Everywhere you look for comparisons of life under anarchy and life under government, life under government is less violent.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that government plays a crucial role in reducing violence compared to anarchy.
Steven Pinker argues that when comparing life under anarchy to life under government, the latter is characterized by significantly lower levels of violence. This highlights the importance of governmental structures and laws in maintaining societal order and safety, implying that without such frameworks, chaos and violence are more likely to prevail.
In practice
This quote can be used in a debate about the effectiveness of government in ensuring public safety.
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.
Islam is based on naql (texts) and βaql (intellect). Some people just have the texts β we call them naql-heads.
You may be sure that when a man begins to call himself a realist he is preparing to do something that he is secretly ashamed of doing.
The crisis that the world finds itself in as it swings on the hinge of a new millennium is located in something deeper than particular ways of organizing political systems and economies.
For truth itself does not have the privilege to be employed at any time and in every way; its use, noble as it is, has its circumscriptions and limits.
There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.
Skepticism . . . is not intellectual only it is moral also, a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul.
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