re: #31 Irenicum

There seems to be something in our DNA that makes us prone to this behavior over and over again.

There is no doubt about that. ‘The Lucifer Principle’ by Howard Bloom, although flawed in places, has lots of interesting material on this subject. From a review:

In the section “How Hatred Builds the Walls of Society’s Bungalow,” we learn that hatred, frustration, anger, hostility, and jealousy are the building blocks of nature. He gives us a blueprint whereby men take their roles in groups and bond in order to clash with other groups and become more powerful. These groups develop into super social organisms whose only goal—like the amoeba—is to absorb its neighbors resources, multiply, and consume, at whatever cost to its members. The more aggressive, the more inhumane, the greater the chance of success, the author writes. We are, the book explains, preprogrammed by natural selection to be savage—the rip-their-tongues-out, lop-their-heads-off, slay-their-babies, kind of brutal.

Nothing is sacred. Moslems, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, agnostics, atheists, philanthropists—all of our ideas and ideals are defiled. Religion is the voice of a super hungry organism that absorbs by force or faith its neighbors, we read in the section “Righteous Indignation=Greed for Real Estate.” Ideology is often what allows a super organism, be it a religion, country, or political party, to gobble up the resources of its neighbors (competitors).