World Peace Is Possible - Part 4

Here's why violent men can't be fixed.

This video is part of a video series on world peace. All the videos in this series are available from the Table Of Contents page.

So far in this video series about world peace we’ve talked about a world without men, explored emotional engagement with violence, and shared the belief that the marriage between violent men and the knowledge explosion is unsustainable.

In this 4th video in our world peace video series, let’s dig a bit deeper in to the claim that violent men can’t be fixed, and therefore must be removed.

The Biological Roots Of Male Violence

From nature’s point of view, the biological function of women is to have and care for children. This is easy to see, for evolution has designed their bodies around this goal.

Please note the phrase “biological function” being used here.  In this video we are not discussing the evolution of women’s social roles in society, as important as that topic is.

What is the biological function of men? To provide sperm of course, to impregnate women. But there’s more to it than that…

To maintain the vitality of the species, evolution doesn’t want just any randomly selected man who comes along to do the job. When it comes to mating, evolution tries to select for the strongest men available on the premise that the strongest men will, on average, produce the strongest children.

The way nature determines who the strongest men are is by having them compete.

As you know, this isn’t just a human phenomena. Male vs. male competition is used by a great many species to determine which male is the strongest, and thus shall have the right to mate.

Biology And Culture

The point here is that the roots of male violence go back millions of years before we were even human.

Knowing this fact of nature helps us understand why in all of human history no religion, philosophy, ideology, law, political system or pattern of social pressure has succeeded in protecting society from violent men.

All these social constructs are only thousands of years old, and the reality of male mammal violence that they are attempting to address arises from a natural pattern hundreds of millions of years old. Culture can only accomplish so much.

This is not to dismiss those cultural forces which attempt to maintain peace and keep a society glued together. Such forces are important, and have done a great deal to civilize the modern world. The point here is only that they’ve never succeeded in ending the threat from violent men.

“But, But, Most Men Aren’t Violent!”

It’s of course true that most men aren’t violent.

The reality is that a minority of men are very violent, and a minority of men are very peaceful, and most of we men lie somewhere along the middle of that scale. While most men are not physically violent, what many of us do is express the ancient drive towards male vs. male competition rhetorically.

As example, we’ve seen on social media that if two people are all wound up in an ego food fight smack down, with each party snottily claiming superiority over the other, most of the time that’s going to be two men doing the ancient male mammal head butting dance.

And one sad little fact about the modern world is that even if a man should win such a male competition contest on the Internet (and who ever does?), he’s not going to be rewarded with the opportunity to mate. The contest is all for nothing, but it happens anyway all over the Net, day after day after day, such is the ancient male need to compete.

The Limits Of Management

So, we can use various cultural methods of managing the behavior of ordinary men, and on average such techniques are useful. But there is no evidence in the historical record of the human race to suggest that such cultural forces will ever be able to fix violent men.

And so we arrive at the following equation:

• If it’s true that violent men can’t be fixed…

• And if it’s true that the marriage between violent men and the knowledge explosion is unsustainable…

• And if it's true that no society has ever figured out how to keep the many peaceful men while ridding itself of the minority of violent men...

We arrive at the proposal that humanity would be better off in a world without men.