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Yes, ancient history was full of violence (just like modern history), but we (we non psychopaths) admire other ancient achievements.
There is difference between someone who, when thinking about Roman empire, thinks "The Romans built roads, bridges and aqueducts that lasted for millenia, they created unparallelled law, literature, art and architecture, they were so cool!" and someone who thinks "The Romans razed and burned cities so thoroughly that no trace remained, they perfected the art of torture, they decorated their roads with lines of crosses, they fed people to the beasts for fun, they were so cool!"
Spread of black plague was even wider and faster. Do you too find Yersinia pestis "inspiring"?
And yet the destruction of Carthage is well known even today, an entire religion was founded based on crucifixion, the "lines of crosses" scene is popular in modern entertainment (including Game of Thrones), as are gladiatorial battles against people and of course lions. It seems a lot of people think that stuff is cool. The popularity of Conan's paraphrase of Genghis Khan ("to crush one's enemies...") demonstrates this as well.
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You don't have to be a psychopath to think genocide is cool. Psychopathy is the state of having no empathy for people in your ingroup. Lack of empathy for people in the outgroup is far more common and can't really be considered an abnormality.
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Come the fuck on, your first post was consensus building already, no need to take it a step further and paint like, 90% of the guys I grew up with - including myself - as God damned serial killers just because we think conquest is cooler than road building.
Well, conquest is parallel killing, not serial killing, so naturally there's less current resistance to it.
More seriously: although it's unfair to say that conquest is no more pro-social than serial killing, because conquest at least implies you have a social circle that includes enough people to form a cohesive army rather than one that might just include yourself ... they at least share the nature of "can be both morally and selfishly opposed by anyone outside that social circle", no? Alexander "the Great" is instead "gujastak", "accursed", in Zoroastrian literature; he was "the evil-minded (badgumān) tyrant who killed our ancestors one by one" to the first Sasanid. The more successful you are as a conqueror, the lower the ratio is of people who benefitted to people who were conquered.
On the other hand, it'd be easier to dismiss conquest as completely useless if history had a better track record of nations being able to combine and unify when necessary without it. Wiki's list of proposed state mergers is pretty short (even considering it doesn't have anything before 1300AD? really??), and if you then omit the failed mergers, the failed-shortly-afterward mergers, the barely-a-treaty "mergers", and the pseudo-voluntary mergers backed by threats of violence, it gets even shorter.
Damn it man, can't you see I'm trying to be cranky?
More seriously, the utility and sociality of war don't even enter the equation for me, I stop short after thinking about popular culture, which considers a lack of conflict a complete non-starter in terms of entertainment value. Our brains are wired to think conquest - competing and winning and celebrating your power - is cool regardless of its utility in our current climate. Boys and men in particular are drawn to it and no amount of peer pressure is going to change that. Eetan obviously wants to stigmatise indo-european studies, and I assume it's because he doesn't want the cw thread to fill up with Aryan supremacy shit - which I sympathise with - but all of the prehistoric civilisations were fascinating as hell and I have to push back against his attempts to stigmatise learning about them. And to then go the step further and claim only psychopaths enjoy battles is just preposterous.
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Nah. The looting and plundering phase of warfare is seldom romanticized, but warfare in general is not. Gladiator arenas are also one of the first things that come up when you ask people about cool things Romans did, and if you ever went to a museum of torture, it's hard not to be impressed by the sheer creativity of some of these inventions.
I would, if I was a bacterium!
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