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I would like to know why urban blacks prey on their own so much. The murder rates among blacks in Chicago, New York, Baltimore & New Orleans are horrific. I don’t understand what is driving this - drugs? poverty? Human nature? genes? -and why is this not be addressed by these city governments?

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Philosophy has tackled this age old question, "Why cant we be Good?" I highly recommend all of Jacob Needleman's books and the one titled "Why Can't we be Good?" I copied and pasted some exerts from Will Durant's "The Pleasures of Philosophy (1953):

“Nearly all the races of men once lived by pursuing beasts, killing them, cutting them up-usually on the spot-and eating them, often in the raw, and always to the cubic capacity of the hunter’s stomach.”

“Primitive man ate like the modern dog, because he did not know when his next meal would come; insecurity is the mother of greed, as cruelty is the child of fear…How much of our contemporary cruelty and greed, our surviving violence, occasional relish for war, goes back to the hunting stage?”

“Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, as hatred becomes respectable in war. Brutality and greed were once necessary in the struggle for existence, and are now ridicules atavism; man’s sins are not the result of his fall; they are relics of his rise.”

“We do not know when man passed from hunting to tillage, but we may be sure that the great transition created a demand for new virtues; and that many old virtues became vices in the settled and quiet routine of the farm. Industrious was now more vital than bravery, thrift more desirable than violence, peace more profitable than war. Then suddenly factories appeared; men and woman and children began to leave home and family, authority, and unity, to work as individuals, individually paid...instead of sowing seeds and reaping harvests in the fields, men fought a life-and-death struggle, in dark filthy shops…”

Our life and death struggle, virtues, and vices have changed in the information age. 20th Century vices like marijuana, gambling and homosexuality are now virtues. No one has time or interest in Religion and Philosophy to develop their own soul so it seems.

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Great read. Utterly fascinating stuff. But as I digest, I wonder: is the theory a bit too general? A bit too tidy? Did human groups organize and select differently across time and space? There were, after all, four hundred thousand years and how many thousands of clans, bands, and cultures over that time? Is it possible that some cultures actually selected for big bad bullies? The theory fits nicely into the box of elegant and easy to grasp and explain. But while I want to swallow it all whole and smile, the idea that the human organism is far too messy an animal for such simplicity remains stuck in my head. I’ll likely be left thinking about this one for a while. Guess I’ll have to read the book.

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The few times I have read your longer form stuff, like the Sadly Porn review and this, it is some of your best stuff and what convinced me to start paying.

Did self domestication build a better psychopath? Were those who had elevated levels on the trait scale of psychopathic deviancy better able to navigate the mob? How does this match up with the gossip trap? Were we in a gossip/psychopath trap? And at the same time did this help us to outcompete the other hominids that are no longer around?

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Excellent review. That guy acting like a 'world state' would be a good thing is a little bit concerning. I'd say that would massively increase the threat posed by tyranny.

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The part about reducing capacity for organized violence resonates with John Robb’s commentary on networked conflict. He thinks we are very few steps from nuclear conflict due to Putin’s war and escalating tensions at Taiwan.

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Hi Rob, it has been said that in terms of international relations, nations act a lot like boys in early adolescence. If so, maybe the same principles can be useful in understanding and guiding national leaders.

For instance, Trump was a clear advocate of national selfishness. But he used that to guide some middle eastern nations into signing the Abraham Accords. Pretty much he told those countries to state what they needed to each other and several of them found common ground.

With Iran it was the opposite. Recognizing that Iran was operating on a path that was completely harmful to neighboring states, US policy was to encourage others to band against Iran in mutual self defense.

Biden, however, treats Iran as if that regime will act in a non-narcissistic way. Obama did the same. Iran doesn’t seem to want to give up its ways. Glad to negotiate in bad faith, accept pallets of cash and keep doing what they were doing.

Maybe Trump, being a narcissist, recognized the same traits in Iran’s leadership, only worse. That might have given him more insight than his predecessors. Or successor.

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Very inciteful. Much of it resonates with common sense from the experienced and observed world. It seems we are seeing more coalitionary proactive aggression within our politics against internal tribes that would otherwise be considered internal members of the same tribe.

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