Are we living in the most peaceful era of world history?

Psychologist and celebrity Steven Pinker has brought out a book this month claiming that violence, in all its forms, has been declining for a long time. Although we don’t realize it, he argues, we are now living in the most peaceful era ever experienced by Homo sapiens.

The title is The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. I have tossed the thesis to my students to debate, and am curious as to what this group makes of it. Here are some links that may help:

• Newsweek has a short piece about it.


• Time has a rather fawning interview with the author, complete with phrases like “the pigsty of the middle ages."


• In Slate, Jonathan Horgan is mildly critical, esp. of Pinker's ideas on the origins of war.


• Historian Gerard De Groot, writing in the Washington Post, finds the book deeply flawed with some racist implications.


• Philosopher Peter Singer reviewed the book in the New York Times. (I love the illustration of a horned devil petting a pink bunny.)


• Singer’s review prompted some letters to the editor.


• You can sneak a look at the book itself at Google Books.

And if you have a subscription to The New Yorker, there was a negative review in the latest edition but one.

As you can see, the book has received a lot of attention.

Pinker is not a pie-eyed optimist about human nature (whatever that is), so his thesis is rather surprising. You can see capsule summaries of his prior books at his website.

Edited to add touchstone to authors De Groot and Singer.

He did a TED talk some time before the book came out, covering much of the same ground.
http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html

I haven't read the book, but from that and other things I think the argument is exceedingly sound.

I find the conclusion...dubious...to put it mildly. If there IS less violence, I suspect that something besides human nature has changed. But given the nature of violence, and the amount committed in areas where reporting is sketchy at best, I would need a lot of convincing. I'm willing to read the book, but the case (and supporting evidence) will have to be pretty overwhelming.

>3 BruceCoulson:

What part to you disagree with—modern declines in violence, premodern, medieval, ancient, pre-historic?

Pinker has done a great deal of research. 800+ pages is a serious effort to put forth the premise that violence is abating. After I read the book I may be able to give an educated opinion.
I see a violent world around me. The first thing I think of is a jail interview I did with a 20 year old man who had been shot twice a week before I spoke to him. He was shot in the stomach and his right thigh. He was lucky because they were both through and throughs and no bones were broken. Another picture that comes to mind is a 12 year old African kid with an AK-47 draped around his neck almost dragging the ground.
For all of those reasons I will read Pinker's book. I would like to believe that homo sapiens is maturing their behavior.

I think that Mr. Pinker needs to look beyond his own back yard and / or needs to read How to Lie with Statistics and Historians' fallacies: toward a logic of historical thought. People have not changed in any fundamental way and violence my be on a downward trajectory at this point in time but whatever conditions are contributing to it will change.

Given the extent of the violence that the planet endured in the first half of the 20th century it is almost inconceivable that we would be in anything but a downturn.

I hope the book comes with whatever Stinker's smoking these days. Then it may be worthwhile to waste a few, while chuckling over the curly wonder's latest offense against science.

Pinker also offered an Edge Master Class this summer on the same topic: http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker

As with any attempt at a grand vision of the sweep of history, it has as many faults as solutions. I suppose the most difficult part for me to digest was his complete omission of religion as a part of the "modern" (an omission noted by Elaine Pagels the next day in her Master Class on the Apocalypse: http://edge.org/conversation/-the-book-of-revelation-prophecy-and-politicsedge-m...

50 Facts That Should Change the World A third of the population of the planet (roughly) is at war: 2.33 billion people. Clearly, in sheer numbers (if not percentages) violence is quite common on Earth. That's not counting criminal actions (underreported, almost certainly), and violence commited by the leftovers of prior conflicts (landmines, poisoned environments).

Now, it is possible that as a percentage, the amount of violence has declined. But, as I said, I'd have to see a LOT of evidence for that claim.

>4 timspalding: Ever since agriculture permitted the growth of a dedicated class of soldiers (as opposed to warriors), violence has been a common way to resolve disputes between groups. I'm not really seeing any decline in that trend, although I have not made an intensive study of the subject, so the claim is possible...at this time, I find it unlikely, though.

I read the first chapter of Pinker's class on Edge.org from the link in 8 and saw a lot of possible problems before I reached a line so completely ... silly... that I could not go on. "For the same reason that a farmer will take steps to prevent its cattle from killing each other —it's a dead loss to the farmer"

Yes, a dead animal is a total loss to the farmer but the example is ... silly... (I really want to use stronger language) I grew up on a farm with a very small herd of cattle, between 20 -30. We had to make sure that they were fed and watered, that they had access to salt and that the insects did not overcome them. We had to care for their hoofs remained healthy in the winter and they gave birth without problems and call the vet when things went wrong. After the vet came we had to stick their pills down their throats beyond where they could spit them out, we had to watch for their eyes and nose getting to dry or to runny. But we never ever ever had to keep them from killing each other.

As for issues that normal people would worry about I wonder about his definition of violence and the source of his statistics. An archeologist can, if I remember correctly from reading Dixon's Quest for the Origins of the First Americans identify broken bones but can not tell if they were broken before or after death. Digging graves is hard work and sometimes bodies were force fit. Also an active outdoor life of hunting and gathering tends to raise the possibilities for accidents. Is he including accidental violence in his calculation? If not how is he separating it out? Prehistoric victims cannot testify and there are few witnesses still available. Is he simply measuring the fact that automation cuts down on accidents?

All of his prehistoric specimens have been preselected by nature. Somehow they are the very small subset of bodies that have survived thousands of years to be examined now. Is it valid to compare these per-selected samples with numbers from the modern general population?

Just yesterday I came across The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, a book that judging from the reviews may be looking at the same symptoms and, to me anyway, seems to have a better chance at having a valid argument.

Cattle killing each other?!? I have to admit, I grew up around a farm, and I don't recall that ever being a problem.

(Pigs will, very rarely, run a pig to death for reasons uknown; but even that is so uncommon as to be a neglible issue.)

Stinkler

Elevated discourse indeed, Miss Poo-poo-pants.

Just the just desserts.

Pinker's thesis isn't nuts on its face, but it's at least partially dependent upon how you define violence: here in the US, street violence IS down (depending on what you mean, say, 'down 30%'or so); but incarceration rates are 'way, 'way up: up 5x or so since just the 1960s. Is 'incarceration' a form of violence?

(Keeping two million people people locked up behind bars - say 2% of your adult men - has to weigh in Pinker's balance somewhere.)

Looking at a longer time scale of centuries, I could certainly believe he's on to something. (One example of how fast society's tolerance of violence is changing: marital rape laws were invented only in this generation. Prior to 1985 or so, a wife had no legal recourse. Two generations ago, domestic violence was fair game as a subject for comedians.)

I noted when Marcos left in '86 that an old-fashioned dictator would have just sent the troops in to mow down the protestors; same when the Berlin Wall fell, same when Mubarek fell. Seems like there's been some change in the behavior of dictators (or in the willingness of troops to mow down their own fellow-citizens.)

(And yes, there are still abundant counter-examples.)

But I think what Pinker is measuring is a simple rise in standards of living.
Violence is a very straightforward way to allocate resources; as a society moves up from Malthusian scarcity, voila', less violence.

Good point at#6: Violence can't increase, or at least not for long; so, logically, it has to decrease.

One order-of-magnitude up from "WWII/atomic war" levels of violence would drive the species to extinction.

QED.

The other thing to consider is this: we are more aware of violence, through the media, than we were previously, but that does not necessarily mean that it has increased. We are aware of events in Libya, Egypt, Iraq, Vancouver, London and on the Mexican/US border, where as in past times we might never have heard of them at all. If someone rioted after a hockey game in the 1800's, in another country, would that even make the press if no one died? If a country in the Middle East held a revolution, unless it affected the Western countries, would we have heard of it, except as an article or two in a major paper?

As well, we are aware of abuses based on race, religion, gender, sexual preference. In contrast these might not even be worth a mention previously. It's not that violence has increased, it's that we no longer consider it "background noise" to be ignored. Things that might have been "hushed up" are dealt with more openly.

I hope someone drops a memo to Sierra Leone, and Afghanistan. Will mean a lot to them.

Absolutely.

But I think Pinker's point was that not long ago, the entire world was at that level. Georgian London was probably more violent than today's Kabul.

But was Georgian Kabul more violent than today's London? I'm not at all sure.

Yeah, you could also make a case that the First World is exporting a lot of its violence onto the global South, too. It's relatively easy to have a peaceful metropolis when all the violence is relegated to out in the provinces.

You mentioned domestic violence, and instituting laws against it. But does that really translate into a decrease in violence? Doesn't it simply mean that nowadays it's (maybe) punished? And even if there's a quantifiable, provable decrease in one kind of violence--let's say domestic assaults--does it balance out in comparison to, say, the loss of security that seems to have been widely lost in the cities? My parents are both city kids, and I started walking to school alone and running errands at age six, across several urban areas--absolutely no chance of that for my niece and nephew thirty years later. (I think the threat of violence must count as violence.)

But mainly I think the topic is impossibly huge and complicated for any useful conclusions. Thank god Stinker has a bigger ego and a thicker hide than those of us who worry about truth.

You mentioned domestic violence, and instituting laws against it. But does that really translate into a decrease in violence?

Violence against children really is in decline. (At least in NYS. I'm not as familiar off the top of my head with the numbers on spousal abuse, but I think that's down, too.) The culture IS changing.

I think the threat of violence must count as violence.

Perception isn't reality. Yes, children's worlds have been shrinking for decades now (I had to cut myself off from mentioning to my kids how I used to hitch-hike - - today's kids are scarcely allowed to cross the street...), but that's a function of parental anxiety. (...possibly related to smaller family size....)

I'm not crazy about Pinker's book ("Behold! the psychologist credits all of this to psychological changes!") but the observation "Today is less violent than the bad old days" is certainly defensible.

Part of what's at work is that there are now major industries pushing the idea that the world is dangerous, as part of their effort to keep the populace anxious.

But by lots of measures, the world is actually safer.

>23 timspalding:

One of his main points is simply the monopoly of violence. Pre-state societies are a lot more violent. Pre-historic and ancient peoples often lived in an almost constant state of war, and when war came it was comparatively more violent. Once the state takes over it stops neighbors from waging war on each other, and puts murderers. who might otherwise have become the center of a family feud. on trial and in jail.

As an example of the viciousness of ancient war, perhaps half or more of the Athenian population died during the Peloponnesian war, from wounds, from starvation or from associated plague—and ancient sources don't really dwell on the scale of the death or its unusualness. It didn't define Athens. The Soviet Union lost 13% of its population in World War II, and it's an absolutely core fact about the war and about soviet identity.

One of my favorite historical factoids: a guy scaled the wall around Kensington Garden and mugged King George II.

London is probably safer today....

Perception isn't reality.

Yes, but I have to disagree with the conclusions you draw. There are laws punishing threats of violence, stalking etc. And people get damaged by "mere" threats too. I'm not saying a curse is the same as a slap and cutting off a finger like cutting off a head, but if there is a possibility of violence, the intention to commit a violent act, that has to be factored in understanding what has and hasn't changed.

There have never been so many people on earth before, and we are the same people, biologically, that we were even 40,000 years ago, let alone twenty. Even if the entire planet were policed 24/7--and it's not by craziest imagination--we'd only have notions about occurrences of violent acts. And even if I granted that these are declining (why not, it's not like I have any info on it anyway), so what, people are the same brute shits as ever, only now they go to jail more often. And for this I get out of bed?! ;)

#23

Did Athens during the Peloponnesian war suffer more than Dresden or Warsaw in WWII? Is dying on a pyre in a concentration camp less stressful than being stabbed by a javelin? Can a murder be non-violent, gentle practically, for instance if I'm sentenced to death-by-butterfly-slaps?

Plenty of current societies live in a state of constant war, including the US (world record holder for having dropped bombs somewhere in the world with nary a break since 1945), and if we cover tribal, gang and criminal conflicts, it adds up--I think to more than enough to belie any "peaceful era" nonsense, but I admit I won't bother proving it.

It's not entirely about policing; there may be a shift in mores, too.

In one generation in this country, drunk driving went from 'amused tolerance' to 'universally shunned'. I think the same sort of thing is currently at work in domestic violence, as well.

At some level, yes, all relations are about power; but the domestic power dynamic has evolved, and if nothing else, the resort to actual violence is much less tolerated today than even a generation ago.

That's not nothing.

Dresden appears to have had a population death-toll of 4%. The number put out by the Nazis themselves was 31%. Civilian bombing—even in Dresden—was a lot better at rendering people homeless and miserable than at killing them.

Warsaw is clearly much, much higher, though I can't get a good fix on it. Perhaps you can. But, for some perspective, total Polish dead in the war is less than 17%, including the horrific mass extinction of an entire people. It's fair to add that the Athenians also tried their hand at true genocide during the war, wiping out the town of Melos and killing all adult males (maybe 33% death rate, plus the rest were enslaved?). This happens over and over in ancient history and none of it holds a candle to what the Mongols did.

Plenty of current societies live in a state of constant war

Our nation is at war. Our society is not at war. War touches most Americans not at all, and the total death rate among American military personnel is extremely slight by historical standards and as a percentage of population. Our impact on other countries is, of course, far more considerable.

It's not entirely about policing; there may be a shift in mores, too.

Agreed, although policing and laws shifts mores too. But they do it slowly. The antebellum South had pretty much the same laws about personal violence that we do now, except as regards slaves. It wasn't legal to kill a slave either. But lots of personal violence took place entirely disregarding potential state remedies—fights, feuds, duels, horsewhippings, etc.—and very few slaveholders were ever prosecuted for killing their slaves. People alive today were taken as children to picnic at the scene of gruesome lynchings of black people, and by apparently normal, non-psychopathic parents. That world is gone, at least in the US.

#23: and ancient sources don't really dwell on the scale of the death or its unusualness

To be fair, societies before modern medicine ALL had appalling death rates - especially infant mortality - and didn't dwell on it much.

You know, I'm completely open to the idea that Pinker is a complete prat - - the jury's still out on that one - - and he's certainly out of his field with this book, and he does seem to be overstating his thesis --

- - and, still, with all that said, it's interesting how much resistance his thesis generates.

I've known all my adult life that one of the goals of the news media is make the public fearful about their neighbors; but the constant drumbeat really does seem to have had the effect of making people over-estimate the amount of crime in our communities.

Our lives are probably safer today than at almost any point in history - why is that so hard a notion for people to evaluate? Who would trade places with anyone in history?

Dammit, now I'm going to have to add Pinker's book to the queue.

Oh, and:
great post, Muscogulus!

To be fair, societies before modern medicine ALL had appalling death rates - especially infant mortality - and didn't dwell on it much.

Right. Life was brutish and short. It's taller now.

One reason for higher deaths is, of course, that everything else was worse. Plague no longer kills people in war—the closest you can get is the rise in AIDS from displacement and societal dislocation. Ditto other diseases, on civilians or military wounded. And as for famine, it used to be a cornerstone of warfare. (Everyone lived so close to the edge.) Now it's somewhat exotic.

Right. Life was brutish and short. It's taller now.

Well, life is wider, certainly.

#26

the resort to actual violence is much less tolerated today than even a generation ago.

In the tiny sliver of the world represented by the Western democracies, maybe.

#27

War touches most Americans not at all,

Do I know it. But it "touched" at least half a million Iraqis, to mention one example.

Okay, I've just been stomach-turned out of this thread. Hasta la bloody vista.

(Everyone lived so close to the edge.)

Right. I mentioned upthread that Pinker seems to be underestimating the importance of sheer economic determinism: the more prosperous you are, the less violence you tend to have in your vicinity.

(If nothing else, you can have your minions and vassals carry it out out of sight. This works on all sorts of scales....)

In the tiny sliver of the world represented by the Western democracies, maybe.

Well, there's half a billion people in the EU now. A third of a billion North Americans, another 100 million+ in Japan - that's close to a billion people: more than a tiny sliver.

Now I'm going to have to read the damn book just to see if he's being completely First-World-centric....

Do I know it. But it "touched" at least half a million Iraqis, to mention one example.

You will notice I mentioned that, albeit you did it with a number. However, I noticed your sentence didn't mention Hitler when I imagined I wanted it to. Therefore, you turn my stomach.

In the tiny sliver of the world represented by the Western democracies, maybe.

Besides the billion Bob pointed out, go down the list of countries. There are lots of non-western democracies. Is Brazil a state of nature, where people kill and beat each other, rather than go to law? No. Is China? No. Is Turkey? Absolutely not. What countries in the top, say, 25 countries does one regularly disregard the state and take law into your own hands? Parts of India, parts of Nigeria, parts of Pakistan, much of Congo?

As I alluded to earlier, it really is a question of the scale from you view it. Is there a certain undeniable sense that over the millenia, the amount of violence the typical human encounters on a day-to-day basis has declined? Yes. But if you try to apply that observation to any particular place and time, it can be easily disproved.

In other words, Pinker's thesis follows the structural pattern of all grand theories of historical development. It works at the most macrocosmic of levels, but can easily fall apart in any particular instance.

This is, however, the case with any generalized theory. For example, Mendelian genetic theory indicates that when you breed for a heterogeneous genotype in a particular trait (i.e. both parents possess one copy of the dominant gene and one of the recessive gene for a particular trait), the ratio of dominant phenotypes to recessive phenotypes in the offspring will be 3:1 (i.e. 75% of the offspring will have the same heterogeneous genotype as the parents and 25% will receive both recessive genes for the particular trait). But produce exactly four specimen offspring, there is absolutely no guarantee that three will be dominant and one recessive. As an example, because my wife has blue eyes even though both of her parents have brown eyes (brown is dominant, blue recessive), it means that she falls into the 25% of her parents' offspring that have the recessive phenotype (blue eyes). Her only sibling has brown eyes. So in practice, my in-laws had 50% offspring with the dominant trait (brown) and 50% with the recessive (blue). Does this disprove the theory? No.

Which is all a long way of positing an axiom about generalized theories: they work over the long-term average, not necessarily in the short-term specific case.

(Obiter dictum: why is this theologian trotting out an example drawn from genetics? Because his wife, a biology professor, is teaching this stuff this week to her Intro Bio students, so it's on my brain.)

>1 Muscogulus: Muscogulus

My sincere thanks to Muscogulus for the comprehensive substance of the OP.

I will try to keep it in mind when posting in the future, but doubt I will be able to measure up to it.

Because his wife, a biology professor, is teaching this stuff this week to her Intro Bio students, so it's on my brain

I love that spouses give you a sort of "minor in" whatever. My wife's a writer, which isn't that different. Talking to a biologist wife must present a real change of thought patterns for you.

> Tim:
She loves the looks it gets her when she says that she's a biologist (with a specialty in evolutionary genetics, to boot) and that her husband is a theologian (who specializes in the Middle Ages). It helps that I have no problems with evolutionary biology; indeed, as a medievalist who can operate with the profound flexibility that medieval exegesis affords, I can find nuanced depths in the text that allow the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature to peacefully coexist. My wife is also considering a proposal for her department that she and I co-teach a course on how evolution and religion can play nice.

I love that spouses give you a sort of "minor in" whatever.

Oh, seconded.
For that matter, I was lucky enough to have a a slew of college roommates who gave me the "101" tutorial in a dozen subjects....

Back to Pinker:

1) It's a forty dollar book;

2) Yay, public libraries and on-line reserves....

"I love that spouses give you a sort of "minor in" whatever."

Twice as true on the second marriage.

>36 nathanielcampbell:

That's a great summary of both the strengths and weaknesses of this book. I think Pinker is a pretty poor historian, treating his sources uncritically and finding what he wants to find. But he's a better psychologist than I'll ever be, and it's interesting to see him attempt to answer such a significant question.

Psychology is not irrelevant to how we interpret the past; I've long suspected that nostalgia and a tendency to believe in a declension narrative both spring from our individual experiences of lost youth, regrets, and physical decline, combined with resentment of those who are still young and don't measure up to our ideals of what young people ought to be. When we project our personal history onto the globe, we get — voilá — a lost golden age from which the world is declining into unavoidable apocalypse, like the death that awaits each of us. Thats just one of many ways our private psychological struggles may guide or shape how we narrate the world's history to ourselves.

So what I most admire about this book is the way it challenges the widely cherished, respectable assumption that the world is vicious and getting worse all the time. He's right to insist there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Our ability to relay live video from almost any point on earth, and our commitment to use this ability mainly to record scenes of brutality, conflict, and disaster, is bound to distort our idea of what is typical of our time.

That said, I believe Pinker pushes his evidence and his thesis too far, although his punchy, often humorous prose will conceal these defects from most readers. He aspires to write world history, but his evidence is Eurocentric, and from what I've seen he regards the course of European history (and that of the European settler states in the Americas, Africa, and Australia) to be normative for most of the world. His statistics about prehistoric violence are fishy, reminding me of how Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, two brilliant economists, somehow talked themselves into deriving numbers for the frequency of violent punishment of slaves, throughout the southern United States, from a single Louisiana plantation journal whose author kept a tally. (This was in their 1974 book Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, which FWIW also got a swooning reception from Time magazine.)

But what struck me as most absurd, even though it seems to be a major point with Pinker, is the idea that human societies didn't really have effective checks on violence until the Enlightenment hit us. Even religion, which Pinker is impartial enough to acknowledge as a mostly benevolent factor in the modern world, generated more violence than peace until the Enlightenment opened the eyes of believers so they could finally be kind to unbelievers and heretics.

There are several things wrong with this, beginning with the assumption that prehistoric tribal societies (I think Pinker would have liked to use the word "primitive" here) had no way to check the violence of young men who had the most to gain by indulging in violence. We have plenty of ethnographic evidence that such societies typically did well at keeping young men in check and limiting the scope of war. Pinker is too impressed by sensational skeletal remains, and he interprets those remains through the lens of his own culture, in which there can be no greater evil than violent death of individual humans. In some times and places, though, survival under changed conditions may have been considered worse than being killed.

In using statistics from Europe's Middle Ages (because he believes they are the only reliable numbers available anywhere before the 1600s or so), Pinker fails to consider that Europe may have been the most obscenely violent place on earth at the time, and that it has since swung past the global norm to become one of the least violent. From what I've seen of records of contact between early modern Europeans and other peoples, the Europeans are generally seen as mercurial, prone to senseless violence, and cruel to their own children, as compared to normal human beings in China or (native to) the Americas.

We easily share the Europeans' horror at how Indians tied up enemy captives and slowly tortured them to death, or sliced the scalp from a dying man's head. We often miss the Indians' disgust with Europeans for slaughtering and burning without the moderation one was supposed to show to enemies in that case. We believe with the Europeans that the object of a war is to win, which implies by inescapable logic that someone else must lose, and the more thoroughly they lose, the more decisive the victory, and the better the odds of future peace. This seldom works in practice, but we continue to teach and learn it as if it were true. "Primitive" people OTOH never seem to have believed that war can generate peace. You can't obtain one by pursuing the other.

So as a history, especially a world history, I think Better Angels is guilty of misuse of evidence to favor a thesis, ethnocentrism, lack of imagination (which has its place in writing history), and a measure of ivory-tower remoteness that smacks of functionalist and model-driven social science. As a polemic against scaring ourselves with our own fancied wickedness, I think it's pretty good. If it makes thousands of readers more hopeful about the future, I'll be very willing to overlook its venial sins — if I may use that term with a theologian in the room ;)

I would certainly agree that overall, most people live better than they did 100 years ago, or even 50 years ago. In fact, in terms of material comforts, there has been a clear overall rise in the standard of living (with occasional backslides and collapses notwithstanding).

That, however, does not necessarily lead to lessening of violence. In fact, wealth disparity tends to increase violence, since the potential gains are much greater. (If everyone has the same stuff, then there's less incentive to take someone else's possessions, since they're no better than your own.)

Philsopher Gary Gutting has attacked the premise that greater rationality leads to less violence, in the New York Times philosophers’ blog (who knew there was such a thing?): Pinker on reason and morality

Mr. Pinker claims that cultural institutions are actually making us better people - the opposite is the case - institution just domesticate humans and try to control 'em through systematic violence. If only Pinker made some research in areas of matriarchat and anthropology he could easily discover that people aren't violent just by their nature but as reaction to unnatural social arrangements, like excessive private property and inequality, enforced monogamy, working for somebody else's reasons, and the like.

I have been meaning to read The Mass Psychology of Fascism in which Wilhelm Reich argues that societies based on sexual frustration are the reason we are still such a violent species.

>45 asg:

Talk of "unnatural social arrangements" implies that there are "natural" ones. I don't even know what that means. Paleolithic kin groups? Abolishing language?

>46 TLCrawford:

Interesting. Having now read a few hundred words about The Mass Psychology of Fascism, I think I detect the concept that inspired The Boys from Brazil, the Mengele-centered book and movie that was a sensation when I was a kid.

Reich's book appeared in 1930. Very timely! I think a lot of other books benefit from greater historical perspective, though. The best I've seen is The Anatomy of Fascism in which Robert O. Paxton defines fascism, describes it as a process, and suggests a metaphor for it as "a disease of democracy," occasionally fatal.

I have not read any of Reich's books yet, but i think i ll look into it. Well, I wouldn't suggest that I know what natural social arrangements are, but in analogy we can look at animal domistication or zoo and it's obvious that animals are suffering and exhibit unnatural behaviour - more aggressive, poor health, self-destructive, unable to fend for oneself once set free, disintegration of social bonds, etc. Is it too much to say that Self-determination is natural for any living being? I don't now, I believe so.

The extend of self-determination have of course limits of environment and self-determination of other fellow (human) beings.
A social setting in which force and manipulation is used to limit self-determination of other and extend external determination in a systematic way is deviation of selforganizing principle of living organisms. I take it to be unnatural.

We dont have to abbolish language, we couldnt anyway. We have to understand our nature and live/organise accordingly. And yes, there is much to be learned (not copied) from "primitive" societies, since they still hold valueble fragments of knowledge we "advanced" societies have forgotten.