A History of (Non)Violence - By Steven Pinker | Foreign Policy

A History of (Non)Violence - By Steven Pinker | Foreign Policy

Contests for dominance, even when nothing tangible is at stake, are among the deadliest forms of human quarrel. At one end of the magnitude scale, many destructive wars have been fought over nebulous claims to national preeminence, including World War I. At the other end of the scale, thesingle largest motive for homicide on police blotters are "altercation of relatively trivial origin; insult, curse, jostling, etc."
There really is a commodity at stake in contests for dominance, namely information: a shared understanding of who will not back down. The socially constructed nature of dominance can help explain which individuals take risks to defend it. Perhaps the most extraordinary popular delusion about violence of the past quarter-century is that it is caused by low self-esteem. Self-esteem can be measured, and surveys show that it is the psychopaths, street toughs, bullies, abusive husbands, serial rapists, and hate-crime perpetrators who are off the scale. Psychopaths and other violent people are narcissistic: They think well of themselves not in proportion to their accomplishments but out of a congenital sense of entitlement. When reality intrudes, as it inevitably will, they treat the bad news as a personal affront, and its bearer, who is endangering their fragile reputation, as a malicious slanderer.