Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…re’s a famous thing where a Roman says, “We Romans, we’re a violent people. We’re a warlike people. And so it’s fitting that we should be accustomed to the sight of death and violence.” Kind of works. There’s a more symbolic interpretation that says, “The amphitheater is an expression of Roman dominance,” a symbolic expression. Because what you have are all segments of Roman society gathered together to control the fate of others. You have foreigners, you have wild animals, you have criminals, you have other people. And we are symbolically asserting our dominance over those groups by determining, “Do you live or do you die?” And that kind of works, too. And the cynical one is, humans like violence. I mean, when people watch a hockey game, what gets them most excited? The fight. When people watch car racing, there’s a crash. What’s going to be shown on the news? It’s the crash. There’s something dark in human nature sometimes that likes violence. And maybe the Romans are just being more honest about it than we are. I think Dan Carlin has a really great episode called Painfotainment. I think in that episode, he suggests the hypothetical: that if we did something like a gladiator games today to the death, that the whole world would tune in. Yeah.…

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