"[9][page needed] Colleges, sports teams, churches, trades unions, female fashions and political parties enable people to exhibit tribal loyalty within large, mass-communicating nations.
[12] "Nationalism as such is no more than a human expression of the animal drive to maintain and defend a territory... the mentality of the single Germanic tribe under Hitler differed in no way from that of early man or late baboon.
The inherited aggression of the amity–enmity rivalry between communities is rationalized under a "persistent cloak of ideology... a matter of ideals, moral principles, social philosophies or religious beliefs.... [O]nly an immense amount of intellectual restraint will save the situation.
According to Steven Pinker, the "bitter lessons of lynchings, world wars, and the Holocaust" have caused "prevailing theories of mind" to be "refashioned to make racism and sexism as untenable as possible.
Man is a product of nature, as much as malarial mosquitoes; both "are doing exactly what evolution designed them to do, even if the outcome makes people suffer... [We] cannot call their behavior pathological... [T]he belief that violence is an aberration is dangerous.