Civilisation is partly about restraining the male of the species from engaging in the violence of the hunter-gatherer period. But it doesn't take an awful lot to unleash it.
Interpretation
Civilization's progress relies on managing inherent violent instincts from our past.
Niall Ferguson's quote highlights the delicate balance of civilization, suggesting that while society has evolved to restrain primal instincts associated with violence, the potential for such instincts to resurface remains just beneath the surface. This underscores the importance of recognizing and managing these inherent traits within the context of modern society to maintain order and peace.
In practice
In a discussion about the foundations of modern society, this quote illustrates the importance of understanding our primal instincts.
It's all very well for us to sit here in the west with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it's immoral to violate the sovereignty of another state. But if the effect of that is to bring people in that country economic and political freedom, to raise their standard of living, to increase their life expectancy, then don't rule it out.
If the financial system has a defect, it is that it reflects and magnifies what we human beings are like. Money amplifies our tendency to overreact, to swing from exuberance when things are going well to deep depression when they go wrong. Booms and busts are products, at root, of our emotional volatility.
For 500 years the West patented six killer applications that set it apart. The first to download them was Japan. Over the last century, one Asian country after another has downloaded these killer apps- competition, modern science, the rule of law and private property rights, modern medicine, the consumer society and the work ethic. Those six things are the secret sauce of Western civilization.
The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.
Over time, the welfare state has become dysfunctional in a surprising way. But in a way it became a victim of its own success: It became so successful at prolonging life, that it becomes financially unsustainable, unless you make major changes to things like retirement ages.
Today, the average Korean works a thousand hours more a year than the average German. A thousand. ... That is the end of the Great Divergence.
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.
If there were a sympathy in choice, War, death, or sickness, did lay siege to it, Making it momentary as a sound, Swift as a shadow, short as any dream, Brief as the lightning in the collied night That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth, And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!' The jaws of darkness do devour it up; So quick bright things come to confusion.
These principles have given me a way of explaining naturally the union or rather the mutual agreement [conformité] of the soul and the organic body. The soul follows its own laws, and the body likewise follows its own laws; and they agree with each other in virtue of the pre-established harmony between all substances, since they are all representations of one and the same universe.
I don't want to own anything until I find a place where me and things go together.
In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
The greater the diversity, the greater the perfection.
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