Wanna fight?

I have been pondering more and more recently the question: Why do people want to fight? The news items coming from the Ukraine war (and any other of the myriad of current conflicts) make me absolutely perplexed.

It seems so utterly senseless. Any Russian involved in the Ukraine war with a modicum of independent thought must know this wanton destruction is enormously costly on so many levels and there are no winners. Or is that too large an assumption to make, and their brainwashing/ groupthink/ blind obedience overrides all reason and rational thinking?

We are such an interesting race. On the one hand, we are capable of incredible acts of endurance, kindness, persistence, and sacrifice for others. But on the other hand, we are equally capable of incredible acts of meanness, deceit, and savagery.

To further confound this, it is not an either-or thing. People are capable of displaying both types of behaviours, which makes things even more perplexing. How can someone show kindness to one group and then savagery to another? Be the best boss ever while quietly defrauding the company. Be an amazing dad, then beat up total strangers who mean you no harm as you take over their town.

How do they manage to reconcile those behaviours?

I. Do. Not. Get. It.

Is it an extension of being competitive and wanting to win? Looking at boxing, MMA, and rugby league matches of old, one could easily draw that conclusion. But not everyone who competes wants to fight - you don’t see many scraps at the high jump or synchronized swimming.

But if you go back through the ages, our history is littered with many examples of conflict. We certainly haven’t learned from the past, so it’s clearly deep within our DNA. Either that, or we are supremely stupid. Probably both.

What is the path forward? Are we doomed because of our innate desire to scrap with anyone who doesn’t share our beliefs? Which seems contradictory because at our core we all want similar things - security, belonging, and recognition. And yet we fight each other to get them! Go figure.

The concept of sharing, the art of compromise. This is the grease that eases the wheel of life. But so many seem to have lost their grease guns, or have no idea how to use them.

Are we doomed? I can sit here with electricity, running water, free education, and logically point out our failings and contradictions. The biggest threat to my well-being is my well-practiced misjudgment of physics. So I’m speaking from a very privileged place. But I’m sure if I was faced with some of these conflict situations I would be flinging myself into the fray, accepting whatever belief I needed to justify my actions. My aforementioned logic would be tossed out of the building and told not to come back because it was being far too disruptive.

I think the answer to the doomed question is; it depends. History tells us we have a singular inability to learn from it when it matters the most. So resolving the conflicts that continually pop up will be like a never-ending game of whack-a-mole.

On the other hand, I believe that most would rather be happy and content rather than angry and scared. So there is hope. The path to achieving that state is where we come unstuck - because humans are shit decision-making machines. This is a result of our preference to rely on emotional and intuitive responses rather than doing the work and deploying some critical thinking. Which is looking long-term, understanding the evidence, evaluating second and third-order consequences, asking what your future self would say, and being aware of our biases. Essentially, we are lazy-arse thinkers, so we need to do the cognitive yards on some decisions.

Forget reading, writing, rithmetic. Proficiency in these areas is important, but not as important as having well-developed critical thinking skills. The wonders of the internet have supercharged the reach of disinformation, allowing it to get to many millions in the time it takes you to let go that sneaky morning fart. Couple this with our propensity to hoover it up because of its perverse, or surprising, or belief-confirming appeal, critical thought becomes our only defense against doing dumb shit. Like fighting.

If critical thinking was pervasive, arms manufacturers would struggle to find employees, Donald Trump would just be a brash curiosity, Gwyneth Paltrow would only be known for acting, generals wouldn’t issue launch commands, and Mark Zuckerberg would be worth a lot less money.

“Ya dreamin mate” I hear you cry. Maybe. But it’s a whole lot better than accepting the status quo. And we are not completely useless. Take the covid response as an example. Here we had a common enemy and look at what people achieved in such a short time when they pulled together. Average vaccine development is a 10-15 year process, yet they smacked these puppies out in less than 2 years! To date, 12.8 billion doses have been given. 12.8 billion! You try counting to a billion (244 years at 16 hr/day - so you’d die before you got there!).

So if I was lord commander of every school curriculum in the world, I would make critical thinking the core subject and the main measure of achievement. And this is an incredibly low-risk approach because even a modicum of success means better decisions get made. Lord knows we need them.