Every single person in the world should have to read this book by age 18. It is heart-warming. It may sound perverse to call a book about the human capacity to dispatch members of its own kind heart-warming, but this book is. Continuing in the spirit of S.L.A. Marshall’s seminal work Men Against Fire, it presents a body of research that points to the fundamental psychological difficulty humans have in killing each other.
At first blush, this might seem incompatible with all the daily headlines about vicious conflicts and massacres across the globe. But the thesis of this book is not that humans aren’t naturally dangerous or aggressive, just that there are certain basic constraints inherent in people that make killing another human difficult. The daily strife that one hears of is merely a sad reminder of how effective humans have become at overcoming these barriers.
What is most important about this book is the way it sets out what factors are conducive to homicide. These include technology, propaganda, mental conditioning, psychopathology and demagoguery. These are some of the tools that make humans overcome their unwillingness to kill. —Al Mousseau
