[extropy-chat] War Is Easy To Explain - Peace is Not

[Jef Allbright]

On 3/14/07, Jef Allbright <jef at jefallbright.net> wrote:
> On 3/14/07, gts <gts_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > Surely you agree that if the world population doubled tomorrow, it would
> > not follow that humans had become half as war-like.
>
> Gordon, the point is not that frequency of violence is a function of
> population size, but that evolutionary and developmental processes
> that have contributed to larger sustainable systems of human
> organization tend to exploit principles of cooperative advantage,
> which are antithetical to violent behavior.

Gordon responded offlist that the discussion was about *war*, not violence.

I understood the theme here to be war as mass-violence and why it
appears to be declining.

Yet if we were to narrow the discussion to war between states, I would
refer back to my original statement about larger systems of
organization and add that while the violent aspects are in decline,
it's only becoming clearer that it is, and always has been, about
economics.

- Jef