A History of Violence: Steven Pinker at TEDxNewEngland

[@drjawad92]

What I don't understand is how come this video has such small no of views! Extremely underrated talk

[@duxgarnifex3678]

KZbin changed its algorithms a while back that misrepresent the number of views and their need to pay out. The demonetized a bunch of channels during this time and doxxed quite a few popular folks like Senor Alejandro Jones of Austin Texas and is followed by numerous information warriors. He is now the most banned media personality in the world.

[@zaknefain100]

The US has moved away from physical torture to, financial torture. If you've ever been unfortunate enough to undergo the process, even if your crime was non-violent in nature, you'll learn this first hand.

[@Kartikeyamani]

First world problems lol..

[@johnsmith2797]

Its like comparing a paper cut to a beheading.

[@zaknefain100]

@@johnsmith2797 pointing out systemic issues within the justice system and the money grabs that go on there. Nothing being compared.

[@Ironwill_Games]

Violence... It just doesn't pay as much as it did! Great talk! :D

[@MrThigpepj]

Great talk. My only critique is that in his discussion of "The Great Peace" he doesn't mention the Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghan wars...

[@thetransmogrifer2522]

The man makes good points but programs like Pizzagate, MKULTRA, GITMO don't appear on most folks radar screens. MSM does it's best to make all of that appear "lone wolf" operations when, in fact, those are incredibly large .gov ops. Witness the Ghislaine Maxwell (a CIA/Mossad operative) and her father Robert's operation to subvert .gov via blackmail and extortion. Those intel organizations have MSM as justification and cover-up. All funded w/ many of the victim's parents tax revenue. Such irony. I am the Transmogrifer and I have witnessed what I report here. In memory of Gina Haspel and Josef Mengele... 32D20 1970-1972

[@iankouf39]

That's because, compared to the past, they're pretty lackluster. The only difference being in Afghanistan and Vietnam the length of the conflicts.

[@simonebittencourt8251]

Very interesting talk. He sounds so eloquent, so well-read. It was very pleasant to listen to his lecture. From what he points out, perhaps compared to other times, it seems that there is less violence in modern times like ours. However, for the ones who still suffer violence every day, violence feels like an endless occurrence. There are conflicts he has not mentioned like in the Middle East, for example.

[@importantname]

the security industry claims to be the fastest growing industry. And rates of anxiety have increased significantly in western nations, with the prescription of anti anxiety drugs undergoing a massive increase . So the fear of violence is increasing and yet the rates of violence is decreasing - wonder who is benefiting?

[@sillymonkey8888]

A moment of violence is not always as bad as a life of fear. Our bodies can recover (but not always), but we carry our fears with us to our dreams which effect our lives and can sometimes be more damaging in the long run if we let our fears rule our lives.

[@squamish4244]

sillymonkey8888 He's talking about violent deaths though - a moment of violence is worse than a lifetime of fear if you end up dead. I imagine hunter-gatherers probably spent a lot of time living in fear too, if they were not on the lower end of his graph - they had to worry about whether they would be attacked, if there was a safe place to sleep for the night, etc.

[@PNHassett]

Try living with a chronic irritable alcoholic bipolar father who put a knife to my brother's throat and we'll talk. Most psychological problems are a result of chronic devaluation and bad parenting .

[@gerardt3284]

They're not mutually exclusive

[@isaac1572]

Violence is decreasing...and I'll fight anyone who says otherwise

[@squamish4244]

Otzi the Iceman had the blood of two people on an arrowhead in his possession, the blood of a third on his knife, the blood of a fourth on his coat (perhaps from carrying a wounded companion), and was himself mortally wounded by an arrow and possibly killed with a blow to the head.

[@ruairihair]

Violence may have declined but nobody said anything about a decline in stupidity I suppose.

[@squamish4244]

***** That doesn't mean societies got more violent, it just means *organized* warfare increased. But these states suppressed the pattern of incessant low-level warfare and raiding that had characterized life beforehand. So the overall violent death rate fell, according to evidence presented in his book. The rest of the video goes into very hard to refute statistics about murder rates in the Middle Ages and the abolition of judicial torture and slavery which you would have found out if you had kept watching.

[@sambush3502]

I think it's an interesting argument that prehistorical people were more violent because they lacked government. If anything, organized government created more violence because it created social structures and surplus to fuss over. In prehistoric (hunter/gather) times, it would seem that there weren't elitist classes and mostly everything would be shared within the group.

[@squamish4244]

+Sam Bush Anthropologists are in basic agreement that hunter-gatherer societies are egalitarian, where everything is shared within the group. That isn't the same as peaceful, however. The archaeological evidence is there, and it''s pretty comprehensive. It's also remarkably consistent with the rates of violence found in modern hunter-gatherer and tribal societies before central government came along, which on average had the same violent death rate as prehistoric societies, 15%. I would hypothesize that violence among individuals in a tribe was lower, but violence between tribes was higher. Other tribes would often have no incentive to cooperate with you, and perhaps not even the capability to (unintelligible languages etc.) and a lot of incentive to exterminate you and therefore have access to all of the resources your tribe controlled.

[@larshetfield3747]

Your assumptions are noted, but they are factually backwards. The belief that government is what created social structures (LOL) or that all governments are the same (hahaha), and that surplus is what creates war (FFS!), would be abject ridiculousness. You would have to know nothing about humanity in general. Wow.

[@morgantaylor6400]

This is encouraging as it does show the trajection of history upward, but it's completely western focused. Every country he listed is in the global north and west. I'm watching this video conducting research on the nature of violence and the middle east/MENA region, which is left untouched. Also the cold war wasn't really zero wars, while the feared world war III did not break out, numerous bloody proxy wars did throughout the global south. A good talk, but not without some flaws and limitations.

[@dustindewynne3111]

Another amazing presentation from Steven Pinker! It is excellent to see so many aspects of human violence addressed. Perhaps a future talk will go even farther to show how other key acts of human violence fit into this trend. For example, I did not hear the word 'abortion' mentioned. I hope that isn't viewed as the "third rail" of this general topic. Obviously not as safe as analyzing, say, slavery. But it would make for an added dimension of awareness.

[@jdearing46]

For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape. His graphs and numbers while interesting when taken as a whole I think you will find that within individual groups violence has in fact increased and will continue to increase as time marches ever onwards.

[@moonstriker7350]

"..you will find that within individual groups violence has in fact increased.." His graphs shows that it decreased radically. Pay more attention.

[@jerseyrover]

Just shows you how our perceptions can be wrong...

[@goldenphoenix6540]

I would like to see the data in regards to native american, indigenous people since the 1800's we seem to be ignored or silenced as an actual genocide..

[@rfvtgbzhn]

About the Death Penalty in England in the 18th century: while it is true, that it was also used for very minor offenses, most offenders where not executed, but deported to colonies like Australia. So it was basically a tool to force poor people to help the British Empire in colonization.

[@LogicAndReason2025]

The sad thing is that we are living at a time when most conflict could be eliminated if only the Western democracies of the world would, together, link trade to human rights in a positive and consistent way. It is primarily the global market race-to-the-bottom that keeps exploitation, oppression and the military industrial complex, profitable. Linking trade to human rights would make everybody better off by creating a stronger incentive toward freedom, than the current overwhelming incentive toward oppression. Oppression is what leads to conflict, and conflict leads to unstable governments by encouraging hatred and blame.

[@moonstriker7350]

You'd have to completely eliminate competition between corps for that to stop, and than you'd have to cross over to communism/socialism which are some of those utopian nightmares that were proclaimed to be biggest instigators of violence by Pinker himself... and he is right too, the leftist utopia-regimes are unmatched record holders in slaughtering poeple. This is why despite thinking that Pinker is bit of genius, he is also only right in this current interval of time, completely wrong in the long term.

[@svetlanadelight8969]

Thank you 🙏

[@AnatolySmolyansky]

Pinker is my fave cognitive psychologist and linguist. Read his book: Language, Cognition, and Human Nature

[@TeriSpears]

Thanks for the information it is something to think about.

[@yasminekhalida2536]

Very interesting and orderly talk

[@saimbhat6243]

Okay, let us, for a second, assume that the violence per capita has decreased, but it is not as if the inherent ability for violence and madness has decreased in an individual. Now, more people are raised to believe violence to be a vice, more people do not want to do violence, and most importantly because of policing, most people cannot indulge in it. But the taste for violence and madness inherent in human psyche is still there and is always in wait for the right moment to break out. The austrian painter, uncle stalin, grandpa mao, rawanda, congo, pol pot, iraq war, vietnam war, hiroshima, nagasaki, bombing of tokyo, dresdon, korean war, libyan civil war, ukraine, hundreds of civil wars???? Having stringent policing and threats of law, school education are just holding the lid, and we always have to hold the lid. There is always a boil under the lid. Never assume the boil to be absent if you don't want to be surprised.

[@MrRrrr698]

And that's his point dumbtard

[@venust.4119]

...when some country buts in into a civil war...we all know what country that usually is.

[@isaac1572]

The biggest earning export business in the USA is military equipment

[@Vikt0rEremita]

Go on...

[@jenslyn87]

The European version I have is 800 pages long! Luckily, Pinker is a great writer, so it's not a hurdle to get through :)

[@saerain]

Pinker doesn't make that claim, however. He proposes it as one possibility ("Maybe Hobbes was right"), but also lays out multiple alternatives.

[@TouchPuuhonua]

Dustin: You'll find a much more complete treatment, including abortion and infanticide in Pinker's book "The Better Angels Of Our Nature". I highly recommend it to anyone willing to tackle an information-rich book of about 700 pages.

[@chrislee176]

His language is imprecise: The State imposes it’s monopoly to INITIATE violence against peaceful people. Individuals do have the right to self-defense, but only members of the State can legally initiate violence -or the threat of it- to force you to do as they command, ex: pay taxes and to go to war.

[@brianfinnegan664]

Love this guy, an objective view of our circumstance

[@vansserafim]

Amazing video, thank you

[@jimcameron9848]

I once saw Pinker throat chop a guy in the same time it takes you to say, "in your face Charles Bronson".

[@rooster0143]

Pinker is a cool cat.

[@craigbenz4835]

Hunting is not violence. I left you when you said we should all be slaves of the state. Bye now.

[@jackylaibach2351]

Since you put communism as ideological motive for violence you should sourly put capitalism as ideological motive for violence too mr. Stinker? Didn't you say that exploitation is the first motive for violence?

[@sammyoco90]

Per 100,000 people, but the worlds population has doubled over the past 2 generations? Doesn't this affect the figures?

[@Vikt0rEremita]

the inclusion of violence against the environment and its nonhuman creatures would be enough to refute his misleadingly optimistic argument. not to mention the dispossession of people from their land, subsistence and culture by capital, unemployment, increasing disparity between the rich and poor, the subtle socio-psychological violence of anomie and generalized anxiety,'mood disorders'. failure to tally these insidious forms of structural violence is itself a kind of violence of interpretation.

[@jenslyn87]

Why should it?

[@QMPhilosophe]

Methinks you know big words and nothing else!

[@shway1]

that's a very loose definition of violence

[@matthewvoigt529]

So there's a decline in stats due to an increase in population, or is this taken into account??

[@matthewvoigt529]

more murders just more people to drive down the average

[@goldensulv]

No bro, it's normalized

[@sebastiankoehns]

I found it not clear about the date 5000 years ago and its realationship with civilization so i google it and found: The Bronze Age occurred roughly between 3000 BC and 2500 BC. The previous millennium had seen the emergence of advanced, urbanized civilizations, new bronze metallurgy extending the productivity of agricultural work, and highly developed ways of communication in the form of writing. In the 3rd millennium BC, the growth of these riches, both intellectually and physically, became a source of contention on a political stage, and rulers sought the accumulation of more wealth and more power. Along with this came the first appearances of mega architecture, imperialism, organized absolutism and internal revolution. The civilizations of Sumer and Akkad in Mesopotamia became a collection of volatile city-states in which warfare was common.[citation needed] Uninterrupted conflicts drained all available resources, energies and populations. In this millennium, larger empires succeeded the last, and conquerors grew in stature until the great Sargon of Akkad pushed his empire to the whole of Mesopotamia and beyond. It would not be surpassed in size until Assyrian times 1,500 years later. So there was civilization, he starts with a false premise. Finish it watching at...1:42

[@kelechii7209]

i thought exactly the same, there were city states before that period. Agriculture emerged 12,000 years ago.

[@angelasylvain2476]

Watching this as Russia invades Ukraine 😢

[@oobrocks]

This obviously predates the Russian/ Ukraine war 😢

[@KrwiomoczBogurodzicy]

19:48

[@markkeogh2190]

His research is skewed by his ideology.

[@TeriSpears]

lol

[@xxoooOFxx]

European revisionist history.

[@MrRrrr698]

Can you debunk him liberal??

[@Hirnlego999]

@@MrRrrr698 Pinker isn't a conservative. Few academics are

[@MrRrrr698]

@@Hirnlego999 ikr

[@janessmith4468]

trade - means exchange with profit and because you do not create any thing, you suck dry creators of necessities for life.

[@johannbogason1662]

how boring... but nice curls!