According to you, is the world violent because there are 7,5 billion people?

You seem to be making a supposition that the world is violent (first), and then that the cause of that violence is the increasing human population of the planet.

In the first place, that assumption or supposition is generally incorrect. The world has never been as generally peaceful as it is now. However, things aren’t perfect, and there certainly is a level of violence – particularly in some parts of the world and in some particular ethnic, religious, racial and class conflicts, and certainly among individuals.

I think that the reason that the world is becoming more peaceful even as the human population increases is because more and more reliance is being made upon capitalism as an economic system that “works” – to the extent that it generally does, and it’s certainly not perfect, either! – to support the populations of the planet.

It doesn’t help.
As technology advances more low end people are shoved out of work making it even harder for them to earn a living creating more desperate people forced to do just about anything to feed their families.
That and people being payed a slave wage they can’t possibly live from.
Hey but get out there and breed,breed,breed, the wealthy need more wage slaves.
What could possibly turn people violent?
Hell let’s just compare people to farm animals for fun,let’s use hogs as just an example if you have enough feeder space, warm area, and water for every one in the pen they get along quite nicely,you over crowd the same area they fight and hurt each other just to get at the food and water, same goes for people.

I think there is something to overpopulation being an influence. After all, most of the large metropolitan centers in this nation have significantly higher crime rates than the rural areas in the same state.

I’ve mentioned this on this site before:
If you put two rats in a box, and feed them, they will multiply. When the box becomes full of rats, they will turn on each other and kill each other. This is a fact! The Earth can only safely sustain about 500 million people, so this can very well be one part of the problem.
But I don’t believe that this is the over-riding reason the world seems ever more violent, although I believe it is a contribution. I believe it is because of chemicals in the air and water that creates a unbalanced condition in ourselves that augments our violent tendencies.

The high human population is not the only or greatest cause of violence, but it is one factor. If the world had 1% of the human population is does now, all other things being the same, there would be much less human violence and much less impact of human industry and many more natural resources and space available so non-human environments could sustain themselves better, and there would be less general desperation on various levels.

Especially in the future, as excessive human industry and agriculture lead to environmental disasters and entire regions likely become uninhabitable due to climate change and other cascading effects, large segments of this large human population will likely be put into perceived competition with each other for survival, leading to terrible violence before we probably all die off. If we had much less population and correspondingly less environmental destruction, there very likely would be no such crises nor the mindsets of world domination and industrial excesses.

Transforming those mindsets and curbing those activities however seems to me like the main root problem facing humans and many other species. The overpopulation is just part of what multiplies the effects precipitates the crises.

Of course it’s about the numbers. But how does one measure or even define “violence”? @CWOTUS is correct. The violence overall has declined considerably in proportion to the population the earth now supports. I take strong issue however with the conclusion that capitalism or any other system footed on greed as models responsible for the reduction of violence.

It will be interesting once the t-shirt you buy at Wal*Mart is made in Kenya. Production is wrapping around the globe west. I would not be shocked if the iPhone 40 was designed in California and made in The Peoples Republic of The Congo. I am not joking.

And this is totally fine with me. I like free trade. Make shit where it is cheapest. I like cheap shit too.

However.. In exchange for this free-trade I want to be able to move to wherever I can get paid the most with minimal bullshit. Open the borders and let people move freely. Let every country compete for labor like the states currently do.

If there is a sweet job in Sweden that is a perfect match I should be able to work there like if I was moving to Alabama..

“Violence” is a human constructed concept.

It is how the world has worked since the beginning. Plants steal nourishment from the Earth. Plant eaters destroy plants, to steal the nourishment. Meat eaters destroy them to steal that nourishment etc.

Fighting each other makes many species better. It’s a big part of natural selection. Fighting, killing, stealing etc is how resources are gained. If an animal isn’t good at “violence,” it will be lost to the pages of history.

Violence isn’t necessarily the problem. Nor is population. It’s the ability to choose when violence is absolutely necessary, or the inability to coexist, and use the resources we have efficiently, that leads to problems. Combine that with greed, and “peace” (also a human concept) is unsustainable.

We have the knowledge, and technology to sustain everyone and more. But it won’t work without massive change in the way society “works,” and how we all view and treat one another…

As Steven Pinker points out in his recently published book, violence has been in decline since the start of the Enlightenment.

People don’t appreciate how brutal life was before the Enlightenment. There were numerous capital offenses, like theft, and various tortures like drawing and quartering were used to punish offenders. Nobody questioned slavery. Women were burnt at the stake for supposed witchcraft.

There can always be improvement and in there is no guarantee that the trend will continue, but generally speaking, things have gotten better.

@LostInParadise They haven’t gotten better in terms of non-human species or the environment.

Even a ways into the Enlightenment, cat burning was a spectator event.. The idea of animal rights is of recent origin.

The changes to the environment by our species has been going on for so long and has been so dramatic that some geologists refer to the Anthropocene epoch.

The world is violent because the world is violent. Nature is violent.

The world has been violent long before there were 7.5 billion people. Just read your history books.