Chimps don’t have buttons that can annihilate entire cities at once. They don’t go out their way to spends years, decades, centuries to develop items and techniques to inflict the maximum amount of pain onto another chimp.
That we (as a species, not inviduals) totally do outdo chimps, or any other animal species, in cruelty. In my mind, the peak of cruelty isn’t mindlessly tearing someone apart maenad-style, but instead calmly designing and building and using instruments for the sole purpose of being cruel.
Mostly no disagreement there, though I want to say that chimps do not go to war out of cruelty. Chimps go to war because they live in scarcity and it increases the war gene’s odds of survival.
In the past this was also the primary reason humans went to war. In modern times we have invented many new reasons, but usually even those do not boil down to simple cruelty (though there’s many cases in history where one could argue cruelty was the primary motivation). Usually war wields cruelty as an instrument, not the other way around.
Chimps don’t have buttons that can annihilate entire cities at once. They don’t go out their way to spends years, decades, centuries to develop items and techniques to inflict the maximum amount of pain onto another chimp.
Yeah and crows don’t have electric drills yet they are still capable of tool use. What is your point?
That we (as a species, not inviduals) totally do outdo chimps, or any other animal species, in cruelty. In my mind, the peak of cruelty isn’t mindlessly tearing someone apart maenad-style, but instead calmly designing and building and using instruments for the sole purpose of being cruel.
Mostly no disagreement there, though I want to say that chimps do not go to war out of cruelty. Chimps go to war because they live in scarcity and it increases the war gene’s odds of survival.
In the past this was also the primary reason humans went to war. In modern times we have invented many new reasons, but usually even those do not boil down to simple cruelty (though there’s many cases in history where one could argue cruelty was the primary motivation). Usually war wields cruelty as an instrument, not the other way around.