The Breakthrough Institute - The Long Peace
“Nothing can be more gentle than man in his primitive state,” declared Rousseau in the 18th century. A century earlier, Thomas Hobbes wrote, “In the state of nature the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The evidence shows that Rousseau was wrong and Hobbes was right, said Steven Pinker. Forensic archaeology (“CSI Paleolithic”) reveals that 15 percent of prehistoric skeletons show signs of violent trauma. Ethnographic vital statistics of surviving non-state societies and pockets of anarchy show, on average, 524 war deaths per 100,000 people per year.
Germany in the 20th century, wracked by two world wars, had 144 war deaths per 100,000 per year. Russia had 135. Japan had 27. The US in the 20th century had 5.7. In this 21st century the whole world has a war death rate of 0.3 per 100,000 people per year. In primitive societies 15 percent of people died violently; now 0.03 percent do. Violence is 1/500th of what it used to be.
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1 comment:
I disagree with this opinion but the disagreement hinges upon the definition of violence.
If violence can be defined so as to include poisoning we are living in the age of a genocide of horrific proportions in which the food industry pressured by the medical profession and Big Pharma poison us with unatural trans-isomer form oils producing symptoms such as obesity, diabetes, cardio-vascular disease, Alzheimers and excess cancers to name but a few.
The death rate from these oils is so high that it is the majority cause of death (and profitable chronic ill health) in the Western world with the ongoing plan being to increase profits and therefore deaths by this method.
This violence is as real and brutal as it is organised and deliberate. Most readers will have lost friends and family to the psychopatic serial killers who have engenderd this dark black evil.
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