The Better Angels of Our Nature Why Violence Has Declined

And you mentioned Pinker. Yeah. And that's everything I will say is redundant to Pinker. I mean that better angels of our nature is one of I think the most subversive books of our time.

The thing that blew my mind about pinker in that book better angels ... blew my mind is there's this line ... that has been obsessing me.

I think Pinker's got the best answer to this question, which is basically, what structures do you need to put in place to make the world a safer and less violent place? That's his book, Better Angels of Our Nature.

He argues that our rosy view of history is pretty much entirely wrong In tribal societies, hunter-gatherers and hunter-quarter culturalists

An average of about 15% of people met their ends through violence In the 20th century, if you try to come up with the highest estimate you can Combining all the wars, all the genocides, all the man-made famines You get to about 3%

but all of the qualities of humanity that you describe are sort of they're parsed off near the end of the book into a single chapter as if they're just secondary side effects of some more profound rationality let's say and it's the rationality that's concentrating on material well-being

but he wrote the better angels of our nature if I remember correctly as well showing that human aggression has decreased substantially over the last number of centuries

Part of the argument of Enlightenment now and before that better angels of our nature is that over the course of history what we might call Enlightenment values have increased.

This was an argument against your book called Cosmolive Conferency, The Better Angels of Our Nature, which basically says wars are less frequent, less deadly than they've been at any time despite the fact that you think otherwise. Some of the counterarguments, one of which is just that.

This is like this Steven Pinker hypothesis.

Yes. Yes, Pinker wrote a book about it.

I think he did a really good job summarizing it, but there are a lot of people who've been writing about this.

So, well, I'm familiar with the work Better Angels of Our Nature, which I think preceded Enlightenment Now, right?

And then in better angels of our nature term of course that I stole from Abraham Lincoln but it fit the idea perfectly so that it's not just a theoretical possibility it's happened war is come down and rape and child abuse you just whatever you have the data you plot them over time and the graphs go down

writing books like enlightenment now or better angels rationality are inherently encouraging it's almost contrarian because of our propensity to focus on the negative why do we need an accurate view of the world that why is this important well it's for the same reason that it's better to see things than to wear a blindfold or hallucinate namely the more you know about the world the better equipped you are to act on it to solve problems when they arise to figure out what works and what doesn't to protect the institutions and the laws and the practices that have made life better get rid of the ones that have made life worse the more you know about the world the better equipped you are to act on it don't get me wrong I agree with the idea that we should keep our eye on a positive view of the future because I think it also encourages us to solve the problems that we do have.

and then in better angels of our nature term of course that I stole from Abraham Lincoln but it fit the idea perfectly so that it's not just a theoretical possibility it's happened war is come down and rape and child abuse you just whatever you have the data you plot them over time and the graphs go down and then like now I brought that to other measures of human well being such as poverty and literacy and work hours and happiness so it's probably fending off the accusation that a belief in human nature is depressing and fatalistic reactionary and means there's nothing we can do to improve our lot it's kind of pushing back against that idea that led me into the idea of human progress.

He's a two-time fueled surprise finalist, one of times most hundred influential people in the world, foreign policies, 100 global thinkers sold a bazillion books.

His book Better Angels is about the decline of violence and the progress we've made as a species.

Well, it is an example of the my side bias which is one of the most pervasive of all of the cognitive biases.

The one is, well how can you say things are declined bad stuff happens? Yeah, but those are totally compatible, namely bad stuff happens but in the past even more bad stuff happened. That is it's the decline is not the same as a disappearance to say that X is less than Y is not the same as saying that X is zero so there's that.

It doesn't mean that every improvement was conceptualized and argued for in the better angels I talked about, for example the decline of tribal reading and feuding and blood feuds, the decline of medieval brigandage and homicide and deaths from jousting and other conflicts along medieval nights.