ON THE NATURE OF VIOLENCE

Nuclear sabre-rattling is back after a peaceful intermission.

- PRATIK KANJILAL

Following a serious attack on Ukraine, Russia's Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu said that, if threatened, his country reserves the right to nuke. The same day, in response to India unilaterally threatening to hold the Indus Waters Treaty "in abeyance" following the Pahalgam shootings, Pakistan made a barely veiled reference to the nuclear option.

Coincidentally, new research shows that violence usually flows from the motive of revenge. Which is another way of saying that, as in Europe and South Asia, violence tends to be an endless cycle, and Francis Fukuyama's 'end of history' was always a mirage.

Is the human race fundamentally violent, as the news and pop culture suggest, or is violence created by a small minority of sociopaths who are present in all societies? If it's the latter, did law and government evolve to protect the peaceful majority?

Until the late 20th century, these basic questions were addressed mainly through the lens of ideals and ideology—the "noble savage" attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau versus the "nasty, brutish and short" lives bereft of central authority, which Thomas Hobbes wrote of in Leviathan.