The last three chapters of his book held an exhaustive list of humans’ negative and positive behaviors and characteristics. Pinker delves into these and determines the biggest causes on an individual basis for violence and the attributions that humans have that decreases the likelihood for violence to occur.
While there are the many excellent motives for violence that Pinker examines while discussing humanity’s inner demons the most widespread, with the vastest body count is undeniably ideology. Pinker accurately describes Western Society habit of mistaking religious ideology with morality. This is most likely done because many ideologies describe types of behaviors that are completely evil and behaviors that are holy with no place of human …show more content…
However, religious ideology is not the only form of ideology to blame when it comes to violence throughout history. While it is true that the Crusades we're motivated by the expansionistic ambitions of the Catholic Church, other forms of ideology, such as the belief that some people are meant to be slaves, are responsible for many lives lost as well. Pinker examines this when he discusses the moralization Gap which he describes the phenomenon in which individuals will justify their own negative actions yet they are extremely less likely to justify the actions of others. During fingers explanation, he shows that this is most commonly done in two ways: by altering the perspective of when an event truly happened, such …show more content…
His first point is that empathy is not what we tend to describe it to be but we have been describing it, it is less psychedelically connecting with the individual going through horn and more distress at watching the harmful action take place. Pinker also takes the time to point out that this distress is not the same thing a sympathetic concern with the armed individuals’ well-being, but is more likely than not the attempt to suppress an undesired reaction or irritation at the event taking place. In this chapter Pinker discusses self-control, where he described low self-control being due to a damaged or unresponsive orbital cortex in one's brain, as well as morality, which was covered earlier with ideology. By the end of this chapter Pinker concludes that we need more then empathy, self-control, and morals to become a peaceful society; we also need to be able to recognize the lack of true evil as well as investing in training ourselves to spread the justifications of an individual's actions and one's own actions evenly. With this we would be able to subjectively determine because for a rationalized violence, see the incense through multiple perspectives, and hopefully find a solution that is not imperialistic in its nature, with the winner demonizing the loser of a conflict