Are humans innately violent? Anthropologists have often said "no" -- in public. But troubling facts kept bubbling up, until in 1966 Napoleon Chagnon published a breakthrough field study of the violent Yanamamo tribes in Venezuela. 

Rousseau's Noble Savage, the primitive man-child who only killed in self-defense, started to crumble fast. In the real world, of course, the daily toll of human-to-human violence never stopped. In warlike tribes the adult male death rate from interpersonal violence now stands around one out of three. Because humans adapt in many different ways, that number is variable. 

A new study published in Nature, the world's original scientific journal, now compares human death by violence with other species and finds it to be remarkably stable, hopefully ending a century of desperate debate among anthropologists, who tried to uphold a taboo against reporting real human violence among primitive peoples. This lie -- that native humans are people and loving --  is still peddled by liberal professors who simply will not face the fact. (It should also be noted that the 1986 Seville Statement, which condemns theories that human aggression is innate, remains in effect today.)

What's wrong with lying about human nature? Well, the myth of human peacefulness has been used to support a century of Marxist tyranny, resulting in authoritatively estimated 100 million deaths. Marxist regimes, their heads filled with false assumptions, routinely conclude that if humans are naturally peaceful, and if the people and the peasants resist their tyrannical demands, then those dissenters must be evil and deserve death. One hundred million people have been murdered under that false assumption, as found by the best historical study done so far, at the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique in Paris. Many historians working on the study consider themselves Marxists. 

The fact is that lies kill in human politics, and that lies about human nature kill more than the usual run of lies. Take Barack Obama, apologizing compulsively for America wherever he does, while doing nothing to reduce the black-on-black murder rate in inner-city Chicago. Obama will do anything to uphold his false belief that other countries are models of peaceful behavior, and that it is capitalism that causes people to kill each other in places like the United States. Obama's fixed obsession is simply false and misleading, and it serves to prop up his whole delusional belief system that supports Jihad (Holy War) against infidels as pursued by his friends the Saudis and his money supplier the Muslim Brotherhood. It is amazing how a single false premise supports a mounting structure of lies. (The purpose of those lies is to accuse white America, and to excuse black America. Just watch him run that scam over and over again.)

Human genes influence our actions, but they are not totally controlling. The history of civilizations is the history of controlling violence, going back to the first settlements more than 10 millennia ago. Every great pyramid-building empire from Babylonia to Beijing symbolized an overarching societal pyramid, in which the god-king is armed with magical weapons to overpower his priesthood, who would overpower the soldiery, who would overpower the slaving peasantry. Often the result was merciless tyranny, which means violence practiced to keep a violent people in line. Even Marxists today like to talk about how peaceful Cuba is, as if they don't really know how severely rebellion in punished in Cuba. Again, a deep lie about fundamental human nature is used to tyrannize over people. 

Modern civilized nations generally manage to find a compromise between out-group violence and in-group violence. Historically the English-speaking nations have been very lucky, because they had natural boundaries against aggression -- the Channel and Irish Sea protected Britain, and North America was protected by the great oceans, and by weaker nations to the north and south of the continental United States. We cannot claim to be especially virtuous and peaceful, but we have been very lucky in our 200 years of growth since 1776. That has made all the difference. 

Enter the Left, with its deeply delusional blaming system aiming to destroy one big class of evildoers after the next. The Left is all wrong about human beings being naturally peaceful and loving. In response, they always want to punish somebody: The capitalists, the bourgeoisie, the Ukrainian peasants, the White Folks in America, male heterosexuals, it never stops. If only the following mass of human beings was dead and wiped out forever we would have the peace and love that so naturally stems from human nature. The Nazis had the same insane conviction about the Jews and other inferior peoples, and Jihad holds that belief about the infidels. Human being are naturally drawn toward messianic cults that promise peace on earth forever and ever, if only the bad folks were good and dead. That is not an overstatement. It is the plain truth about utopian Marxism in the 20th century. 

​Just telling the truth about human nature, which is quite violent all by itself, may seem like a tiny step towards sanity. Yet historically, the worst mass-killing beliefs human have owned have also led to the worst killings. Anthropological findings about natural "background" levels of killings may help to bring people back to a more tragic view of human life. We can at time reduce the rate of killing. The means to that end are obvious: alertness, and honest police force, and restraining the mob when it wants to destroy the forces of civilization. It isn't hard. All it takes is common sense and a common front against violence. That may not create utopia, but it can minimize human violence. ​