Quote from: General_A on January 27, 2015, 06:50:29 PM

. . .

^^ I could not agree more with this. It has taken many a hard working man to create the society in which we are blessed to be currently living in today. Our forefathers have fought for centuries told to fight for the standard of living that most of us in the west enjoy today. They would probably be immensely proud of how far our species has come and the fruits that our and there labour have brought. However, I am also sure they would be a little pleased to see how are appetites for bigger and better have increased exponentially, whereas our hunger to work hard for such improvements has practically vanished.

In Asia, that hunger is growing. Watch the east.

(Red colorization mine.)

Quote from: Jonathan Webb, BBC News, 2014 link=http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29237276

These parameters link the violence to natural selection: killing competitors improves a male chimp's access to resources like food and territory - and crucially, it will happen more frequently when there is greater competition from neighbouring groups, and when the males can patrol in large numbers, with less risk to their own survival.

Chimpanzees and bonobos are our closest living evolutionary relatives

"It's a natural behaviour - it's not something that we've induced by disturbance or intervention," explained Dr Susanne Shultz, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Manchester.

Quote from: Dale Wilkerson, University of North Texas, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy link=http://www.iep.utm.edu/nietzsch/#H4

Nietzsches philosophy contemplates the meaning of values and their significance to human existence. Given that no absolute values exist, in Nietzsches worldview, the evolution of values on earth must be measured by some other means. How then shall they be understood? The existence of a value presupposes a value-positing perspective, and values are created by human beings (and perhaps other value-positing agents) as aids for survival and growth. Because values are important for the well being of the human animal, because belief in them is essential to our existence, we oftentimes prefer to forget that values are our own creations and to live through them as if they were absolute. For these reasons, social institutions enforcing adherence to inherited values are permitted to create self-serving economies of power, so long as individuals living through them are thereby made more secure and their possibilities for life enhanced. Nevertheless, from time to time the values we inherit are deemed no longer suitable and the continued enforcement of them no longer stands in the service of life. To maintain allegiance to such values, even when they no longer seem practicable, turns what once served the advantage to individuals to a disadvantage, and what was once the prudent deployment of values into a life denying abuse of power. When this happens the human being must reactivate its creative, value-positing capacities and construct new values.

(Red colorization mine.)

Alexander did, indeed, conquer many a people; however, conquest is a self-preservation technique so primitive as to be employed by chimpanzees.