The Better Angels Of Our Nature

The Better Angels Of Our Nature illustrates why we live in the most peaceful time ever in history, by looking at what motivates us to behave violently, how these motivators are outweighed by our tendencies towards a peaceful life and which major shifts in history caused this global reduction in crime.

One thing that Tai Lopez kept beating on in his 67 Steps was to avoid extreme ideologies. It’s something Charlie Munger (the billionaire partner of Warren Buffett) talked about in his 2007 USC Law commencement address and it’s stuck with me ever since.

Examples of ideologies gone extreme and violent are the Christian crusades between the 11th and 15th century, the nazi regime and the Jihad war. The reason ideologies have a bigger propensity towards violence than all of the other factors Pinker describes is that they target huge groups of people and are aimed at the greater good.

However, acting as or in the name of a group and for a cause that transcends selfish motives makes it a lot easier to justify using violence to as a means to an end. So what could get us to fall into an extreme ideologist way of thinking?

Pinker says four things in particular make us prone to such violent ideologies:

We think of ourselves in terms of ingroups and outgroups, groups we belong to or not and it feels natural to antagonize other those who we consider to be in outgroups. In those groups people with similar ideas and values are huddled together, reinforcing those and polarizing them, until they become more extreme. This is also known as confirmation bias. We avoid saying what we really think to not upset anyone in the group and go with the groupthinking. This is called herd behavior. For the sake of social conformity we tend to punish those outside of our own ideology, in hopes of converting them.

That’s how some of history’s worst incidences of genocide started. One person shared an extreme ideologist view with their ingroup, they all conformed and then spread the idea, punishing, intimidating, threatening and silencing all non-conformers, until the majority of society was part of the group.

One thing that nips extreme ideologies in the bud is reasoning. Using your rational thinking powers can quickly debunk extreme and violent ideas and luckily, these powers have been increasing across the globe for the past 100 years and more. Named after researcher James R. Flynn, the Flynn effect describes the continuous rise in IQ scores – 3 points per decade, on average. You might think that’s not a lot, but if you took one of today’s teenagers and dumped them in the year 1910, they’d instantly be smarter…