Name Thy Demons: The Roots of Human Violence

you know, and I find it relaxing. It's totally predicated on war and violence, and like the mechanics of the game like have like there's like kill executions and stuff that are you know, supposed to make it more thrilling or whatever. But like I get like a sort of zen quality of like clearing my mind from doing it. Yeah, it's interesting to take it apart. I mean it's true. I I've never thrown or taken a punch in my life.

I've never had like a true interest in personal martial arts, except you know, maybe it's just a possible way of like exploring your body awareness. I could see the appeal there. Yeah, violent media has always been present in my life. I write violent things from time to time. I've always been a fan of of the simulated yet impactful theater violence

of professional wrestling. Uh, and it does make me wonder to what it's extent is there like this innate violent aspect of of of humanity that finds its way out in these forms. I mean, I also ask these questions when I observed my my five year old son. I'm around him all the time. I don't know to what extent the influences of other children play into his uh, his uh, his demeanor, but but I know that he digs mostly sweet things at his age. He like the animals,

he likes totorow and yet he easily took to dinosaur violence. Uh. And he likes to climb on me in a manner that feels kind of wrestling esque, and he's taken to sort of punching me, but he's not. He doesn't call him punches. He's he pretends that his fists are dinosaur eradicating asteroids and he'll go asteroids falling, and then he uh, he's sort of like that. Your kid is acting out

like mass extinction level genocide with a punch. That's pretty amazing. Yeah, Like the first time you watched Panio, another Miyazaki film. He was a little upset because Panio's dad was a little too serious. Granted he's voiced by Liam Neeson in the version he's watching, but he got upset over that and had to grow to where he could watch Panio. But and but yet dinosaur eradication via extinction of it,

he's totally on board. Yeah. Oh, I imagine, like he's seen skeletons and museums and stuff like that of dinosaurs, so he's got a firm grasp on that. Yeah. Well, you know, I've been thinking a lot about this lately, not just your son and and like the progression of violence, but just violence in general. It's been in the news lately. And I'm saying that now, and I suppose you could say that at any period of time, right, there's been

violence in the news recently. It just feels like it's it's it's omnipresent, and it it's been kind of disturbing me. So a friend suggested that I read Stephen Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature for reassurance, because essentially the premise of this book is that the world is actually less violent than it used to be and things are

getting better in terms of violence, but slowly. It doesn't seem like it in the present because the media's attention is very much on the sort of like it bleeds, it leads news, right, So of course, like there's constantly going to be stories about shootings or bombings or fires or knife attacks, right, And this kind of stuff is pretty disturbing and upsetting, and I think in a cynical worldview makes you think like, oh gosh, like we are

just you know, bent on utter self destruction. But Ker's book actually makes a really good point that we're not, and that there are a lot of ways in which we're rising up out of that. Now you're probably asking you some of you may be asking yourself. Who is Stephen pinker Well. He's a Canadian born American cognitive scientist, psychologist, linguist, and popular science writer. His name has come at a time or two on the podcast. I think, uh, what

was it? Euphanisms? I think we're one of the recent things we're discussing euphanisms and Pinker's writing he talks about euphemisms and here in relation to ideology, So we'll touch on that a little bit. And actually this episode. This is like a meta stuff to blow your mind episode, because I feel like we're really zooming up big picture, looking at human biology, evolution, philosophy, and very specifically neuroscience

in a lot of cases. But it touches on many episodes that you and Joe and I have have done in the past, so we'll be bringing in stuff from that as well. Yeah, we're gonna be zipping down the high way here, and along the way, they're gonna be some exits to look very interesting. In some cases, those are avenues we've explored before. In other cases are avenues

that we can explore in the future. So let us know and we'll either direct you in the right direction or accord a new episode that lines up with that area. So just up front, I should establish that this book, The Better Angels of Our Nature is massive. It's like eight hundred nine hundred pages long. So there's no way we could do an episode that would be of like normal length for you to listen to where Robert and I had discussed this entire book. It's just too big

to do that. So for this episode, we're really honing in on a section that he refers to as inner Demons, and this is where he explains why human beings are violent, and he does a really good job of doing it by doing this massive literature review of of human existence and sort of how we've applied violence over time, but

also what we've learned about violence through various research methods. Uh, we're gonna touch the other stuff that's in the book, and like Robert said, like if if some of it comes up and you say, like, oh, I would like a full episode on that, you know, we may gloss over it here, but talk to us and maybe we'll be able to do something in the future. So he

starts off with doing this overall huge data analysis. Basically, I think it's like the first six chapters of the book where he essentially looks at the course of human history and says, yeah, violence is a major part of it, and it seems to be very specific to our species. But it doesn't have a fixed rate. So violence isn't like a human urge in the way that sexes or

hunger or sleep. And he says, in fact, if you look at the data presented, violence has actually declined over time, and there's plenty of evidence that human beings are in fact averse to violence. So for instance, uh, this is something we've talked about on the show before it comes up in the office a little bit too, that there's an example that most soldiers in war don't actually fire

with the tent to kill during wartime. This observation comes from the Second World War and from historian and US Army bridgetier General S. L. A. Marshal, and he reported the firing way it was fifteen and out of every hundred men engaged in a firefight, only fifteen to twenty actually use their weapon. And then in Vietnam, for every enemy soldiers killed, more than fifty thousand bullets were fired.

But we have to point out that some critics have charged that Marshall's observations were more observational than a true

science scientific study, and others have been less kind. Yeah, so it's I mean, you can you can look at that and maybe, like, if you're worried about the amount of human violence that's going on in the world, you can say, well, that's an encouraging sign, right right, And and I and I should also point out that this is just one of the many examples that Pinker draws upon, and so he's not basing everything just on this on

this thing about to kill stats. Uh, and in general, when we're talking about Pinker's argument that violence is going going down, he is talking about over arching statistical evidence and just in the broad picture of human culture, obviously an individual human is still capable of staggering cruelty and violence. We know the examples. We preserve the examples in our cultures like specimens on a shelf. But again we have to come back to what does the larger pictures say,

What are the larger trends for humanity itself? And so for evidence of human violence. Pinker actually at first turns to one of the an unlikely area that I would think of, But actually, when you brought up your son earlier,

it makes sense. He looks at two year olds as being the most violent stage of humanity, basically talking about and you would know better than I do, but you know that like at that age, we're thrashing around a lot, We're more likely to get angry at the drop of a hat or burst into tears and and really like uh, kind of exert like dominance and revenge kind of tactics

over small petty things. Yeah, I don't know, it's a difficult want to rule on because I just have the one child too to base my observations on, and then every kid is going to be a little different. Maybe Pinker just had some really rough kids. Yeah, I don't know. I mean when I guess one of the things is when emotional responses are coming online for young children, there are less filters, so when they feel mad over something, they feel it, and then when they feel happy about something,

they just feel it. And so you observe these these for what what for an adult would be just crazy mood swings, but for a child, like that's the power they're they're painting with. But even when you look at the statistics related to adults, it gets a little bit scary in terms of how much we fantasize about violence. Seventy of men and fifty to eighty percent of women in a study, and these were all college students, admitted

that they fantasized about killing someone. Uh. And this kind of gets into the sort of idea, like the general idea that bad people actually do what good people dream about doing. Right, and this is why we have this violent fiction and fun right like our video games where we're shooting everything or we're watching horror movies or action movies or whatever. I think I think that the language

here is very important. Like when we use terms like fantasize that that makes it sound like you're like the revenge fantasy on my head. Here is just I'm really, I'm really getting off on this vision of me, uh, punching that guy in the face. Whereas and we'll get into this more later on, but if you view it as a sort of mental simulation, if you're thinking of the things that I could do in response to this uh, you know, this individual uh ticking me off or offending

me in somewhat some fashion. Of all the possible things I can do, punching them is one of those things. And here is how it might play out in my mind. Here are the pros, here the cons. Here's how it might make me feel. But then here's how it might feel to to get arrested. So if you look at it from that point of view, it's like it's not it's not as creepy and weird as fantasizing about violence. It's more like, yeah, your brain knows that violence is

always an option. It's just to what degree does your brain say that it's almost always never worth the effort. Yeah, and pinker later, you know, goes on to describe that as sort of one of our angels rather than our deanons, is the ability to rationalize risk assessment, essentially whether or not the risk and reward is worth it for violence.

But where it gets really and it's really worth us zooming in on is the neuroscience, because neurosurgeons have described something that's referred to as the rage circuit in the mammalian brain. And I'm gonna walk you through this using a rat's brain as an example to start off, why did you bring that in in your pocket? Or you know, well, I've got the rat. I figured I might as well take the brain out. Uh. So, here we've got the

rat brain. It has a pathway that connects three major structures in the lower parts of its brain, and these are similar to other mammalian brains like humans. A aller of tissue in there is called the para aqueductal gray and this is comprised of gray matter that is surrounded by a fluid filled canal that runs from the spinal cord to the brain. And this is essentially where this

rage circuit lies. It contains all the inputs that create our irritation, things like pain and hunger and blood pressure and our heart rate and temperature and our hearing, and so the para aqueductal gray is partly under the control of our hypothalamus, and it's regulating emotional, motivational, and physiological states.

It sits on the pituitary gland, which is pumping hormones into the bloodstream, regulating cortisol from our adrenal glands, and cortisol is pretty important here in terms of like the biochemistry. The hypothalamus itself then is regulated by the amygdala, which is applying our memory and our motivation, giving emotional coloring to our thoughts. So on top of all of this, this entire rage circuit is the cerebral cortex, and that patches into our eye sockets literally with the orbital cortex.

These terms are going to be important later as we're going through sort of methods of rage turning into violence. Now, I'm going to step away from Pinker for just a second to discuss uh some ideas by neurobiologists Douglas Fields. These are not ideas that are contrary to Pinker's arguments.

I think they line up rather nicely in fact, as as we continue on with the discussion, but Fields has written a great deal about the rage circuit as well, and he argues that violent behavior is often the result of the clash between the modern world and the evolutionary hardwiring of our brains. We all have triggers, he says, and we have to be aware of them in order to manage them. And uh, these are the triggers that he proposes. It spells out the word life morts, So

that's I didn't know that was a real word. Yeah, life morts. There's so many great band ideas already, Rage circuit, life, more, life, more more. It's his L I F E M O r t s That L is for life and limb that's defensive aggression as a trigger for your violence. Then I for insult, F for family or maternal aggression. So you're protecting your family, protecting your your your child, or at least that's the argument in your brain. Then there's

an environment to territorialism. Then M for mate, which does not refer to British pub brawls but rather made benheaviorimating aggression. Then there's oh for organization, the organization you're part of are for resources or lack of resources, T for tribe, an s for stop and this one refers to being trapped, constrained or cornered. Yeah, And as we'll discover with Pinker, that s part that being trapped, restrained, or cornered, that's

when humans can be their most violent. Quick quote from Fields. This is from a National Geographic interview. He says, you're not going to engage in violence and risk life and limb for a trivial reason. There are very specific triggers.

So that's the it's key here. The even though our violence within the modern framework is irrational in many cases, it's tied into evolved responses that makes sense in the in the like the long history of human evolution and sort of the the the the full temporal picture of the human being. Yeah, and Pinker makes this point and I'm gonna cap it at the end of our episode two. But that, like, the ability to define these things and recognize what's within ourselves that makes us capable of violence

is sort of the first step towards stopping it from happening. Indeed. Uh, And so it's whether it's Fields model or it's Pinker's model, you know, that just depends on what sort of like linguistic thing you're applying on top of it. But both help. Now. Pinker also focuses on practicality of violence, and he says, when you move toward harming a fellow human, it must

accomplish two things. It's got to be at least increase the chance at the target will come to harm, and it will give the your target and overriding goal of harming you before you harm them. This means we have to consider the consequences of our actions practically, like we're talking about earlier risk reward rationality. This is why most human violence is cowardly, stealthy, and preemptive. Right, so we tend to do it from afar, or you know, do it when somebody's not looking or or not be a

part of it. Right. Um, it's very rare that like somebody will be so psychopathic that they will like, uh, just you know, murder hundreds of people face to face, because the human averseness to that violence is biological. I briest to mind all these examples as generally from our fiction, where like one character demands that the villain fight them fair and square, right, and but yeah, this is generally not what we do. We're all about taking advantage and

having the upper hand. Oh yeah, and there's absolutely evolutionary reasons for that too. Another component of that that Pinker brings up is something that he refers to his forward panic, and this is when humans face an opponent in a long state of apprehension and fear, and then when they can catch that opponent in a moment of vulnerability, it leads to just utterly savage violence. This is human beings

that they're worse. So going back to that model that Fields has earlier, that's when you're trapped or restrained or cornered, right, and you've got the opportunity to break free from that, and that you just see human beings just going to just utter carnage. Then, yeah, this is basically the whole idea of the Purge series, right, yeah, yeah, you know, I hadn't really thought of it before, but like those speak to sort of a real like inner uh quandary

of human violence. So he also argues though, that the way that we get away with that in our own heads is because we have something called a moralization gap, and this is where we create narratives of victims and perpetrators, and they diverge, and only really a neutral party can see how they diverge from one another. So it's really kind of self serving thinking. That's a form of cognitive dissonance, and we develop all kinds of mental strategies of self

deception to help support it. Subsequently, this quirk in psychology means no one thinks they're evil, right like you hear you think about that in the world, like people who are described as villains, No one sits around and thinks I'm evil, I'm doing evil right. They all think that what they're doing is innocent and that they themselves are long suffering victims within their own narratives, so they always

think they're acting morally. And Pinker reminds us here of Hannah Errant's infamous term the banality of evil, when referring to the ordinariness of the Nazis atrocities during World War Two. It's worth remembering this when you're looking at our storytelling to write, Like whether you're making a story, you're watching a movie or reading a book, even the worst bad guy has justifications for why they think what they're doing

is right, you know. And so when when we tend to watch fiction is just like, this guy is just evil for the sake of being evil. At least in this current day and age, that's not necessarily engaging for us, right right, Yeah, you need some idea of their motivations and why they view their actions as righteous. Yeah. Um, and again this all makes perfect sense if you look

at things from a life morts standpoint. The triggers are they're they're evolved to enable survival, and what you can think of is the temporally average human, the tribal hunter gatherer, the hominid. All of this culture business is relatively new. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. A couple other terms I want to establish upfront for Pinker before we get into what his quote unquote demons are.

Another thing that he describes within the brain is the seeking system, and this runs from the fore brain through a bundle of fibers in the middle of the brain to the ventral striatum, which we call the reptilian brain.

It was discovered in rats when psychologists realized that if they stimulated it with an electrode via a lever, the rats themselves they would at this lever it was stimulate the electrode in their own brain and what they would start doing is hitting the lever over and over and over against stimulating that part of their brain until they became utterly exhausted. And these connections are actually two way, they're not top down. So all these components in the brain,

they're talking to each other. The neurons within are signaling each other with the neurotransmitter dopamine, and this motivates animals to achieve goals for instance, hunting. Uh. There's actually also a fear circuit that is theorized and it's connected to the rage circuit. Some extreme fear, so this goes back to what we were talking about about being you know, caught or trapped. Extreme fear will trigger an enraged, defensive

attack or violence, So there you go. Likewise, there may be another motivational system that triggers violence that is referred to here as inter mail aggression or the dominance system. Basically, the idea here is that the seeking system in our brain leads males of a species to willingly seek out aggressive challenges with other males, and this sometimes also leads

to blind rage. Now, the difference here between the rat brain that I've got here in my hand and our human brains is that these structures are enveloped by large bloated cerebrum. The for humans, we have this big cerebrum surrounding all of this stuff, and and it's taken up by the frontal lobes, which possibly contends with our rage and fear with things like restraint, prudence, and morality. And this is where Phineas Gauge comes up. Good old Phineas Gauge.

I can't imagine how many episodes if you go back through the stuff to blow your mind catalog, he comes up as an example. Yeah, Phineas Gauge, it comes up. It comes up quite a bit. This was a nineteenth century individual. There was a freak railway accident that blasted a crowbar like tool called a tamping iron up through his skull. It entered under the left cheekbone and exit through the top of his head, and it basically gave

him a frontal lobotomy. So when I was in high school, Uh, for dare they made t shirts for all of us that had Phineas Gauge's skull with the railway rod shooting through it. Dare you mean to keep a kid off drugs? Because it was a demonstration of what your head was like when you were drunk or when you were on certain kinds of drugs. So it's supposed to be these t shirts that would remind you like, if you drink and you drive, you're just gonna be like a guy

with a with a rod through his his head. They were like, I thought it was kind of cool at the time, but like I look back on it's like this really morbid example to give kids. Yeah, like that's that's not what it's like kids. That It also makes me imagine like a you know, in a local evening news story, kids call it gauging. They're blasting tamping irons

up through their skull in order to get high. Well, if they were doing that, they would have to make sure that they actually just droid the orbital cortex and the ventromedial cortex, because that was what is theorized to be destroyed in Phineas Gauge's brain, which led to these unchecked emotions he was experiencing. So the orbital cortex is actually adjacent to something called the insula, and that registers

our physical gut feelings. This is when you say something like you've got a physical trigger, like my blood is boiling when you're angry. This is coming from the insula. But when you scan the brains of people who are prone to violence, especially those with antisocial personality disorder, the orbital regions, those are shrunken and less active. But when you compare this to somebody, somebody like an impulsive murderer,

you find that their orbital cortex is actually malfunctioning. So it's not smaller, it's just not working the way it's supposed to be. And so it seems that this is our major inhibitor of violence, the orbital cortex, and certain acts of violence our weight as being justifiable by our brains. So, for instance, let me give you a scenario, Robert. What if there were five people on a train platform and you could see that they were going to be run

over by the train. The only way you could stop the train was to push another person in front of the train and derail it. Oh well, this is this is a classic moral problem, right, Well, you have to choose whatever benefits the most people, right, Yeah, it's very spock right exactly. So you get into this quandary between the logic of it and the humanity of it, right, And we react against this with our amygdala and our orbital cortex, and you have like a more utilitarian motive thinking,

like let's call it the Spock motive thinking. That's your dorso lateral cortex where our intellectual, abstract problem solving is done. All right, we got all that out of the way. We've covered the brain pretty thoroughly. Let's take a break, and when we get back, we're going to get into the actual demons that Pinker has defined here, the five things that make us violent. Alright, we're back. It's time to summon the five demons. Yeah, get get out your

pentagrams and your your salt. No, they're not those kind of deal and then not the fun kind. But I guess we can imagine, we can imagine what their forms might look like. Yeah, it works very well within Pinker's format for this book, because you know the title The Better Angels of Our Nature. The idea is that after he presents these demons that we're going to talk about in this episode, then he presents the angels subsequently that we use to combat these demons that would keep us

from being as violent as we could be. Yes, So the five demons argument, this is a rejection of the hydraulic theory of violence. And the hydraulic theory is basically what I was bringing up earlier when I was saying, oh do I do I play violent video games? Because there's an inherent violence in my body and this is the necessary escape vow. The hydraulic theory is simply that humans have an inner drive to violence, a blood lust that has to be satisfied one way or the other.

And this is a this is a rejection of that argument. Yeah, that's Pinker's main thing is that we are not there's no actual single psychological route that makes us violent. In fact, he says there's five things their predation, dominance, revenge, sadism, and ideology. We're gonna go through each of these and kind of touch upon Pinker's, you know, definitions for why these are the things that make us violent. Well, I'm envisioning this pack of demons right now with their grotesque

body in there. That'd be a fun project for stuff to blow your mind fans, if you wanted to draw our five demons of violence for for Pinker's set up. There so predation, I'm imagining that's going to look something like a predator. Of course, it's gonna have like the

dreadlocks and the weird uh spidermouth man thing. Right, Okay, Well, what Pinker means by this is that is a use of force as a means to an end, and it's usually deployed in pursuit of a goal that's set up by that seeking system part of the brain that we mentioned earlier. So, for instance, when you're hunting for food or sport, that's literal predation, right, you're preying upon another species.

There's a certain amount of empathy that we have with prey as well in many cultures, right, Like a lot of cultures revere the animals that they kill for their food. Yeah, look no further than the ancient horned gods of chaos un predictability of the hunt. And you can look to to the deer stickers you see in the back of trucks that clearly belonged to deer hunters, the trophies they

put in their homes. And perhaps this is kind of a stretch, but maybe even the weird anthropomorphized mascots of barbecue restaurants, you know, like the talking pigs and pots. You brought this up a couple of days ago in one of our company meetings, and you were a hundred percent right. Every time I drive past a barbecue place, I am confounded. The logos are either uh, pigs that look like they're like so excited to be about to be eaten, or like they're about to eat themselves. They're

like eating ribs from their own body. Yeah, like they're they've gotten knives and forks pointed at their bellies and they're grinning. It's the strangest thing, but you're right, it's kind of like our modern version of sort of, you know, honoring the food that we're eating. But Pinker argues, when you've got this chasm between the perpetrator's perspective and the victim, so you don't have that kind of honoring, it makes

it a lot easier to conduct predatory violence. And so this is when atrocities are committed and we say, how could they possibly do that? Right, our empathy is actually outweighing the predatory perspective, and this is why it helps for perpetrators themselves to be able to see their victims as quote unquote vermin or morally disgusting. Right, we talked about the immoralization gap before. That's where it comes into play, they basically convinced themselves, well, these people are less than

me and they're deserving of this. Yeah, it's that it's the act of mothering it. We I mean we still see in many cases today, and I mean really we see it all over the place. Like, to whatever extent you can make the other party less human and and and more of an alien entity than than more becomes permissible towards them, tying back into pinker demonization, so turning

them into demons. Now. He also talks about positive illusions as being this sense where we have we think, oh, well we're lucky, or we're super capable, or we can justify ways that make it easier for us to be predatory. Right, we usually exaggerate ourselves as a useful tool when we're facing a rival. And then you know the reason why is like, if the world didn't have these positive illusions, there might only be violence when two rivals were closely matched,

because let's face it, they're not always matched equally. So an example of this works when you look at war, right, so perfect example, Napoleon and Hitler both trying to invade Russia, Like those were obviously difficult odds, but there were countries that initiated wars and ended up losing them. And here's what's interesting. When you look at the statistics, countries that initiate wars, they lose them twenty five to fifty percent of the time. So people and nation states get into

fights that they can't win all the time. And this is based on their bravado, buying into their own height. Exactly. Yeah. Now leaders can totally overestimate that bravado, and that's what leads us into this. Pinker also calls this the Lake Wobegon effect after a Prairie Home Companion and Garrison Keeler, because the idea here is that everyone assumes that they're better than average. So when you ask the you know, the general populace, and you say are you average, are

you lower than average? Or you better than average? Everybody says they're better than average. Yeah, I mean, that's I mean, especially in America. That's the idea of American exceptionalism, right exactly, everybody's everybody has the potential for greatness. Nobody is law into a particular cast. So this leads us to the second demon on our shoulder, which is dominance. And this is essentially our drive for supremacy over our rivals. And it's tied back into that brain part that Pinker was

talking about earlier, which is the inter male aggression. Here's the thing, though, it's easy to hear that and think, oh, well, men are only violent, but actually it's not gender exclusive. It's just that men tend to exhibit these qualities for biological reasons. Will get into yeah, I mean, and in the basic idea is that for the when you look at the broad history of the human species, you have a situation where the males, the males are the males of the body for violence, and then in turn, they

have more of a brain for the violence. They're more wired for the for the physical violence. Right. So, if you look at homicides, the largest motive for them in all altercations is trivial in origin. It's usually things like somebody insulted me or they accidentally jostled me. But the participants they actually behave as if there's more at stake, which leads to murder. Uh. And this kind of violence it acts as a way to prove dominance so that you,

as sort of like an alpha, are challenged less. Right. The goal here is actually a spreading of information by by showing that you're the stronger one. Hopefully the you know, the crowd will see this and they will spread it along so that you're challenged less often. Studies actually of American street violence show that young men who have a code of honor are more likely to perpetrate violence because that code of honor sort of helps them with the

moralization gap. Likewise, if there's an audience presence, that doubles their likelihood that they're going to be violent because that

audience will help spread that information. Now, this calls back to the episode that Joe and I did where we interviewed Franz da Wal where we talked about primates and how primates will fight with one another but then after they'll reconcile, and the Walls theory was that this is because their long term interests are bound together, so primates actually do their own version of rationalization, and with Bonobos that the reconciliation often takes a sexual form. Yeah, yeah,

that came up as well, I believe. Now that's a good point to bring into the gender difference here, which is that Okay, men, yes, are far more violent and they are more likely to value their professional status and to take greater risks due to overconfidence. This is actually thought to be a product of evolution, as males can reproduce more quickly than females, so they're competing for sexual opportunities.

In the male brain, there's a nucleus in the anterior pre optic portion of the hypothalamus that is twice the size of a female's And there are so many receptors in the system that are for testosterone, which is actually five to ten times more plentiful and men. That makes sense to us, But the fact that the receptors are for that leads you to understand why men can be more violent. Now, biologists aren't actually convinced that testosterone is

fully to blame for male aggression. Instead, they think that what it does is it prepares men for the challenge of dominance. Getting back to this, this demon the secondary demon here of dominance. It's it's getting us ready for that challenge. Now, Fields he pretty much backs all of this up, and he also points out though that this is all a double edged sword because certainly nine of inmates are male, but nine of Carnegie Institute medals for heroism have gone to men as well. Now, there you can.

You can tease that apart in various ways. But he said, again, you can attribute much of this evolution of male and female brains. That's how we evolve. Men have the body, greater strength size for violence, and then therefore they have the brains to use it. So Pinker actually argues that this is a bad scenario when you've convinced yourself of your sort of grandiosity, right, your bravado. If you have

too much self esteem, you're more prone to violence. So people who are narcissistic and think well of themselves but out of proportion with their actual achievements, those are the people you should be worried about in terms of dominance and violence. Uh, this is a trio of symptoms that Pinker says can actually make for a political leader that is a tyrant. And he says these are grandiosity, the

need for admiration, and a lack of empathy. But through our identities as members of social groups, we actually see our dominance play out in less violent ways, and this is one of the ways that we sort of defeat this. Right, we've got sports teams or political parties, for instance, and this can also lead to attitudes such as racism, and other discriminations. Right, the idea of hitting social groups in one way or another against each other people to varying

degrees harbor ultimately a motive for social dominance. And the idea here is that the group that they belong to is part of a hierarchy and they want their group to always be on top in that hierarchy. So Pinker's arguing that maybe the social dominance itself, it might not be about race per se, but more about what he calls coalition, where groups have evolved together and they banned together.

And he brings it back to that part of the brain again into male aggression, and he provides evidence that racism is actually more likely to target minority men that minority women. So he provides some studies in this book showing that that is actually the case. So racism is more likely to take place between men of different races than between a man and a woman of different races. Now, this becomes especially deadly when you combine it with nationalism.

So that's basically a welding of tribalism. It's a cognitive conception of the group that you belong to, and it's the political apparatu us of the government that we belong to. Right. You combine all these things together, and this can lead to the conviction that one's nation has the right to greatness, that it deserves to be great, It deserves to be on top of the hierarchy. Any lowering of that status is explained away as malevolence, and it's applied to either

an internal or an external foe. Now, Pinker it comes out with sort of like a positive take on this, and he hopes that dominance will actually be tempered by the civilized institutional systems that we exist within. So he actually says the governmental part. Hopefully that and laws and etcetera. Will will keep us sort of on track and keep

us from being violent. He says in roads for women together with cosmopolitanism will help as well, and having a scientific understanding of these biological processes will hopefully make us more self aware about where are violent urges for dominance

are coming from. So to a certain degree, it's the idea that that hopefully the thing that we will want dominant and the way the thing that we will will push all this longing for dominance into will be more positive international models or species wide models for what we can be Yeah, as the people. I think that's where he's going with it. And in the latter sections, which we'll touch on at the end of the episode, but the sort of angel sections, both feminization and cosmopolitanism are

listed as being factors there. So let's cross our fingers and hope that's the case. And he definitely provides evidence throughout the book where you know that this episode isn't about that. We can't cover everything, but the steep drop in violence over the course of history is definitely on display in this book. It takes some good six chapters to show it, but there's a lot there. All right,

Let's summon the revenge demon. The demon it's all about driving us to payback harm in kind fired up by the rage circuit, right, so this is the third demon. It is the urge for vengeance, and it's actually a major cause of violence. And what's kind of weird is we seem to celebrate it in our cultures, right, Like

everybody loves a good revenge story. I haven't seen John Wick yet, but everybody talks about that movie is being like it's the ultimate revenge film and it feels good, you know, I don't know, it's the ultimate revenge picture, but it's fun and and of the revenge trope that the basic revenge pacing is something we can all easily hop on board with. Yeah, that's a narrative that we're familiar with and and as such, it's actually the motivation for ten to twenty of the homicides that occur in

the entire world. When you take this to a macro scale, revenge is essentially the motive for things like terrorism when nations retaliate against it, and then subsequent wars we engage in. Right, So let's look at the neurobiology here, get back to that rage circuit that we describe before. Let's say an animal is hurt or frustrated and it wants to lash out at its nearest likely perpetrator. This is fed information from the temporo parietal junction, and that indicates whether the

harm was intentional or accident. All. Then the rage circuit activates and it turns on the insular cortex, which gives us sensations of pain, disgust, and anger. And studies have also found that feelings of revenge actually light up the region of the brain that is associated with craving sweets, nicotine or cocaine. So when they weigh the pleasure of revenge over the pain it might cause, it actually lights up the orbital and ventromedial frontal cortex, which we talked

about earlier. So those frontal areas seem to really be what's keeping us from just going into blind like wolverine hulk rage all the time. Uh. And that is interesting the idea of associating it with sweets, right, because we we'd speak of poetic language like the sweetness of revenge. Revenge is a dish beest or of cold like stuff

like that. Yeah. Well, I mean we have a lot of other things about revenge too, right that there's the old Chinese proverb that if you set out on a course of revenge, be prepared to dig two graves exactly, yeah, which is thinking more with the front part of your brain, yeah, than the rage circuit. So this all leads to the function of risk, acceptsment, and deterrence, which you know is

what Robert's talking about with that proverb. To convince your rivals that they have any attempt to advance their interests at your expense will lead to such severe penalties that their gambit will end with a net loss. So this is essentially like applying capitalism to revenge theory here, right, like it turns it into sort of a net gain kind of situation or risk reward situation. But that really

is how our brains way the factors involved. Yeah, I mean, when you start looking at um, let's say, you know, nuclear deterrence, Like that's basically the whole argument there. It basically like any nation's nuclear deterren exists to ensure that any nuclear attacker will have to dig two grades, right, yeah, exactly. Uh, And this brings up something that I think has come up on the show before, but I'm not sure. It's called the prisoners dilemma game. And we don't have time

to go into the whole scenario here. Honestly, that would be a whole episode. But the result is essentially that people are more likely to selfishly defect from one another and get a greater punishment than they are for cooperating altruistically and getting a smaller punishment. So this is a game of studies that has been run on multiple people

and every time it comes out the same. Theoretical models take that even further and they find out that over time, in iterations researchers can theorize that the long term effects of revenge on humanity are pretty complicated. Uh, and that might be fun for us to explore in another episode. But essentially, most people employ what are referred to as tit for tat strategies and enjoy cooperation over the threat of revenge. So that seems like a good thing right now.

This made me think immediately, what's the most popular superhero team in the world right now? Suicide Squad. Oh, you're right, that's that's that's even worse the Avengers, right, and Avengers insinuates that their motive, their goal is all about revenge, right, and that revenge primarily works as a deterrent if the Avenger has a reputation for being able to carry it out right. So, subsequently, this is why most not Avengers like the superheroes, but just Avengers who are enacting revenge.

They want the target to know that they met out the punishment. Right. Well, I have a serious comments question that how much avenging do the Avengers actually get up to and and is there like a ruling counsel that decides that the matter is vengeance worthy. I don't think so. I think that's just a cool name that they plucked out of the air. But remember in the in the Josh Weeden movie, I think he felt like he had

to justify the name. And so it was like when one of their friends were killed, that was when they were like, Okay, now we're gonna have our revenge. Were the Avengers, we have to avenge somebody, but for the most part, we don't have an entire heroic or organization based around and this often vilified but but sometimes celebrated concept. No, but you know, that would be a really interesting take on doing the Avengers. I think that Marvel should hire

you and get right on that. I like the idea of having like there's a council that's like the Hulk and Captain America and Iron Man and Black Widows sitting around and they were like, well, I don't know, does it really justify revenge? Now, revenge evolved to be a deterrent um, So then we have to ask ourselves why is it so common in the world if the idea is it's supposed to deter other violence. Pinker again points to that moralization gap because people consider the harms that

they're inflicting to actually be justified. And subsequently law and government come into play as implements to keep our revenge in check. So maybe the Avengers need that uh, and hopefully we internalize this even when the rule of law isn't around to monitor us all the time in real quick He says. Other ways of trailing revenge include broadening your circle of empathy from those who you're close to outwards.

So most of us are automatically empathetic with our family and our friends, but try being empathetic with people further out from you, or when your relationships are too valuable to sever. Also, he says, a sincere apology can go a long way politically. We've actually seen a huge spike in apologies and reconciliation since the nineteen eighties. It's really interesting when you look at the graph of this. Like nations or like big religious organizations didn't used to apologize

to each other. It's a relatively new thing, and it's essentially to try to keep the whole revenge factor from getting out of control. All right, Well, the demons of say, of sadism and ideology are standing outside their medals, clinking their their chains and whips dangling. But we're gonna take a quick break before we let them into our hearts. Thank alright, we're back. What's that knocking on the door. Oh that's sadism. Demon hear it, and it is full

of a joy for hurting. Uh. Now, here's the thing about sadism. Uh, it is inherent to human beings, but it might just be a psychological quirk. So let's go through this and hopefully we'll find out that we're not all inherently sadistic. Yeah, and this is definitely one of those areas where this could be a topic onto itself, but we're going to Uh, we're gonna run through it as best we can. Yeah. So too many of us, sadism is not just morally monstrous, but we're also baffled

by it, right because there's no apparent benefit from sadism. Now, think about torture, for instance. Some people like to justify torture as being a method of sadism that's worthwhile. For instance, if you have a ticking bomb scenario, right, a bomb is about to go off. The only way you can find out is if you torture the suspect and they tell you where the bomb is. But we actually find that it's seldom instrumental because victims will really say anything

to just make the torture stop. Now, you look at our past entertainment, right, it's full of sadistic acts. We've got the Roman Colosseum and other blood sports. And then you look at the history of serial killers. Now here's where I'm not a hundred percent on board with Pinker. He aligns serial killers in general with sexual gratification, and given what I know from researching the topic of serial killers for things here at work, that's not always the case.

But maybe that's something we should go into in a different episode. Serial Killers, though they're they're not exactly new, right. They seem like they're a product of modern society. But it's been around for a long time. It's just taken other forms. Yeah, And I think it's it's one of those cases too where it's, uh, maybe it's it's become harder to be really good at it given advances in society. And likewise, I guess the ones who are really good at it are so good at it you never know that.

That's the that the that's the scariest part. Yeah, So Pinker's argument about sadism is that, and you can check yourself on this and maybe you'll discover something about yourself and your sadistic or non statistic qualities. Is that it requires two things. The first thing is a motive to enjoy other suffering, and the second is the removal of restraints that allow people to act upon the motives to enjoy other people's suffering. So he boils this down to

a couple of different things. First of all, the macab that's when we have this morbid fascination with the vulnerability of living things. This example here is when you're a little kid and you pull the legs off bugs, right, or you're driving by a car accident, you slow down so you can try to get a look at it. That leaves a lot of room for interpretation, because there are versions of that where you can say someone's a morbid artist and but they're not necessarily hurting bugs or

even the whole slowing down for car rex. Anybody that's ever done any any amount of driving on on our interstates, like you know that people seem to be gauging in this to a considerable degree enough to you know, shut down traffic in in the lane that is not directly affected by the wreck. So yeah, I think there's a there's a big tempt there on that first category. Yeah, I'll throw this in just as like a qualifier about

this book, which I really like this book. But there are points where Pinker supplies a lot of evidence, he cites sources, and then there's points where he just kind of throws things out where he's like, here's my take on the world, and I think this was one of them. Uh. Now, he also pulls in two of the demons that we

previously discussed as being part of sadism, dominance and revenge. Now, in the case of dominance, it's sort of a Shoden freita, right like, we like the idea of somebody we want to dominate falling down on a banana appeal, right Like, it fills us with glee. Uh. And likewise with revenge, there's this idea of justice, right, so vingeance has served and justice is exactly Yeah, you did a really good imitation of ghost Rider there. That's what I think. It's

something along those lines. He's the spirit of vengeance now Pinker again. And I think sexuality isn't exactly pinker strung suit, but he gets into sexual sadism here too, and he argues that the circuits for sexuality and aggression are intertwined within the limbic system, and both of these respond to testosterone. So examples, for instance, include veterans who described killing in war and they say like it's an actual sexual release

for them. Or the other example he gives is UH reports from SS concentration camps where commanders reportedly masturbated during floggings of prisoners. So he's making this argument that there's a there's an inherent connection between sexuality and aggression. He does it very briefly. I'm not a hundred percent convinced along the lines of also that like all serial killers are doing it for sexual reasons. Yeah, I mean, there's a there's a lot of room for UH for questioning

and uh an elaboration there. I mean, for for instance, you can you can take into account the fact that many people's different kinks and fetishes involve essentially violent themes, but that doesn't mean that they're necessarily violent people. I feel like Pinker is maybe going a little just surface

level on this. Yeah, and he there are points where he sort of like brushes up against sado masochism and bondage, but it's like I got the impression that it wasn't a topic he was like intimately familiar with, you know. Just I'm imagining pinker at like a dungeon literally brushing up against people in a bondage thing. Uh. And it's hilarious.

So he actually says, all right, we've got all these possible sources for sadism, Why then is it less common than all of these other forms of violence that we we end up with. Well, his his reasons are empathy. So, for instance, like when he talks about empathy, is not just talking about feeling each other's pain or inhabiting their minds, but he's actually thinking about aligning your happiness with that of another being. And he says, this is more like

sympathy or compassion. Yeah. And as we've explored in past discussions about psychopaths in particular, there's this argument that with most of us, the empathy switches default on, and with these individuals it's default off, but can be turned on, can be employed through the right you know sort of training and mental exercises in the same way that we can, we can and do find ways to tamper our empathy through you know, mothering and and uh, and the reducing

of another person to something less than human. Right, So this is a perfect example of why it's important to be able to identify scientifically like what causes these things, so that we can then say, all right, we know what this is, we know the symptoms, let's look where

we think it is in the brain. And then you have to ask YOURSELFLF is it morally right to turn that switch back on how to bring in And we're talking demons, And if I know anything from the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual, it's that knowing the true name of a demon could gives you power over it. You know, I think you just nailed the episode title. Another thing he says that curtails this is cultural taboo. Right, So mostly the world and its governments see torture as being immoral.

That's why it's prohibited by the Eneva Conventions in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Humans also have a visceral revulsion and that inhibits us from hurting other people. Right, So, uh, just the sight or sound of seeing someone screaming in pain,

it's enough to make primates averse to eating food. And this is a perfect point to bring up Stanley Milgram's experiment for evidence that participants were visibly distraught when they thought that they were electrocuting people they couldn't see, right. You know, this this brings up something. So so the primates in the study had trouble eating during this, And yet I was in the theater with you at the Alien Covenant, and I think people were eating popcorn the

entire time. Man. I was like in some of the more grizzly scenes, like people's jaws being sliced off, and and I'm just like, how are you just still taking in palmful after palmful of that delicious popcorn there is? You know, for me, there are certain horror movies that I can't eat during Texas. Chainsaw Mascer is one of those that movie does something like somehow it taps into

that visceral revulsion. Uh, And I don't know how it does it differently than Alien Covenant, But during Alien Covenant, I just felt like everything was obviously fake. Um. But there are horror movies that certainly do that for me. Well, I will say it's Alien Covenant was certainly very polished, and Chaw Masacre has that that that feel to it that you're almost watching documentary foe could be real. And yet I'm sure they're people out there who have like

a regular ritual of eating barbecue during TCM. So yeah, that's that wouldn't surprise me. They probably do that at the Alamo draft. That sounds um And you're talking about psychopaths earlier. So they've got this disabled inhibition against sadism. That's because they're amygdala and their orbital cortex shows a blunted response to signs of distress, so if they see a person screaming, they're less likely to respond to it.

Pinker actually argues that, besides psychopaths, sadism actually has to be cultivated over time, and his examples include, for instance, when you have older prison guards who participate in torture because it's something they've gotten used to overtime serial killers again, and then middle age crowds, not people who are of middle age, but crowds in the middle ages. Uh that they acclimatized to public sadism as a part of everyday life, right,

like torturing people in public. Are these colosseums where you'd feed people the lines or whatever, right, right, So yeah, in a way, it ceases to be a taboo. And it also this makes me wonder about about the cycle of violence as well. Yeah, an individual being more likely to participate in the violence because some level of this was perpetrated upon them. Uh, that might be a valid

argument as well. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um. So you know, you look at this at least the sadism, and it says something about us that's both terrifying but also a little hopeful for the reduction of violence in human society, which is, you know, thankfully we have this natural inhibition that's built into most of us, and thankfully it takes most of us a long time to build up a tolerance to become sadistic. So this leads us to our final demon. Yeah, I see him right here, the ideology demon.

This is when believers we've a collection of motives into a creed and then recruit others to carry out its destructive goals. And man, this could be a podcast into of itself. So we're gonna really boil this down quickly. Pinker's argument here is there's an important distinction because the body counts of history get way higher when large numbers

of people actually work together toward violence. Now, what's dangerous about ideology is essentially it promises utopia, which prevents its believers from weighing that cost benefit analysis that we're talking about in the front of the brain. Likewise, it paints its opponents as inherently evil and deserving of punishment. So again it gets around that moralization. Yeah, this is the

classic holy war scenario totally. Pinker again turns to Milgram's experiment as evidence of what we're willing to do if it's part of our social understanding. So it's worth remembering that sixty of the participants in that study, we're willing to go all the way up to the maximum shock level just because they were being cold to do it.

And further evidence from research by John Darley and bib Lataines study on by standard apathy shows that people that might respond to an emergency as a single person will fail to respond to that emergency if they're in a group of people because if they're in a group, they assume, well, if nobody else is doing anything, the situation can't be

that bad. Yeah. We there's an older episode that I did with with Julie where we get into this uh at length and it's it's it's interesting to to have that information and go in and do a CPR training course because they directly play upon that. The whole idea that if you ay, they're training you to be the person that actually steps forward and starts to initiating CPR. But then also, you don't just say somebody call nine

one one. You point to someone and you say you call nine one one, right, you have to be active in not passing right, and and it has and you have to be specific because if you just say someone do it, then the by standard effects going to take place, and people are like, oh, I guess somebody's gonna call nine one one, and everyone just stands around hesitating while all time to expY. And this sounds horrible, right, but at the same time like it's again it's worth recognizing,

like this is part of human nature. If we're aware of it, then we can do things like apply it in CPR courses so that we can save lives. Now, this leads to another famous experiment that, of course, is going to come up in this episode, the Stanford prison experiment. This is where participants were given faux roles as prisoners and guards. The guards quickly took their roles way too far and they abused their power. The experiment had to be called off after six days for the safety of

the people playing the role of prisoners. And this demonstrates that when a group of people has given power over another group, it can actually bring out barbaric behavior in people who would otherwise never display it. So Pinker wonders, have we actually progressed enough since these studies, since Millgroom, since the Stanford prison experiment, that participants would be more likely to disobey orders or to take advantage of authority

in these situations. So he's essentially saying, if we conducted those experiments today with modern day uh, you know, inhibitions, culture, politics, etcetera, keep those results from being as high as they were the first time around. Now some people have replicated that, and you can look at those studies separately. They're also

in the book. He takes a look at something called the spirals of silence, and he says, this is the phenomenon of people just going along with the crowd, uh and even on violence, simply because they think, look, it's gonna make other people in the crowd happy. So when you survey a group of people afterwards after a violent act, the majority of them will say, oh, yeah, I realized at the time that it was unpleasant or what we were doing was wrong, but I wanted to make sure

everybody else around me thought I was with them. So there's all kinds of methods in ideology that keep violence perpetuated. We talked earlier about the moralization gap euphemisms. You out up euphemisms earlier as being a pinker thing. So he says euphemisms are one single way that our language and communication allows us to get away with being violent. Think of the difference between the terms collateral damage, ethnic cleansing,

and just murder. Right, So the the sort of vagueness of those former terms makes it seem a little bit more acceptable. He says, there's all kinds of other ways that we sort of, you know, uh, methodize our ideology in violence. He talks about gradualism, responsibility, how how distant we are literally from the violence as it's happening. In fact,

this is one of my favorite quotes. He says, it's safe to say that the pilot of the Aola Gay who dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima would not have agreed to immolate a hundred thousand people with a flamethrower one at a time. So that's a really interesting take on the ideology aspect of violence. Uh. He taught more about demonization and dehumanizing victims, and minimizing the harm that you're doing, relativizing the harm that you're doing, and falling

back upon requirements of your task. So, for instance, when people make the argument, oh, well, it was just my job or I was only following orders. So this leads us to the angels, Pinker says he thinks the vaccine here, specifically for ideology, is to have an open society where people and ideas are allowed to move about freely and

no one is punished for having dissenting views. That sounds kind of like what we're in right now, right, which might be why he argues that violence has declined massively over time. Now, what other solutions does he present us with. Well, like I said, the mere step of identifying these demons is supposed to be a step in the right direction, but it's followed by the four angels, and we're not going to dive as deeply into those angels, but let's

talk about them briefly. Yeah, the demons are always more interesting, that's true, But yeah, you've You've identified the demons, you've learned their true names, given you the power over them, and now you have to summon some angels to really, you know, whack them. So the first one is empathy. And we've recorded whole episodes on this one before. It's

it's been it's pretty vital. This is the ability to feel the pain of others and or attempt to understand that pain, and it gives us the power to align our interests with the other person. And a lot of this comes down to our mere neurons and theory of mind. It's a it's a vital tool for navigating a world full of unknowable minds. We have to be able to put ourselves in their vicious heads in order to dodge and maneuver in this bone swinging world of tribal horror.

But of course that enables modern individuals, especially much more than mere Stone age machiavellianism, you know. So it's not just I have to know my adversary. It also means you you can know your friends. It means you can you have a better idea of of what's going ahead of even the average person on the street, some stranger that you'll you'll never know that, you'll never even uh you know, have exchange a word with But thanks to

a theory of mind, you can. You can contemplate what their position in their worldview consists of, and then you can take it that step further and turn empathy into sympathy or compassion, where you're actually tying your happiness into their happiness. Yeah, that's the final form of this angel, I think is that alright? The next angel is self control, so yeah, will power, and this ties into another key cognitive ability, which is known as chronosthesia or mental time travel.

So it kind of comes back to what we're talking about with revenge earlier. We can weigh the outcomes of our intended or considered acts, and as such, Pinker's point is that we can anticipate the outcome of acting out on our impulses and inhibit them as needed. So if the cost is too high, the risk is too great,

then we can just tamp it down. And this, like empathy, becomes even grander in the human condition because in many cases, we can live entire lives, maybe not too happy lives of of lives, but we can live entire lives and inhibiting perfectly natural impulses. So you know, there's a there's a there's solace to be taken in that fact, right, Yeah, and this gets back to I mean he mentioned a lot of these angels along the way and the demons, which is that the self control part really is wired

to the front part of our brains. And so that's something that we can take a little bit of uh solace in, which is that, like we're actually wired up to out rationalize the rage portion. Now, the next one, the third angel, is moral sense. So this governs a set of norms and taboos that govern our interactions. This, for an everyday example, can be as simple as a walking aboard an elevator and figuring out where you need

to stand. It can be as simple as walking into a school dance, an office party, or any other social setting and figuring out the rules and the expectation. Where are people setting, what are people wearing? How much food are people eating yet? And they are how much of they eat? You know, all these little things, these little

calculations did most of us take for granted. Yeah, and this totally gets into like the institutional idea and even like ties back into ideology right ideology is one of the demons, but in a way it's also one of the angels right because it supplies the moral sense and the cultural taboos for us to keep from being violent.

This one touches on some of the discussions we had in our Leaping into the Void episode where we talked about, you know, the the urge to jump off a building, the rational urge uh when you're you know, in a high place. But it's it also also like I find myself in a gallery, for instance, and They'll be this famous work of art and I could literally reach out grab it and start licking it, and I can't help

but think about it. I'm not actually, I'm not actually tempted to do it, but I keep thinking, like, what's the worst thing I could possibly do in this gallery to lick the painting? And uh, And there's terrifying about considering it, or not even considering it, just running that simulation in my mind. But what's keeping you from doing it is probably a combination of your brain and the

social uh institutions around you, especially in the museum. Yeah, it's the it's the two angels of self control and moral sense are standing by me, holding me back. Uh, and but and maybe the fourth angel as well. And that's reason. This is the power to reflect, deduce, and quote guide the application of the other better angels of our nature. So reasons kind of the quarterback of if I'm if I'm using my sports ann no idea, I'm

the wrong person to ask, but yeah, I'll go with it. Yeah, the quarterback then for the other angels and saying, all right, you run there, you run there, you hold him back so he didn't look the painting, and uh, an empathy will be standing over there, so he doesn't judge the guard too harshly. All right. And then on top of these angels, they don't have to go in and defeat these demons alone. They also have so you could say

institutional help from the five historical forces. And these Pinker argues are the exo A genius forces that favor peaceful motives and are the forces that are largely responsible for bringing about a decline in violence. So the first force here, the first of the five historical forces that Pinker presents, is the Leviathan nation state. So Leviathan. Here's a reference to Thomas Hobbs in a book Leviathan, a book on state craft in the structure of society and legitimate government.

He's not actually talking about a sea most government and UH in in this case. In Pinker's argument, this is state UH and the judiciary that has a monopoly on the use of force. And yes, this gives it great power to abuse, but also to reduce tendencies for exploit of attacks and revenge. It can also dismantle self serving biases that make everyone believe their individually in the right right,

especially when you've got that moralization gap at at a hand. Yes, Now the next forces commerce, which which this one makes me think of you know, Wu Tang's cream everything around me. Yeah, because think you're here is arguing that that that this is the positive sum game in which everybody can win.

Trade in communication means that people are more valuable alive than dead, and so there's less need to demonize and less need to destroy other groups and salt the earth because at the very least your cruelty will take a commercial form as opposed to you know, a barbarically violent one.

This is where we get those sort of like a libertarian arguments that like capitalism and commercialism is ultimately like the guiding force that's going to keep us civilized, right, because it's essentially tied into that risk rewards system that's keeping our brain from devolving into just utter barbarism. Yeah, well, I mean, I think there's there's some some merit there. Now, you can certainly say that it can't act in isolation. It has to have these other elements, such as the

next fourth, which is feminist zation. So this is the ongoing process by which cultures increasingly respect women. And Pinker argues that since males tend to be the violent ones are the more violent ones, that with the empowerment of women, feminized cultures move away from the glorification of war and

they produce fewer quote rootless young men. Right. Yeah, And so as we're recording this, the movie Wonder Woman just came out and has been a huge hit, and you can look at that as like a cultural touchstone right of our society at least progressing in the form of feminization. Now, there's obviously some pushback against that too, but Pinker's argument

here is that it's a good thing, all right. And the next one is cosmopolitanism, And this is just about literacy, mobility, mass media, all of it come and get together to promote people toward an understanding of other people and quote expand their circle of sympathy. Right yeah. Whenever I think of the term cosmopolitanism, I think of the idea of

um not at hearing necessary. They did the idea that you're a citizen of a particular nation, but that you're a citizen of the world, and then you're in it together with all of humanity and finally the escalator of reason. And this idea is that the application of knowledge and rationality can force people to recognize cycles of violence in the world and see it all as something that needs to be solved rather than one and they may even come to the point of realizing that their own interests

and privileges shouldn't always trump the interests otters. Okay, so man, we've barely covered like half this book, but we we just flew through a bunch of it. So we've got the demons, we've got the angels, we've got the historical forces. This is basically like the primary layout for Pinker's big argument here. But not everybody agrees with this guy, right yeah.

I mean this book was when it came out of several years back, was was a big deal and continues to resonate, And as we were discussing it, because it has a lot of truth in it, and it it does resonate, it does give us perspective on on how we're we're behaving and functioning as a as a culture and what direction we might be moving in. And Pinker isn't the only one to make this claim or to

have made it. Joshua L. Goldstein presented a similar view in Winning the War on War The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide that was also in two thousand eleven, and both authors credit John E. Muller's book Retreat from Doomsday, The Obsolescence of Major War. And you can trace similar concepts, you know, the idea that we're getting becoming more peaceful, we're getting further away from war, at least back as

far as the nineteenth century French Enlightenment. Now, American analyst John Arquella argues that another major factor that could be playing a role in the reduction of global battlefield casualties is the stalemate imposed by the greater horrors of nuclear war. Now. Pinker certainly takes nukes into account, but he says that hey past W. M. D's like poison gas, these didn't prevent more wars. Uh and and so nukes alone are

not going to do it either. But of course nuclear weapons are far more destructive, destructive on a level that has has changed the balance of power. Totally goes back to that one sentence example that he had earlier about the flamethrower in the Aula Gay. Now, one of the critics that I ran across was English political philosopher and author John in Gray, and uh, we just want to read a couple of arguments that he made a regarding pinker.

He says, quote, no serious military historian doubts that fear of their use, and he means nuclear weapons has been a major factor in preventing conflict between great powers. Moreover,

deaths of non combatants have been steadily rising. Around a million of the ten million deaths due to the First World War worre of non combatants, whereas around half of the more than fifty million casualties of the Second World War and over nine of the millions who have perished in the violence that has racked with the Congo for decades belong in that category. Because we we haven't had big wars chew up so many lives, but we've engaged in proxy wars. He says, quote, while it's true that

war has changed, it has not become less destructive. Rather than a contest between well organized states that can at some point negotiate peace, it is now more often a many sided conflict and fractured or collapse. States that no one has the power to end all right, that's not comforting. He also argues that depending upon casualty numbers doesn't take into account the equal weight of lives lost, say under

the boothill of oppressive regimes and social structures. And he points out that the United States, for instance, maybe depending on whose commenting uh considered the most advanced society in the world, but it also has the highest rate of incarceration. A quarter of all the world's prisoners are tied up in that, and it disproportionately a number of them are

African Americans. And then on top of this, many of the prisoners in question are mentally ill or their aged um or they're just they're they're they're they're unhealthy at this point in their lives. Especially, have to ask yourself, how does that play out in this perception of violence? Also worth note in the US has the largest military in the world by a considerable margin. Alright, so things

that we like really excel at prisons, mental illness and militaries. Yeah, I mean basically that's that's That's kind of Gray's argument here is is yet to what extent can war catalties alone be the metric for your your discussion here. So Gray is like the cynical side of me again taking over and saying, not so fast, pinker, the world is

a lot worse off than you think. Now. These quotes are from from Gray's book The Soul of the Marionette, A short inquiry into human freedom, and there's an excerpt from it that you'll find on on on the Guardian dot com. Include a link to that onlineing page for this episode. It goes on for a bit, but he only ends up talking about the Black Mirror of Dr John d. So it's it's worth checking out. Well, if you're if you're deep into stuff to blow your mind,

terror to worre, that'll be an interesting connection. Now another note about war and violence. Uh, this is a from Ian magazines. Is There a War Instinct? By evolutionary biologist David P. Barash, and he points out that quote, violence is almost certainly deeply entrenched in human nature, warfare not so much so. He has this analogy that he grow that he that he draws on where he's saying that violence is like a marriage and it war, on the other hand, is like arranging a wedding with the bridal

shower and the bachelor party and all of this. He says that it's a quote. It's safe to assume that neither employing a photographer, serving a multi tiered wedding cake and listening bridesmaids, nor trying baby shoot tying baby shoes to the bumper of a newlyweds car spring from the human genome. Although people are capable of doing all of these things by the same token, plain old interpersonal violence

is a real, albeit regrettable part of human nature. War is even more regrettable, but it is no more natural than a bridle shower or the assembly line used to construct a stealth bomber, and he argues that Pinker exaggerates

our pre existing natural tendency for war. He argues that recent anthropological studies from Douglas Fry and others proved that the predominant mode of human life again that sort of that, you know, broad analysis of what it is to be a human being that for most of that were nomadic hunters and gatherers, That war is a group based lethal use of lethal violence against other groups was almost non

existent for most of this time. It only emerged within the early agricultural surplus period, and the right emerged with the rise of elaborate tribal organizations, and this is what allowed the warrior ethos and military leadership of sorts to emerge. Who's saying war has not always been with us, It's a recent phenomenon when you consider the full history of our species. So again, that seems like a positive thing.

Now we just hit you with a lot listeners. That was like, that was like a sledgehammer of information about war, human nature, and violence. But we're you know, I think based on like this experience that I'm feeling, I think other people are feeling it too, just like every day it's like, oh gosh, like all these horrible things are happening. Is this is this what we're just destined to keep

doing to each other forever. Pinker's argument is at least no, like we're proceeding, we're finding ways and we're understanding how our brains work, so that this will eventually slow down. It already is slowing down and probably won't ever stop, but it will be minimized. Yeah. I think the two critics that I mentioned here, I think they make valid points, and I think there it's important to consider the criticism. But at the same hand, on the on the same hand,

I really like Pinker's argument. And uh, and not just because I feel like I have to have to live an act as an optimist and I can't really live an act as a pessimist. But but but I do think he makes a convincing argument for the most part. So listeners, are you convinced? Do you think Pinker's got it right? Do you feel better? I feel a little bit better, Pinker that that person who let me borrow this book and said you should read this the objective

achieved like it did make me feel a little bit better. Um, So do we agree with this? Do we not agree with that? Maybe we agree with Barasche and Gray Instead. Let us know we are on social media where you can talk to us about all of your violent urges

on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, or Instagram. And as Robert mentioned, the landing page for this will be on stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, where we have all of our blog posts, all of our videos, and every episode of the podcast and you can always reach out to us the old fashioned way shoot us an email at blow the Mind at house of works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is that house stuff Works dot com. The bigg