There is something mysterious about homo sapiens' organized violence behavior: How much of it is genetically driven (nature) versus culturally determined (nurture)?
Random individual violence does not seem to be innate except as an aberration. You can walk in any tightly-packed megapolis of millions (an environment that was presumably never encoded / selected-for in our DNA) and not really worry that one of the thousands individuals you come across will simply go berserk for the fun (or benefit) of it. "Rage" of various forms happens, but typically under intense stress conditions.
But give a group of individuals the slightest pretense in the form of some arbitrary cultural narrative and they will engage in acts of incredible cruelty and dehumanization of random "other" groups. Competition for actual resources seems just a fig leaf. Clan dominance in some imagined anthroposphere is typically the real driver. Think e.g., two football fan clubs attacking each other in ritualistic or actual murder. Its supposed to be fun, there is nothing real at stake, yet somehow group violence is triggered.
This behavior is so pervasive in history (and pre-history) that it is almost certainly based on genetic traits. But maybe what was once a "positive" feature is now a millstone around our neck. In a crowded planet with ever advancing technological capabilities large-scale violence based on arbitrary cultural concoctions is simply not a scenario we want to have in front of us. Feels like maybe the most critical aspect of our own species we need to understand and somehow "manage" - assuming its at all possible. Do we have a survival strategy?
Why We Fight by Mike Martin is a great recent book about this. It argues that our tendency to war is indeed an effect of evolution but that the historic trend to us forming larger and larger groups has significantly reduced violence
The most basic definition of state is that it is some institution with the monopoly of violence. Think of it, who in all myriad society organisations and hierarchies has the legitimacy to use force? The state.
Even murder is allowed and trained for, if you are part of the state organisation, normally called armed forces.
Many anarchists in the XIX century despised the idea of state because accepting it means accepting organised violence and importantly a monopoly on it.
Reaching aaaall the way back to high school, this is basic locke theory of government. You give up a freedom to gain some protection against the jerks who would use that freedom against you.
I would argue that the OG of state violence monopoly is Thomas Hobbes and the concept of sovereign as the deposit of the individual’s ability for violence. Will read the link though.
In Portugal there is also philosophy in high school and with time I realize that it was the most practical and important class I ever had and at the time me and my colleagues completely missed its value.
That's my interpretation as well. I was in a slum in Africa once and fell victim to that kind of random violence. I think it happens everywhere in the form of crime.
Obviously no one likes crime so societies try and clamp down in that
I agree its not a sharp example, there are lots of interacting effects and factors. But to me at least the statistics seem rather overwhelming. Social structure and rules and enforcement seem more tailored to mop up aberrations rather than constrain "normal" behavior. There is probably social studies of toddlers etc that analyze this question when conforming behaviors are less developed. I don't recall reading something that proves it is only learned cultural norms that "pacify" us.
In different places and times there were different thresholds on the level of violence acceptable to society.
We should be careful to not project our current norms on the entire history of humanity.
A quote from A Distant Mirror The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman:
In village games, players with hands tied behind them competed to
kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it to death with their heads, at
the risk of cheeks ripped open or eyes scratched out by the frantic
animal’s claws. Trumpets enhanced the excitement. Or a pig enclosed
in a wide pen was chased by men with clubs to the laughter of
spectators as he ran squealing from the blows until beaten lifeless
and another one:
The citizens of Mons bought a
condemned criminal from a neighboring town so that they should
have the pleasure of seeing him quartered.
The criminal was a) condemned, so organized state violence and b) brought over by the entire village, so a group of people. Not an individual outburst of violence, then.
The group of people trying to head-butt the chicken to death are playing a sport. Often enough to at some time add trumpets to it.
> Competition for actual resources seems just a fig leaf.
More often than not, and very broadly speaking, the fight is over mindshare: tribal beliefs and allegiances. Differences of religion, politics, nationality or ethnicity are nearly always perceived to be far greater than they actually are.
I keep thinking back on a space opera conflict involving many domains of species. There are mammalian, avian, reptile, etc. They've formed coalitions in an effort to catch some highly valuable fugitive humans. (IIRC from Brin's Uplift Wars universe. Star Tide Rising?)
The machine's weapons of choice are algorithms, code, simulations, viruses. No physical violence. But still very high stakes, like mind wipes.
It’s evolutionary to see danger in strangers because historically it was better to overestimate danger then underestimate it for your survival. You can only react once if someone hits you with a stone from their back. So people and groups overestimate danger that they will be hurt/diminished in some way and then attack when they see the slightest sign of a threat. It can be used to manipulate crowds, just say their children are in danger because of the out-group. Can really recommend the book on the exact mechanics of anger by the most influential psychologist of our times https://www.amazon.com/Prisoners-Hate-Cognitive-Hostility-Vi...
Violence between groups exist in other animals as well.
My take is that this is a natural consequence of competition for resources. The more individuals or groups are organised, the more violence becomes organised as a logical consequence.
We have evolved as social animals members of tight groups and this seems to be quite old looking at chimpanzees and gorillas, for example. So this 'tribal' streak is probably embedded in us to this day.
I don't think gorillas show violent tribal behavior. They rely on their silver-back male to defend the group in a same way lions do. Baboons on the other hand have right out wars involving the whole group as do chimps and some other primates.
If one frames organized violence as a means rather than an ends, then it is possible to see an answer other than the survival strategy of “be the best at organized violence.”
I don't see this working in the long-term. It assumes that one can win "once-and-for-all", whereas the splintering in competing factions and the pursuit of group objectives with violent means seems a recurrent pattern. Historically even in absolute monarchies (where you would think power relations have been settled would be paralyzed by internal strife, infighting clans etc.)
Now, all this would be just the normal human history (and as per the article, pre-history). What changes the dynamic is the advancement of science and technology. If we assume that it is accruing monotonically (which has been the case for several centuries), then if the same social dynamic or emergent organized violence continues, at as some point even a small group that drifts into a state of feeling aggrieved could prompt vast destruction.
>Historically even in absolute monarchies (where you would think power relations have been settled would be paralyzed by internal strife, infighting clans etc.)
This isn't surprising at all given that "absolute monarchy" was more of a marketing term than a description of reality.
England, which rather decisively cut off their monarchs' pretensions at absolute power, was far more centralized than whatever the fuck the different parlements (sp?) of France or the Spanish cortez were doing during the absolutist age.
Ok, but what if another group disagrees and or doesn’t do it well? Won’t you have to enforce it globally or you’re just creating a population which has no countervailing force to counteract it?
And at least right now, wouldn’t that require massive, global, overwhelming force?
No matter how objectively correct or convincing, I could see no way China or Russia would take any such proposal seriously, or take any such action voluntarily, let alone a large chunk of the rest of the world? And they certainly have enough might to not take it lying down.
For example, it wouldn’t have mattered one bit how peaceful Ukraine was when Russia started on its rampage.
Near as I can tell, the only reason Ukraine still exists is because Western Europe and the US had massive stockpiles of weapons they gave, Ukraine had enough angry (and murderous) Ukrainians, and Ukraine and the US had been preparing to murder a bunch of Russians for years after the last move Russia made before Russia made it’s move this time.
And even then it is no small, certain, or cheap endeavor. Horrible destruction has been wrought.
But compared to it’s women and children taken (and raped or ‘married off’/‘adopted’ within Russia) and the men slaughtered, conscripted, or imprisoned, and everything that made them, them destroyed, it’s still the better outcome no?
And that is exactly what would have happened, and has been happening in the area they did take.
Which is pretty normal for these kinds of things. NOT having it happen is definitely the notable exception.
So seems to me, these traits, while irritating/disruptive in peacetime, are essential at some level during times of conflict. And conflict inevitably comes, always. Just as death is a part of life.
I don't see a disconnect between those two states.
As individuals we want acceptance, respect and love. It's abnormal for someone to randomly, attack others when they are alone and already vulnerable feeling. Normal people crave community and do not attempt acts that result in their ridicule and/or rejection. Only outliers like psychopaths continuously break societal norms.
As groups we form bonds and have our place/role. Protecting what we have and those we love seems natural as does protecting the society, world view, or leader(s) our group supports.
Therefore, I would expect individual violence to be much less than group violence in intensity, duration and occurrence.
>Random individual violence does not seem to be innate except as an aberration. You can walk in any tightly-packed megapolis of millions (an environment that was presumably never encoded / selected-for in our DNA) and not really worry that one of the thousands individuals you come across will simply go berserk for the fun (or benefit) of it. "Rage" of various forms happens, but typically under intense stress conditions.
to me this analysis is not starting off in the right direction. We're talking about Neolithic people here so it's appropriate to use more straight up evolutionary law of the jungle thinking. Sudden violence is in us from the get go. Look at so many other mammals, they use violence with each other to sort things out at the drop of a hat. Look at how we portray cowboys, and indians (or fasts, and furiouses?). I'm not even saying that the picture is accurate to history, I'm saying the picture is accurate to how we think, viscerally, and such films excite us, not because of memories because we were there, we weren't. Just because it's how we think.
So I'd start out the analysis with, we are violent animals at the base of our brain, or is it at the base of our evolution, but animals don't kill each other that often. On top of that we are extremely social animals, you can walk down the street surrounded by strangers and not hit them. But also on top of that we are thinking, calculating, theory of mind imagining: this person has been irking me for awhile now, if I secretly kill them, my problems will be solved.
I'm not saying it's anywhere near that simple or that that's accurate, but we need to think that way. We've seen some papers recently here that said it's not appropriate to think we have 3 brains in 3 layers, wrestling with each other, because they're more intertwingled than that. So this kind of noodling only takes us so far, but I have the sense that it's the right kind of thinking.
I don't think our violence is aberrant at all, but we did "invent" being extremely social, and then etiquette, and then even the term aberrance to talk about some behaviors which are unusual within that framework. Rabies might be aberrant behavior in dogs, and anxiety conditions, but otherwise they're pretty basic. And anxiety is so prevalent we have to assume it's adaptive anyway.
Starting with Freud, an aspect of psychology that is not as widely understood as it should be is the notion of unconscious thought, and unconscious motivation. (The term subconscious is associated with a more woo-woo theory of Jung's, that we share subconsious awareness with other people, is why unconscious is the usual term.) It's very difficult for people to grasp that they don't actually know what they are thinking, but it does leak out.
If you are talking to somebody and say "I'm not saying that you're X, I'm saying that you are Y", you are definitely thinking that they are X, or at least a substantial part of you is. That's where you got the idea to deny it from. It can be broken down plainly in computer programmer terms. While the brain isn't "just like a computer", in order for you to compare X and Y you have to use the subroutine or the struct or the class for X and the other one for Y, they are separated at some place in your mind. You can't say X without the X part of the brain lighting up. What makes you say "I'm not calling you X" is another part of your brain lighting up to say "this is an unpleasant thought, better not be accused of saying it, that will be socially awkward".
"Children blurt out the truth, children say what we are all thinking." We have additional brain processes that children have not developed yet, but we didn't lose the thoughts they have, that's why we understand them. It's all that shame and judgement we fear from other people and apply to ourselves that starts to tear our coherent ideal self (that we think we are) apart.
So, imho we don't get anywhere by imagining we are a "good people" walking around who sometimes aberr; we are complicated collections of competing selfish ideas, some of which are nasty.
On one hand, war and violence kill off the most violent people in society, providing a genetic benefit to those who don’t fight. On the other hand, the winners produce a lot of babies.
But the mass killings of early modern and modern Europe really didn’t increase the fecundity of the winners. It mostly just killed off the violent.
I’ve no idea about the genetics of this, might be bunk, but europe and Japan were both so warlike for so long, it is bizarre to see them so peaceful.
I think in most historic wars the civilian deaths far outweighed the soldier deaths, not fighting would not protect you from dying because of that war.
E.g. if we're talking about the major conflicts causing depopulation - the 30 years war had half a million combat deaths but five million or more dead civilians; Mongol conquests lack good numbers for aggregate combat deaths, but they are clearly a small fraction of the 40-75 million of total depopulation, as the armies simply weren't even close to that large; conquest of Americas has most of indigenous population die outside of combat; WW2 has civilian deaths at twice the military deaths; WW1 is the exception of being roughly equal, but then we have events like Taiping rebellion which killed more than WW1 but again with civilians outweighing combatants, etc.
>might be bunk, but europe and Japan were both so warlike for so long, it is bizarre to see them so peaceful.
This applies to all the world. Before Hispanic conquerors, in America the wars were extremely gore, with things like pyramids of heads(The conquerors wrote about them , but archaeological evidence had been found recently), skinning and scalping the of enemies, human sacrifices.
The wars in North America were not less violent, with everyone carrying a rifle, people using them to hunt Indians from the train, and the eventual extermination of almost the entire native population.
Africa? When has Africa been peaceful? I helped refugees in Europe from recent wars in places like Congo or Central African Republic where kids are given automatic guns and enforced to kill and rape their family members. That is happening today in Africa and nobody cares.
Asia? Most of what you call violence in Europe actually came from Asia. The Huns, the Parthians, the Mongols, the Arabs, the Turks, all came from Asia, mostly from the central plains.
China history is full of violence in order to unify the territory. They also suffered from invasions like the Mongols, the Manchus and the piracy of the Japanese.
>On one hand, war and violence kill off the most violent people in society
This sounds very counter-intuitive to me! Interesting if true. I get that two war parties going at each other would result in some violent people dying. But I am not sure bravery and violence are always locked together, and it would also seem that a relatively small group of very violent people could kill a very large group of non-violent people.
You mean hundreds of Spanish soldiers with superior technology allied with tribes that were subjugated and enslaved by other Native American tribes?
The Spaniards did not do it alone. This is a fact very easy to prove. It always shocks me to see people in North America complaining about Spaniards, when in North America there is less than 1% native Americans, the rest were exterminated, ethnic cleansed. In most hispanic countries, native and mixed people are over 70% of the population.
The Spanish invaders relied as much on diplomacy as on violence. They formed alliances with local groups who were opposed to the Aztec and Inca empires.
It think in evolutionary terms we are still the product of our way of life as it was over hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of year.
Smallish tight groups of hunter gatherers trying to survive in an hostile environment. As such, when group violence arose I suspect that there wasn't much of a "those who don't fight" kind of people.
Change to this way of life is relatively recent (on a scale of thousands of years, not hundreds of thousands+). And the "modern world" is really something that is brand new and most likely has not changed us in evolutionary terms yet.
Nah, violence breeds violence, not killing it. The trend to violence goes down because the majority has found a better way to deal with disagreement: corporation and compromise. At the same time, a better economy and less inequality has rendered violence less and less necessarily. When I look back at many societies, where until very recent decades violence was the norm on the street and now seemly disappeared altogether, I could find no better explanation than a better economy has encouraged the new life style.
It killed off the slightly less violent and the slightly less ruthless. Those who where more so survived (and less subject to pain), as did their DNA.
As for countries and war-like...that doesn't seem to be limited by geography and/or DNA. The species generally prefers violence. World history teaches us that. Sure, there are exceptions but they are rare.
On a tribal scale "the violent" organise the violence. They don't take part in it.
That's one reason why it's still happening.
In contemporary war, tribal leaders have no direct, personal, immediate threats. They have meetings while other people do the dying for them.
TBF this wasn't always true, and that didn't make war less likely. But it's true today, and there are certainly leaders who would be less casual about death if they were facing it personally.
Neolithic is ~10,000 years ago, when agriculture, sedentary life, cities, started; not sure how you all trying to attribute organized violent behavior to genetics.
Not to mention that there seemed to be surprisingly little lethal human-on-human violence prior to the Neolithic period. From what we know, lethal violence rose sharply as soon as people started settling down, amassing possessions, and forming more elobrate social hierachies.
Lethal is an important qualifier here, because even skeletons from before that priod routinely show signs of human-on-human violence - it just wasn't what killed them.
Which makes sense: To this very day most killing is done for material gain or when fighting over land. Without these reasons, we'd likely be a more peaceful species.
Most people don't have a concept of the timeline of civilization. Which leads to a warped sense of human history across other topics. Like probable human organization in Spain in roughly the same era in which people in Egypt were planning the Pyramids. At the same time, commenting is fun.
How (modern) society has overcome violence as the dominent means of ensuring compliance and replaced it with decades of social norms and training and to be fair material reward (go to school, learn, work hard, don't kill anyone), this is "the greatest trick the devil ever pulled".
Actually, if you look at history, there were often extended periods of peace during stable empires. For example the Pax Romana during the high Roman Empire.
During these periods of imperial peace, warfare is mostly confined to the frontier regions or where the empire abuts another empire.
One could argue that we are in a similar time now. The USA basically has a de-facto empire over the Americas and Western Europe. The Middle East is a frontier zone. Ukraine abuts a former empire (Russian/Soviet) trying to regain its former glory. Taiwan abuts China which is trying to establish its own hegemony in its region.
> often extended periods of peace during stable empires
Peace as in no major wars, sure. But plenty of hyper-local conflicts (think clan feuds, hyperlocal peasant revolts, etc) would happen all the time before the expansion of state power in the 20th century.
Hell, when my great-grandfather was born, they were recent settlers in a region of Northern India that was completely depopulated of the indigenous population during the British conquest of the Sikh Empire.
Where my great-grandfather's family was from was filled with multi-generational clan feuds, the occasional peasant revolt against the govt tax collector, and the occasional millenarian revolt.
You wouldn't read about most of this stuff in your high school history textbook or on History Channel, but it would happen with consistency. I can guarantee with a fact that this same story existed in every single country before the 20th century and the rise of the railroad, canned food, and the telegraph.
Before those 3 technologies arose, power projection was difficult, and "empires" were in reality a mixture of local fiefdoms (literally) who pledged feality to some guy in a capital far away.
To use the classic Chinese and Russian quote - God and the Emperor are far, but I am here [0]
> The USA basically has a de-facto empire over the Americas and Western Europe
A country that is a bully to others is not the definition of empire. This isn't even loosely comparable to a real former empire like British Empire and yes "Soviet Empire". China is slowly becoming an even bigger bully in Asia and Africa, but that doesn't make it an empire either.
Centuries of Genghis Khan style "submit or perish" probably has a certain "domesticating" effect on a population. The more rebellious ones don't last long in that environment.
The region my family is from was directly ruled by "submit or perish" types (it was historically common in the marginal regions of Inner Asia). Plenty of rebellions, peasant revolts, and clan feuds have happened over the centuries.
Also, what you described is basically psudeoscience and veers very closely to eugenics (the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable)
Ignoring whether or not this specific situation is true, describing how different environments select for different traits is not pseudoscience; it's the foundation of evolution.
Are you suggesting that we should disregard if this specific situation is true, but that it is possible that some populations are genetically evolved to be more servile?
Violence remains the dominant means of ensuring compliance, the "supreme authority from which all other authority is derived." Social norms are backed up with a threat of violence from the community. Civil society and its laws are enforced with violence from the state. Religious authority is enforced with the threat of divine violence. Even familial authority is very often enforced with violence from parents.
Of course, not all violence is physical. The real change has been the transition from the common application of physical violence to emotional and psychological violence as our societies become more abstract and removed from the cold brutality of nature and subsistence living, except in "extreme" cases.
Also the "greatest trick the devil ever pulled" was convincing people he doesn't exist. Slaves pick your food, sew your clothes and mine the rare earth minerals in your electronics. Vast engines of automated slaughter put meat in your stores. Every advertisement is mind control and every news story is psychological warfare. Every cop is a thug, every judge a sadist, every CEO a sociopath, every politician a psychopath. "People sleep peacefully in their beds only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf," as George Orwell said. And they do, cruel, wicked violence. Your hands are soaked in blood, the roads are paved with bones, and the skies are blackened with ashes from the ovens of Moloch.
But you don't see it most of the time, it's hidden away from you, or it's intangible. That's the trick the world learned from the Nazis, how to manipulate and control mass perception through modern media, and by extension to normalize the violence that drives modern society. You can just play Candy Crush, pay your taxes, be nice and not kill anyone and pretend the devil isn't real.
Most of what your talking is gross exaggeration. Exaggeration to the point of falsehood. Even the kernel of truth of underpaid, subsistence workers producing a lot of our food and machines, to call the rest of it what you have is just false.
if chatgpt wrote that then I for one welcome my angry, passionate, articulate robot overlords.
Yes we hide a lot of ... oppression/violence/unfair business practises ... under the supply chain. But hell i think the electronic ledger and RFID will be amount the most transformative technologies our children will see.
Precision is important. Hyperbole doesn't help anyone, but neither does calling the comment entirely false.
Underpaid subsistence workers do produce a huge portion of goods consumed in western nations. Engines of automated slaughter do put meat in stores. Advertising cares not an ounce for your wellbeing, food conglomerates employ chemists to optimize not for health or flavor but how compulsively you want to eat their products, game studios and social networks employ psychologists to most effectively addict you. Mindlessly consuming the news is a great way to get psyopped. Note that I have dropped the universals (e.g. "every", "all") because they weaken the argument by opening it to pedantic attacks, but the above is largely true.
The "every X is a Y" is more fraught. Police are too often predisposed to violence and abuse, many politicians are sociopaths, surely. Selection effects are real. But there are reasonable people too.
The more important point, which the comment misses, is that nobody is really in charge. Yes, there are "smoke-filled rooms" where conspiracies are hatched, but modernity is too large and complex for complete centralized control. The dominant forces today, I would argue, are distributed algorithms composed of flesh and blood human beings, their ideas and social fictions (which comprise institutions), and a vast array of machines. This vortex, this enormous, evolving structure of incentives and infrastructure, has its own autonomy. This is Moloch, and it doesn't even require active malice on any particular person's part.
Paperclip maximizers are not just a thought experiment, we are surrounded by them. We are in them.
What irks me about this (op's) line of thought is the labeling of these facts as the devil, evil, even though it's still very likely the best the humanity got to ever experience.
Yes, the advertisers don't care one bit for the well-being of the consumers, but can you imagine a reality where they would? I don't. Calling something evil even though there's not much improvement to be made is ... needlessly negative?
I agree that it doesn't help to call it evil or invoke the devil. I don't agree that there's not much to improve on.
> the advertisers don't care one bit for the well-being of the consumers, but can you imagine a reality where they would?
Yes. Imagine a reality where we don't have anything like the advertising sector, or myopically extractive industry in general, sidestepping the whole problem.
Failures of imagination seriously constrain the possibility space. Modernity's totalizing tendency ("the end of history", "the best we've ever had it", etc) is a big reason it threatens to self-terminate, I think. History is path-dependent, yes, and for all I know we do live in a block universe, but for practical purposes the future is under-determined.
I love how people debate about "the greatest trick the devil ever pulled" - as if it is not amazingly obvious it was creating religion and himself along with gawd as these giant boogieman. There is no devil, children.
Anyone interested in our violent past, and how we got to our less-violent present, would be interested in The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker. He goes into great detail about how ridiculously violent the past was, and how much less violent we have become over time. Tl;dr: the concentration of permission to commit violence into the hands of the state has been a huge factor. As the numbers in the article here show, it is a rare state that can keep up with the level of violence that occurs naturally when individuals are having at it.
I found this a fascinating bit of research. I suspect that there is so much of our history undocumented, with only remnants like those described as a window to that past.
What is considered history is basically only what is written down. That means that everything that wasn't written down, and everything that happened before we invented writing, is lost.
This includes almost all ordinary peoples lives, but also things like the childhood of people like Charlemagne.
Everything that wasn't written down, and everything that happened before we invented writing, isn't lost, it's simply called prehistory instead of history.
We do know all kinds of things about ordinary people's lives based on physical evidence in archeology; we can figure out what they ate and where they got that, what jobs they did and how they organized that, what health issues they had and how they died.
10k years ago about the same time as when more advanced civilizations could’ve possibly existed. Wonder if these are the inhabitants getting attacked by them.
Random individual violence does not seem to be innate except as an aberration. You can walk in any tightly-packed megapolis of millions (an environment that was presumably never encoded / selected-for in our DNA) and not really worry that one of the thousands individuals you come across will simply go berserk for the fun (or benefit) of it. "Rage" of various forms happens, but typically under intense stress conditions.
But give a group of individuals the slightest pretense in the form of some arbitrary cultural narrative and they will engage in acts of incredible cruelty and dehumanization of random "other" groups. Competition for actual resources seems just a fig leaf. Clan dominance in some imagined anthroposphere is typically the real driver. Think e.g., two football fan clubs attacking each other in ritualistic or actual murder. Its supposed to be fun, there is nothing real at stake, yet somehow group violence is triggered.
This behavior is so pervasive in history (and pre-history) that it is almost certainly based on genetic traits. But maybe what was once a "positive" feature is now a millstone around our neck. In a crowded planet with ever advancing technological capabilities large-scale violence based on arbitrary cultural concoctions is simply not a scenario we want to have in front of us. Feels like maybe the most critical aspect of our own species we need to understand and somehow "manage" - assuming its at all possible. Do we have a survival strategy?