I absolutely agree with you on this until you get to your last sentence Squatter.swatter555 wrote:
I think we can meet halfway if you can accept the evidence to the contrary. I am not denying that there is truth in what you say, that would be overlooking evidence for your argument. At the same time, men have been killing each other long before the inventention of centralized govt or political idealogy. You would be suprised at the size of ancient battles, especially relative to population. Whether it is clubs or cruise missiles, men love to kill each other, so it would seem.
To prove that human beings are inherently violent to one another, you would have to have evidence that they behaved in this way under all circumstances and in all possible forms of social organisation. In fact, despite your comments about the ancient world, we do not have that evidence, so on that principle, at the very least, the jury is still out. However, we do have some evidence to work with.
The fundamental issue of private ownership of communal resources in the economies of the ancient world and the Middle Ages was not so different to ours today. The ancient world was largely based on slavery (the physical ownership of the slave by the slave owner) and the Middle Ages was based on land holding (a graduated pyramid of rights to land use by a variety of sectional groups). These societies had huge, divisive power structures just as our capitalistic society (based on the sectional owernship of capital) does today. As a consequence they fought in similarly violent ways over use and ownership of resources. But that is because similar sorts of institutional pressures prevailed upon them, not becaused they necessarily 'loved to kill each other'. I see no evidence for that.
Go back to earlier stages of human economic organisation to a time when private ownership of wealth production was absent or less organised and you find an interesting situation. You find much less evidence of organised violence within society and a variety of different situations on the boundaries between societies. Some of the tribal common-ownership societies had violent confrontations with their neighbours, some did not. Some where highly peaceable. Generally, when there were no internal property divisions, and their neighbours were equally peaceable there were no violent confrontations.
That is not universally the case but is a strong tendency. We have insufficient evidence from tribal survivals to investigate all the factors that might have been involved in what determined differences in behaviour, but the fact that some societies lived peaceably with their neighbours in these circumstances and were very peaceable in their own culture suggests that large scale violence is not innate to human beings.
That still leaves me with the view that it is institutional and economic forms that cause human beings to act violently in a collective manner - and within society as well. So, I think that promoting the view that humans are inerhently violent to one another merely adds to the likeliehood of such behaviour occurring.
