Michael Blastland
speaker
745 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2011
last heard Aug 2011
Michael Blastland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
potentially violent assaults by others.
We do it by a much more complex system of interactions which are both psychological interactions, I mean the way we look at each other, the way we signal to each other, but we also do them by formal institutions.
We do things like we establish financial systems that allow me to go and get some food from a restaurant and pay for it with a scribble on a credit card slip.
which is, if you think about it, a fantastically elaborate and abstract way of doing what chimps have to do by coalition management, bonobos have to do by having sex.
And we do in this huge array of different ways.
Most people think they see CNN, they see the world news, they think, you know, my God, we live in a dreadfully violent world.
And we do in terms of the total numbers of people who die, which is why BBC News always finds plenty to report.
But in terms of the relative risk of dying violently as opposed to dying some other way, we're in the most peaceful century the world has ever known.
Because of economics?
Yes, because the things that have tempted us to deal with each other instead of fighting each other have been the promise of a more prosperous life.
Just keep our distance, actually, while they're about to pull apart your...
Your luggage.
There we go.
Sorry.
There's a wonderful description of the Libyans and the Carthaginians trading, and the way they would trade is that they would meet each other at a distance in the desert, and one group would go forward very cautiously to the others, always watching to make sure that they had an escape route, and they would lay some goods on the ground, and then they would scurry away, and the other group would come forward and inspect the goods, and...
If they were tempted by the goods, they would put down some goods of their own which they thought were of an approximate equal value.
And then they would scurry away.
And this thing would go on until both sides indicated they thought it was a fair deal, in which case they would take the other's goods and go away.
Now, you can see all sorts of risks in this.
Even if you keep your distance enough to avoid being killed by the others...
Showing 561–580 of 745 · page 29 of 38
← Previous
Next →