The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #59118 Message #939957
Posted By: Amos
25-Apr-03 - 11:00 AM
Thread Name: BS: The Roots of Violence in Humans
Subject: RE: BS: The Roots of Violence in Humans
Xenophobia is the root of violence? But why? I cans ee why your explanation would explain less violence in homogenous cultures -- the expectations are stable, the agreements are predictable. But going among other kinds of people does not uniformly lead to violence -- it varies wildly with the individuals involved.
Ya know, one thing that stands out about violence when it is inappropriate to the circumstances is that it never occurs in the presence of full understanding between participants. It may be that the probability of violence is a perfect inverse of the degree of understanding. If that is so, then the factors which cause violence would be the same factors, generally, as those which prevent or impede understanding.
Some of these which come to mind are lies (false information), enforced information (authoritarian data), the suppression of communication in various ways, the absence of information, alterations of facts concerning "when, how, where and who" in events, and the distortion of importances on arbitrary grounds.
This ties in with the notion of erroneously included past data entering the equation, mentioned above.
A