Reddit reviews Dark Nature: A Natural History of Evil

I have a couple of non-fiction reading recommendations. They helped me at least understand a lot of what frustrates me about other people. I still disagree with a lot of things folks do, but at least I understand why folks do these things without having to think of them as evil fucktards.

1. The Authoritarians, by Bob Altemeyer. Link is to PDF version provided by the author. It explains a lot of the behavior of religious followers for simply accepting what religious authorities say. From WMDs in Iraq to creationist tropes, this helped me understand the underlying mechanism of why seemingly otherwise rational people believe this crap.
   
   
2. Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined (amazon link). Whether or not you agree with Pinker's analysis (some folks don't like that he rates violence per capita rather than raw count), his breakdown of factors that contribute to violence is fascinating. I went into the book thinking that religion causes violence, but came out convinced that it's more frequently used as an excuse for violence that would have occurred anyway. It's an interesting read by any metric and will drastically change the way you think about trends of violence. It's also reasonably approachable by laymen (like me) to statistics.
   
   
3. Dark Nature: A Natural History of Evil. This studies a lot of the evolutionary and naturalistic reasons for "evil". This one is a bit dated now, and you may wish to look at one of Frans de Waal's books on primate morality instead, but I personally liked most of it. He veers a bit off course at the end IMO, but the first 3/4 of the book is an excellent analysis of why evil not just exists, but will likely exist as long as we allow evolutionary drives to exist (and we're a very long ways off from genetic engineering sufficient to counter it).

Recommended reading:

Dark Nature: A Natural History of Evil

by Lyall Watson

https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Nature-Natural-History-Evil/dp/0060176881/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=Lyall+Watson&link_code=qs&qid=1556099776&s=gateway&sourceid=Mozilla-search&sr=8-4