likely to respond to it.
Speaker 1: Pinker actually argues that, besides psychopaths, sadism actually has to
Speaker 1: be cultivated over time, and his examples include, for instance,
Speaker 1: when you have older prison guards who participate in torture
Speaker 1: because it's something they've gotten used to overtime serial killers again,
Speaker 1: and then middle age crowds, not people who are of
Speaker 1: middle age, but crowds in the middle ages. Uh that
Speaker 1: they acclimatized to public sadism as a part of everyday life, right,
Speaker 1: like torturing people in public. Are these colosseums where you'd
Speaker 1: feed people the lines or whatever, right, right, So yeah,
Speaker 1: in a way, it ceases to be a taboo. And
Speaker 1: it also this makes me wonder about about the cycle
Speaker 1: of violence as well. Yeah, an individual being more likely
Speaker 1: to participate in the violence because some level of this
Speaker 1: was perpetrated upon them. Uh, that might be a valid
Speaker 1: argument as well. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um. So you know,
Speaker 1: you look at this at least the sadism, and it
Speaker 1: says something about us that's both terrifying but also a
Speaker 1: little hopeful for the reduction of violence in human society,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, thankfully we have this natural inhibition
Speaker 1: that's built into most of us, and thankfully it takes
Speaker 1: most of us a long time to build up a
Speaker 1: tolerance to become sadistic. So this leads us to our
Speaker 1: final demon. Yeah, I see him right here, the ideology demon.
Speaker 1: This is when believers we've a collection of motives into
Speaker 1: a creed and then recruit others to carry out its
Speaker 1: destructive goals. And man, this could be a podcast into
Speaker 1: of itself. So we're gonna really boil this down quickly.
Speaker 1: Pinker's argument here is there's an important distinction because the
Speaker 1: body counts of history get way higher when large numbers
Speaker 1: of people actually work together toward violence. Now, what's dangerous
Speaker 1: about ideology is essentially it promises utopia, which prevents its
Speaker 1: believers from weighing that cost benefit analysis that we're talking
Speaker 1: about in the front of the brain. Likewise, it paints
Speaker 1: its opponents as inherently evil and deserving of punishment. So
Speaker 1: again it gets around that moralization. Yeah, this is the
Speaker 1: classic holy war scenario totally. Pinker again turns to Milgram's
Speaker 1: experiment as evidence of what we're willing to do if
Speaker 1: it's part of our social understanding. So it's worth remembering
Speaker 1: that sixty of the participants in that study, we're willing
Speaker 1: to go all the way up to the maximum shock
Speaker 1: level just because they were being cold to do it.
Speaker 1: And further evidence from research by John Darley and bib
Speaker 1: Lataines study on by standard apathy shows that people that
Speaker 1: might respond to an emergency as a single person will
Speaker 1: fail to respond to that emergency if they're in a
Speaker 1: group of people because if they're in a group, they assume, well,
Speaker 1: if nobody else is doing anything, the situation can't be
Speaker 1: that bad. Yeah. We there's an older episode that I
Speaker 1: did with with Julie where we get into this uh
Speaker 1: at length and it's it's it's interesting to to have
Speaker 1: that information and go in and do a CPR training
Speaker 1: course because they directly play upon that. The whole idea
Speaker 1: that if you ay, they're training you to be the
Speaker 1: person that actually steps forward and starts to initiating CPR.
Speaker 1: But then also, you don't just say somebody call nine
Speaker 1: one one. You point to someone and you say you
Speaker 1: call nine one one, right, you have to be active
Speaker 1: in not passing right, and and it has and you
Speaker 1: have to be specific because if you just say someone
Speaker 1: do it, then the by standard effects going to take place,
Speaker 1: and people are like, oh, I guess somebody's gonna call
Speaker 1: nine one one, and everyone just stands around hesitating while
Speaker 1: all time to expY. And this sounds horrible, right, but
Speaker 1: at the same time like it's again it's worth recognizing,
Speaker 1: like this is part of human nature. If we're aware
Speaker 1: of it, then we can do things like apply it
Speaker 1: in CPR courses so that we can save lives. Now,
Speaker 1: this leads to another famous experiment that, of course, is
Speaker 1: going to come up in this episode, the Stanford prison experiment.
Speaker 1: This is where participants were given faux roles as prisoners
Speaker 1: and guards. The guards quickly took their roles way too
Speaker 1: far and they abused their power. The experiment had to
Speaker 1: be called off after six days for the safety of
Speaker 1: the people playing the role of prisoners. And this demonstrates
Speaker 1: that when a group of people has given power over
Speaker 1: another group, it can actually bring out barbaric behavior in
Speaker 1: people who would otherwise never display it. So Pinker wonders,
Speaker 1: have we actually progressed enough since these studies, since Millgroom,
Speaker 1: since the Stanford prison experiment, that participants would be more
Speaker 1: likely to disobey orders or to take advantage of authority
Speaker 1: in these situations. So he's essentially saying, if we conducted
Speaker 1: those experiments today with modern day uh, you know, inhibitions, culture, politics, etcetera,
Speaker 1: keep those results from being as high as they were
Speaker 1: the first time around. Now some people have replicated that,
Speaker 1: and you can look at those studies separately. They're also
Speaker 1: in the book. He takes a look at something called
Speaker 1: the spirals of silence, and he says, this is the
Speaker 1: phenomenon of people just going along with the crowd, uh
Speaker 1: and even on violence, simply because they think, look, it's
Speaker 1: gonna make other people in the crowd happy. So when
Speaker 1: you survey a group of people afterwards after a violent act,
Speaker 1: the majority of them will say, oh, yeah, I realized
Speaker 1: at the time that it was unpleasant or what we
Speaker 1: were doing was wrong, but I wanted to make sure
Speaker 1: everybody else around me thought I was with them. So
Speaker 1: there's all kinds of methods in ideology that keep violence perpetuated.
Speaker 1: We talked earlier about the moralization gap euphemisms. You out
Speaker 1: up euphemisms earlier as being a pinker thing. So he
Speaker 1: says euphemisms are one single way that our language and
Speaker 1: communication allows us to get away with being violent. Think
Speaker 1: of the difference between the terms collateral damage, ethnic cleansing,
Speaker 1: and just murder. Right, So the the sort of vagueness
Speaker 1: of those former terms makes it seem a little bit
Speaker 1: more acceptable. He says, there's all kinds of other ways
Speaker 1: that we sort of, you know, uh, methodize our ideology
Speaker 1: in violence. He talks about gradualism, responsibility, how how distant
Speaker 1: we are literally from the violence as it's happening. In fact,
Speaker 1: this is one of my favorite quotes. He says, it's
Speaker 1: safe to say that the pilot of the Aola Gay
Speaker 1: who dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima would not have
Speaker 1: agreed to immolate a hundred thousand people with a flamethrower
Speaker 1: one at a time. So that's a really interesting take
Speaker 1: on the ideology aspect of violence. Uh. He taught more
Speaker 1: about demonization and dehumanizing victims, and minimizing the harm that
Speaker 1: you're doing, relativizing the harm that you're doing, and falling
Speaker 1: back upon requirements of your task. So, for instance, when
Speaker 1: people make the argument, oh, well, it was just my
Speaker 1: job or I was only following orders. So this leads
Speaker 1: us to the angels, Pinker says he thinks the vaccine here,
Speaker 1: specifically for ideology, is to have an open society where
Speaker 1: people and ideas are allowed to move about freely and
Speaker 1: no one is punished for having dissenting views. That sounds
Speaker 1: kind of like what we're in right now, right, which
Speaker 1: might be why he argues that violence has declined massively
Speaker 1: over time. Now, what other solutions does he present us with. Well,
Speaker 1: like I said, the mere step of identifying these demons
Speaker 1: is supposed to be a step in the right direction,
Speaker 1: but it's followed by the four angels, and we're not
Speaker 1: going to dive as deeply into those angels, but let's
Speaker 1: talk about them briefly. Yeah, the demons are always more interesting,
Speaker 1: that's true, But yeah, you've You've identified the demons, you've
Speaker 1: learned their true names, given you the power over them,
Speaker 1: and now you have to summon some angels to really,
Speaker 1: you know, whack them. So the first one is empathy.
Speaker 1: And we've recorded whole episodes on this one before. It's
Speaker 1: it's been it's pretty vital. This is the ability to
Speaker 1: feel the pain of others and or attempt to understand
Speaker 1: that pain, and it gives us the power to align
Speaker 1: our interests with the other person. And a lot of
Speaker 1: this comes down to our mere neurons and theory of mind.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a vital tool for navigating a world
Speaker 1: full of unknowable minds. We have to be able to
Speaker 1: put ourselves in their vicious heads in order to dodge
Speaker 1: and maneuver in this bone swinging world of tribal horror.
Speaker 1: But of course that enables modern individuals, especially much more
Speaker 1: than mere Stone age machiavellianism, you know. So it's not
Speaker 1: just I have to know my adversary. It also means
Speaker 1: you you can know your friends. It means you can
Speaker 1: you have a better idea of of what's going ahead
Speaker 1: of even the average person on the street, some stranger
Speaker 1: that you'll you'll never know that, you'll never even uh
Speaker 1: you know, have exchange a word with But thanks to
Speaker 1: a theory of mind, you can. You can contemplate what
Speaker 1: their position in their worldview consists of, and then you
Speaker 1: can take it that step further and turn empathy into
Speaker 1: sympathy or compassion, where you're actually tying your happiness into
Speaker 1: their happiness. Yeah, that's the final form of this angel,
Speaker 1: I think is that alright? The next angel is self control,
Speaker 1: so yeah, will power, and this ties into another key
Speaker 1: cognitive ability, which is known as chronosthesia or mental time travel.
Speaker 1: So it kind of comes back to what we're talking
Speaker 1: about with revenge earlier. We can weigh the outcomes of
Speaker 1: our intended or considered acts, and as such, Pinker's point
Speaker 1: is that we can anticipate the outcome of acting out
Speaker 1: on our impulses and inhibit them as needed. So if
Speaker 1: the cost is too high, the risk is too great,
Speaker 1: then we can just tamp it down. And this, like empathy,
Speaker 1: becomes even grander in the human condition because in many cases,
Speaker 1: we can live entire lives, maybe not too happy lives
Speaker 1: of of lives, but we can live entire lives and
Speaker 1: inhibiting perfectly natural impulses. So you know, there's a there's
Speaker 1: a there's solace to be taken in that fact, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this gets back to I mean he mentioned a
Speaker 1: lot of these angels along the way and the demons,
Speaker 1: which is that the self control part really is wired
Speaker 1: to the front part of our brains. And so that's
Speaker 1: something that we can take a little bit of uh
Speaker 1: solace in, which is that, like we're actually wired up
Speaker 1: to out rationalize the rage portion. Now, the next one,
Speaker 1: the third angel, is moral sense. So this governs a
Speaker 1: set of norms and taboos that govern our interactions. This,
Speaker 1: for an everyday example, can be as simple as a
Speaker 1: walking aboard an elevator and figuring out where you need
Speaker 1: to stand. It can be as simple as walking into
Speaker 1: a school dance, an office party, or any other social
Speaker 1: setting and figuring out the rules and the expectation. Where
Speaker 1: are people setting, what are people wearing? How much food
Speaker 1: are people eating yet? And they are how much of
Speaker 1: they eat? You know, all these little things, these little
Speaker 1: calculations did most of us take for granted. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: this totally gets into like the institutional idea and even
Speaker 1: like ties back into ideology right ideology is one of
Speaker 1: the demons, but in a way it's also one of
Speaker 1: the angels right because it supplies the moral sense and
Speaker 1: the cultural taboos for us to keep from being violent.
Speaker 1: This one touches on some of the discussions we had
Speaker 1: in our Leaping into the Void episode where we talked about,
Speaker 1: you know, the the urge to jump off a building,
Speaker 1: the rational urge uh when you're you know, in a
Speaker 1: high place. But it's it also also like I find
Speaker 1: myself in a gallery, for instance, and They'll be this
Speaker 1: famous work of art and I could literally reach out
Speaker 1: grab it and start licking it, and I can't help
Speaker 1: but think about it. I'm not actually, I'm not actually
Speaker 1: tempted to do it, but I keep thinking, like, what's
Speaker 1: the worst thing I could possibly do in this gallery
Speaker 1: to lick the painting? And uh, And there's terrifying about
Speaker 1: considering it, or not even considering it, just running that
Speaker 1: simulation in my mind. But what's keeping you from doing
Speaker 1: it is probably a combination of your brain and the
Speaker 1: social uh institutions around you, especially in the museum. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the it's the two angels of self control and
Speaker 1: moral sense are standing by me, holding me back. Uh,
Speaker 1: and but and maybe the fourth angel as well. And
Speaker 1: that's reason. This is the power to reflect, deduce, and
Speaker 1: quote guide the application of the other better angels of
Speaker 1: our nature. So reasons kind of the quarterback of if
Speaker 1: I'm if I'm using my sports ann no idea, I'm
Speaker 1: the wrong person to ask, but yeah, I'll go with it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the quarterback then for the other angels and saying, all right,
Speaker 1: you run there, you run there, you hold him back
Speaker 1: so he didn't look the painting, and uh, an empathy
Speaker 1: will be standing over there, so he doesn't judge the
Speaker 1: guard too harshly. All right. And then on top of
Speaker 1: these angels, they don't have to go in and defeat
Speaker 1: these demons alone. They also have so you could say
Speaker 1: institutional help from the five historical forces. And these Pinker
Speaker 1: argues are the exo A genius forces that favor peaceful
Speaker 1: motives and are the forces that are largely responsible for
Speaker 1: bringing about a decline in violence. So the first force here,
Speaker 1: the first of the five historical forces that Pinker presents,
Speaker 1: is the Leviathan nation state. So Leviathan. Here's a reference
Speaker 1: to Thomas Hobbs in a book Leviathan, a book on
Speaker 1: state craft in the structure of society and legitimate government.
Speaker 1: He's not actually talking about a sea most government and
Speaker 1: UH in in this case. In Pinker's argument, this is
Speaker 1: state UH and the judiciary that has a monopoly on
Speaker 1: the use of force. And yes, this gives it great
Speaker 1: power to abuse, but also to reduce tendencies for exploit
Speaker 1: of attacks and revenge. It can also dismantle self serving
Speaker 1: biases that make everyone believe their individually in the right right,
Speaker 1: especially when you've got that moralization gap at at a hand. Yes,
Speaker 1: Now the next forces commerce, which which this one makes
Speaker 1: me think of you know, Wu Tang's cream everything around me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because think you're here is arguing that that that this
Speaker 1: is the positive sum game in which everybody can win.
Speaker 1: Trade in communication means that people are more valuable alive
Speaker 1: than dead, and so there's less need to demonize and
Speaker 1: less need to destroy other groups and salt the earth
Speaker 1: because at the very least your cruelty will take a
Speaker 1: commercial form as opposed to you know, a barbarically violent one.
Speaker 1: This is where we get those sort of like a
Speaker 1: libertarian arguments that like capitalism and commercialism is ultimately like
Speaker 1: the guiding force that's going to keep us civilized, right,
Speaker 1: because it's essentially tied into that risk rewards system that's
Speaker 1: keeping our brain from devolving into just utter barbarism. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think there's there's some some merit there. Now,
Speaker 1: you can certainly say that it can't act in isolation.
Speaker 1: It has to have these other elements, such as the
Speaker 1: next fourth, which is feminist zation. So this is the
Speaker 1: ongoing process by which cultures increasingly respect women. And Pinker
Speaker 1: argues that since males tend to be the violent ones
Speaker 1: are the more violent ones, that with the empowerment of women,
Speaker 1: feminized cultures move away from the glorification of war and
Speaker 1: they produce fewer quote rootless young men. Right. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: so as we're recording this, the movie Wonder Woman just
Speaker 1: came out and has been a huge hit, and you
Speaker 1: can look at that as like a cultural touchstone right
Speaker 1: of our society at least progressing in the form of feminization. Now,
Speaker 1: there's obviously some pushback against that too, but Pinker's argument
Speaker 1: here is that it's a good thing, all right. And
Speaker 1: the next one is cosmopolitanism, And this is just about literacy, mobility,
Speaker 1: mass media, all of it come and get together to
Speaker 1: promote people toward an understanding of other people and quote
Speaker 1: expand their circle of sympathy. Right yeah. Whenever I think
Speaker 1: of the term cosmopolitanism, I think of the idea of
Speaker 1: um not at hearing necessary. They did the idea that
Speaker 1: you're a citizen of a particular nation, but that you're
Speaker 1: a citizen of the world, and then you're in it
Speaker 1: together with all of humanity and finally the escalator of reason.
Speaker 1: And this idea is that the application of knowledge and
Speaker 1: rationality can force people to recognize cycles of violence in
Speaker 1: the world and see it all as something that needs
Speaker 1: to be solved rather than one and they may even
Speaker 1: come to the point of realizing that their own interests
Speaker 1: and privileges shouldn't always trump the interests otters. Okay, so man,
Speaker 1: we've barely covered like half this book, but we we
Speaker 1: just flew through a bunch of it. So we've got
Speaker 1: the demons, we've got the angels, we've got the historical forces.
Speaker 1: This is basically like the primary layout for Pinker's big
Speaker 1: argument here. But not everybody agrees with this guy, right yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean this book was when it came out of
Speaker 1: several years back, was was a big deal and continues
Speaker 1: to resonate, And as we were discussing it, because it
Speaker 1: has a lot of truth in it, and it it
Speaker 1: does resonate, it does give us perspective on on how
Speaker 1: we're we're behaving and functioning as a as a culture
Speaker 1: and what direction we might be moving in. And Pinker
Speaker 1: isn't the only one to make this claim or to
Speaker 1: have made it. Joshua L. Goldstein presented a similar view
Speaker 1: in Winning the War on War The Decline of Armed
Speaker 1: Conflict Worldwide that was also in two thousand eleven, and
Speaker 1: both authors credit John E. Muller's book Retreat from Doomsday,
Speaker 1: The Obsolescence of Major War. And you can trace similar concepts,
Speaker 1: you know, the idea that we're getting becoming more peaceful,
Speaker 1: we're getting further away from war, at least back as
Speaker 1: far as the nineteenth century French Enlightenment. Now, American analyst
Speaker 1: John Arquella argues that another major factor that could be
Speaker 1: playing a role in the reduction of global battlefield casualties
Speaker 1: is the stalemate imposed by the greater horrors of nuclear war. Now.
Speaker 1: Pinker certainly takes nukes into account, but he says that
Speaker 1: hey past W. M. D's like poison gas, these didn't
Speaker 1: prevent more wars. Uh and and so nukes alone are
Speaker 1: not going to do it either. But of course nuclear
Speaker 1: weapons are far more destructive, destructive on a level that
Speaker 1: has has changed the balance of power. Totally goes back
Speaker 1: to that one sentence example that he had earlier about
Speaker 1: the flamethrower in the Aula Gay. Now, one of the
Speaker 1: critics that I ran across was English political philosopher and
Speaker 1: author John in Gray, and uh, we just want to
Speaker 1: read a couple of arguments that he made a regarding pinker.
Speaker 1: He says, quote, no serious military historian doubts that fear
Speaker 1: of their use, and he means nuclear weapons has been
Speaker 1: a major factor in preventing conflict between great powers. Moreover,
Speaker 1: deaths of non combatants have been steadily rising. Around a
Speaker 1: million of the ten million deaths due to the First
Speaker 1: World War worre of non combatants, whereas around half of
Speaker 1: the more than fifty million casualties of the Second World
Speaker 1: War and over nine of the millions who have perished
Speaker 1: in the violence that has racked with the Congo for
Speaker 1: decades belong in that category. Because we we haven't had
Speaker 1: big wars chew up so many lives, but we've engaged
Speaker 1: in proxy wars. He says, quote, while it's true that
Speaker 1: war has changed, it has not become less destructive. Rather
Speaker 1: than a contest between well organized states that can at
Speaker 1: some point negotiate peace, it is now more often a
Speaker 1: many sided conflict and fractured or collapse. States that no
Speaker 1: one has the power to end all right, that's not comforting.
Speaker 1: He also argues that depending upon casualty numbers doesn't take
Speaker 1: into account the equal weight of lives lost, say under
Speaker 1: the boothill of oppressive regimes and social structures. And he
Speaker 1: points out that the United States, for instance, maybe depending
Speaker 1: on whose commenting uh considered the most advanced society in
Speaker 1: the world, but it also has the highest rate of incarceration.
Speaker 1: A quarter of all the world's prisoners are tied up
Speaker 1: in that, and it disproportionately a number of them are
Speaker 1: African Americans. And then on top of this, many of
Speaker 1: the prisoners in question are mentally ill or their aged
Speaker 1: um or they're just they're they're they're they're unhealthy at
Speaker 1: this point in their lives. Especially, have to ask yourself,
Speaker 1: how does that play out in this perception of violence?
Speaker 1: Also worth note in the US has the largest military
Speaker 1: in the world by a considerable margin. Alright, so things
Speaker 1: that we like really excel at prisons, mental illness and militaries. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean basically that's that's That's kind of Gray's argument
Speaker 1: here is is yet to what extent can war catalties
Speaker 1: alone be the metric for your your discussion here. So
Speaker 1: Gray is like the cynical side of me again taking
Speaker 1: over and saying, not so fast, pinker, the world is
Speaker 1: a lot worse off than you think. Now. These quotes
Speaker 1: are from from Gray's book The Soul of the Marionette,
Speaker 1: A short inquiry into human freedom, and there's an excerpt
Speaker 1: from it that you'll find on on on the Guardian
Speaker 1: dot com. Include a link to that onlineing page for
Speaker 1: this episode. It goes on for a bit, but he
Speaker 1: only ends up talking about the Black Mirror of Dr
Speaker 1: John d. So it's it's worth checking out. Well, if
Speaker 1: you're if you're deep into stuff to blow your mind,
Speaker 1: terror to worre, that'll be an interesting connection. Now another
Speaker 1: note about war and violence. Uh, this is a from
Speaker 1: Ian magazines. Is There a War Instinct? By evolutionary biologist
Speaker 1: David P. Barash, and he points out that quote, violence
Speaker 1: is almost certainly deeply entrenched in human nature, warfare not
Speaker 1: so much so. He has this analogy that he grow
Speaker 1: that he that he draws on where he's saying that
Speaker 1: violence is like a marriage and it war, on the
Speaker 1: other hand, is like arranging a wedding with the bridal
Speaker 1: shower and the bachelor party and all of this. He
Speaker 1: says that it's a quote. It's safe to assume that
Speaker 1: neither employing a photographer, serving a multi tiered wedding cake
Speaker 1: and listening bridesmaids, nor trying baby shoot tying baby shoes
Speaker 1: to the bumper of a newlyweds car spring from the
Speaker 1: human genome. Although people are capable of doing all of
Speaker 1: these things by the same token, plain old interpersonal violence
Speaker 1: is a real, albeit regrettable part of human nature. War
Speaker 1: is even more regrettable, but it is no more natural
Speaker 1: than a bridle shower or the assembly line used to
Speaker 1: construct a stealth bomber, and he argues that Pinker exaggerates
Speaker 1: our pre existing natural tendency for war. He argues that
Speaker 1: recent anthropological studies from Douglas Fry and others proved that
Speaker 1: the predominant mode of human life again that sort of that,
Speaker 1: you know, broad analysis of what it is to be
Speaker 1: a human being that for most of that were nomadic
Speaker 1: hunters and gatherers, That war is a group based lethal
Speaker 1: use of lethal violence against other groups was almost non
Speaker 1: existent for most of this time. It only emerged within
Speaker 1: the early agricultural surplus period, and the right emerged with
Speaker 1: the rise of elaborate tribal organizations, and this is what
Speaker 1: allowed the warrior ethos and military leadership of sorts to emerge.
Speaker 1: Who's saying war has not always been with us, It's
Speaker 1: a recent phenomenon when you consider the full history of
Speaker 1: our species. So again, that seems like a positive thing.
Speaker 1: Now we just hit you with a lot listeners. That
Speaker 1: was like, that was like a sledgehammer of information about war,
Speaker 1: human nature, and violence. But we're you know, I think
Speaker 1: based on like this experience that I'm feeling, I think
Speaker 1: other people are feeling it too, just like every day
Speaker 1: it's like, oh gosh, like all these horrible things are happening.
Speaker 1: Is this is this what we're just destined to keep
Speaker 1: doing to each other forever. Pinker's argument is at least no,
Speaker 1: like we're proceeding, we're finding ways and we're understanding how
Speaker 1: our brains work, so that this will eventually slow down.
Speaker 1: It already is slowing down and probably won't ever stop,
Speaker 1: but it will be minimized. Yeah. I think the two
Speaker 1: critics that I mentioned here, I think they make valid points,
Speaker 1: and I think there it's important to consider the criticism.
Speaker 1: But at the same hand, on the on the same hand,
Speaker 1: I really like Pinker's argument. And uh, and not just
Speaker 1: because I feel like I have to have to live
Speaker 1: an act as an optimist and I can't really live
Speaker 1: an act as a pessimist. But but but I do
Speaker 1: think he makes a convincing argument for the most part.
Speaker 1: So listeners, are you convinced? Do you think Pinker's got
Speaker 1: it right? Do you feel better? I feel a little
Speaker 1: bit better, Pinker that that person who let me borrow
Speaker 1: this book and said you should read this the objective
Speaker 1: achieved like it did make me feel a little bit better. Um,
Speaker 1: So do we agree with this? Do we not agree
Speaker 1: with that? Maybe we agree with Barasche and Gray Instead.
Speaker 1: Let us know we are on social media where you
Speaker 1: can talk to us about all of your violent urges
Speaker 1: on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, or Instagram. And as Robert mentioned,
Speaker 1: the landing page for this will be on stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind dot com, where we have all of
Speaker 1: our blog posts, all of our videos, and every episode
Speaker 1: of the podcast and you can always reach out to
Speaker 1: us the old fashioned way shoot us an email at
Speaker 1: blow the Mind at house of works dot com. For
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics. Is that
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