And yet our biggest business is war, the most successful games are killing games, the most successful TV & films usually have lots of 'thems' getting killed. And it is far easier to manilpulate people towards hate than love, because it's our more natural state of being. If you understand that, and are aware of that, then you can actively work against it, rather than stick your head in the sand pretending the world is full of love, whilst all the time wondering why, when you turn on the news, it's full of people everywhere being **** to each other.
That's only one side of the human experience - the bit that gets all the headlines, but only part of the story. The world is full of love. A thousand acts of kindness go unreported every day; people helping each other, those who have giving to those in need. People laughing at themselves and each other. Acknowledging all that isn't sticking your head in the sand, it's choosing to focus on the positive; the negative is pretty ****ing difficult to ignore after all. Anyway, to return to the original argument. I do not believe human beings are born to hate, I think we are taught that; though I acknowledge it must be within each of us to begin with. Still, no child is born a racist; that's my sincere belief.
Disagree with that. War is created by a very small minority in the world, who happen to wield the most power. Violent games and TV are created as a catharsis in the same way that little (and big) boys and girls like to play soldiers and pirates. Completely disagree that it’s eaiser to manipulate people towards hate rather than love because it’s our ‘natural state of being’. It has everything to do with social conditioning to hate other people. We aren’t born haters, we learn it from others. As archers points out, there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of incidents of love, kindness and compassion that happen every single day on the planet. They don’t get reported on the news, made in to TV programmes, or turned into video games. It isn’t fashionable or newsworthy to report these stories, but they are the prevalent state of the human condition.
disagree with it as much as you want, but the simple inescapable fact is that war has been around since before man walked the earth, you think it's some modern phenomena created by rich people? The Earth is a perpetual warzone and has been since life first appeared. I'm guessing you have never actually watched a nature program and let the information sink in. We didn't form social groups because we were all lovey-dovey, we did it so we could kill other outsiders.
Where did I say it was a modern phenomena created by rich people ? I said that war was generally created by a small minority who hold the power. You are trying to claim that everybody is born to hate each other and inflict violence upon one another, yet the overwealming evidence shows that isn’t the case. As for your reference to nature programmes, I assume you’re trying to claim that a kind of ‘dog eat dog’ model is the norm ? In that case I would suggest that it is you who has failed to grasp the complexity of the natural world, and that species cohabitation depends on many symbiotic, collaborative, and complex intwinned relationships in order for every species to survive.
I thought this was an interesting view. I agree that tolerance is not innate and does indeed have to be learned but then you said this ... Racism or any other -ism isn't genetic. It's variation in the environment, not variation in biology that's more useful in explaining racism. Scientists are still debating whether there really are 'genes for' various diseases let alone one for a response in certain individuals to certain situations.
