What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even?
State government is comparatively new phenomenon, arising only fifty five hundred years ago. Before then, local groups, tribes and chiefdoms played major roles organizing groups of people, and vengeance guided wars and competitions.
Jared Diamond's article in The New Yorker, "Vengeance is Ours" provides a parable, comparing between New Guinean Highland tribes' complex rationales in warfares, mostly based on revenge, and modern society's difference and similarities in the stately suppressed emotional feelings of hatred and vengeance.
20th century had witnessed so much devastations, brutality, and killings of millions of people in wars after wars, genocides after genocides, that it is considered the darkest one in terms of bloodshed scale. However, Jared Diamond observes, "this is because they enjoy the advantage of having by far the largest populations of potential victims in human history; the actual percentage of the population that died violently was on the average higher in traditional pre-state societies than it was even in Poland during the Second World War or Cambodia under Pol Pot."
Unlike celebrated emotions like love, anger, grief, and fear, "thirst for vengeance", which is one of the most primitive and deeply rooted emotions human beings posses, but unlike the celebrated emotions, "We grow up being taught that such feelings are primitive, something to be ashamed of and to transcend......My conversations with Daniel made me understand what we have given up by leaving justice to the state. In order to induce us to do so, state societies and their associated religions and moral codes teach us that seeking revenge is bad. But, while acting on vengeful feelings clearly needs to be discouraged, acknowledging them should be not merely permitted but encouraged. To a close relative or friend of someone who has been killed or seriously wronged, and to the victims of harm themselves, those feelings are natural and powerful. Many state governments do attempt to grant the relatives of crime victims some personal satisfaction, by allowing them to be present at the trial of the accused, and, in some cases, to address the judge or jury, or even to watch the execution of their loved one’s murderer."
Jared Diamond's articles, like his previous must read books, "Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies", and "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed", pierce through media's abundant hyper inflated jargons, and shines light even on the basest emotions we the human beings constantly try to tuck deep inside layers of emotional chaos or thunderstorms. Sometimes, political trickeries do indeed masquerade the real vengeful intentions with the neatly promulgated hyperboles so that even point blank cruelty camouflaged as "good intentions" of bringing freedom to the "backward" ones remains ashamedly unchecked!
Civilization to the "uncivilized"! End of story.
Believe it or not, we do buy into butchered fables and mockeries.
Read Jared Diamond's article from following link:
Vengeance is Ours
Jared Diamond's article in The New Yorker, "Vengeance is Ours" provides a parable, comparing between New Guinean Highland tribes' complex rationales in warfares, mostly based on revenge, and modern society's difference and similarities in the stately suppressed emotional feelings of hatred and vengeance.
20th century had witnessed so much devastations, brutality, and killings of millions of people in wars after wars, genocides after genocides, that it is considered the darkest one in terms of bloodshed scale. However, Jared Diamond observes, "this is because they enjoy the advantage of having by far the largest populations of potential victims in human history; the actual percentage of the population that died violently was on the average higher in traditional pre-state societies than it was even in Poland during the Second World War or Cambodia under Pol Pot."
Unlike celebrated emotions like love, anger, grief, and fear, "thirst for vengeance", which is one of the most primitive and deeply rooted emotions human beings posses, but unlike the celebrated emotions, "We grow up being taught that such feelings are primitive, something to be ashamed of and to transcend......My conversations with Daniel made me understand what we have given up by leaving justice to the state. In order to induce us to do so, state societies and their associated religions and moral codes teach us that seeking revenge is bad. But, while acting on vengeful feelings clearly needs to be discouraged, acknowledging them should be not merely permitted but encouraged. To a close relative or friend of someone who has been killed or seriously wronged, and to the victims of harm themselves, those feelings are natural and powerful. Many state governments do attempt to grant the relatives of crime victims some personal satisfaction, by allowing them to be present at the trial of the accused, and, in some cases, to address the judge or jury, or even to watch the execution of their loved one’s murderer."
Jared Diamond's articles, like his previous must read books, "Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies", and "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed", pierce through media's abundant hyper inflated jargons, and shines light even on the basest emotions we the human beings constantly try to tuck deep inside layers of emotional chaos or thunderstorms. Sometimes, political trickeries do indeed masquerade the real vengeful intentions with the neatly promulgated hyperboles so that even point blank cruelty camouflaged as "good intentions" of bringing freedom to the "backward" ones remains ashamedly unchecked!
Civilization to the "uncivilized"! End of story.
Believe it or not, we do buy into butchered fables and mockeries.
Read Jared Diamond's article from following link:
Vengeance is Ours
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