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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...more

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There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts. Visual arts - deco...more

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Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.

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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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Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.

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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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The European wars of religion were more deadly than the First World War, proportionally speaking, and in the range of the Second World War in Europe. ...more

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Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage ...more

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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 ...more

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Academics lack perspective. In a debate on whether the world is round, they would argue, 'No,' because it's an oblate spheroid. They suffer from 'the ...more

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Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history o...more

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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...more

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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...more

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The scriptures present a God who delights in genocide, rape, slavery, and the execution of nonconformists, and for millennia those writings were used ...more