Interesting argument, but misses how modern culture abstracts and distances violences.
If you included people being starved and denied healthcare for "economic reasons", and also the number of deaths from avoidable illnesses caused by promoting harmful and/or addictive products for profit, the numbers would be less reassuring.
I don't think that these two can be directly compared.
For example, a lot of animals are kept and slaughtered in less than optimal conditions away from our sight, but it would be a stretch of the word to call everyone who is not a vegan a psychopath for just eating animal products that came with some history of abuse.
The defining thing about psychopathy is that psychopaths like, or at least are indifferent to, violence face to face.
U.S. population: ~335 million
Deaths per 100,000: 412
‘’’
So combined with the 8 violent deaths per year it washes out to be about the same as the 420:100,000 prehistoric figure. (Using very hand waivey numbers - and excluding things like traffic deaths that have a huge utility tradeoff).
It really isn't. Even if we accept the premise that offering/advertising cigarettes is somehow equal to bashing someone's skull with a rock, there's still the problem of attributing all tobacco/alcohol/drug deaths as being perpetuated by others. In other words, it assumes people have no agency and pretends that all such deaths wouldn't happen if it wasn't for tobacco/alcohol/drug companies, which is absurd. Tobacco and alcohol are almost as old as civilization, for instance. Thus your calculations are at best, an upper bound for how much "violence" is being inflicted.
There's also the problem that as medicine and sanitation improves, deaths shift from causes that are hard to blame on anyone (eg. pneumonia) to deaths that can plausibly be blamed on society (eg. cancer, heart disease). Cancer deaths have gone up not because the environment has gotten more cancerous, it's because the non-cancer deaths have been eliminated. I doubt anyone would think that's a bad thing, even if you accept those things count as "violence".
That’s a fair point about personal agency, but it sidesteps the meat of the parent's comment: modern systems are engineered to obscure accountability. Many "personal" deaths - addiction, poor health, lack of care - aren't just random or self-inflicted. They emerge from structures built to deflect blame: lobbying, regulatory capture, and alegal negative externalities[1]. The issue isn't agency vs. violence - it's that our bureaucracies are designed to make harm invisible and responsibility untraceable.
Or as Stafford Beer wrote "the purpose of a system is what it does." The system we've built reliably produces death and violence - intentions or agency aside.
Yeah, this is an interesting point! It would be very hard to quantify, but it feels fair to say there is a significant level of what might be called “covert violence” in modern society that would increase the numbers if it could be accurately measured, and wouldn’t have applied to prehistory. I would largely exclude things like alcohol and tobacco, but a lot of other things feel valid to include to me. And if you consider something like Covid-related deaths could be included, which I realise would be debatable, the numbers would rise significantly.
If you included people being starved and denied healthcare for "economic reasons", and also the number of deaths from avoidable illnesses caused by promoting harmful and/or addictive products for profit, the numbers would be less reassuring.