“When war comes the bank clerk may escape and become a commando, and then at last he feels that he is living as nature intended him to live. But, unfortunately, science has put into our hands such enormously powerful means of satisfying our destructive instincts, that to allow them free play no longer serves any evolutionary purpose, as it did while men were divided into petty tribes.”
Bertrand Russell writes that competition and impulses have always existed. Humans have always acted on these impulses for creative and evolutionary purposes. He alludes to primitive competition and how it has changed over the years. He states that competition should not be discouraged or destroyed, but rather modified so that we do not cause each other any great harm. To support his claim, Russell uses the rivalry in sports, arts, and politics to demonstrate that competition is healthy and helps us to exercise our natural combative instincts. However, as time passes, technology changes as well. The advancement of science and the tools available to us today makes it hard to practice benign matches/rivalries. Science and technology offers destructive weapons that people can use against each other not for evolutionary purposes.