The people arguing against you would be a who’s who of my forum bffs, but, uh, yeah.
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We suck because up until last week humans killed each other like it was going out of style, and darwinism is a thing, so every good person has long been culled. Every one of us is directly descended from stone cold killers and somebody out there can say that their great-great- … -great-grandfather wiped the last good man’s bloodline from existence.
I’ll go one further. You all know we’re the only life like ours in the entire universe, right? There’s not even a Great Filter like the theorists imagine, preventing some sort of transcendence and subsequent interstellar contact. There’s nothing at all like us, because life in any form is an anomaly of an anomaly and life getting to the point of us, sitting here typing words on an internet forum, having the audacity to proclaim our inherent goodness, is an anomaly of that anomaly. Way out there on some habitable exoplanet there’s a dumb and cruel ape who is picking up a tool and beating another ape to death, and it pretty much ends there. They don’t go on to invent an internet and wax philosophically about their inherent goodness. Their fish watch from the sea and then their sun supernovas.
We’re a universe-defying accident because life wasn’t meant to get to the point where it can contemplate the inherent horror of the very concept of life itself. Picking up tools and bashing others’ brains in was meant to be the failsafe killswitch to prevent that.
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Boredsocial is a fucking rookie.
It’s interesting seeing hundreds of posts on the philosophy of history, historiography and the prehistory of violence. These are well worn topics in the social sciences.
The spear in the head argument was just bad historiography. Anecdote just isn’t very convincing data for drawing broad history patterns. Nonetheless, Evidence does suggest prehistory was much more violent than today.
It’s also a stretch to take this fact and use it to suggest something like “humans are inherently bad”. All animals are violent to some degree. If anything, I would think moral philosophy and psychology has demonstrated over and over that human are uniquely good, if we are defining good as something like altruistic, willing to act for the greater good ect. If only because we have a near unique ability to project into the future and live within a complex cultural system not matched anywhere else in the animal kingdom.
This book is a nice summary
I’ve never killed anyone, at least not directly, even before last week. I think I currently only vaguely know one person who has, but he seems decent enough, it’s just that at one point when he was young (Vietnam War) people with guns and prisons ordered him to kill.
I think the rest of your post is probably rightish though. I don’t think there’s an expectation for all the apes to beat each other to death with clubs, but there are enough apes willing to do it that things like societies and governments and leaders and nuclear weapons are incompatible with life.
Of course you haven’t, most haven’t, but that hardly matters in this context. The killing’s already been done and these are the last days.
Ok I should probably dial it back a bit.
Most days I take a walk along the river where the ducks, geese and swans live I’ll see one or more acts of unnecessary territorial aggression between ducks as one paddles harmlessly past another’s patch.
By the time I’ve retuned home I’ve probably seen ten times as many humans as ducks and not a single act of aggression between humans.
But ducks are cute and have feathers while people are weird looking gangly fuckers so ok.
Jalfrezi Attenborough
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a) All species suck b) humans just have a constant implied threat of violence towards one another, i.e. mutually assured destruction.
— Team Meteor
I’ve heard that they have found hunter gatherer tribes that don’t even have a word for murder.
I’m not sure if that is true or not.
But everyone is just kind of making shit up as they go along in this thread so I figured I would join.
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It’s not true. 
Weren’t homicide rates in those societies incredibly high by modern standards? Seems like you have a kind of Noble Savage notion of how early humans lived.
I wasn’t talking about early humans, but keep up the good trolling.
I’m not trolling. Every legit study of the kinds of people you’re describing seems to show them as being astonishingly violent by modern standards. Of course they also don’t engage in global conflicts that kill millions, so YMMV.
I do think there’s a danger in romanticizing the lifestyles of these kinds of cultures.
Read my post. I’m talking about modern humans.
Remote modern people living in places like the Andaman Islands are also not sitting around singing Kumbaya all day. It still seems like you’re romanticizing these kinds of cultures.
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High murder rates do nothing to prove the thesis “all humans are trash”.
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About 0.005% of the US population are murderers and that includes a single supposed murderer for every unsolved murder. How much higher was the rate in those societies? What percentage of people have to be murderers before you call people, writ large, violent savages/trash?
Nonsense. As I said to BS, the least you could do is watch some actual documentaries. Who knows what you might learn (though I’m not sure that’s the objective of this subthread).