Why Humanity Turns to War 

That is more today as it is in the past.

Who will write

According to Russia: Ukraine, Poland, Czech Republic, Solvakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia etc we are NAZIS...

But what determines right, if not might?

@@MiikeyLawless I suppose that depends on the cause you’re fighting for… 💡 One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter

Oh I see you are a man of culture

"Well I didn't vote for you."

"You're fooling yourself, we're living in a dictatorship!"

I'm being oppressed

Come and see the violence inherent in the system!

The last one hits

Such an underrated movie. One of The Cage's best.

One of my favorite movies all time

The end scene in "The Watchmen" had a similar feel.

Yeah um .. Did alexander the great, darius of persia not count? What about lile... Scipio? Or Hannibal? I think that theres a big distinction between the statement "there's less war" is more accurate. War on a large scale was an advent long before the new era.

@@patrickbarnes1685 that’s what he said, frequent means how often something occurs.

Rome and Carthage?

I mean one could even look at Mesopotamia. The Assyrians had (for the time period) massive wars. As did the babylonians. Just because they are smaller than what we have today doesn't mean they weren't large scale wars for the time period.

I'd say they narrowed the timeframe of it too much, but the main gist of the argument is still correct. Even if you count ancient civilizations, most of human history (what we would call "pre-history") occurred before that, so it'd still be correct to say large scale wars are a recent phenomenon. Even then, until european colonialism, these kinds of large scale conflicts were confined to Eurasia, north Africa and Mesoamerica, so it wasn't really unanimous to the human experience at all

War always changes

"War has changed"

If there is one thing about the Fallout franchise, this is the ultimate truism. War, indeed, never changes. The only thing that changes are the sides involved and the weapons we use to fight said war. The ultimate base reason still remains.

Guys look I found the Fallout player

Forreal thats pop history for you

Yea.... I'm not entirely sure where they're getting their figures. Maybe you could say that organized social structures are required for large scale wars, and I'd probably buy off on that. But even before organized social structures you would have had small scale raiding between tribes. They try to brush off the skeletons that have been found, but there are many many instances where the situation is not ambiguous at all.

I think they mean that what we imagine as war. The kind that can drag on indefinitely and use massive amounts of organized troops anywhere in the world a new thing. We also have a tendency to focus on war in history and ignore all the not war.

@@dororo101 So, just as an example, the Punic wars between Rome and Carthage dragged on for generations, used massive troop movements on land and sea, and were more than 2,000 years ago…

@@Sophistry0001 Fall Of Civilisation podcast detailed the lives of ancient civilisation where they account many many ancient war and the first known human civilisation (the Sumerian) even ended its life with its biggest war being raided by stateless barbarians, and the Bronze Age civilisation also ended with an epic war in the Mediterranean with stateless sea-people attacking every kingdom till the Egyptian become the last survivor of that era. The Fall Of Civilisation is really sad.

Lets hope we don't get into that situation.

And that the masses identity towards a particular leader (or cult leader) has been the basis of thousands of years of civil war in China

@@JustThatOneRandomGuy The Kingdom must divided.

What video were you watching? Because Michael irrefutably did hit each and every example you gave; that’s confirmable by direct quotes from the video. 8:35 ‘”It's important to note that the idea of national identity is a relatively new one if you take the grand span of human history into account. Some scholars note that while some medieval elites had a national consciousness, _thanks in part to the influence of the church_ ,this didn't really reach the masses and become modern nationalism until the 18th century when, _thanks to enlightenment_ and romantic thinking, nationalism became what scholar John Hutchinson called a _surrogate religion_ ." I’m trying to avoid writing a whole abstract that explains how this video is so elegantly structured to hit issues and justify counterpoints. But it’s relevant to say: sense they use nationalism as an arc, it’s clear and necessary to summarize where nationalism ideologies began. And that is from the dust of religion’s societal dominance in Europe. And yet, he made an impressive amount of reference and acknowledgement of these other identity markers without derailing the video by getting into the weaves of it. I find this to be enough to show how incorrect you are to say that ‘He neglect[ed] to mention’, but he contradicts your comment again at 9:08 [while listing 3 attributes his source credits to the rise of European nationalism]: “First, _the fall of Latin as Europe's universal _*_religious language_* companied by the rise of national dialects. Second the death of the _divine monarch_ in the cultural imagination which required now precariously positioned rulers to seek out other forms of legitimacy. And lastly the emergence of the _mass produced newspaper which united countrymen in a shared experience and world view_ ” Not only giving acknowledgement to the fact that the universal language of Latin was a religious one, but they also visually symbolizing in the video what he means by divine monarch. And more directly from this quote do they hit your example of linguistic influence. Sorry to write so much; I was already exhausted by other comments misunderstanding the underlining message in this video, to then see yours comes off so heedless, it was a bit shocking.

when two groups of people have incompatible identities and/or competing material interests they fight

These are also not present for long enough in human evolution. Organized religion and settled tribes are relatively very recent.

Yeah... the idea of human rights is relatively novel, ancient civilizations were not very reluctant killing off entire enemy civilizations.

Was looking for a comment like this. The stuff presented in this video is just hilariously Disney-escue and needs a better reality check

no. the difference between war and fighting for dominance is that war is group violence. Violence is part of our nature, systematic violence is not.

@@naturalinstinct4950 Are tribal conflict and organized warfare so different? In both the goal is domination and resources.

@@austingoyne3039 yes. The scale makes it different

I’ve been a wisecrack viewer and fan for awhile but recently I’ve seen several videos on topics I was previously familiar with and I also noticed that some of the basic facts seemed wrong. Now I’m also beginning to question wisecracks videos

I think oldest remains of war in europa are from 3200 years ago 🤔but i bet there is even older stuff that we havent found yet

I caught that too, I’ve found Wisecrack has lost credibility for me. Also I’m pretty sure the ancient Egyptians had a few large scale conflicts with Palestine nearly 2000 BC… Wisecrack was only off by a year or two lol

Wisecrack says one shouldn't be biased but they are biased themselves, the Punic wars, the trojan wars, early Egyptian expansion, the sea people's, china's warring states period are older than 2000 years. Also the fact that they says archeological remains where skulls had been found crushed might be because predators did it it's generalizing. Ötzi the mountain man from the alps lived almost 6000 years ago and he was murdered, we know because they found an arrowhead in his body and he had traces of blood from two other people on him, which leads scientists to think he died due to injuries he suffered in a fight with other people.

They do mention later in the video that there has been large war prior, I think it was mentioned more to counter our typical notion of "hole in skull must mean pvp".

The only reason the USA and USSR remained at peace was because they made war so costly that no victory would be worth the price. ... So they just went to war with everyone else and killed tens of millions of people.

Happy is that city which in times of peace, thinks of war

Talking about USA and Russia as sort of peaceful nations that avoid war at all cost. Really bro?

This is very euro-centric and state centric way of thinking. Pretty fucking terrible realism you got

​@@paulgoogol2652as horrible and violent proxy conflicts are, to major countries it is far more preferable than to have half their population wiped out by intercontinental ballistic missiles.

as simple as it sounds it captures a deep reality about biology.

And perhaps after that, Man will fight the Inhuman. ( Xeno Scum)

Humanity is not in a war with nature.

Is any other animal in a war with nature?

@@dgvanz1155 If you wanna get technical, a cavemen is at war with nature by having to survive wild predators and hunt animals, natural weather conditions, figuring out agriculture, building, etc and the tools, means of doing so.

@@percivalconcord9209 This is a completely wrong and terrible way of viewing the ecosystem, and is likely why so many people think of humans as 'above' or 'separate' from nature. We ARE nature. We are an animal. We happen to have evolved ways to manipulate the environment for our benefit, but we are not and never were 'at war' with nature. War implies the need to defeat the opponent. What does it mean to 'defeat' nature itself?? Its nonsensical. Even the idea of 'mastering' nature is silly at best, and utterly insidious at worst. This is because similar to what is mentioned in the video, many ancient cultures viewed nature similar to we might view a grocery store... ie a part of our life that we navigate to get what we need and want. Sometimes it has what you want, sometimes not.. but you don't view the store as some sort of enemy to defeat or thing to enslave. It's super important to change the way we think about nature and our role in nature if we hope to create a more sustainable lifestyle and technological development.

I think he might have ment 2,000 bc.

@@christophersnedeker I think that could be an understandable take, but it's effectively irrelevant, and is still incorrect. Looking for "large scale" wars, they go literally as far back into history as we have history. Every civilization has had war. Besides, the latter part of the video makes it clear - the aim is to lay the blame on "modern" nation-states (which is a different idea than the city-states or even empires of old0, and that is just as much a nonsense assertion. The only statement you can get out of that idea is "we have more people now, so war is bigger" which... yeah, so is everything. War is not inevitable. It is not the default or natural state of mankind. But war is the natural result of other elements of mankind - specifically our drive for more, for expansion, for unity vs. diversity, for morality and moral assertion, for in-group vs. out-group and other elements - and every part of written history attests to this... and so does archeology. Civilizations without writing have waged war - we've found their battlefields. To lay the blame on "modern" developments simply doesn't work.

Aye, that number was not well established. After-all, we have the well known example of Hammurabi too who already predates even you example by multiple centuries and we can safely assume that people, while not frequently, did go to war. Raiding a small village of say, 200 people with your own clan aso. would constitute as a large scale conflict if there are only a 1000 people living in the overall area. It most certainly would have been a very different war but considering Ötzi ( currently the oldest European natural human mummy ) was most likely murdered and so was the "World’s Oldest Murder Mystery Was 430,000 Years in the Making By Erika Engelhaupt for National Geographic in 2015, we can safely assume that conflict has been around for as long as humanity existed. We even have literal cases of primates who were studied committing acts of, what can only be described as war, against each other. Summed up; it’s safe to assume that large scale conflicts are a LOT older than we think. Not frequent, not consistent in their nature but almost certainly far from just being an assumed consequence.

Yeah, but just because there are outgroups doesn't mean they deserve death or pain.

If not for the "other", there would be no reason to compete or improve. The reason people reached such great heights or technological feats was fucking over their version of the "other", be it the development of gunpowder weapons, farming techniques to create more food for greater populations, the creation of the Internet, or the Space Race. A "unified" humanity is a dull ambitionless void, waiting to collapse from internal strain.

You know there's this old anime called Macross where a giant alien space battleship crashes into the ocean. After discovering that aliens exist and the kinds of weapons they have, a lot of countries start thinking they need to form one unified global government so they'll be ready if the aliens invade. Only some countries didn't like this idea which is what led to a series of wars called the Unification Wars. My point is even if humanity did encounter an "other" (like aliens) it wouldn't necessarily end wars between humans.

Aliens

@@billmozart7288 It's not like our reason for war is just malicious in nature. Resources and territory for protection are some examples.

@iightSoBoom; “..And if you don’t know, now you know.” Another great line from AZ.

“I came, I saw, I conquered” - Naz

@@xXRickTrolledXx Julius Caesar.

Nas greatest rap alive. Nas is like Michael Jordan and Z is Scottie.

@@jaywyse7150 r/woosh

then explain religion wars

@@Amquacktador The scarce resource is followers. There are several religions competing for mindspace and followers. There is limited real estate in each person's brain; it can only believe in one religion (you can't be a Catholic AND a Protestant). There are also a limited number of humans in a given area. There is simply not enough mindspace for all religions to have all the followers they want, thus scarcity. Each religion wants to have as much total mindspace as it can, but every religion cannot convert every human. Therefore each faith must compete with each other for followers, in much the same way that companies must compete for customers. Sometimes they can handle this competition peacefully (for example the Ottoman millet system or 20th century liberalism), and sometimes violence breaks out (like the Protestant Wars or the Crusades). A religion has two ways to increase it's own share of the total mindspace. 1. They can convert nonbelievers to the faith. 2. They can kill followers of the other faith. Either of these is just as good at increasing that religion's relative power.

@@AJX-2 while I agree that followers are a scarce resource I don't think that's what had driven historically most of the religion-related wars. I lean more towards identity causes. Because our world now has far better and more available resources than ever and we still go into war not entirely considering resources or the fight for them in the first place

@@Amquacktador All wars are fought over something. Identity is the way the teams are delineated, scarce resources are what the war is actually fought for. The Crusades were fought for a scarce resource (the Holy Land) even if the people fighting those wars organized themselves along identity lines. The mere existence of Christians and Muslims does not cause war, it is when both groups want something that only one can have that war breaks out. Resources doesn't just mean natural resources, it means anything that is finite and desireable, by anyone for any reason. As resources like food and industrial capacity become less scarse, human greed shifts its gaze to new resources, as it always has and always will. Debt, land, space, culture, drugs, shipping lanes, and the internet are all valuable resources that countries are willing to go to war over. Whoever controls the scarce resource at the end of the war wins; there is no other way to define victory.

We never had real scarcity issues after the industrial revolution. We have always produced more than what we needed. The scarcity is always artificial.

As long as resources are limited, there will always be wars. Climate change will exacerbate dwindling resources and therefore more warfare.

Exactly

A world without wars is possible. The solution is to make the world so global so that people will gradually leave unnecessary old traditions (religions and prejudice for example) and instead will adopt universal customs and traditions. It means that cultures won't be connected to a nationality or a ethnicity. In this kind of world stereotypes won't exist. You wouldn't see a kimono on the street and think immediately "oh kimono is Japanese", the same way you wouldn't see tacos as Mexican, beer as German and hijab as islamic. It will all become a part of a "one universal human culture". Think about that, People today are more globalised than they were a hundred years ago, if we keep up this trend, customs will leave their "innovators" or "first adopters". When cultures are no more connected to groups like nations, religions, ethnicities and such the only thing that can keep countries from uniting with one another is language. If the world wants to I guess that within a century the whole world would be able to speak the same language. When everyone will speak the same language you will see countries unite with one another. The only thing that will be different between humans is their Ideologies but even then, the changes will be quite small as people will agree on 90% of the things. Also, "natives" will not be a thing as nationality will not exist. The best solution is that there will be thousands of microstates that each microstate will have slightly different laws. If immigration is free then everybody will live happily in their microstate. Microstates will respect each other and wars won't happen. Wars won't happen by that time because it's most likely that by time humanity will be energy independent, using renewables (unless we don't take care of climate change or die in any other catastrophe by that time; Meaning we weren't following the trends and ideas that I have written). If we take care of our political system, making sure democracies stay strong and that democracy spread around the globe, adopt science and leave prejudice behind, solve the climate crisis, become energy independent and so rich (so that differences will cease to exist because everyone will become so rich) wars will not make sense. Therefore wars will cease to exist. If everything that I have said makes sense than world peace by the year 2300 seems reasonable.

I mean it’s do able people just need to not resort to violence when it becomes convenient. Like not saying it’s going to happen but we could 100% do it. Civil wars are prominent now due to how the modern world was formed rather than it being the norm.

Well I mean it is at least if you don't believe in Jesus

Just convince the violent society that violence sucks. Hey look everyone is smiling and happy here because we help each other. All of you are constantly angry and sad because you punch each other and destroy your roofs. Have you tried not destroying each others roofs?

But that ignores the doctrine of mutually assured destructions where it could reach a point where these societies get so good at war each is aware the other could destroy them at anytime prompting them to not fight yo ensure their own survival.

@@AMVhuntingSyndrom good luck trying to convince Russia China and N Korea of that

I mean if Rome can take multiple beatings during the 2nd Punic War against Hannibal and still come out on top, I think that is something.

Even earlier than Rome, the Yamnaya people didn't invent chariots to bring agriculture to Asia. They brought war and social hierarchy.

They are saying hierarchy bad return to utopian idea of society (a communist one). It's literally what Marx was trying to push as the idea. They ignore the well documented war chimps so against each other. Not just violence but with bands moving in ambush and leaving the females unharmed.

Not to mention the total civilization-destroying wars of the Bronze Age Collapse

Heavey breathing(while watching the Russian-Ukraninan conflict

@@capturedflame that's a good one loool

The was another option: The cold war. Sci fi writers loved the "cold war". Aliens were always surprised at how fast humanity had developed technology without killing ourselves off. We had the benefits of war fueled research, without actual war. There's always another option. One of my favorite examples of missed opportunity. Ancient Greeks had glass, including curved glass. Y'know, lenses. But they never thought to use them as lenses!!! What could Archimedes have done with a microscope or telescope? The point is, we are often just mentally choked and don't see other options.

War infinite loot. Casting spells and curses. I don't care who side I am on.

@@sultanaljuhani1571 : I’m intrigued now by Daniel’s reply, as I didn’t see it and it’s been removed.🤔

Very true.

true….

You didn't get evolved much from Meerkats, didn't you?

We'd better wait for wars to break out before we colonize the solar system. Let's work on it. There will be no point in so much advancement in science and technology if we cannot put an end to this terrible evil that persecutes human beings. If the problem is our nature, then we will change it. War, violence without empathy and in the name of the “homeland” or anything else is unacceptable at all times and in all civilizations. A solution will have to emerge. Pre-crime, planetary simulation, artificial superintelligence, one world government, some solution will have to emerge. Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, of those who do not think about many, many possibilities before making a decision. This will be changed. The end of wars on our planet and in the future, in our galaxy, is without a doubt the biggest challenge that will drive humanity's greatest scientific and technological advances, contrary to what many people think. In fact, more people need to be thinking about this. It is necessary to think outside the box for such a challenging problem.

I think the way conservatives see those two things is very different. One is identity (often race) while the other is a proxy for welfare and collectivism.

In my experience the conservative and „nationalist“ anti-government mentality is a uniquely american combination. Usually as I see european nationalism it advocates for a strong and capable government. In the US, conservatives are always to an extent liberal when it comes to individual liberty.

Conservatives are not anti government. They are against the state having a heavy hand on the affairs in the market. This is because many conservatives are business owners.

It's not so much that they are anti governments in general, though they may talk like they are. Rather, they are more against governments not supporting their idealized perception of the national identity and values. They have absolutely no qualms about the government overreaching if it does so to suppress behaviors that they see as divergent. They don't care if the government regulates marriage, permits only certain religious identities, busts unions, harasses minorities, or dispels migrants because even though these are the activities of a large and oppressive government, its not a government that oppresses them or acts against what they believe are the values of the nation. However, if a government does the opposite, then they become anti-government because in practice they are really anti that government. They are against any government that they believe is destroying the nation or selling it out to foreign interests.

Ya I think he probably meant to say a number bigger than 2k years, but that would still be relatively small compared to how long our species has been around.

And the Peloponnesian War predates that by 3 centuries. Conflict and violence is arguably part of human nature.

even then hunter ganther raid each other so while it is not technically a war in the modern sense they still fought the conflicts that were possible then

That would imply that victory in war always equates to positive societal outcomes. Which does not hold true with human history.

@@CTP909 Benefits must outweigh costs and leaders and their respective societies do not benefit from risking the lives of their most skilled hunters, fighters, and most robust tribe members without being able to gain a substantial benefit. Now increased population makes each person more expendable and replaceable plus the increased population and output of potential foes make the reward greater as well. To say people act without reason is just as dismissive as saying people are naturally disposed to violence. Violence is a tactic and like all tactics may be applied responsibly and irresponsibly.

@@CTP909 it depends. War often did give a significant benefit to the victors. Usually slaves and resources.

@@CTP909 People go to war to gain said positive societal outcomes be it resources or interests. Remember for most of human history kings and leaders often go to war as well and have a high chance of dying. NO one go to war for shits and giggles. Its a gamble

Well thankfully we have found some solutions to this problem over time. But despite that, this kind of mentality, as if those are the only two options, surprisingly still exists today.

@@edumazieri that is what it ultimately comes down to. The EU exists to keep the peace in Europe, which only works because the EU-stick is bigger than any individual country's stick.

@@AJX-2 Far too few understand this often spouting comforting lies like "we've found something different" NO, someone else just has a bigger stick (US, China, Russia, EU, as well as regional powers) and everyone else shuts up. and no one wants to get bonked unless they think they'll come out on top.

😂😂

We differ from ants though because dont war by instinct like they do. As he stated, as long as homo sapiens have evolved a conscious, we have abstained from war. In fact, many hunter-gatherer cultures did not have a concept of scarcity or of territory. We are closer to trees than insects, in that we have survived through cooperation over competition. Many indigenous cultures viewed the land they lived on much the same as you might view the air you breathe... its 'yours' only in as much as you use it, .. but if someone else happens to breathe the air you breathed, than so be it. It's not a 'territory' that you must defend. If you saw another human in an area where you gathered resources, you would be more likely to try and engage them in a trade network or invite them to your group rather than fight them for no reason, because cooperating would mean you could benefit from their skills, knowledge, and company for a long time, while fighting them would mean a lifelong enemy just for one meal (or one season, since they were often nomadic). We did not start to have war until we created artificial, rigid identity structures. I think we therefore need to figure out how to let go of these rigid identities if we want to live in a world without war.

@@elijahclaude3413 I think the current war in Ukraine would disagree with you. Ever heard of The Heartland Theory?

@@seancarroll9849 The war in Ukraine is very much exactly an example of identity being used as the fulcrum and justification for war. A brief lookup into the Heartland Theory also presupposes nationalism as opposed to the flexible community groups of hunter gatherer and other egalitarian cultures. When one creates an identity that is rigidly tied to something like land or religion or the like, is when you see the development of war. Therefore we should consider what it might look like to divorce ourselves from these identities, at least as a rigid definition of who we are as peoples.

@@elijahclaude3413 For Heartland Theory to work...you need *territory* to buffer your state. Territory almost always comes up. Stop ignoring that fact.

@@seancarroll9849 I'm not talking about a theory that only tries to explain geopolitics of the last few centuries. I'm talking about what may or may not be an aspect of human behavior reaching for hundreds of thousands of years. The fact that we have no evidence for war for most of human history in the archeological data up until the development of proto states and rigid identity groups says a lot about the theory that war is tied to these identities rather than 'natural' human behavior.

You completely missed the central point of the video. You dismiss the "imagination" as the primary source of conflict and then you say all kinds of political communities went to war regardless of size. You don't think those political communities played a part in how our ancestors "imagined" their enemies? All politics is a function of human imagination and rationalization.

@@TheRockerX To call politics "imagined" is like calling your family just people you happen to share DNA with.

@@riethc now you are now in inciting war.

@@meidyot1672 This video is just an poor, decontextualized understanding of history that blames modern nation-states for war. If you look at history, there's been millions killed in wars before the idea of modern nation-states. Cherry picking the Hundred Years War and saying it was a precursor to the "big" wars is bullshit. The War of the Three Kingdoms in China was estimated to be between 35 to 40 million killed in 184 - 280 A.D., making it the third largest death count in history due to war. In Europe/near Asia, the Jewish - Roman wars are estimated in the millions as well as the Punic Wars. This was at a time when people were still fighting with swords and bows and arrows, and when there was a fraction as many people on the planet. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

@@TheRockerX Politics is part that, but more importantly is based on material conditions and power relations between groups.

Excellent take on it very easy to understand

I think part of it is due to the militarization of civilians. Democracy means that when an army goes to war, it does so on behalf of the people, and therefore the people are complicit in the war. In the Middle Ages the peasants had no say over war, the king was in charge and answered to nobody. As a result, peasants were rarely targeted in medieval wars, because the peasants weren't really involved. (Discounting things like Viking raids, where peasants were attacked because the goal was not victory, but loot).

Like Hamas which is sad.

This is not true. Far more civilians were killed in wars in the past. The Assyrians, Persians, Turks, Huns, Mongols, Han Chinese, Greeks, Romans, and others massacred and enslaved and robbed and burnt entire cities and villages.

Because the ability towards violence is deeply ingrained in our nature and we naturally divide ourselves into various groups, sometimes, with diametrically opposed interests and goals.

Our nature and capacity to exercise free will inevitably puts us at odds with each other, eventually.

"Being heavily armed is fun, but only in war or if you are insane." Jesus Christ

Better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war

I don't think "mutually assured destruction" matters much. it deters rational people. Surely one of the reasons that Putin has not launched nukes against Ukraine is because he knows that he would be vaporized in hours by Western retaliation. But, then, we don't know whether or not he will just factor this in and launch nukes against the West, fully expecting to die fighting. consider the proliferation of guns. it used to be that if you got into an altercation with someone, you would size them up, gauge the likelihood of getting your teeth kicked in, and decided whether or not to escalate to a fist fight. a lot of violence never made it past there because the outcome was pretty obvious. why start a fight with a guy you know would beat your ass? but, when guns were involved, there was no clear winner. the skinniest guy, or woman, could win any fight just by pulling a gun. And once that became a factor, everyone had to get guns, in case they might need to defend themselves against another gun. You would think this is the "mutually assured destruction" scenario and everyone would look at every potential enemy with caution and respect. looking at the murder rate in places like Central America, you would be hilariously wrong. whether spite, desperation, or just plain stupidity, there is always someone who will just pull the trigger

@@civilengineer3349 yeah, if you don't care about anyone else, but yourself. when you believe that the suffering of others doesn't impact you, (or worse, you believe that you benefit) then you will be perfectly happy being a complete menace to everyone around you. Better to be the gardener, because after all the mighty, noble warriors have slaughtered each other, normal people will need food, shelter, and stability.

@@PoorMuttski in the end of a battle between a number of warriors, atleast one will survive and he will take what he wants from the "normal" people who are too afraid to do anything about it. The govs and their militaries are the warriors of today

^This^

Facts and the fact that most nations today run on a capitalistic way of thinking ie more profits every year leads to the inevitable drainage of its own natural resources, forcing itself to look outwards at other nations for resource extraction

"it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism" -Fredric Jameson / Slavoj Žižek

@@TheLegoboy20000 though its not like anti-capitalist societies have been more peaceful. The Soviets were famously brutal in their invasions of Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Humans =/= chimps What is much more meaningful is the fact that our own ancestors, australopithecines, lost their adaptations for interpersonal violence before humans evolved cognitively to the point where weapons production could begin.

It's almost like his world view doesn't match reality

@@smonkedweed7414 Yes chimps are not humans, but they are an evolutionary relative. It’s possible to examine their phycology as a comparable example to other apes (humans). The fact that one of our closest relatives has such a recognizable and identifiable trait, that it’s perceivable that humans may have the same trait ingrained into our base nature. Australopithecine may have been an ancestor to humans or may have just been a relative, from your description they seem closer to bonobos. Also; just because an ancestor lost an adaptation, doesn’t mean that the next evolution wouldn’t regain it.

@@YoFreshWiggy ...what adaptation are assuming lost here? Bonobos pacification technique isn't really healthy for humans, so I have my doubts considering what seems to be the end goal of trying to link us to them. Chimpanzees show way more similarities in emotional behavior and development. And we lost a lot of adaptations that hopefully will never return primarily the band of muscle that would make our jaws stronger but limit the growth of our brain.

@@majdjinn5042 oh… yeah… lol. I see how my reply to @Smonked Weed ‘s comment doesn’t make much sense without the comment. Did it get deleted or something? The comment was something like: Chimpanzees are not humans, Australopithecine is a direct ancestor, Because they weren’t violent we shouldn’t be … I don’t remember it all, but I do remember that there was a lot of “plot holes” to the logic.

I didn’t really put this very well,but if you get

Yes, because the only constant in life is change.

It was permanent until 2000 years ago did you not watch the vid

Is your story just a string of words too..?

@@MultiReptilian The mere fact that peace ended at all is what makes it temporary.

@@DaAxiomatic assuming human history as all encompassing and eternal

At this level of civilisation, war is not a necessity for survival. It's a product of greed and ego

@@francissaute3808 So I want access to your house and my entire family of fighting age men are coming with me. Abandon your greed and ego.

@@francissaute3808 There will always be a competition for limited resources. Here are just a few limited resources: 1. Fertilizer 2. Energy 3. Freshwater (Look at Ethiopia and Egypt) 4. Lithium for rechargeable batteries 5. Other metals for electronics These are just to name a FEW competing resources. Some of which are non-renewable. Sure, there is some greed and ego, but to pretend that there aren't constant competing resources is shortsighted.

@@jbsmoove6642 but those are due to the resources we have being limited by money or the idea of it.

@@runningbetweenspaces Yes, money buys resources. We work for money to get resources to get and take care of our offspring. That will never go away. Before money, it was bartering aka trade. Every organism does this from bacteriophages to bacteria to plants to humans. They all trade and have wars if they need to. Humans are no different. It just looks more complex.

Yep, it's fundamentally about material scarcity. There is not enough stuff in the world for everyone to get everything they want all the time. We set up peaceful ways to solve this problem (property rights, taxation, contracts, laws, ect) but when those fail to at least placate the parties involved, violence takes their place.

Rule of acquisition 35 - Peace is good for business.

Graeber is (was, RIP) incredibly based, both as anthropologist and as anarchist.

War is unnatural then

@@oattyrant2035 mostly, yes

@@oattyrant2035 Hard no. It's very natural.

War is natural in the sense of being a natural consequence of civilization. The question then, is whether civilization itself is a natural thing.

@@jmrtnez "You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it." -- Wendell Berry

"people in power" will never go to war for "their country", they will do it for money and power.

True

Well you are basically thinking in the exact same way the video argues has happened. People feel they can't do anything about it, therefore, nothing gets done about it.

@@balinttoth9287 That too, also from fear or greed.

"Nation" is just the biggest relatively stable form of "in-group" we have. And human beings are genetically predisposed to be willing to both die AND kill for their in-group if they think they are under an existential threat. "Ask yourself if you would die or kill for the concept of " the association of plummers" or the "greatest generation in their 30s" ?" A thousand times, YES. You WOULD die and kill for those concepts if you feel you belong to them and think said concepts are under an existential threat. Now, the caveat here is whether those existential threats are REALLY existential or not... or even if they exist at all. Heck, that point is the whole reason why the concept of propaganda even exists: to convince the other people in the in-group that there is an existential threat. But that's a completely different conversation altogether.

You can if youre buried there!

@@XanderVJ I personally would not kill or die for any arbitrary group, but it's a special case, you right about that most would do. The largest group as I see is humanity, or even "living organisms", but that's not a helpful categorisation, form a primarily social in group out group approach.

This nails a lot of my issues with what people assume about nations perfectly. Well said.

You clearly don't know why wars are waged, through out history wars were waged for more resources, personal grievances and preemptive attacks as long as people have stakes to loose and human consciousness is not unified there will be large scale violence doesn't matter if you call it "war"

Even in ancient times there were still some pretty impressively sized armies. Persia is thought to have had over 100,000 soldiers in a single army against Greece at Platea, and the Greeks had almost 100,000. That’s not too bad of a number even for today. This video is just ridiculous

slavery was a form of peace

"... almost always inevitable ..." unless there's somewhere the attacked to go to. The loss of human frontier is a tragedy. One reason I strongly support space travel research.

This is very much a "wealth is the start and end of history" argument. In order for Europe to go to war over resources, it has to develop a system of governance that limits who has access to resources and then motivate people to fight to take more resources from others in order to preserve the resources of some. But before that system, no one would fight for a king. And apparently people were less likely to fight for a chief or a council.

I get the other two, but why is the patriarchy a contributing factor? I would expect the patriarchy to be another consequence of the other two contributing factors.

War is a byproduct of civilization. Without civilization, it is impossible to coordinate a group larger than Dunbar's number (around 150 people). Once you have civilization, you can use things like laws, religion, and honor to coordinate action on a larger scale. Though you can have war between two tribes that are each at Dunbar's number, but if resources are plentiful then there isn't much reason to.

How we deal with conflict is a choice. "The amazing part is that the since WWII we are in the most peaceful time of modern human history" That is simply not true and this very video explains exactly that. Do not take the last couple of millennia as the entirety of human history.

I like how you take my quote where I say "of modern human history," and then say that my statement doesn't count because it doesn't cover periods outside of what it states it covers. I'm interested in history, prehistory is too obsessed with projecting ideas onto eras with no written records for me.

@@jfridy Yeah, sure, if you disregard the majority of the time in which humans have existed and how exactly such "written history" came to be with its biases, then yes, your sentence may be correct...and also irrelevant in view of the subject and title of this video. P.S.: The conclusions of authors like Fry, Scott and Bregman is based on evidence

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-beCAQafATPg.html

On the nation state theory; I am not denying its original benefits but they always came as a package deal. Democracies are not fighting other democracies ( usually ) but nations fight another all the time. The nation state is an improvement in comparison with the all powerful states held together by king, clergy and nobility and wealthy citizens in most of Europe for instance but we fall prey to the idea that it is a pinnacle in evolution far too often and also that it was accompanied by at the time, seemingly radical ideas such as democratization and abandoning the extreme censorship that had been established after the great wars following the French Revolution, cumulating in Napoleons famous coalition wars and related campaigns. To say that Germany was fiercely militaristic fails to understand that it was bordering, at the outbreak of WW2, the two greatest colonial powers of their era, as well as the Russian giant which had also, _like France and the United Kingdom_ , *conquered* a vast area of land. To say that these three neighbors which literally had conquered most of the world at that point ( or another in case of Italy ) are less militaristic just doesn’t do any justice to the geopolitical realities of the 19th and 20th century. Let’s say, Irans current modern situation ( if we ignore a lot of factors ) and it remains a very, *VERY* shaky example to elaborate on but it’s probably the best we are going to get; you just can not argue that it’s more militaristic than the western world. It’s like saying that Germany in WW1, which controlled barley any foreign territory, is more militaristic than France or Great Britain who constantly were at war for CENTURIES before the what would later be known as German states, even formed their unified state. That’s arguably one of the least logical conclusions one could come up with in that regard. For further ideas, look into the “Platz an der Sonne" concept but with a wider, less isolated perspective.

@@Arcaryon I think we disagree on what militeristic means, look up "militerist" in a dictionary, that's what I mean. No other country in Europe was like Prussia in this way, only Japan was comparable and they learnt it from the Prussians! Here's what I mean: _It may also imply the glorification of the military and of the ideals of a professional military class and the "predominance of the armed forces in the administration or policy of the state"_

@@korakys We have the exact same definition. You can look up the British army or comparable French forces, their standing in society, their influence on politics and make the comparison yourself. To claim that Prussia was unique doesn’t hold up. If you had used the whole of Nzi lead Germany in say, 1939, sure. And yet, fascism originated in Italy, not in Germany. You fall pray to the continuation narrative that tries to established a very simplified direct line from Prussia to the third Reich but in reality, things were far more complex than that. The allied propaganda during and after WW2 is well documented. The glorification of the military in Germany prior to WW1 really doesn’t stand out whatsoever when compared with the massive displays of militarism in France or the United Kingdom. It’s a simple imperialistic trait, not even remotely unique to any one state.

@@Arcaryon I don't think Prussian militerism has much to do with Nazism. However if you can't see a difference between Prussia and Britain when it comes to militarism then this conversation is over.

@@korakys The sun never sets on the British empire because people just love joining its club? What? Is the Royal Navy a joke to you? Or the fact that the east india trade company literally had its own standing army? That’s a COMPANY owned be the crown by 1858 having literally subdued _an entire subcontinent with its military_ and KEPT IT FOR DECADES!!! . If that’s not even far more "militarism /ˈmɪlɪt(ə)rɪz(ə)m/ nounDEROGATORY noun: militarism the belief that a country should maintain a strong military capability and be prepared to use it aggressively to defend or promote national interests." than some minor wars where you don’t even conquered anything in your eyes, I have no idea how you even get the idea to remotely try to qualify yourself to talk about this in any capacity, no offense. What did Prussia actually do to qualify for the idea of it having an unusual amount of militarism? Build a large army? Like France, Spain, Italy, Russia, Great Britain, Austria-Hungary, the Ottomans aka like pretty much EVERY SINGLE ( EUROPEAN ) POWER that ever existed? I can see a difference between the two - it’s that Prussia as Germany lost WW1 and consequently got all the negative press whereas the UK and France went on an entirely different route, keeping their colonies even after WW2 ended, but obviously having a much more favorable reputation in the west as a result of their actions. It just happens that I like to look at the actual facts and not just what people like to think about a period. Case in point, common perception of the Middle Ages vs. how it actually was. If I misunderstood you I apologize but I think you underestimate how militaristic most countries were and, usually, are to this day.

One of their militia wear nazi symbols on both uniforms and flags, are people really supporting nazi as long as they fight against russia?

I think you hit the nail on the head with US isolation and it goes beyond isolation. American are taught little about other countries in public schools they have a very American centric view of history which leads to further detachment to the rest of the world. This is reflected in multiple surveys have shown how goes graphically illiterate Americans are in general like in 2014 73% of Americans couldn’t find AMERICA on a map