Skip ahead to modern times, and I invite you to look at the last 20 years of entertainment in its various forms. The rise of MMA as a legitimate sport. The primacy of the superhero film genre. Hilarious fail videos on the Internet. Grand Theft Everything. Fuckin' Shark Week. I defy anyone to suggest, with a straight face, that we are beyond or above or even adjacent to violence as a species. We're staring it in the face, one hand balled into a fist, the other digging into our popcorn.

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Even our snacks are created by violent food mini-explosions.

If conflict is essential to good storytelling, then violence, devoid of context, is entertainment, I would argue. How often do people stop to watch a fight? Kids in a schoolyard congregate like ants on a Twizzler when classmates throw down. Internet videos of fights are hugely popular. We don't need to know what instigated the fight, but we'll watch it play out if we can. It doesn't even need to be humans. How many nature shows are based on the circle of life, stoically narrating friendly meerkats being eaten by ravenous meerdogs? It's engaging to watch two things struggle, violently, against one another. There's a reason Floyd Mayweather can afford to be so obnoxious; people like watching him kick other people's asses.

What makes a human aggressive? You may be surprised to learn there isn't a thing -- a switch, a gland, or a little rager spot in your brain -- that controls it all. Aggression is a nuanced, contextual response that cannot be pinpointed and explained away. People want science to work that way; they want a gay gene and a fat gene and an aggression gene, but at best what happens is neuroscience may discover a section of some people's brains that in certain instances seems to promote certain reactions that make it more likely for you to be obese, or an alcoholic, or violent. But it's never 100 percent. It's just some people. Sometimes.

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"He didn't tell me they charged extra for guac. I regret nothing."

Chimpanzees are pretty closely related to humans, and they can be extremely violent as well. But why? Studies of violent behavior in chimps come up as empty-handed as studies of violent behavior in humans. Violent chimps don't have an advantage in mating, or food gathering, or anything. Just like humans. Do violent dudes get their pick of the ladies for mating? Quite the opposite, sometimes.

And yet we do violence. We cheer action heroes. Hell, we call them heroes. Being heroic involves overcoming a great adversity that often in fiction literally means killing something. The hero slays a dragon or some terrible beast. Iron Man dukes it out with The Hulk and gets his ass handed to him, but triumphs in the end. The hero has violence done unto him and then doles out even more to balance the scales for the side of justice. Justice is being killed the right way, in this instance. Maaaaaybe being imprisoned, but only after the bad guy was beaten so badly he couldn't run away if he tried.

Marvel Studios
"Half of my leg bones are currently leaking out of my asshole."

The Mawe people of Brazil famously weave bullet ants into gloves that are worn on the hands of young men as part of an initiation to become warriors. This is an isolated tribe of about 10,000 people with no modern technology, no cares for the world the rest of us live in. This is what they feel is part of becoming a valuable member of society, a ritual of pain. Endure, and you prove yourself. You become the hero. The warrior. The man.

Humans, as I understand it, were not particularly violent in their earliest iterations. It was only when we started forming agrarian societies and living in groups that violence became a prominent part of life.

Like the mighty, sexy bonobo and the mighty, bitey chimpanzee, humans are not violent by nature. We simply possess the ability. We have a violent acumen, if you will. It's in our skillset. So when the circumstances are such that we feel the need to be violent, we are. And this can be both right and wrong. Because there's more than one kind of violence.

There's structured and unstructured violence. Violence in which we participate willingly and violence in which we do not. Of course we abhor senseless violence, the real kind with real victims who did not ask for it and did not deserve it. No one wants women and children being abused, and any kind of violent crime should be offensive to people in any society. But to deny that we revel in structured violence is to deny our humanity.

Like mice, humans crave violence. That's science, people. And that's what's enraging about these pseudo-elitist, advanced humans who look down upon the sweaty masses and their bloodsports. There's nothing wrong with bloodsports if they fall under the structured, planned violence label. Much like alcohol and drugs can be abused, a car can be used as a weapon, and you can use fire to cook a tasty burger or burn down an orphanage, violence in general can be abused. To lump it all together under one banner as bad, or subhuman, or crass and bestial, does a disservice to humanity and insults us all.

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Save those labels for where they belong: politics.

Consider the role justified violence plays in our society. Things like contests and even in instances of self-defense. The act of violence ends with a reward for one participant. You get something out of being violent. You win a boxing match and are rewarded with literal prizes. And even if someone tries to mug you, if you fight them off the reward is a win; you have triumphed and protected what is yours. That's an undeniable rush. And it's physiological, too.

The fight-or-flight response releases a juicy cocktail of good-time chemicals into your body, including norepinephrine, adrenaline, and various endorphins. This gets you primed and ready to kick ass or at least run away like a gazelle. After the fight, the feeling of glorious victory is bolstered by serotonin, dopamine, and the happy-time chemicals your brain likes to dole out when things are awesome.

I think it's a refusal to acknowledge, at the very least, a dichotomy of violence. Of good and bad violence. We're willing to accept all manner of other "bad" things from smoking to drinking to bum fiddling groups of strangers, and we just tell people to do it responsibly. Why can't we beat the shit out of people responsibly? Don't answer; it's a trick question. We already do. In wrestling, in boxing, in any place someone agrees to throw down just for the hell of it. Violence is OK. It's thrilling and fills a need, a hunger that humans have inside them. This conflict and struggle entertains us. The creative ways to dispatch a foe in movies and video games thrill us. And why not? You could read detective fiction and get a thrill from pretending to solve a crime, or you could watch Deadpool and get a thrill from pretending to hack a dude's head off.

See why violence in movies can be totally off the mark in 23 Lies Everyone Believes About Violence (Thanks To Movies), and check out video games that make Deadpool look about as violent as two pillows hugging in A History Of Violence: 6 Old-School Games As Brutal As 'GTA.'

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