Were humans just more sadistic and psychopathic in the past? It seems a big part of raiding/warfare was that killing people energized/excited them and they liked to see people suffer in fear. This isn't about religion btw it's about premodern vs modern look at even 1600s Germany if you want an example.
>>17818233 (OP)No, we've always been as savage. Back then it was with swords against rivals, now we murder our own through ideology.
>>17818233 (OP)I've been reading a lot of primary sources from ancient Greece lately, and it's been pretty surprising to see not just that the greeks were highly militaristic, but they seem to have actually been excited by war. I really don't know what to make of it.
>>17818238It's like sports or sex unironically but just more extreme than you can imagine where you're constantly risking life and limb. Premodern people also didn't have that much to lose compared to us which is why you have white boys getting butchered in the jungle or coughing up blood from parasites because they want glory and plunder.
You must be a pencil necked zero testosterone pathetic specimen if that sort of thing does not sound highly appealing to you.
>>17818233 (OP)Not really. Some places along the Silk Road for example were really peaceful while other places in the near east were violent because of various instituional arrangements. Certain instiuttions create incentives to be violent and others don't. For example, if you society focused a lot on property and held people were property you tend to create an incentive for people to violent. This is also why people are actually less violent now.
>>17819454East Asia historically had long periods of peace with nothing happening but when wars did happen they were apocalyptic. China has reliable records on crime dating back centuries and they show that the rate of street crime was generally much lower than in Europe; Asian collectivism and social shaming discouraged it.
>>17818233 (OP)Dude, read about Mao's oppression in China; he animated an entire society into killing itself and ruthlessly persecuting fellow cititzens in the most sadistic ways possible.
>liked to see people suffer in fearSee the public displays of persecution, humiliation and execution, such as struggle sessions.
Likely yes as it gave you an edge for survival in a lot of instances. Nowadays we send the best inheritors of those traits to jail.
"Nothing personal bro" - god
>>17818233 (OP)Chuds don't want to face the truth but we really do are better than our ancestors.
>>17818233 (OP)Chuds don't want to face the truth but we really are better than our ancestors.
>>17820966Yeah so much better losing everything to a bunch of low IQ shitskins.
>>17819424Raping and pillaging ā fighting and kiling someone in battle/duel you retarded projecting low t cuck
Also you use the tough guy larp but im sure i would crush you low t cuck projecting ass irl
Its always the biggest pussies that are the edgiers
>>17821012You mean like medieval europeans
>>17821035Yup, we got ourselves a shitskin.
>>17818246>remodern people also didn't have that much to lose compared to usThis. Life was probably boring as fuck. Not even fucking books were available unless you are rich or a monk. Humans would do anything to get away from enui.
>>17818233 (OP)>Were humans just more sadistic and psychopathic in the past?>in the pastI strongly encourage to read the Rape of Nanjing, or read about the Bosnian War. There's probably many other examples. Nothing has changed, people are the same...unless you think human beings are fundamentally different than they were less than 100 years ago. Which would be a completely dumb thing to think.
Just imagine before people could watch horror movies where people are forced to walk on glass or lit on fire and split in half by a sword. Do you like to watch violent movies or play video games? You're channeling the same destructive impulse. In the past people would just do those similar things in real life instead, because seeing people die is a form of entertainment that just became digitized instead of going to the town square to see a lynching. People are no less cruel than they ever were.
>>17820966The reason why you think you are better than other people is because you are narcissistic, not because you are actually a better person.
>>17818238It's just ignorance about warfare. Back during Iraq war people would often do multiple tours, simply because they enjoyed war. Lots of people enjoy war.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGZMSmcuiXM&ab_channel=TED
It's well-understood but not popular to talk about. Everyone thinks war is a really horrible thing and every soldier is severely mentally disturbed, violent, ready to explode at any minute. Maybe some of those things are true, but they still look back fondly on war days.
>>17821107No
Ancient war was enjoyable
Modern war isnt
>but IrakConventional modern war between two competent armies
Not against poor untrained sheperds and farmers
>>17821113Are you the reincarnation of a Punic war participant? How in the hell would you know that ancient war was more enjoyable than modern war? You don't. Stop flapping your gums you have no idea what you're talking about.
>>17821124Being infested by lice and shitting yourself until you die and marching 100s of kilometers in heavy gear is fucking awesome dude!
Most crime is committed while on alcohol or drugs so it's clearly hard to get a man to want to kill another human being without being on mind altering substances.
I think about 20% of people are truly sadistic and evil
It got especially epic when you were wounded and just left for death with all the other poor sods while slowly dying of exposure. Or if you were lucky the camp "doctor" would extract an arrow out of you, with some wine for anesthesia. Or if you survived everything but your commander fucked up/ran away you were carted off to some shithole you couldnt locate on a map, sold into slavery and worked to death on a field or in some mine.
>>17821124>>17821129Anything can kill you in modern war and you pretty much powerless
Its dystopian as fuck
>>17821143Wheter you like it or not its better than being droned, sniped, mined, tanked, bombed
Public humiliation and executions are no longer a thing you need to go to liveleak to see something that would normally happen in the middle of town.
Only mongols and euroaches were collective psychopaths
The civilizations of western asia and eastern asia were pretty chill
>>17821272That's what evolving and adapting for Siberia does for ya subhuman slave.
Enlightenment meme, the middle ages weren't like game of thrones. Even looking at periods like the viking, magyar and tatar raids, it was limited to a few regions for a few decades and it would be years before this or that calamity in one place or another. Though it probably had less to do with human morality and more to do with the impracticality and expense of war, only when you have an overwhelming advantage and the enemy has untapped pillage is it really worth the cost and risk, and even then a bad ass viking warrior can still shit himself to death.
>>17818233 (OP)Most people dont like to kill.
Some do.
And theres a lot of emotional damage to go around.
>>17821315Did you ever read medieval primary sources dude
>>17821357History and narratives by nature generally only record "the cool parts" or the things that mattered to the people doing the writing i.e. the military nobility. No ones going to write a chronicle about all the different time he took a shit, but he will write about that one time kickin' rad time where he lopped that guys head off with a sword.
>>17821404Obviously and most people were peasants and most days were boring not good but not traumatic or anything but you have to admit premodern people did explicitly like war a lot and they talked about this and they were more violent clearly
>>17821322>Most people dont like to kill.Only because we have killed most of the savage bloodlines who really like killing.
>Some do.Because we haven't fully eliminated them and we can't control random mutation, so as more people procreate there are more chances of them being born.
>>17818233 (OP)in today's society, you ultimately have not much to gain from murdering and raping.
compare that to the 30 years war, where entire villages were constantly looted, the women raped, the men murdered and burnt to the grounds without any repercussions.
>>17818233 (OP)No, they were just as empathetic. Its just reality of the time was much harsher, but people still wanted to protect themselves, their friends, their family, their neighbors. Communication between larger distance was difficult, so in-group was smaller.
>>17818233 (OP)Far as I can tell people still love to wish their enemies to hell, so they seem just as sadistic and psychopathic now than ever, but just too lazy to act on it.
Honestly if war and the idea of a violent death doesn't excite / arous you then I don't know what the fuck to call you. A basedboy? A woman? If you read the Iliad and Conan the Barbarian comics and / or listen to Manowar and don't get pumped up then you should just chop your cock off, or be a slave I guess. Real men have no place for irony, I think going on a viking raid would be one of the most cool things you could do, I love reading viking sagas.
>>17821272Yea dawg, the Assyrians and Sumerians were totes chill af
>>17818233 (OP)Women were not part of this. This is all a male thing and still happening. You get a band together sharpen a stick and go take someone elses shit including their female property. Take, fuck, kill constantly.
>>17821315The Middle Ages did not have large scale warfare, wars were small and territory seldom changed hands as the result of a war.
>>17821959You must be 18 to use this website.
>>17821989Middle ages in Europe had wars that lasted decades, even a century. Things would come to a boil they'd fight and stop but never at peace. The real fuckery happened between that fighting when large roaming bands of armed men (formerly fighting under some banner) with nothing to do terrorized the peasantry for gain and pussy. Brigands on steroids.
>>17818233 (OP)>bad harvest>family is on brink of starvation>a foreign settlement a couple days travel down the coast had a decent harvest>gather some men and set sail to take their stuff in order to save your family at the expense of theirsThat is the cause for the vast majority of human historical violence and I would do the exact same thing.
>>17818233 (OP)>WereThey still are, but they have the comforts of modernity. Take the average person nowadays, put them in pre-modern conditions, and I guarantee you that they would act no different.
>>17818233 (OP)Raiding was just the best method for warfare and massacres of cities were best explained by people being pissed off and needing a relief valve.
>Be ancient soldier>Had been on campaign for months>Dealing with hunger and disease>Besiege city>They refuse to surrender>For three weeks keep fighting them in assaults and sallies while trying to get them to just give up>Finally launch an assault, take the gates and start flooding the city>Months of frustration and suffering released in a single moment as you can do whatever you want, run through a surrendering soldier who had weeks to surrender during the siege, rape a woman, smash an infant's head in>People who had been tormenting you for months and would do the exact same thing in your situation now beg for mercy because you finally have power over them
in truth there were always very long periods of peace with nothing happening so we tend to think the past was more violent than it was
>>17821107It also helped that in ancient Greece war was much more a collective action. You didn't just get assigned to a unit with random people who live 1500 miles away from you, every soldier was a guy you grew up with or knew growing up. Your dad is in the same unit, your uncle, Socrates who lived down the street, your best friend, and when you went to war it was much more closely tied to you. Also the enemy you fought was much closer. Athens fighting Thebes was closer culturally to your town playing the next town over in the state championship of football except people died so rivalries were much closer. You weren't fighting some random country you never heard of you were fighting the Springfield Bandits who killed your uncle three years ago.
>>17821140Tell him he can steal a war bride for himself.
This usually works.
>>17821959You talk about war being cool, but you want to raid with the vikings, so mostly attack peasants who can't fight back? That's hardly a war.
>>17821357reading "primary sources dude" is one thing, analysis is another, if you note down the dates and locations of all the sources you can find on battles, sieges and towns pillaged then compare them to period before and after and the region as a whole, you can only reach the same conclusion as me
>>17821989wars were very limited, most of the castles built in England were never actually used until the 17th century, whole regions saw centuries without a battle or siege
>>17820885they were wealthier and had stronger governments so they could wage more intense and sustained wars when it came to it
euroids simply couldnt afford to raise significant armies and they usually shattered after one decisive battle
>>17818233 (OP)>vikings have been raiding the shores for decades>move to the shore>get raided>AAAAAAAAA HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN TO ME Why were people so retarded? Same shit with the berber slave trade. Nigga just dont live in a coastal village or build a wall or something.
>>17818233 (OP)>Were humans just more sadistic and psychopathic in the past?We still are. Why do you think entertainment (which is like 90% a simulation of violence or sex) is possibly the single most profitable industry on fucking Earth?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N26N7lQHNW8
>>17818233 (OP)I have a theory that most humans throughout history were just bored
if you had to choose between growing wheat all day or going to the edge of the world clashing with armies of other civilizations for the chance of glory, of course people would choose the latter
>>17821945Yeah this is about out-groups. The same viking in OP's picture would easily cry bitterly over losing his friend or mom.
>>17823373>>17821945Yep. Human genetics dont change much over the last million years or so. Hell, the same genomes that govern our in-out group behaviour can be seen in almost every animal. Its very very ancient genetics. So
>>17822919near the sea is the best place to live, you can take boat for transport and fish. expecially back then, if you can fish, you basically got another option instead of just gruel 26 times a month.
>>17818233 (OP)This still happens in the modern day, but mostly in massacres or genocides since modern war doesn't have as many close-up kills (most are hundreds of meters away or further) and war is scarier since you can be killed from hundreds of meters away.
>>17821989>The Middle Ages did not have large scale warfare, wars were small and territory seldom changed hands as the result of a war.European states until the 17th century didn't have the capability of mass mobilization with vast armies the way the Muslim empires or China were able to do. You hired like 10,000 tops knights and mercenaries, fought a few battles, and that was it. Territory was mostly exchanged through marriage alliances rather than war. Also a war would often have to halt when you couldn't pay your mercenaries.
>>17823593the main strategy in medieval warfare was to burn down villages and slaughter peasants in order to make it easier to besiege castles/cities or prove a point if you're too weak to capture anything
>>17821113Plenty of people still sign up for the action, especially when its an excuse to shoot some random ragheads that lack airstrikes or drone capabilities.
>>17818238Teenage hoplites under Alexander would have fun razing Afghan villages, it's a natural thing that modern society desperately tries to suppress through years of school and pacification
>>17818233 (OP)In the lawless days of 1500s Sicily, you needed a minimum party of 20 men if you wanted to travel across Sicily safely
>>17818233 (OP)Violence was very normalized and a lot of people carried weapons regularly.
>>17823930>it's a natural thing that modern society desperately tries to suppress through years of school and pacificationyou must be 18 to use this website
>>17822919Vikings used rivers to raid deeper in land than just the coast.
>>17818233 (OP)Short answer: yes
Long answer: the modern enviroment, ever since around the 20th century, has been gradually less and less hostile and with a lot of commodities provided, thus turning the average man more docile. Of course you would argue this is incorrect and has more to do with psychological predisposition, but with each generation passed, the mind is thinking less about survival and more about commodities which makes the modern man seek or enjoy violence less.
This is why brown men in hostile third world countries are also more likely to violence than white men in first world countries.
>>17822450Much of the Roman Empire saw no wars for literally hundreds of years and any fighting there was was in border regions.
>>17818233 (OP)The worst atrocities and most wide scale killing and suffering were done within the last 100 years, not before. The reason why you believe you are less sadistic and psychopathic than your ancestors is because you have an inflated ego, not because you are fundamentally any different than they were.
>>17821438You are right only in the sense that people had to be more violent due to the construction of society. For example these days if someone is trying to kill you, you can call the cops and they'll be there in a short time. During times before centralized states, best thing to do was to keep a weapon and kill a bandit yourself. Likewise, these days it's more expensive to execute someone than it is to feed them for years. At that time, you just use a rope and it's more economical than keeping someone on death row. Violence was handled at a lower level so the average person was more exposed to violence, but I don't think this means that they "liked war more", only that they were more violent out of necessity.
>>17818233 (OP)Were they? Because I think they would probably think of us as aloof, selfish, insanely arrogant and disconnected from anything divine as we are bound to our computers, phones, cars and whatever other machinery beyond their comprehension we use in our day to day lives.
>>17823988If only I was younger, could emulate young great men like Hercules or Conradim
>>17824016Yup the Pax Romana saw unprecedented peace, and any wars that did happen were in far away lands.
>>17821129It's the same exact stuff in modern war, in Ukraine they have to deal with rats the size of cats and diseases. At least in World War 1 they had extensive trench systems, connected with rear positions full of hot food, medicine, and waste disposal. In Ukraine and even Syria they can only afford rudimentary trench lines, where they toss empty tins, water bottles, and shit bags out of the trench they're hiding in for 3 days
>>17818233 (OP)the vikings never did anything worse than what you'd see in Gaza or Ukraine today.
And if you think things would look any better if India went to war with Pakistan or China you're fooling yourself
It is hard to describe the feeling of bloodlust that soldiers often talk about in the heat of battle, or more usually right after the battle. During battle, they are often in shock, pumped full of adrenaline, too terrified and wired out of their minds to do anything but desperately stay alive. They kill out of that combination of fear and desperate anger. Then the terror fades, and you see the helpless foe fleeing before you, or you see his undefended village or town after breaching its defenses, and this is where it becomes hard to relate what happens. An indescribable urge to kill, to maim, to exact bloody, horrible vengeance for all the terror and pain that the soldiers have felt up to that point causes them to fall on the defenseless without mercy.
It's seen again and again throughout history, in different cultures, among different races. It's not the battle that produces the worst slaughter, it's afterward, when one army flees, or the town is sacked, that sees the majority of brutality.
>>17824325Trenches are harder to maintain in the era of air strikes and FPV drones. You spend all that time digging trenches the enemy will just start sending in suicide drones in to disable your air defense systems then air strike you with impunity. Elaborate trench systems made sense when you could reliably gauge the range of your enemy's artillery and create safe zones with permanent lines of supply to the front.
Ukraine's battlefields are impossible to maintain to that degree because the front line is permeable for both sides. There's nowhere truly "safe" anywhere in Ukraine or even within Russia close to the Ukrainian border, as Ukraine has shown. Russia can launch missiles anywhere into Ukraine almost any time they like, and Ukraine periodically sends drone strikes into Russian cities. The "front line" where the infantry and armor bump heads is to me a holdover from outmoded military doctrine of the Soviet Union which was the basis for both Russia and Ukraine's strategy going into this war. Ukraine has received some NATO training, but their military is very much a Soviet remnant.
>>17822919You're aware vikings attacked Paris and London, neither of which are coastal cities? Viking ships were versatile, they could handle ocean voyages or traverse navigable rivers. They were able to penetrate deeply into Europe via its network of rivers. They used this for trade, also, not just raids, and went as far as Constantinople and the mideast, traveling the great rivers of Eurasia. There was nowhere you could really escape from vikings during the peak of their activity in the 8th and 9th centuries, not unless you lived in a remote mountain community.
>>17824405It's like drugs or sex but much much stronger.
>>17824040Ehhhhh, China has been the big leagues for 2000 years, Rome was in the big leagues too, but Europe didn't make it back until the 30 years war.
>>17824062>it's more expensive to execute someone than it is to feed them for years.No it isn't, its just not as socially acceptable to execute people, so you have to navigate decades of bureaucratic red tape, but raw cost is not a major factor since we have no problems affording either and a lot of middlemen make a lot of profit feeding prisoners, but if there ever were any real food shortages or famines that made if prohibitively expensive to feed those prisoners, you would see that red tape suddenly get a lot shorter really quickly.
Iām pretty sure it was about religion, people viewed foreign religions as slave subjects if they were conquerable
>>17824947Sometimes yeah but certainly not always.
Rome hated Carthage because they were a regional rival. Not because they worshipped Baal and not Jupiter
as others said most crime is committed while drunk or high so i don't think people are naturally psychopathic unless they're on something
>>17825284>Rome hated everybodyNot true. A lot of Romans were massive greekboos.
>>17818238Back then war was rewarding for the soldiers themselves. The Iliad opens with an argument over war booty. It would be a lot easier to stomach the shitty parts if you got to take home a bunch of money and slaves instead of going home to argue with the VA over health insurance.
This of course makes war even worse for the civilian populations on the receiving end. Which could then encourage future enthusiasm for war from them for the sake of revenge.
