Why Are Humans Violent? w/ Eric Jacobus
56:26 Share

Why are we violent? That's the question of our discussion today. My guest to explore this is someone who has been on the program before. He is a stuntman, a martial artist, an actor, and he is someone who we've had on many times to explore anthropology. Eric Jacobus, how you doing? Hey, David. Doing great, thanks. Now, some of you who are video gamers may know you and some of your...

Your acting and your motion capture and games like what? God of War? God of War, God of War Ragnarok. We did Mortal Kombat 11. Excuse me. I did Mortal Kombat 11, various characters for that. We did the cinematics for Mortal Kombat 1 at our studio. Call of Duty, Midnight Fight Express, Saints Row 5, if anybody played it.

Marvel's Avengers. I could go on, but I'm also the guy that gets thrown around a lot in Mafia 3. So whenever you kill somebody, a lot of the time it's going to be me. Did you do Super Mario 2? I'm not that old, David. So who was your favorite Mortal Kombat character to play?

When I was playing? I mean, I can't... When you performed. Oh, when I performed? Yeah. I think Kano was the most fun to perform as. That was in Mortal Kombat 11. Just because when you have a character that's such a character, he's such a, you know,

just pretend to be an Aussie with a, with a Terminator eye. It's really easy to kind of put character into every movement. And the thing about when you're doing motion capture, at least for gameplay, you only really have about a second or two seconds to tell a story in your move. Yeah. And,

The more story you can give in that movement, the better that movement is. And that gets really hard when your character is like Baraka was a little bit harder because Baraka, you know, the direction is like, well, he's kind of an animal. So, yeah, that's hard. There's not animals don't really have character like people do. Not the same. So, yeah, I'd say Kano. Those are my fun.

And who, so what's the last game that you were doing motion capture for, the latest one? Well, I can't talk about the latest game that we worked on. It was all top secret. What's the one that we can know about publicly? Publicly, I guess the big latest one, I guess that would be Mortal Kombat 1. That would be the big one. We also did Asgard's Wrath 2 here.

So if anybody plays Oculus games, we did Asgard's Wrath 2. What did you think when motion controls were introduced into wide-scale sense with video gaming? Motion controls. Because you're doing motion capture, and all of a sudden now Nintendo, but this is back in the 2000s,

comes out with the Wii letting senior citizens bowl like they're bowling in real life again. And it becomes a big sensation around the country. And of course, people have taken it into different directions. But how did you feel as someone who puts motion into the capture of these games?

to see the controls starting to allow a little bit of that for the player. And I've really thought about the fact that that really expands the franchise of gaming, you know, because when you, you know, when, when we all got our first, you know, whether it's a Nintendo or an Atari, you know, when you're translating movement of a character to this little direction pad with four buttons, you know,

That is kind of a language that you speak in a way you have to be able to translate. You know, I want to go over there to a certain, you know, thumb press and you can do, and that's the same with, you know, I was telling my, one of my sons the other day, he was learning how to type. He said, he said, how do you type so fast? And I said, it's a different language, even though you're using English to type English, but mapping your language to typing is,

is a translation process. So when you learn how to type quickly, that's like being fluent in a language. And I think that the less, you know, if you can lower the barrier to entry as much as possible by introducing controls that really map one-to-one with the language that you already speak, and I do view movement as a kind of language,

Whether it's bowling, right? Bowling has a language to it. There's a certain way that you bowl. I'm thinking of Wii bowling, which is such a great game. I mean, what an amazing idea because we were all used to playing bowling like this. You know, you wait for the little thing to get into the red zone or the green zone, right? And it's like, that works. But then if you turn it into one-to-one, well, then you actually reduce the amount of translation needed.

So you're kind of like speaking the native language of movement at that point. Yeah. And Nintendo was watching how, you know, people who were not, who were casual gamer people would, would, uh, you know, tilt the controls when they were trying to do a race game, you know? It's true. And they watch and they said, the intuitive thing is to do the action of the action that you're watching on screen. If you're not, if you don't know the native buttons, uh,

That's right. They tried to mimic that to some success they had for sure. But I just curious how you thought about that since you're you know, like you said, you talk about the language of movement a lot. And that's what you get into with this this new book you have. Do you have a copy of the book? We could. Oh, yeah. Hold on. OK, so the book the book is called If These Fists Could Talk, A Stuntman's Unflinching Take on Violence.

There it is. You can get it on Amazon right now. That's a cool cover. Let me see that up close. I like that. Yeah, so that's the front. Yeah, and this is the back. And then when you open it, this is my buddy's idea. When you open it, so you have the one hand up, which kind of represents fighting, right? But the other hand up would mean deferral.

Holding back. And that is where you introduce the idea of your theory of violence, right? Yes. And what do you call your theory of violence again? The ROBA hypothesis. ROBA, what does that stand for? ROBA stands for Reciprocal Object-Based Aggression. That is the basic formula for human violence. And reciprocal object-based aggression is not only unique to people, but it's universal.

So only people have reciprocal Roba reciprocal object-based aggression. We'll just call it Roba and only people have it and all people have it. So it's not only a universal human property, it's an exclusive human property. And this is something that what about, what about the, um, orcas that use the ice water to knock over the, uh, the little seal who's stuck on the ice flow. I'm glad you asked David. And I'll tell you all about that. Here's the difference. Um,

And you can look animals use objects all the time. Right. You see it with primates. You see it with even a hermit crab technically uses an object. Right. Like a shell is a is a defensive object. And the difference is that in human combat, we use objects in a reciprocal way such that we actually have no idea what the object is going to be.

Now with orcas, orcas using ice to take out a seal, for example, that's not combat. That's predation. And perhaps the seal knows that this is coming and there might be a game. There might be a very simple game that they play. I actually don't know. I would assume. And you see these games in the wild between two different species, which would be interspecific aggression or predation. I just saw one the other day of this amazing video of a, looked like either a lion or a cougar that,

snuck up to a water buffalo calf, grabbed it and dragged it under some bush while the mom was trying to attack it. And the mom just ran into the bush and couldn't get through. So the cat knows that it can drag its prey under a bush and get away. And the horns of the adult are going to get stuck.

And then, of course, the buffalo knows that it needs to do this certain move in order to get at a cat. So there are clear games that animals play with their natural weapons and then sometimes with objects, too. But it's extremely limited. And within combat, say, for example, when a chimpanzee fights another chimpanzee, there might be a stick.

waved in the in the in the affray there might be a stone tossed but what's so interesting is that those aren't those don't really turn the tides in combat those might increase the sort of uh imposing nature of whichever one does it but it doesn't actually affect the outcome like the action itself does not affect the outcome so when a chimpanzee swings a stick around

they're not really doing damage with that stick. They just sort of look bigger and it's going to induce other chimpanzees to back down. When they throw a rock, they don't throw a rock to actually hurt other chimpanzees. They tend not to do that. They tend to throw a rock to make a sound and they'll do this alone too. And you know that we know this because they spend a lot of time throwing rocks at, at logs and for a long time, you know,

primatologists were wondering, why are they throwing rocks at these trees? Well, it makes a loud knocking sound. It sort of designates a territory. So when you have these knocking sounds, it sort of increases the, you could almost say it like increases the call, the call distance of the chimpanzee that denotes its territory. That doesn't make it a weapon of war. And if it were a weapon of war, then chimpanzees would be bringing rocks to fight the

All the time, but they just almost never do. It's very rare because rocks are sort of reserved for intimidation.

And they don't use them for combat, even though they could. They could very well take a rock and smash it, smash it over the head of another chimpanzee. They could do that. They tend not to. Either it's not effective or they who knows. There's some kind of unwritten law of creation where you can take that rock and smash a nut. But as soon as combat starts, you might huck it. And then the fighting always devolves into fists almost always. So that's kind of this clear definition.

delineation point between human and animal combat. And I, I focus so much on combat and Roba in particular, because it's such a clear dividing line. And it indicates that humans by virtue of the fact that we can bring an object into combat and we can pick up an object in the middle of combat, and then we could back down and pretend to give up and then go back and get another one or bring more people. It indicates that there's this sort of infinite, infinite,

excuse me, infinite level of war tactics going on where everybody's trying to anticipate the object and the tactics of the opponent. And then you're also anticipating that the opponent is anticipating you. And so when you have that kind of mirroring,

Animals have mirroring, but humans have this mirroring also that goes infinitely deep because you can never anticipate what the actual outcome is going to be. In animal combat, they know. At least they have a pretty good idea. I know for a fact that that chimpanzee is going to use his teeth, his fists. He's going to grab, maybe jump on me.

But in general, I'm not anticipating that chimpanzees are going to start stoning me to death. And they don't do that. They're correct. And if you could anticipate that chimpanzees are going to stone you to death, you would bring more chimpanzees with rocks, right? It would be this sort of closed loop system. It's not like that. Humans are very different. And that's why...

With humans having that infinite layer of anticipation, we naturally escalate to extremes, but it's also the most basic form of recursion. Recursion being self-nesting because you're sort of nesting the intentions of the enemy that are also nesting your intentions that are nesting his intentions. Nesting as in, you know, have you ever taken a camera? Here, I'll do it right now. If I were to take a camera and point it toward you,

Right. Oh, there it is.

Recursion is also in programming. If you have a function to add one to a variable, you could use shoddy programming, in my opinion, to call itself. You call the function of add one to itself multiple times until some amount is met. That's recursion because you're self-nesting the function within itself. Language is recursive because we nest sentences within sentences.

And we can have an infinitely long sentence. You can make infinite numbers of sentences. And every word is also infinitely nested with ideas. So every word, you take any word of a sentence and unpack it forever. That's what Socrates did, right? He sort of revealed the recursive nature of every word. What does equality, what does love mean? You can just go forever. It's a fun game, but that's kind of like the basis. Kind of reminds me of semiotics, you know? Yeah. And I'm not very familiar with the depth of that.

field but just from my cursory reading of people like john deely right you know this idea that these signs are just referential to other signs and this constant kind of uh i guess eternal nesting as you would say it there you know i think so yeah and i think it goes deeper than just what it means in your mind i think it also implies that there is some kind of shared you know well of course language is a shared kind of ledger of symbols and meanings and everybody's always trying

accessing this ledger, right? Like whenever I say the word ledger, I'm talking about, you know, I'm kind of imagining in your mind what you're seeing. And I'm trying to match that based on like, we're kind of in the same library checking out the term ledger. And if the idea is matched, then we have this idea that's shared and it's all kind of implied, right? So recursion is not just self-nesting. I'm also nesting your thoughts and mine. Now with language, recursion is messy and

Every almost every linguist now writes about how that kind of recursion, aside from Noam Chomsky, actually, like Steven Pinker, for example, and language instinct. He says that recursion is like gradually evolved over time. And he sort of has these examples of animals that are becoming recursive in their communication. And so therefore, as communication became recursive, it became more beneficial. And that's why we have language. Right. That's kind of like the evolutionary argument for recursion.

Okay, that's very difficult to, it's just very difficult to have a debate with that because you could go forever. That's kind of the nature of language, because we're operating in recursion, we'll like never really get to the end of it. But with violence, it's kind of like, well, I can show you how humans have this thing, roba.

And now it's up to the evolutionary scientists to prove that there are other animals that might have roba or some kind of hint of it. And as far as I can tell, there's a pretty hard dividing line between animals and humans there. So it's much more clear cut with violence. There's a clear distinction between human violence and animal combat.

It gets blurrier with animal communication and human language, animal kinship and human kinship or animal reproduction and human kinship, animal kind of ritualized behavior and human religion. That gets very gray. But with violence, it's very clear cut. And that's why I start there. Why is it clear cut there? Is it just so or do you have a reason why? It's just so. I mean, like the best example I can think of is the Gombe chimpanzee war. So it's a four year, quote unquote, war in Gombe in Tanzania.

And Jane Goodall wrote about it. And it was a situation where it wasn't started over a banana, was it? It might have been probably more about breeding, breeding rights and, you know, territory.

Which again, if we're talking about aggression as a function of defending territory, then again, you get very blurry. So that's why I try and look at human violence mechanically. What mechanically is it? Of course, it's about territory, but sometimes it's not about territory. Sometimes it's about a million other things that are far loftier than territory.

So in the case of the Gombe chimpanzee war, you had the, the Casacalla chimpanzee tribe, which is bigger. And you had this Kahama tribe, which is smaller as a splinter group of chimpanzees that kept coming off and like taking females from the Casacalla. So the Casacalla males started infiltrating the Kahamas and they would ambush the males and you know, it'd be like six on one at a time. And so eventually they decimated the Kahama tribe. And what,

What people seem to remember from the Gombe chimpanzee war is

is that the chimpanzees were fighting with sticks or fighting with rocks. There's this collective memory about it that is straight up a Mandela effect. There was no instance of chimpanzees bringing rocks and sticks to combat. They didn't do that. There's no evidence of this happening. The only anecdote is one mention that Jane Goodall has of this one chimp named Rodolph that has a four pound rock that

Just like not that heavy, throwing it at the head of another chimpanzee that's lying prostrate on the ground.

And that is supposed to be this sort of evidence that animal that chimpanzees use objects in combat. And that's just not the case, because more than likely that chimp threw that rock for the same reason that it throws a rock at a tree, which is for intimidation, not to finish off a chimpanzee. They just don't do that. And if they did do that, there would be plenty of evidence of it happening. And there just isn't. Why did he throw it at the prostrate chimp? Just because it was down.

But why would he intimidate if it's down, I guess, is what I'm saying. Who knows? I don't know. Again, this is what she said, right? She said that he threw this rock at a chimp. Again, they will throw rocks. Nobody's denying that. They'll swing sticks. But those rocks, like a four-pound rock is not going to finish off a chimp.

Four pounds is heavy. I get it, but that's probably not going to finish off a chimp. Chimp heads are very hard, and four pounds is not that much. You're saying they don't intend to kill anybody, or do they want to kill anybody with their tools and sticks? I don't know what is going on. I don't know what's in their heads. All I know is that they just don't do it. They do try and kill. They're not opposed to killing.

They're completely fine with killing young. They're fine ganging up and just exhausting another male until he has organ failure, whatever it is, or a female. They seem to have no issue with this. And this is something, again, where that's not the dividing line. Animals will kill their own.

very willingly. Mice do it, hyenas do it, meerkats do it, any animal will do that. The difference is that chimpanzees don't use objects and they don't have recursion within their combat system. They just don't have that issue. And again, what is recursion again, just for folks? Recursion meaning that, well, because they know what the object of aggression is going to be, they don't have this infinite nesting and they don't escalate to extremes. Do you have a theory as to how humans got to that

That state that, that whole other thing there. I don't know how you could go from one to the other. Yeah. I have no idea. That's not, that's not my domain, right? Like people have asked, well, if humans have robot and animals don't, how did we get robot? To me, I don't have an answer to that. Like to me, that's just the definition of being human is having robot. And if you, if you think, okay, if there, if there is like a, a traceable origin of humans, right.

Whether whether they came out of the mud where they came out of the sky. I don't know. Again, it's not my that's not my forte being kind of imagine, in my view, what would make the most sense is that at the beginning, violence and language and the sacred and kinship was all the same thing. It's all the same stuff. And over time, little pieces become differentiated right kinship differentiates from violence.

Language differentiates from kinship. Religion differentiates from kinship. That's kind of a pairing off over time where the domains of human behavior become more and more succinct and more differentiated. I think that at the beginning, maybe violence and religion was just the same thing. Maybe there's something that was before that where we've differentiated it to the point where we don't even know what that other thing was anymore.

But for me, I don't really take any – I don't really exhaust any effort trying to find out how you could go from chimpanzee combat to human combat because it's just not happening. And if there was evidence of chimpanzees starting to bring rocks and sticks into combat, okay, you got my ear. But until somebody shows that, then I don't even know what use that exercise has because that might not be what happened.

So when you see like ritual combat where there's rules, where there's no weapons, how does that fit into your – I mean, obviously, it's a ritual to dance or something. But, you know, you have karate championships or MMA. They're not allowed to have weapons. What's going on there? Yeah, I mean, we are so far down the line that we look at sports and combat –

at least in the West, we look at sports and combat as different from religion. Like it's like not even attached anymore. You'll have total atheists in jujitsu schools, bowing, getting belts and doing, you know, wearing a, having specific gear and having certain terminology. It's all very like, it's, it's the same thing as going into a temple, but they just don't call it that. They just call it martial arts. They call it a dojo. And, and,

In ancient societies, those are just the same thing. You know, like the Muscogee, was it the Muscogee? Yeah, the Muscogee Native Americans would, they would do yearly combat. And the combat was not like for fun. The combat was part of the ritual. It's just the same stuff. They don't even differentiate the two. And so in the West, we've differentiated them so much where

you know, on the one hand, you can kind of partake in these fun ritual activities without calling them ritual. On the other hand, we're sort of forgetting where they come from. And so in the case of any kind of ritualized combat, the only way that you can actually have

The only way that you can have combat safely in human society is if you put this strong boundary around it. You have to put like a physical boundary, a mental boundary, spiritual boundary, a legal boundary. You have to do all these things to encase it and to like keep it enclosed, right? Because what you're trying to do is you're trying to prevent the escalation to extremes. That's what Rene Girard talks about in Battling to the End. Now, he didn't really give them – he didn't really break it down mechanically. He was much more kind of just talking historically about it. I'm trying to break it down mechanically and applying it to today.

So in the case of, for example, fist fighting. Now, bare-knuckle boxing in America...

is actually a very recent phenomenon, at least sanctioned bare-knuckle boxing. For years, nobody would allow it. Every state legislator would come down hard on bare-knuckle boxing. It was the same with cage fighting. They used to call it cage fighting before the UFC. Well, now that the UFC has come around and sort of legitimized it and they allow blood, which is also very interesting because boxing doesn't allow blood. So we've sort of moved beyond the clean boxing into, okay, now we allow blood in the UFC. Okay, now we're allowing...

blood with bare knuckle boxing where you don't even have gloves anymore. So there's way more blood than before. And the more you sort of move into that bloody territory where there's a higher risk of contagion, it's sort of like the more boundaries you need to start putting around these things. And I think it actually speaks to the

advanced state that we're in that we're actually allowed to have bare knuckle boxing now throughout America. And it's not causing gang wars. In fact, it might be, it might be alleviating them. I don't know. Like somebody should do a study on it. I don't think it's, I don't think there's necessarily a rule about that. But that to me is a trend where,

The more advanced you go, the more you're able to actually have these things within like strict confines. And if any kind of escalation happens, you shut the thing down. But that can only happen within a differential framework. You can't have it outside of that because as soon as you break out of that and you allow just open, you know, open season, allowing any object to enter the into the equation, then you just have to you just have to shut it down again.

Why do you think there's such a human spectacle and desire to watch these ritual containments of violence from our parents? I don't know, man. It just does something to you. After a long day at the office, there's something...

Well, that's religious. That was religious to me. It's completely religious because we're religious people. I don't know if you get it. And, you know, we're just I'm just talking with you. So it doesn't have to fit within the confines of your book. And you can go back to some other things from your book you want to explore with us. But I think about the symmetry here of what you're talking about and mating rituals, you know, in the humans and animals, you know, and the differences. Right.

And it seems like there's some kind of parallel between combat and violence and how it relates to humans versus animals and mating, you know? Well, with animals, mating rituals are never about exchange. Mating rituals with humans are about exchange. So this is the really important distinction that I lay out in the book, which is that violence, with humans, violence has an exchange property to it. And that's why you can flip violence into language and into kinship. You can exchange these things.

Animal combat doesn't exchange very freely for anything because it doesn't have to, because animal combat doesn't cause a decimation of the species. With human combat, nuclear weapons can decimate our population entirely, and it can decimate everything else too. I believe that's true. So with anything humans do, there's always an exchange property, meaning –

Human mating, again, we're in this weird world right now, David, in America, in Europe, Western Europe, and probably Australia, where the mating ritual now is supposedly just you go to the nightclub and you sort of put on whatever your best outfit is and you're trying to attract women to go and sleep with them. And that's very new. This is not traditional mating. Right.

We like to think that early cavemen were like this, where cavemen would wander around with a club and they would find a woman they like and they do a mating dance. The woman didn't like it. They club them over the head and take them anyway. We like to think like that. Right. But that doesn't really line up with any of the anthropological material. All the ethnographic research done.

from the 17th century, from when they first started contacting Native people around the world, is that they noticed that there are none of these wandering cavemen. They just don't exist. They're all in community, and they're all so tightly connected that any kind of marriage ceremony has tons of regulations. If you even dare to think about committing incest, they'll kill you.

And so I think that was surprising to ethnographers who thought that they would find these wandering cavemen. In fact, they found very tight knit communities that were constrained way more than even Victorian England was constrained. Like in Victorian England, you weren't killed for having incest with your cousin on your father's side. But that was surprising.

That was going to happen to you if you committed incest with somebody of your own totem marker in Central Australia, Africa, North America. And so when we talk about mating rituals, then we really need to look very carefully at the anthropological record, which has unfortunately been sort of decimated by modern academia, in my opinion. They just don't really like talking about kinship. I think sometimes it's embarrassing for them. That's a different topic.

But in general, all mating, mating, I don't even like calling it that because it's not mating, it's exchanging. All kinship in human society is exchange. And Claude Lévi-Strauss talked about this, and I found about Claude Lévi-Strauss through Girard.

Any marriage, it's always reciprocal, right? So if a man takes a bride, or a lot of the time in these matrilineal societies, the bride will take a man into her clan. Her clan usually offers a reciprocal either payment or another mate, like they might exchange men, right? They'll take somebody from their clan and give it back.

or this is the that that would be called a restricted exchange and the more interesting one is like the Burma the Burma I think it's catching see K A C H I N S they have these five tribes

You think like ABCDE, right? And A gives a bride to B and B pays A. B gives a bride to C, C pays B. C gives a bride to D, D pays C. D gives a bride to E, E pays D. And then E gives a bride to A, A pays E. Now, if anybody reneges on payment, the entire cycle breaks.

So everybody is so held to these customs and there are so many customs in the catch-ins. Like everything has these, has like multiple payment schedules and they're like rate sheets, like certain catalog. It's like blockchain, isn't it? It's totally blockchain and it's shared. It's shared just by verbal agreement. I don't even call it agreement. It's just sort of in this ledger that sort of unites this tribe. And what that does with these five tribes is,

is that it creates this bond where it becomes very difficult for them to go to war with each other, right? So if A is going to go to war with C, right, then there's going to be all these marriages that say, well, it's going to screw up everything. You can't do that. And so the sort of operating system of these, you know, old networks is that you keep on spreading outward and forming these exchange networks through kinship. And what that does is it just makes it very hard to go to war with each other.

So how does that exchange continue today? Has it been eliminated? You mean in America? Yeah. We have an exchange system, but it's very different because we have a modern state. And what the modern state does is it's sort of

sort of took over those responsibilities of exchange. And you really kind of have two different kinship networks in America. There are multiple. There's a lot. America's huge. There's so many cultures here. But like you can kind of imagine the two major kinship networks as the political parties. I'm not going to get political. I am going to get anthropological. So if you think of like the liberal, the liberal kinship system as sort of originating in the East Coast and then the the the

the conservative kinship circle kind of combination of cowboys plus plantation where it's like property was handed down father to son locally. Well, those two kinship networks really draw everybody into their fray. And it's really hard to belong to both. You really can't like you have either one of the other kinship network, you belong to neither of them. And, and,

In the case of liberals, for example, there's a lot of promises within liberal society. There's a lot of promises within conservative society where if you align with us, we'll sort of

pay you back in a certain way, right? So if you align with us, we will make it easier for fathers to give inheritance to sons, right? That's sort of the conservative kinship system. And the liberal kinship system is, if you align with us, we'll make it easier for you to sort of go around everywhere and like, you know, go across borders. We'll make it easier for you to maybe start corporations. Like there's just a different kind of

promise. And if you don't have a male in your life will sort of like help fund you. Right. It's sort of just different incentive networks. Right. These are not normative statements, but that is sort of like our massive kinship system in America is has been like you could say co-opted by these political parties where you

You as an individual don't really have to join either one. But it's just a lot of the time it's more convenient. It's more convenient to join, you know, the Trump side or the, you know, Harris side or whatever it is.

Uh, and that just makes things more predictable for you. And you don't really have to go on an ad hoc basis when you're, you know, constructing your family system. Um, but you don't have to, you can come up with creative kinship systems. I'm, I'm doing that. I don't, I don't really like belong to either one. I just, you know, I'm kind of, I'm a single father and I kind of have my own idea of how I want to do this. And in fact, I find that not really aligning with either one of them makes it very easy for you to think creatively about your own kinship network. What do you think about all the exposure, you know, given, um,

the nature of violence as you describe it and uh how does that affect you know when we were all kids we were watching looney tunes and anvils are being hit on bunnies and stuff and we're all thinking it's okay is it okay though or does that do something you know ritualistically or neurologically or something that wires our brain or does it just you know

watching hours and hours of cartoon violence where none of the violence has any consequences or, of course, being exposed to brutal violence would even be traumatic in a different level for children. But we grow up and it's almost like an initiation into society. It doesn't matter what you, in the modern world, if you're going to watch programs, sooner or later you're going to see cartoonized violence on a regular basis. And the same thing goes for video games and so forth.

I have a section in the book about the exchange transfer between violence and kinship and kinship to violence. And I give some examples of some native societies. I actually had a copy editor who said, I shouldn't put this in. It's like, you're going to get people mad. But I was like, well, if it's not true, I'll just give the source, but I'm going to put it in for what I know. So there were various ancient traditional societies, Native American, Maori, that would teach children

to be totally uncompromising. And the way that they taught them to do that was by torturing animals. And sometimes they would partake in torturing people. And so violence, exposure to violence for children is nothing new. When George Washington fought in the Revolutionary War at age 16 or something like that, I don't really know that history. But kids and violence are...

That's that's old. That's an old thing. Right. And in any in, you know, the right of initiation into manhood for a for a for a boy is typically between 12 and 13 years old. It's a very violent process. It was bloody. You would technically sometimes they would die. Sorry, he didn't make it. And so I'm not convinced that first of all, I'm not convinced that this is new.

Okay, is it good? Well, I think you have to take each instance on its own. And this is an issue with video game violence and I work in the business. And so a lot of the questions that I get are, well, is video game violence causing violence or is it preventing violence? And the question is, yes.

you have to look at whoever it is that commits a violent act or who doesn't commit a violent act right you can pull up tons of examples columbine kids would make doom levels based on their in their high school you could make the case that like wow doom was really driving them toward violence but maybe and then you could also take all these people who's claimed that well if it weren't for video games i would have shot up my high school right you could you could take all that and sort of

politicize that i i you know i kind of follow the golden mean i'm like confucius i i say look each case needs to be taken on its own the columbine kids you got to look at what was going on in their lives there's probably a lot more than doom going on in their lives let's let's let's put doom away for a

At their lives, what was going on? Like, I don't really know anything about their parents. All I don't really know about, like what their situations were. All I know is that they were playing Doom. Well, is that fair? And so what seems to me most likely, and I'm not going to put money on this, but I would argue that video games neither cause nor prevent violence. I just don't think that it's like an adequate catalyst. I think that the catalyst is way more structural.

I think that crises cause violence, right? And this is like a, otherwise I think we're just scapegoating people for making art. Art is much more to me is much more of the medium of violence instead of a catalyst, either stopping or causing. So I try and, I try and, you know, bring some sanity to this. I have this story where in Catholic school, we, um,

I was kind of a kingpin in my Catholic grade school. So what I, what I, I was the guy, I was the guy who could get rap albums. So I could get the albums that had the parental advisory stickers. Cause I had, I had a whole system worked out where I could convince somebody to go and buy it for me, or I'd pull the sticker off. And I had like a whole stack of these stickers in my wallet and I'd show them like, Hey, that was my claim to fame. And the school became convinced that that rap music was going to make us violent.

And so they confiscate they couldn't confiscate the the albums, but they could confiscate our flannel jackets, which if you remember, flannel jackets were all the rage in the 90s because of rap artists. Right. So they took our flannel jackets and.

So there was this huge crackdown in the 80s and 90s. There was a lot of, you know, the evangelical right was really hard on media at the time. You know, they were saying that rock music and rap music was the cause of all the Satanism and the child sacrifice going on and the satanic panic. A lot of that was sort of predicated on this idea that media was causing this problem.

And you see the same thing later in, you know, in recent times where there was this and it wasn't as big, but there was this sort of fear mongering over this kind of music called Fashwave. Fashwave was this electronic music is usually probably made out of from Finland or, you know, guys on keyboards. Right. And it was supposedly this fascist electronic music that was like threatened to turn people into anti-Semites.

And the left then went on this campaign like, well, we need to we need to not allow this. And now you see it with with YouTube censoring words like drug, rape, kill. They censor these words now on YouTube. And if you don't self-censor, then they just like cut out your your demographic. You're not going to be able to get as many viewers on your video now.

And I'm not convinced at all that either side is correct in this. I think that censoring speech and censoring art does practically nothing. It just causes people to look somewhere else. Sometimes you go to the black market, you have worse problems.

And so that's that's sort of I try and bring some sanity to that discussion in the book, because I don't think that it's even a worthwhile political debate. I think that you just need to look at the individual situations, look at every instance of violence and look at structurally why that violence happened, because the answer is deeper than what they were playing always is. So it seems like human authority kind of derives from who has the ultimate power.

black box other tool at their disposal, right? Becomes the kind of

authority for the time, right? It's like you've got this escalation of extremes. I throw a pebble at you, you throw a boulder at me. I pull out a sword, you pull out a gun. I duck it and bring back an army of guns. You bring back a tank, you know, until you get to the states that we have today where they have nuclear power and drones and insane levels of killing mechanisms at their disposal.

And they then take on a sacred aura that we tear each other apart over whenever it gets threatened. So what would happen if that's the case, and that's the way humans do violence, if they were to be introduced to a story that they find somewhat believable, that the biggest authority is pursued and relinquishes all claims of violent reprisal to the point of being executed?

Oh, man. Yeah. You kind of touching on just the heart of the crucifixion and the resurrection. And, you know, just going back to what you said about the black box, you know, the the the people in power, I would argue now are the nuclear physicists. They're sort of the ones that figured out the bomb. And so all of our sciences are sort of filtered through that mindset.

And unfortunately, what that means is that when you filter the social sciences through nuclear physics, then everybody gets reduced to atomic matter and you lose differentiation. You lose a differentiation between humans and animals. And you see this with a lot of kind of modern philosophy where people are saying, well, you know, humans are just space dust. Neil deGrasse Tyson goes on about this stuff. Carl Sagan did, too.

And you have kind of like a modern religion about the worthlessness of humans and antinatalist movements and whatnot. And I think that that all of that is sort of born out of nuclear physics and the nuclear bomb. Um, not the nuclear physics itself built that even Einstein, you know, when they told him like, by the way, did you know equals empty squared could be used to destroy a country? He said, no, I didn't know that. Uh, uh,

So you can't, I mean, you can't blame Einstein. I'm sure he, he obviously was very torn about this. Oppenheimer obviously was very torn about this. I spent a lot of their time sort of trying to write that if there was any writing to be done, but

Just as that was the case with nuclear power, the same was true of gunpowder. The same was true of iron. Everybody was always talking about doom and gloom due to gunpowder, doom and gloom due to iron. So Hesiod, Enoch, Ovid, Aeschylus, they all sort of talked about how iron being introduced as...

The sort of death of humanity. This was the thing that brought war, right? And every sort of black box, like you mentioned, every new black box is the new thing. At the same time, every black box, nuclear energy might be our solution to this issue, right? The nuclear energy, if we can not use bombs, which we haven't, we haven't used them, which is amazing, right?

If we can avoid doing that, and if we can figure out a way to harness nuclear energy, we might have a solution to all these issues. Imagine nearly free power. It's possible. And so, again, everything, but all of this entails exchange. So if you think of exchange on a secular level,

Food, for example. In everything that we do, we have a relationship with it. So we have a relationship with food. We have a relationship with kinship. We have a relationship with our environment, our house. Everything is this give and take. And the world...

sort of imposes a rate sheet on us, right? Like, so, so when you're eating, whatever it is, uh, you know, if you're an ancient, if you're in an ancient society, because you're eating, you're sort of feeling obligated to pay a chi for a God, right? In a modern society, when you're eating, you're sort of feeling obligated to donate calories, you know, in a workout, sort of feeling obligated to fast. Uh, there's always some kind of exchange,

And that's what happens when we get wrapped up in worldly affairs. And like you said, you know, and it's the same thing with violence. When you get punched, your gut reaction is like this. This is an exchange. And I have to give back. That's sort of a gut reaction. That's not an animal thing. That's a human thing. The human the human desire for reciprocity is uniquely human.

Because, you know, if you shoot an animal, an animal doesn't go get a gun. They don't they don't act like that. Right. Like some of them just cower and sort of submit. Humans are not that way. There's always there's this like built in exchange system with humans. And so what what the resurrection tells us is that you can actually sort of default out of this exchange relationship and just pass it off to a third party.

Right. And that's basically what a high priest has always done. The high priest is always supposed to be that sort of that's sort of you can kind of like outsource the exchange to the high priest. And that's in this this this trend you see is happening in the Bible.

Because at first it's like, okay, if you commit some kind of a wrong, and if you don't want to give your blood for that wrong, you go to the high priest and the high priest gives an animal, which gives the blood. So he's doing the exchange. And you see with tithing, if you're not able to...

So you're living off the land, you're sort of living off of the fruits of Israel and the Bible. You're expected to give a tithe offering to the temple. But if you can't, if it's too far away, well, then just bring money, go to the market, the temple market, exchange it for tithe offerings and then take that. So there's always these ideas building up to this third party that is going to help you exchange whatever it is to get you out of that loop.

And the crucifixion is sort of like the ultimate exchange property where not only do you no longer have to partake in violence, you actually don't really need to partake in any kind of exchange relationship on earth if you're working through love. And a lot of that comes down to, you know, like the gospel message of, you know, love thy neighbor as thyself, which comes from Leviticus. And by acting through love, you sort of like undermine the exchange system.

And you don't even really need to participate in it. And just by exchanging love, you sort of go on this like other kind of vertical exchange system. And that's just how I've come to understand, you know, how the horizontal exchange properties of humans, whether it's violence, kinship, even language, that's stuff that you kind of get stuck on by default. But then there's a vertical exchange system where you can exit that.

Is love in that, I know there's a lot of ways to unpack that, but as far as your theories, framework, would love be an attitude or a disposition or just an action or, you know, a feeling of wanting the best for the other for no other exchange purpose other than that's a fondness or is it just a wanting peace and, you know?

How far can we go with what love is in the framework of your theory? Well, I'm very leery of the term peace. If Gerard taught me anything, it's that peace is a red herring. Because you can get peace by killing a scapegoat. Human sacrifices produce a lot of peace. So is it an attitude? Well, what does the attitude come from?

To me, love is a relationship. And I don't think that you can really love your neighbor as yourself until you love yourself. And what I'm hoping is that the psychiatry sciences and social sciences kind of catch on to this idea more.

about the wounded child within. Alice Miller wrote these amazing books about child abuse. She wrote this one called For Your Own Good, where she basically psychoanalyzed the Third Reich and Hitler, which is a very daring thing to do. And she's a Jewish woman. And it might not have looked very good for her to do this because she's looking at Hitler as a wounded child. How crazy is that? That Hitler might've been a child at one point, which he was.

Everybody starts as a child. Everybody starts as an innocent child. We have to acknowledge this. And that includes ourselves. We all start as innocent children. And if we don't acknowledge that, right, if we think instead that we're just pure garbage, we're not lovable. Well, if you believe that you're not lovable, then that's self-destructive. If you don't want to destroy yourself, then you need to project that outward and you will treat other people as being unlovable.

And you'll start hating the world. And that's a relationship. That's a relationship that you have with yourself that's being projected outward. And so when you accept yourself as a child worthy of love, who is wronged, not intentionally necessarily, but just by the nature of these exchange cycles in the world.

Everybody's wounded by that. Everybody, everybody all the time. And so if you see yourself as a product of that and as unlovable, then you're going to treat the world that way. And that's going to be your attitude. But if you understand yourself as inherently lovable, as being in the image of our creator, right? If you accept that, then you can look at yourself in a new way.

as being inherently worthy of love, and then you can see the world that way too. So you don't need a behavior change. You don't need an attitude change at all. It's a relationship change, and it has to start with you. That's good. Yeah, you know, when you're talking about the human unique nature of violence,

And I thought of and then you talked about love. It made me think about how much our relationships in this country are mediated by the violence of the state with the family court systems and people go into a death drive where they're fighting tooth and nail over a child. And, you know what I mean? And that's kind of like that.

That you don't know what tool they're going to pull out next thing through a judicial mechanisms and legal mechanisms and all these terrible things. You hear all these horror stories that people go through and what do they say? 50% of divorces are marriages in, in that way. And there's all these incentive structures that,

politically to keep that going. So many people making money off of the blood sport of the family court system's approach to marriage. And it makes you see your theory come to life there, you know, in a psychological tool sense. But it's a real tool. It is. Yeah, it is. And then your family structure will naturally sort of follow suit. I had a crazy...

I call it miraculous kind of break with that where I now have full custody of my three boys and there was no fighting over it. It was just one and done. And don't even ask me how that happened because I can't quite understand it. And that was how I came to being a single father, the three boys. If you are mad at yourself, you are going to hate your kids.

they're going to drive you insane because everything they do is sort of stuff that you did. Right. Especially with a father who has a boy, just one boy, whatever he does, the stuff that you did. And when you hate yourself, you see him doing the stuff you did and you hate him. And when you're hating your son, man, it's just one thing leads to another. And then now CPS is on you and you lose your kid.

And now I'm not in the game of like fighting CPS and like advocating that people should be allowed to beat their kids. Like I'm not I'm not there. Like to me, it's like we got to go way higher than this. We got to go back to understanding yourself, loving yourself, go back to the Gospels, go back to the Old Testament, love yourself, love your neighbor as yourself. And then from that, all good things will happen. You won't have to worry about the court system.

That's the way I see it. Like if you want, if you're worried about the court system, if you're worried about politics, again, I say then that you are, you are in this horizontal exchange system. But if you go for the vertical, if you get out of that, then I think that there's nothing to fear. Right.

There's a lot of young people in Gen Z that don't want to have family formation because of that very fear nature that people have. Yeah, it's sad. But it all ties into the things you talk about in your book. Can you show it again? And then we'll give your website any last words you want to share with us today? If these fists could talk, a stuntman's unflinching take on violence, you can get it on Amazon and paperback and e-book.

And my website is ericjacobus.com. You can also get me on Instagram now. I'm on X as The Eric Jacobus. It's a sort of autobiography, but there's a lot of good stories in there where I talk about my career as a stuntman. And that's sort of how I bring the theory to life.

So I hope people aren't afraid of a theoretical approach to violence because it is sort of written for the common person. It's not an academic book. I understand the fatigue with reading academic books. It's very difficult, especially books on violence. So I tried to write it for the average person. So I hope everybody enjoys it. Well, thank you for your time, Eric. It's been great talking to you. Thanks, David. Thank you.

Bye.