“Arma virumque cano”, says Vergil in the first line of his Aeneis[1]. Like him, I want to talk of men and arms today – or: Of mankind and war, of human beings and conflict, and of men of mind and their methods. Concretely: A recent article by Pasquale Cirillo and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “On the tail risk of violent conflict and its underestimation”[2], has (re-)ignited a discussion first sparked by Taleb’s earlier criticism towards the hypotheses regarding the decline of violence put forward by Steven Pinker in his book “The Better Angels of our Nature”, first published 2011[3]. Is there – this is the question on the table – less violence today than in the past of mankind as we know it?
Why preventing violence might not prevent violence
