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Comment by arca_vorago | Hacker News Reader

It provides a sense of purpose, it builds comraderie, and actual combat is more addictive than any drug.

There ya go, the basics in easily digestible civilian form.

I often wonder if economic competition is not a re-emergence of that need into a non physical manner. Kinda like sport. You try to kill your opponent but symbolically (team or alone).

It absolutely is, and it's at the core of everything else we do -- even if it doesn't seem that way on the surface -- because violence is a core component of what it means to be human. Not only human, but an animal from mother nature. Violence is just nature asserting itself. Anyone that thinks they can beat mother nature is fooling themselves.

It provides the missing counter-piece to human civilization, ever since we started farming.

You can not be intellectually honest with yourself and against war(before the invention of fertilizer and the atomic bomb) if your lifestyle produces x^2 kids every generation. So war always was the other part of the cyclus civilization was ramping up towards.

And this cycle deformed us - the culture as a total down to the individual whose psychological variations and epigenetics are basically barely hidden adaptions to these cycles.

So even the most seemingly peaceful society is one recession away from becoming a emotionally hardened band rallying behind some leader to wage conflict upon whoever is foreign and in reach. Which is one of the reason why the economic mill must be kept going, no matter what- the alternative is not some settled down hippie life- but a war of all against all.

Respect to whoever coerced the current path (cell-phones with cameras, internet) into being. It seems to be pretty reliable when it comes to instilling self-control and preventing the war mode partially. And of course, thanks goes to Los Alamos, the atomic egg that prevents the best at power-grabbing from sending millions to die like in the iran-iraq war or the WorldWars.

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