It is actually insane if you think about it. On every level of life there is competition, hierarchy, violence and death.
The process of evolution is literally the history of death, violence between life-forms is essential to the process of life’s evolution.
Humans have an in-group bias, and we are naturally suspicious / hateful of outsiders and favour our own kin for obvious evolutionary reasons. It is only as of the modern age that we have realised (to an ostensible extent) that it is morally wrong to murder and enslave people who are not exactly like you.
Through the ages we have managed to override this evolutionary bias against those who aren’t like us by expanding the definition of what we consider our ‘in-group,’ to encompass all of humanity rather than just our own settlement (as it was in the Stone Age), our kingdom (as it was in the classical / medieval period), or our nation state and race (as it was in the colonial period).
The irony of this blows my mind, remember that humans have only been around for roughly 200,000 years, and there were no civilisations up until 4-5,000 years ago.
That means for roughly 195,000 years humans were living in tiny isolated settlements which would rape, enslave or kill each other whenever they came into contact with one another.
That is a monumentally long period of time given the brevity of the existence of civilisation (which was still strewn with , up until about 60 years ago a state of war was more common than peace in most parts of the world.)
All of this is overwhelming enough until we remember that even before the evolution of mankind, war rape and death was as popular amongst the ape species that proceeded us as it is amongst our own kind.
‘War was always here, before man was, war waited for him’ - Judge Holden, Blood Meridian.
This is a history of strife and suffering going back millions upon millions of years throughout the ages of evolution.
It should not surprise us that there is so much suffering in the world when we are the outcome of this endless churn of blood and struggle. It should not surprise us that the unjust imposition of hierarchy and dominance permeate every level of human experience when they are the engines that drove the entirety of our history since before our existence as a species. We can pretend to ourselves that we are just and civilised because we can collectively establish laws to maintain the pretence that we are all valuable and accounted for, but on an individual level we simply cannot avoid arranging ourselves into hierarchies in which some of us are seen as valuable, and others totally worthless.
The process of evolution is literally the history of death, violence between life-forms is essential to the process of life’s evolution.
Humans have an in-group bias, and we are naturally suspicious / hateful of outsiders and favour our own kin for obvious evolutionary reasons. It is only as of the modern age that we have realised (to an ostensible extent) that it is morally wrong to murder and enslave people who are not exactly like you.
Through the ages we have managed to override this evolutionary bias against those who aren’t like us by expanding the definition of what we consider our ‘in-group,’ to encompass all of humanity rather than just our own settlement (as it was in the Stone Age), our kingdom (as it was in the classical / medieval period), or our nation state and race (as it was in the colonial period).
The irony of this blows my mind, remember that humans have only been around for roughly 200,000 years, and there were no civilisations up until 4-5,000 years ago.
That means for roughly 195,000 years humans were living in tiny isolated settlements which would rape, enslave or kill each other whenever they came into contact with one another.
That is a monumentally long period of time given the brevity of the existence of civilisation (which was still strewn with , up until about 60 years ago a state of war was more common than peace in most parts of the world.)
All of this is overwhelming enough until we remember that even before the evolution of mankind, war rape and death was as popular amongst the ape species that proceeded us as it is amongst our own kind.
‘War was always here, before man was, war waited for him’ - Judge Holden, Blood Meridian.
This is a history of strife and suffering going back millions upon millions of years throughout the ages of evolution.
It should not surprise us that there is so much suffering in the world when we are the outcome of this endless churn of blood and struggle. It should not surprise us that the unjust imposition of hierarchy and dominance permeate every level of human experience when they are the engines that drove the entirety of our history since before our existence as a species. We can pretend to ourselves that we are just and civilised because we can collectively establish laws to maintain the pretence that we are all valuable and accounted for, but on an individual level we simply cannot avoid arranging ourselves into hierarchies in which some of us are seen as valuable, and others totally worthless.
