Thursday, February 2, 2017

The origin of violence

Pitirim Sorokin
On the question of violence and evil in society there are three fundamental theories:
  1. Every human being is a battlefield between good and evil and carries with him strong tendencies towards evil and violence. It is necessary to educate him in moral values, ​​to teach him to control his impulses.
  2. Man is good by nature, society makes him bad. Education must try to keep us as much as possible in our original natural state, the good savage. This is the theory of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
  3. Man is good by nature, everything bad is a consequence of a poorly focused education. The solution is education in the gender ideology, which is dominant today.
What does science say (in this case, Sociology)?
One of the most important sociologists of the 20th century, the Russian-American Pitirim Sorokin, wrote the following in his book Society, Culture and Personality (Chapter VI, Factors of Solidarity and Antagonism):

Taken in themselves... the following characteristics of the parties in interaction are not important factors in the generation of solidarity or antagonism:
1) The sex of the part, in the sense that neither sex is more solidary or antagonistic than the other.
2) The race of the part, in the sense that per se none of the races is more antagonistic or more solidary than the others.
...
6) High or low intelligence, mental brilliance or ineptitude, with the possible exception of mental defects... [which] make the mentally ill dangerous for the other parts.
7) Presence or absence of literacy or illiteracy in the parts; of elementary, secondary or higher education, when education consists mainly or exclusively in a culture of the intellect, without training in forms of behavior, whether cooperative and altruistic, or competitive and selfish.
...
10) The technology of the parties, their life in an agricultural, pastoral or industrial age...
...we cannot say that people of good health or high intelligence or a certain sex, age or race show... greater solidarity or greater antagonism... Statistical studies on the correlation between high or low intelligence and cooperation... do not consistently result in high correlation rates... The brighter students from elementary, secondary or higher education do not show... higher altruism than clumsier students; nor do they show a greater antagonism. The same can be said of the cultivated and the illiterate. Nor does historical induction authorize the widely held view that an increase in elementary culture, scientific discoveries, technological inducements, and democracy, reduce social antagonisms. From the thirteenth to the twentieth century, schools, discoveries, inventions, population culture and democracy have grown together; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries... they increased in enormous proportions, and yet wars, revolutions, conflicts between groups and crimes show that antagonisms have experienced unprecedented growth... On the other hand, these data do not authorize anyone to claim that these factors generate antagonism.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
It seems that sociological data do not prove the assertion of the dominant ideology, that [domestic] violence has its origin in an educational problem, associated to centuries of a patriarchal culture (see paragraph 10 in Sorokin’s quotation). As education in the dominant ideology prevails, male violence does not diminish, perhaps even increases. Is this a consequence of this ideology, or of social resistance to it? Serious studies should be carried out to verify this, but the dominant ideology refuses to carry out such studies. Their claims are true by definition and cannot be questioned.
The dominant ideology does not allow anyone, especially judges and rulers, to think otherwise. This puts an end to freedom of thought and expression, which are supposed to be the fundamental principles of democracy, and have been replaced by the following:
Everyone has the right to think whatever he wants, as long as he thinks the same as we do. And if they don’t, they will become social outcasts.

The dominant ideology has established a stifling censorship, a gag. Whoever does not belong to it, if they play any role in society, cannot express themselves freely, and if they do, the supporters of that ideology force them to retract their opinions or to resign their positions.

The same post in Spanish
Thematic Thread on Politics and Economy: Previous Next
Manuel Alfonseca

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