Chapter 8: The Inner Demon

“… kinds of Victims fills a page of a rhyming dictionary: homicide, democide, genocide, ethnocide, politicide, regicide, infanticide, neonaticide, filicide, siblicide, gynecide, uxoricide, mariticide, and terrorism by suicide. Violence is found throughout the history and prehistory of our species, and shows no signs of having been invented in one place and spread to the others.” (482)

“The decline of violence allows us to dispatch a dichotomy that has stood in the way of understanding the roots of violence for millennia: whether humankind is basically bad or basically good, an ape or an angel, a hawk or a dove, the nasty brute of textbook Hobbes or the noble savage of textbook Rousseau. Left to their own devices, humans will not fall into a state of peaceful cooperation, but nor do they have a thirst for blood that must regularly be slaked. There must be at least a grain of truth in conceptions of the human mind that grant it more than one part — theories like faculty psychology, multiple intelligence, mental organs, modularity, domain-specificity, and the metaphor of the mind as a Swiss army knife. Human nature accommodates motives tat impel us to violence, like predation, dominance, and vengeance, but also motives that — under the right circumstances — impel us toward peace, like compassion, fairness, self-control, and reason.” (482-483)

“There are many taxonomies of violence, and they tend to make similar distinctions. I will adapt a four-part scheme from Baumeister, splitting one of his categories into two.

The first category of violence may be called practical, instrumental, exploitative, or predatory. It is the simplest kind of violence: the use of force as a means to an end. The violence is deployed in pursuit of a goal such as greed, lust, or ambition … …

The second root of violence is dominance—the drive for supremacy over one’s rival (Baumeister calls it “egotism”). … …

The third root of violence is revenge—the drive to pay back a harm in kind. … …

The fourth root is sadism, the joy of hurting. … …

The fifth and most consequential cause of violence is ideology, in which true believers weave a collection of motives into a creed and recruit other people to carry out its destructive goals. ” (508-509)