Humans didn't invent war.
War and murder surrounds us, everywhere, from micro to macro, as we feed on each other to live.
It's a Murder Planet
this post was submitted on 31 May 2026
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The only other animals on the planet that go to war are ants. Most animals do not fight to the death, outside of predators going for prey to eat. And absolutely none of them have atomic bombs besides our stupid asses.
Most animals do not fight to the death, outside of predators going for prey to eat.
The only reason this is true is because every moment of combat is dangerous - which means it is far safer to chase your opponent off, whether by intimidating them or wounding them. Humans are unique in that our tool use allows us to kill our enemies with a single blow. Animals besides ants that operate in large social groups can absolutely come into conflict with other groups, and engage in what can easily be considered warfare.
If you somehow managed to hand a rabbit a pistol and teach it how to use it, I guarantee there would be dead animals near its burrow.
Apathetic bloody planet. I’ve no sympathy at all.
Only when the last tree has died and the last river poisoned and the last fish caught will we realize we cannot eat money.
Cree Native American proverb
Humans invented war? Tell that to ants, birds, bees, wasps, wolves, and millions of other animals. We just happen to be very good at it. If there's one thing to be said about humans, it's that we are ridiculously good at killing things.
Oh c’mon that’s like saying the cave painters of Lascaux invented cubism.
Yes, they both involve creating visual artifacts but one of them is orders of magnitude higher as a discipline. War as she is practiced today is a library’s worth of theory, history, practices, and knowledge.
Not to minimize the cave paintings. In their own way greater than any style, respectively.
That's a silly analogy, if natural murder is analogous to cave paintings, modern war would be more suitably analogous to AI creations, not cubism. One cannot exist without the other either way. (we never get to AI slop without the cave painters before us)
Anyway, our planet is fundamentally violent, so of course we are violent. We know nothing else.
"Peace" is an ideal, and temporary, not the norm. Even as you look upon a quiet meadow, war is there should you pay attention. Maybe not for you at that point in time, but it's there. Those cute bunnies feed those adorable foxes, and so on.
That's a silly analogy, if natural murder is analogous to cave paintings, modern war would be more suitably analogous to AI creations, not cubism.
Er, sure. Fine.
Anyway, our planet is fundamentally violent, so of course we are violent. We know nothing else.
Mmmmnot sure where you grew up but over here we knew a lot more than just violence. Good food, for example.
I remember this was a thing in Larry Niven's "Known Space" sci-fi universe. Humans had become super peaceful because we were too good at war. The way it was achieved however was to have everyone medically pacified, except for a handful of selected people for their insight...
I hate takes that condemn the whole of humanity for the evil of a powerful handful. That's basically conservative ideology.
If history teaches us one thing, it's that there's no shortage of horrible people.
I've always felt the primary takeaway from a broad history education is the nature of power and how it's misallocation corrupts people. If your main takeaway from history is that "There were a lot of bad people" then I think you're missing out on a lot of critical nuance.
If we were inherently good, that wouldn't happen
First, nobody claimed that we're inherently good either. Second, you definitely don't know that for sure and wouldn't be able to prove it if you had to. Third, the apparent need of some to reduce our conception of humanity to either good or evil is a loaded premise that is damaging and derailing to a more meaningful and useful understanding of humanity and should probably be unpacked on it's own elsewhere.
Well, I'll believe humanity isn't evil when we turn around and start treating each other well and look after the planet and it's inhabitants
It starts with you and me!
It's religious nonsense, we're all sinners.
if we're all sinners, then religion can't be nonsense.
Sin is a creation of religion.
Also its kinda true.
If you consider normal human behavior sin, sure.
Or just aberrant to living peacefully on a rich planet.
We weren't gifted anything. And any species will expand to consume all the available resources. We're just better at it than all the previous ones. The challenge now is to find an equilibrium, which is a totally new concept in the history of evolution on earth. The jury is very much out on this one.
Yeah its a mystery
Pretty sure most of the medicine were done by us in the last 100/150 years
True...but...
A lot of medicines are fully natural things that we've learned how to cultivate or synthesize with remarkable accuracy. Look at Aspirin/Salicylic acid (sourced from certain bark, iirc). Or Penicillin.
Insulin is another great example, something we've learned how to extract from pigs.
And now tons of medicines are biologic. We are finding all sorts of stuff in nature that we can borrow and make it grow inside of domesticated plants or animals.
When you get right down to it, everything we make came from the earth. Hell the phone I'm typing this on is really just a chunk of smart sand.
Pretty sure medicine always existed and it's only gotten a lot better in the last 100/150 years
Yes, losing half your children before they became teens used to be normal.
In addition, there were a lot of trees, fruit and water. But, the majority of the fruit wasn't something humans could eat. It was simply there so that the plant could reproduce.
It took millennia of cultivation to get nice, juicy fruit like we have today. Even just a hundred years ago, a sweet orange was a rare treat.
For most of history, just getting enough calories every day was a challenge. The whole reason why debt, feudalism, war, etc. exist is that life was hard and sometimes people were willing to kill or die for the chance at something better.
Maybe we can find a way to have both? Science, research, health care and technical innovation don't need to go hand in hand with capitalism.
Well that’s not how you get endless record quarterly profit margins, silly
First of all, we are a product of it. We also demand nutrition, like any other animal. We work by the same principles like any other animal. We just have a large neocortex, which allows us to solve complex problems, which other animals cannot. We use this to our advantage like any other animal would do. I am not saying that it is the right thing we are doing but we grew out of primitivism and have much more complex problems at hand now, which mainly need us to reject our tribal behaviour and move past it. Many of these large problems are due to our tribalism. Why should we care about the world? We care about our loved ones only. Why should I give money to people I do not know? I would rather give it to my close ones. Everything else is a potential threat. Our tribalism doesn't function properly at this scale and we have to move past it somehow, while it is deeply natural for us to behave like this and it's at small scale also beneficial and not harmful to others.
We work by the same principles like any other animal.
No we don’t. No other animal has the ability to use language the way we do. Or to conceive situations as we can. At least so far as 20,000 years of recent history has revealed. It’s not even close. We’re unbelievably, fantastically strange compared to all other animals.
Almost like, humans are some kind of outside species in a world full of organisms that otherwise work on the same principles.
Where meme
It’s in here:
Didn't you hear?
Screenshots of body temperature takes from Twitter technically count as Memes according to some definitions, these are what we'll have to consume for the foreseeable future
Where politics?
Capatilism was mentioned
I don’t really see how this is important. Earth will heal once humans destroy themselves/their environment. Theoretically we should be trying to save earth for the next generation, but leaders think short term…. The next 3 months.
Earth will heal once humans destroy themselves/their environment
Depends on how ambitious we get with our fuckery. We could potentially create cascading environmental collapses that are bad enough to where we lose a huge chunk of biodiversity. Life will most likely continue on in some form, but it may never recover to be as complex and diverse as it is now.
It’s because of the mosquitoes
It's a simulation with misery algos so that aliens can feed off our negative energy.
'Debt' will always exist though. Unless you regress to a hunter-gatherer society, debt is always there.
Agriculture is debt, effort now for a payoff in the future. Everything since then is just more debt. Even Communism was still debt.
War sucks bigtime though.