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Comment by rwallace | Hacker News Reader

http://celtic-lyrics.com/lyrics/225.html

"For Willie McBride, it all happened again, / And again, and again, and again, and again."

And still humans choose war when we could have chosen peace, and follow war leaders when we could have impeached those leaders and thrown them in prison. Probably there is an anthropic selection effect in that this conversation only happens between descendants of killer apes, but that does not excuse us from the last stage of the Great Filter.

Will we learn in time?

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Ah, but there is great payoff for the Kings and Queens.

Not so much for the pawns.

Aye, at least given that they are programmed to behave as though their utility function consisted almost entirely of the thrill of wielding power. So, fellow pawns? Stop voting for the damned Kings and Queens. It's a secret ballot; your instincts telling you to vote for the likely next tribal chief are wildly outdated. Vote for whoever demonstrates the most distaste for war - even if they aren't going to win this election, you'll be sending the right message instead of the wrong one.

Raping and looting though. Couldn't you also be rewarded with land or was that only for the higher ups?

Every Roman legionary post-Marian reforms received a plot of land after their 25 year service [0], officers monetary rewards, and auxiliaries Roman citizenship for their children.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_reforms#Marian_reforms

Incidentally, that was because before Gaius Marius every legionary had a plot of land. Marius introduced recruiting from the 'capite censi', the propertyless citizens.

Rome fought off Carthage with just its small farmers. Probably did not have many urban poor at the time, either.

Which shift in socio-economic demographics was only accelerated by the formation of latifundia [0], enormous aristocratic estates consolidated from small farmholds, at least partially due to the latter's failure when their owners were at war for more than a single planting/harvest season. This increased agricultural productivity employed slaves to fuel its economies of scale, at the expense of inflating the class of landless peasant citizen, who migrated to cities and became the urban poor. These were then recruited into the army, which conquered new territories and enslaved new peoples to work the lands from which their soldiers' lineages had been driven.

This same dynamic repeats itself in Byzantium [1], though with a more explicitly feudal flavor.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latifundium

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynatoi

Edit: landless peasant citizens

War is in our nature, judging from history. I don't think that will change, but I hope I'm wrong.

As long as humans fight for resources, there will be conflict.

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