Everything is not like with people: why does a person continue to solve the problems with the help of violence

Writer and publicist Lev Usyskin touched upon the most important for human civilization and extremely relevant today, if you look at the events in Belarus and not only, the topic: why the world, having gone through so many bloody events in its history, continues to solve its problems with the help of violence with idiotic persistence?

“I met the same statement several times in the tape. Say, the world is nevertheless becoming more humane and various cruel savagery that took place in the past, now, thank God, are still impossible. The idea, on the whole, is incorrect, although it has certain grounds.

As I understand it. Cruel savagery, that is, violence, is rooted in the nature of people very deeply - in fact, there, in those epochs where man was just becoming a man, ceasing to be an animal - or even deeper into the history of the species. In other words: violence is historically the first way people have mastered the way of interaction, a way of management, a way of solving problems. It is also the cheapest in the sense that it does not require any special institutions, skills, knowledge, especially subtle things like networks of mutual trust, etc. That is why violence is always with us, and society is always able to turn to it, return, and in any technically achievable scale. In this sense, so-called disruptions like World War II and the Holocaust are quite natural and should not be surprising, as incredible events are. They were and they will be in the future and more than once - we are all infected with this bacterium and it will inevitably give inflammation whenever the immune forces of the social organism are weakened.

And what are these forces? This is the experience accumulated in history of interaction on a contractual basis. Compared to the experience of violence, he is very young. And it is complex, that is, it requires efforts to maintain itself, requires certain institutions, requires certain knowledge, education, some other things, mental abilities from people, finally. It is the destruction of this infrastructure that gives way to violence - even though people may even remain the same, who have recently tasted the joy of contractual existence.

However, this experience of interaction is really accumulating, thanks to which the standards of humanism develop - but it is precisely the standards, ideas about the possible, and not real life. If I don’t confuse it, the ancient authors reproached Alexander the Great for having taken Tire by storm and dealt with its defenders according to cruel customs that were already outdated in his time. Thus, if any obstacle to violence grows, then it is in the form of knowledge that one can do without it. The gap between this knowledge and the actual practice of violence creates a kind of cognitive brake - but only if this knowledge, or rather, its carriers are available. It is enough to knock them out or just deprive them of their voice - and that's it, the world (part of the world) will easily return to the most cruel, bloody times..."

Needless to say, these conclusions of the author caused a lot of comments.

So, Andrey Andrianov writes:

“Yes, it seems like the opposite is true: man is a gregarious primacy, and trust and mutual assistance among“ his own ”are hardwired into him. The question is, where is the border between "friends" and "aliens" - a cunning brain is able to draw it anywhere, including in such a way that "friend" is only yourself, and all the others are "aliens." (And so that "our" - all of humanity, is also capable)

And "strangers", of course, in which case gets mad aggression, all according to Konrad Lorenz. Since an unarmed person is a weak fighter and does not have aggression-restraining mechanisms built by nature into strong fighters..."

Mikhail Medvedev echoes him:

“The fact that the treaty is much younger than the attack seems to me deeply wrong. Both are equally "sewn" into the nature of Homo sapiens: after all, we are herd animals. I see a certain softening of morals not so much in the change in the ratio of violence and non-violence, as in the expansion of the category "our" relative to the category of "stranger"..."

However, the author continues to insist on his position, explaining the significant difference between the herd instinct and the social contract:

“Where is this conviction that there is agreement in herd behavior? They do not agree in the herd and generally hardly think. The closest analogy: imagine an army of the old, best of all, times. There are no agreements. It's the same with animals. The herding principle is something exactly the opposite of the contractual principle. If in the contractual a guarantee of the security of an individual is the contract itself (well, and what makes the parties comply with it), then in the herd it is precisely the multiplicity of these individuals. The threat is divided into this multitude. The tiger can grab any antelope, no one will and cannot protect it. But since there are 20,000 antelopes in the herd, the probability of death of one is very small and we can assume that it is protected without any additional tricks..."