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The essence of a culture of honor is that it does not sanction predatory or instrumental violence, but only retaliation after an insult or other mistreatment.

~ Steven Pinker ~

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The essence of a culture of honor is that it does not sanction predatory or instrumental violence, b...

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Picture of Steven Pinker
Steven PinkerThe Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

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If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or both. Anarchy is one of t...

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Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease.

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I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.

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Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with.

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We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.

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The decline of violence isn't a steady inclined plane from an original state of maximal and universal bloodshed. Technology, ideology, and social and ...

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cademics and intellectuals are culture vultures. In a gathering of today’s elite, it is perfectly acceptable to laugh that you barely passed Physics f...

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The main reason that violence correlates with low socioeconomic status today is that the elites and the middle class pursue justice with the legal sys...

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So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one’s chances of being a victim of violence fivefold.

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One of the tragic ironies of the second half of the 20th century is that when colonies in the developing world freed themselves from European rule, th...

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The collapse of communism and a recognition of its economic and humanitarian catastrophes took the romance out of revolutionary violence and cast doub...