A great future begins when violence completely stops
In this blog post, we are going to talk about how a great future begins when violence completely stops. We are first going to look at a brief history of violence, the causes of violence, what defines peace and how realistically achievable is it? We are going to look at how can reduce violence to achieve that peace. We are also going to have a look at existing societies and theoretical societies that exist and could exist in the future.
*Disclaimer: Luvioni does not claim to be a professional doctor, psychologist, psychiatrist, spiritualist, governmental official or any form of authority. The following is purely the opinion and ideas that Luvioni has gathered by the thoughts that are our brains and the information that is readily available on the internet. If we show statistics or mention research, we try our best to link the pictures and references to the original source. Luvioni also tries its best to use the outmost reliable resources for its researches that are mainly following the Harvard and Oxford style of conducting research but is not limited to the aforementioned research style.
For how long have humans been fighting each other?
People have been fighting for a very long time. Some might say animals fight as well or it’s normal for humans to be fighting, hurting and killing each other, but is it really normal? As an ”intelligent” species that have created rocket ships, medicine, robots and electric cars, why do we still hurt others? From what we think we know, people have been violent towards each other even during our period of ”modern human evolution”. From what we can prove, people have been being violent towards each other for at least 100,000 years, and that is already 100,000 years too many. The human species is around 7,000,000 years old (SEVEN MILLION YEARS OLD), and that we still solve some problems with other humans through violence is embarrassing to the rate of evolution and to the whole universe. Imagine if another species in another space has been watching us for SEVEN MILLION years and we are still acting like barbarians. They may be looking at us like wild animals, just as we see lions fighting each other like wild animals that we have to stay far away from.
In this picture ”Murder rate by country 2021”, purple means that the murder rate is zero or very low and if it gets redder or orange that means the murder rate per 100,000 habitants is higher. Grey colour means that the country is either so underdeveloped to gather data or conflicts there are too unstable to even conduct proper research. As you can see, there is more red than purple on the global map, and these are the statistics in 2021, which is not even over yet.
Countries that find themselves in the European union or more economically and infrastructurally developed countries see generally less violence and murders.
Just imagine if the whole world rate were all purple colours, keep reading this blog and you’ll find out how we might be able to get there.
We couldn’t find a trustworthy source showing a lengthy chart of violent activities, which is why this shows only for Western Europe, however, the rest of the world seems to be following the same trend in general. If you have a trustworthy source showing the chart of the whole world for a lengthy period of time, please leave it in the comment below.
We do have to mention that this chart is up until 2016. Recent reports suggest that crime rates and violence started going back up again in 2019, and grew even harder in 2020, the trend seems to be following in 2021. Even tensions between countries seem to also be increasing with the most recent tension-filled situation being Kabul in Afghanistan.
Historical data suggests that there can be a few years where the violence rises again, however, the amount of growth in violence hasn’t be seen in decades in some countries, which is something to pay attention to. Only time will tell if this is just a short spike in the greater time frame of centuries.
Top 10 causes of violence
Some of these causes of violence were seen in the YouTube video ‘‘A History of Violence: Steven Pinker at TEDxNewEngland” and the rest were ideas from Luvioni. Some ideas or causes you see here below may have been seen in other researches, but the following will be based on our opinions and not exactly what is written in scientific researches. Some of these causes are also caused we have observed in different situations.
1. Monetary or societal position growth
ECONOMIC GAIN IS THE BIGGEST CAUSE OF CONFLICT. (total death toll wise) THE WORST ATROCIOUS CRUELTIES COMMITTED BY MANKIND HAD ECONOMIC GAIN BEHIND IT OR AT THE VERY LEAST IN PURSUIT OF POWER.
To name the infamous 3 examples:
- World War 1
- Word War 2
- Slavery
Some people simply want monetary gain and power, even in the most recent big wars like World War 1 and World War 2. Different countries fought not only to defend their countries but there were different battles fought simply to win over commodities, trade routes, oil-rich lands and other rich-making potential lands.
There is also such a thing as war profiteering, where people or organisations profit from conflicts, can be selling weapons, providing security, constructing or selling facilities, or gaining land in the chaos. Gaining land and resources through war might is one of the biggest reasons why people do this. The said thing is, the people killing each other do the killing mostly under a false perception and fabricated emotional motivation. We are NOT saying EVERY SINGLE WAR OR BATTLE WAS DONE OR STARTED IN THE NAME OF ECONOMIC GAIN, however, the cause is often due to this reason from at least one side.
Old School Monetary Gain
Even though this is old school, it is still very active.
This has caused the most death, governments making their inhabitants fight to the death or influencing them so emotionally to the extent that they will literally take someone else’s life. This is not the ideology of Luvioni nor is it our intent to influence you, we just want to mention things that not a lot of people seem to mention.
The fact that a lot of soldiers regret going to war have mental problems afterwards, depression is a sign that killing is not something they really wanted to do but feel pressured to do. It’s like when you are 6 years old and your friends pressure you to steal money from your parents so you can buy some candy, the guilt will eventually consume you.
So if the motivation of war is for economic gain, how do the people that fight the war and gain no (direct or large) economic benefit from it? how do the people get influenced to kill for their country or organisation?
How do people get influenced to kill during WAR?
- Nationalism
- Religion
- The perception that they have to defend against a threat
- Influenced by Actual threat they have to defend
- Entertainment used for cultural reformation
Number 1 is self-explanatory, your country says go fight, you’re proud and loyal to your country, you want to go fight? You don’t care about the personal lives of the people you are going to eliminate because they have different nationalities and you can relate to or understand them.
Number 2 is a subject so touchy that we won’t go too deep into that. It is basically when one disregard all logic, fact or scientific proof in exchange for faith and commit atrocious acts in the name of their religion/cult/leader.
Number 3 is when a threat does not exist but people get convinced that a deadly threat exists and that they must act first before something happens. This has a lot to do with manipulation, thus we won’t go too deep into this as well.
Number 4 is when the country/organisation or group people have no choice but to act violently in order to defend themselves.
Number 5 is when entertainment is used to influence people’s mindset, values, norms, what to like, what not to like, who to follow/like and who not to follow/like. These can be seen as talk shows, social media influencers, series, movies, lives events etc. WE ARE NOT SAYING ALL ENTERTAINMENT HAVE AN AGENDA OR BAD INTENTIONS, the manipulation of media isn’t something new and has happened time after time again in history. Click on the picture for one research, there is a lot more, more notably the Nazi’s propaganda and attempt to portray the English as the enemy of the Netherlands due to bombings.
Regret and depression after committing violence
The consequences of this cause are the saddest because it is the people that go to war who suffer the worst consequences. We can tell you a bunch of things, but just google interviews with veterans and you’ll see a range of emotions and feelings towards the war. Very few are proud that they have to take a life, even when that other person was trying to take theirs.
You’ve heard of it.
- Trauma/PTSD
- Depression
- ”Never doing it again”
- ”It was a mistake”
- ”Not proud of what I did”
- ”I am not a hero”
- ”Was it even worth it, did I even make a difference?”
2. Wiring
The number one reason is how the brain is wired because if you want to inflict violence on someone else, physically damage them short term, long term or even permanently, then something is not 100% correct in that person’s brain. Everyone can get angry, this is a normal human emotion, however, to physically want to hurt someone, or be physically capable is something that is wired into someone’s brain to do so.
This doesn’t mean that everyone with this pre-disposition will actually commit violence, they are just more likely to, this is where the other causes may or may not play a role in the actual act of committing violence to your fellow human, animal or nature in general. Every living thing is connected to nature, thus by hurting nature you are actually hurting yourself, inflicting pain on yourself which is just not logical in a normal person’s brain.
At the end of the day, your thoughts, ideas or fantasies may cause you inner pain, however, what really counts in the end and what you can physically control are your physical actions. There is no proof that someone is fully physical incapable of controlling what they do or not do. (There are cases where mental illness does not put the blame on the offender, especially where another character ”is in control” of their body. However, this is very rare and is subject to manipulation so this diagnosis is never fully 100% accurate).
3. Family & friends
What plays a heavy role, and what can be devastating in combination with BAD WIRING is a bad group of family members and friends. Not only in the way you gain norms and values from the surrounding group you’re in but the genes you inherit from your family (which can be correlated with bad wiring). You can have bad genes from your ancestors, however, if you are raised by a positive great group of family and surround yourself with a good non-violent group of friends, your bad wiring may not ever be activated.
Imagine this, say your family are Spartan fighters, and Spartans are known to be trained to be violent from a very young age, say that goes on for decades and centuries, that your only purpose in life is to train hard and be an effective killing machine. When the next generation is born, they practically have no choice but to be violent.
However, if you take this baby away from this very violent bloodline and its traditions that help activate these instincts (that have been coded in their DNA and traditions) and raise it with another purpose and different values and norms, it will be different. There is this theory that babies start observing and absorbing their surroundings from the moment they start developing in the womb. The type of music, what you eat, what you say, your thoughts and emotions, all of this the baby will start feeling and developing. Say you feel anger and aggression every day when you are pregnant or your partner is aggressive and angry every single day during the pregnancy, this is already damaging to the little human.
There’s a reason that the saying; ”show me your friends and I’ll show you your future exists”. It is scientifically proven that if a child hangs around friends with bad/violent influences, he or she will act more violent and aggressive to be accepted by the group. Children with wiring for violent tendencies and lack of education will naturally gravitate towards those negative/violent groups of people. More so if a family/caretaker they are with is on the extreme other side and censor negative/violent behaviours and do not clearly explain the negative MAJOR consequences of this. This child with a natural tendency and curiosity for violence does not get his or her answers from the parents, thus they go seek it elsewhere amongst friends that are already in a messed up situation.
These bad friend groups just want to be accepted and loved by others and when they get acceptance from doing bad and violent stuff they get and feel loved and accepted. Their brain cannot comprehend that they are damaging a life or lives, the emotion of love and acceptance they gain from their friend group clouds the guilt and bad feeling people get from hurting someone else. You might ask, how do these groups form, they naturally form due to the aforementioned causes and the causes that will be mentioned next. People that have things in common connect with each other, even if they are messed up in the head, for them it is something positive. You do have at times that someone completely different to the values and norms of their own have a dominant character trait and they accept the delinquent and teach them the ways of the good. Teaching people that there are other positive ways to be accepted may be the best way to counter this cause.
4. Society (environment)
This kind of relates to the family and friends, however, this focuses more on the Meso and Macro-level (outside their family and friends group). You can have absolutely the best friends and best family that have never thought of violence or committed violence, but what if the city you live in or the world you live in has different conflicts or is in war? Societal pressure where you have to be violent in order to survive is a tough one, but not an impossible one to solve.
For example, if you go to a school, and you have bullies or people that are violently physical. Say you are the target, you get pushed around, no one says something, not your fellow students, not the teachers and you eventually have to defend yourself in order to survive. One violent person multiplies to two because of self-defence, does violence increase. BUT LET US BE CLEAR THAT BULLYING OR BEING PHYSICALLY HARMFUL TO SOMEONE AT SCHOOL IS ONE OF THE LOWEST THINGS TO DO AND IF YOU ARE ONE OF THOSE YOU ARE ABSOLUTE SCUM. People go to school to develop and learn, and if this is a negative experience, this can have negative consequences for both parties.
However, research shows that the people who bully and physically hurt someone ends up less successful, less happy than the people who they bully or hurt. Is this because they bully or hurt people? No, the reason that they want to hurt people and bully people means that they are already messed up in their head due to one of these causes, and this is what eventually leads to their unhappiness and not being successful, they have simply never been happy (or haven’t been so for a long time).
It can be that your government forces you to be violent by joining and fighting in armies, and another reason could be that you voluntarily join these conflict areas and armies to provide for yourself and your family.
5. Macho and cultural pressure
THIS IS ONE OF THE DUMBEST REASONS TO COMMIT VIOLENCE, but it is one of the most common causes of violence, absolutely stupid. This can be correlated with society, family, friends and wiring but not necessarily because most of this is simply cultural preference within a given region, it being a small or large region.
Example: In some cultures, it is expected to be physically violent when someone looks at you too long, looks at you directly in the eyes or just look in your general direction. THIS IS ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS, there is no way someone can intelligently explain why that justifies a reason for being violent.
In some cultures, it is normal for when you feel insulted or disrespected(without someone even laying a finger on you), that grants a reason to be physically violent towards that person. This culture usually exist in less developed countries or poorer areas, this can be caused due to frustration of their own situation and pent up anger, this can also be a result of lack of education and lack of leadership to lead the cultural expectations into a more positive direction.
This could be solved by changing the cultural expectations and making it clear that one doesn’t have to be macho to be accepted or respected by their culture. Not physically hurting someone or being violent someone does not make you weak or a lesser man or woman.
6. Frustration due to no sense of purpose
Some people don’t know what their purpose is in life, thus get angry and frustrated against the world. They can gain resentment and jealousy against someone or a group of people so hard that they do not want them to exist anymore or suffer as much as they are suffering. When that frustration gets too high, with most of the time a combination of bad wiring, they can snap and do unspeakable things.
One of the most common examples is when a wife or husband caught their spouse cheating on them. When extreme love mixes with extreme resentment and frustration, terrible things can happen. This is often seen in the news, most people connect their relationship to their purpose, without that person they have no sense of purpose and when they feel robbed of this, things can get pretty ugly. Not only were there situations where the jealousy cost the lives of their spouse, but the whole family, you wouldn’t think that a fully normal functional person is capable of doing this, that is why most of the time they have had a predisposition towards violence. Women are mostly the victim of these situations, which is completely disgusting.
7. Lack of positive vision and ambition
This cause basically speaks for itself and kind of matches with cause number 7 ”frustration due to no sense of purpose. With this some people have no positive vision in life and lack productive ambition, these people can easily become like a stray dog and wander around. This lack of ambition can lead to alcoholism, drug addiction or another form of addiction. A lot of addicts can lead to aggressive behaviour, but it can be intentional or unintentional. Due to the blindness of addiction or under the influence of drugs and alcohol, terrible things can happen to innocent people.
SOme of these people may have good wiring in their brain but just got lost along the way.
8. Nothing to live for, no ''real'' long term future plans
PLEASE SKIP THIS CAUSE IF YOU YUR SELF HAVE A FEELING OF SADNESS, DEPRESSION OR KNOW THAT YOU HAVE A MENTAL ILLNESS.
One of the worst violence and saddest violence is violence towards oneself. This again can be directly connected to the wiring, but Luvioni are not professionals in mental health situations and we know that it is a very hot pressing topic at the moment, so that is why we won’t go too deep into this. If you feel down, empty or depressed, please consult loved ones, friends professionals before taking any actions. PLEASE PLEASE DO THIS BEFORE TAKING ANY ACTION. we will close this with this, people usually do this when they have the perception of having nothing to live for and have no real feeling of long-term plans or lack the confidence that their long-term future plans will be successful.
9. Lack of intelligence, or lack of applying intelligence
This speaks for itself, this again can correlate to wiring, but some people are simply not intelligent or emotionally intelligent enough to appreciate the terrible consequences of violence. This cause is so complex and so rare, we will not be going too deep into this cause.
10. Purely revenge or avenge
The final cause is simple, complex at times but most of the time stupid simple. People get hurt and they want revenge does they inflict pain on others again. Or when a person sees another get hurt by another and the person is incapable of retaliating, then that person will avenge.
Like the quote says here, it goes back and forth back and forth, this can be connected with the macho culture most of the time, where people even forget why they are fighting. Most of the time they don’t even know why they are fighting, but they keep doing so because both sides don’t stop hurting each other.
How can we stop the killing and gain peace?
There are different methods that are theoretical but haven’t obviously worked yet on a global scale. One popular one that has a paradoxical effect most of the time and has caused a lot of atrocious activities is a utopian ideology. Vikings and Scandinavia are sometimes correlated with a Utopia, the people that live there at the moment are a result of…well…Viking, thus stealing, plundering and kidnapping and enslaving people, most knowingly women. These were and still are terrible things, but since then Iceland has become one of the most peaceful countries on planet earth, but fully quite perfect. On the other side of an ”Utopian” pursuit, which was Nazism, everyone now how that ended and what happened in that pursuit, utterly disgusting. Another example is when America nuked Japan in pursuit of peace but had a lot of collateral damage. That is the biggest dilemma of the Utopian ideology, one must ask if the Utopian that one is seeking is really Utopia? Is the cost of Utopia really worth it? This is so complex or humans are still not intelligent enough to make this work.
Methods for peace according to Steven Pinker
- The Leviathan
- Gentle commerce
- The expanding circle
- The escalator of reason
So what's Luvion's solution to get peace?
Our attempt to obtaining world peace is to promote peace by writing this article and talking to people in person about the topics we have written. Educating people is a strong tool because most people that commit violence may not even know why they are doing it, the consequences of doing it or that there are better positive things to do.
If you know someone that is struggling with urges of aggression or you have to commit violent acts and you just want to stop, we highly suggest you talk to a professional and if that doesn’t that keep finding different ones until it does help.
We have never written something like this before, so if you have any feedback, arguments, suggestions, addons, questions, clarifications, please feel free to leave it in the comments below. Do you like these kinds of topics, feel free to read this blog post as well where we talk about animals and protecting them.
