Quotes from David Livingstone Smith

It's through media that dehumanizing ideas are spread and reproduced. That's why totalitarians out a premium on destroying freedom of the press.

It's through media that dehumanizing ideas are spread and reproduced. That's why totalitarians puts a premium on destroying freedom of the press.

Beware of attempts to destroy the credibility of media outlets that oppose and expose the dehumanizing propaganda of those in power.

Like religion, politics traffics in and plays upon our deepest hopes and fears. And like religion, authoritharian political propaganda works by first making us feel endangered and then offering us a way to escape form our feelings of helplessness.

Because thoughts about ethnoracial groups have a deep resonance with thoughts about biological species, people's minds naturally turn to thoughts about the latter when they want to denigrate the former. Because derogatory thoughts are the driving force, hated or despised species are unconsciously selected to represent them.

Our brains needed to be able to do more than simply create models of the world. The power of imagination took root in the brains of our ancestors because it helped them predict uncertain futures.

When enemy is thought of as filth, war is conceived as a grand hygiene operation.

War is both intensely horrible and exquisitely pleasurable. It is horrible because of the danger and suffering that soldiers and civilians endure, and the unavoidable guilt that comes with killing. It is pleasurable because -like all pleasures- it is something that benefited our ancient ancestors who were victors in the bloddy struggle for resources.

The joy of war is the joy of the huntm of bringing down game, of ridding the world of a man-eating monster or obliterating a plague.

Our relationship with killing is ambivalent, a compound of pleasure and aversion. Both are deeply rooted in human nature, and neither can be extirpated.

Our feelings of sympathy do not embrace all of humanity in equal measure. Some human beings matter to us. We care intensely about their well-being. Others do not matter very much, and still others do not matter at all. This is a hard saying, and may be difficult to accept but it is obviously and undeniably true.

Those who in principle reject an evolutionary account of collective human violence must either deny its existence -which is surely a quixotic move- or else provide an alternative hypothesis. So far, no coherent alternative has been suggested.

Faced with an impressive and rapidly developing scientific image of the human animal, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that our mental states -the thoughts that we think, the passions that move us, and the decisions that mould our lives- are consequences of physiological processes ocurring in our brains.

it is hard for many people to abandon the concept that human beings are angels imprisoned in earthly shells.

Violence has followed our species every step of the way in its long journey through time.

From the scalped bodies of ancient warriors to the suicide bombers in today's newspaper headlines, history is drenched in human blood.

When chimpanzees embark on a raid, their behavior resembles a monkey hunt. They're out for blood—but this time it's the blood of a member of their own species. Based on chimpanzees' alert, enthusiastic behavior, these raids are exciting events for them.… During these raids on other communities the attackers do as they do while hunting monkeys, except that the target "prey" is a member of their own species.

Human isn't a scientific concept at all. It's a folk-concept that means, roughly, one of us. As Rorty insightfully observes, such people "are morally offended Ã¢â'¬Â¦ by the suggestion that they treat people whom they do not think of as human as if they were human.

Raiding chimpanzees don't eat their quarry, but they attack it with utmost ferocity. It's not just killing—it's overkill. Wrangham and Peterson report that "their assaults Ã¢â'¬Â¦ are marked by a gratuitous cruelty—tearing off pieces of skin, for example, twisting limbs until they break, or drinking a victim's blood—reminiscent of acts that among humans are unspeakable crimes during peacetime and atrocities during war."6

Subhumans, it was believed, are beings that lack that special something that makes us human. Because of this deficit, they don't command the respect that we, the truly human beings, are obliged to grant one another. They can be enslaved, tortured, or even exterminated—treated in ways in which we could not bring ourselves to treat those whom we regard as members of our own kind. This phenomenon is called dehumanization.

Olmsted inquired of the man if he found it "disagreeable" to whip the slaves. "I think nothing of it," he drawled in response. "Why, sir, I wouldn't mind killing a nigger more than I would a dog."5

These human beasts of burden were recruited to work alongside oxen and donkeys, or, in the case of many captive women, to satisfy the victors' sexual urges. The origin of slavery in warfare is preserved in the etymology of the word servant, which comes from the Latin servare ("save"). Servants were "saved" for forced labor instead of being summarily executed.

There are unmistakable parallels between the treatment of slaves and the treatment of domestic animals. Brown University historian Karl Jacoby points out that that virtually all of the practices deployed for controlling livestock—practices such as "whipping, chaining, branding, castration, cropping ears"—have also been used to control slaves.

the common Greek term for "slave," andrapodon, "man-footed creature," was built on the foundation of a common term for cattle, namely, tetrapodon, "four-footed creature.