War Seminar/War is in our DNA

I am the one who created the call for contributions and made an effort to clean up this page. I am very busy and will keep this essay short.

I was born in 1952, and when I was young Freudian psychology was king. There was a medical case where a baby boy was born with a problem that caused the doctors to turn him into a girl. The experts at the time had a blank slate theory that said if he was raised to be a girl, he would be one. Now we have gone full circle with the understanding that we are born with our gender. I agree that there are people with a Y chromosome who were born as girls (though I have concerns about children in puberty making bad gender decisions regarding sex change procedures.)

But I am convinced that humans are born with the inclination to fight for their tribe. Just as LBGT folks were "born that way", humans are born with tribalistic tendencies. It's how we evolved. Europeans took over the western hemisphere because they were better at war, and the same happened all over the world. I also believe we are to a limited extent are born with our political inclinations.

As Pogo put it,

"We have met the enemy and he is us"

I don't know if it was nature or nurture that caused me to be fascinated by politics, and convinced by the dismal state of social media that we badly to learn the art of thoughtful communication. That lead me to Wikiversity several years ago, and why one of my "hobbies" involves encouraging people to write thoughtful essays.

For more thoughts, read a longer essay I wrote on my first attempt to insert a call for contributions into a Wikiversity page:


 * Socialism/Is it a thing of the left?

Feel free to comment on this essay at Talk:War_Seminar/War_is_in_our_DNA. Better yet, go to the War Seminar and write your own essay. I will help you move it to another call for essays if your essay is not really about war.