Critics on the other side of these debates have deeper worries. For one thing, the false picture of, say, Amazonian tribes as ceaselessly violent has been used to justify stealing their land. According to Stephen Corry of Survival International, a human-rights organization that advocates for indigenous tribal peoples, “Pinker is promoting a fictitious, colonialist image of a backward ‘Brutal Savage’, which pushes the debate back over a century and is still used to destroy tribes.”
