Tuesday, October 25, 2011

studies show world 'has never been this peaceful'

studies show world 'has never been this peaceful'from ap: Historically, we have never had the world this peaceful. That is the thesis of three new books, including one by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. Statistics reveal dramatic reductions in war deaths, family violence, racism, rape, murder and all sorts of mayhem. In his book, Mr Pinker writes: "The decline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species." It runs counter to what the mass media is reporting and essentially what we feel in our guts.

In his new book, "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined", Mr Pinker's findings include the fact that the number of people killed in battle has dropped by 1,000-fold over the centuries as civilisations evolved and that rape in the United States is down 80 per cent since 1973.

Mr Pinker says one of the main reasons for the drop in violence is that we are smarter. IQ tests show that the average teenager is smarter with each generation. "As we get smarter, we try to think up better ways of getting everyone to turn their swords into ploughshares at the same time," Mr Pinker said.

Mr Joshua Goldstein, a professor of international relations at American University and author of "Winning the War on War", has also been telling the same story as Mr Pinker, but from a foreign policy point of view.

The "Human Security Report 2009/2010" - a project led by Mr Andrew Mack, former head of strategic planning for United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan - is a worldwide examination of war and violence and has been published as a book. It shows that the average annual battle death toll has dropped from nearly 10,000 per conflict in the 1950s, to fewer than 1,000 in the 21st century.

Mr Mack and Mr Goldstein emphasise how hard society and peacekeepers have worked to reduce wars, focusing on action taken to tamp down violence.


Anonymous said...

This article had me thinking to the point I read "

That moment, I knew it was all BS.

Anonymous said...

Was this lifted from The Onion?

Anonymous said...

is this a report from the onion?

Anonymous said...

Part 2 (see other comment for part 1)

They have to create violence society (through deliberate policy), provoke it and then hype it in the 'news' 24/7 (stabbing, shootings, gangs etc) because otherwise we'd all start realising that the only people committing violence in our world are our rulers.

Yet despite this attempt to make us violent and make us THINK we are more violent than we really are, we (the general public) are still becoming less violent generally. And so just imagine if these toxic 'inputs' were taken away. (I don't mean censorship, I mean a society WITHOUT control over media, education system, economy, culture industry). In a freely organised society there would be virtually no endorsement of violence like there is to today.

This would snowball/ feedback on itself within just a few generations until violence became a foreign language. They will not understand how dropping bombs on a country in order to bring peace could ever work.

Even now people are starting to question the logic of this! A century or two ago people would not have even considered the logic, let alone questioned it.

Just think how Hitler managed to create his Nazi Germany. We have seen the exact same tactics being used today (and on a far greater scale), yet a decade on and we are still not approaching Hitler's Germany (I mean in society generally). War mentality needs to be sugar coated and buried in euphemisms rather than celebrated openly in the way it used to be.

I would suggest it is simply impossible to create such a thuggish, brutalising, violent society as Nazi Germany or wartime Britain or the US (let's be fair here!) today BECAUSE more peaceful parenting has created a more peaceful population by nature.

Only a small minority are able to be turned into thugs by the state today, and aren't they now screening them for IQ (selecting only low IQ candidates) and giving them testosterone patches and other drugs to make them more violent and less empathetic?

And on the flip side - where are the violent protests? There is enough information out there to fuel a violent and bloody revolution attempt.....yet it seems the population is not inclined to act in that way anymore, preferring peaceful dialogue, awareness raising, spreading of information, the building of alternative communities and other ways to 'leave the paradigm' rather than attack it with violence.

Of course the danger now is that we will confuse non violence with apathy and acquiescence! As we leave violence behind we need to develop and express our fierceness in new, more sophisticated ways.


The NWO will never be defeated through conflict and violence. This is because it feeds on conflict and violence. But it can be abandoned because it is ridiculous and insane and replaced by a better society.

As we leave the never ending cycle of suffering violence and passing that violence on to others, and as our IQ inevitably rises as we become more peaceful we WILL all start to see the ridiculousness and insanity of this system of control.

We will see (to quote Monty Python) "The violence inherent in the system"..... and then we will start to abandon it.

The biggest force for change in society is death of one generation being replaced by the next. Parenting IS humanity's steering wheel. How can it not be?

Post a Comment