Human Aggression

"The two most powerful psychological forces in human history have been without doubt violence and greed. The amount and degree of atrocities that have been committed throughout ages in various countries of the world-many of them in the name of God--is truly unimaginable and indescribable. We can think here of the countless Christians, sacrificed in Roman arenas to provide a highly sought-afar spectacle for masses, many hundreds of thousands of victims of the medieval Inquisition who were tortured, killed, and burned in the autos-da-fe, the mass slaughters on the sacrificial altars of the Aztecs, and the millions of soldiers and civilians killed in wars and revolutions of all times." International Journal of Humanities and Peace - January 1, 2001 - Grof, Stanislav)

They sliced and diced the adults and roasted infants on spits. If they had cameras they would have sent home pictures of their vile "human-animal" deeds.

"...Several well-regarded scientists including anthropologist Richard Wrangham and psychologist Steven Pinker have asserted the existence of evolutionary and genetic underpinnings to explain humans' consistent engagement in violence despite cultural differences..." (Sonya Una Sanchez - "Does Human Nature Necessitate War? - , April 23, 2003)

Where do we get all this aggression? Why are we so aggressive? Religious fanatics even seek their own death. They welcome it. They hasten it. They believe it will free them. It has at times been attributed to male hormones and Hollywood (and Bollywood) portrays men in their films doing most of the killing, but that is a self-delusion. Women also kill and many have led men and other women into battle urging on their bloodbaths.

Males can be stronger, but women are not anymore peaceful than their male counterparts. Today they participate in wars just as frequently as men and there are many women fighter pilots. Peru's Shining Path assassins were very often led almost entirely by women.

Howard Bloom (The Lucifer Principle) writes "killing is an invention not of man but of nature." "Nature's amusements are cruel." he says. Indeed they are.

"..[B]iological studies suggest that aggression is still an innate part of the human behavioral repertoire. Indeed, despite the so-called progress of civilization, aggression continues to haunt the human experience. Thousand's of years of warfare have not dampened the human race's capacity for violence and aggression. General levels of violence have increased in the United States and in many parts of Western Europe over the last half-century... In fact, human intelligence coupled with the capacity for aggression is a deadly combination in an era of thermonuclear weaponry, growing international terrorism, ethnic cleansing, genocide and state-sponsored, state-organized warfare." (Christopher Larsen, Human Aggression)

Diane Fossey, studying our close cousins, the central African mountain gorillas, found evidence of widespread infanticide. Human history is replete also with examples of infanticide where close relatives were in competition to inherit power and riches and who would carry on the blood line. Islam had simlar wars, after Muhammad died, to determine the line of descent. The Chinese empirers had hundreds and even thousands of noble family members and they very often died violently - and even at the hands of females. And females also are very skilled at encouraging violence. They do it with sex and "love" as they woe warriors and those who they can benefit from in sexual unions.

Violence was rampant during all periods of human history. Crusaders often roasted babies alive, even Christian babies when the local folk did not speak their language so they considered them heathens to whom they showed NO mercy. They sliced and diced the adults and roasted infants on spits. If they had cameras they would have sent home pictures of their vile "human-animal" deeds.

Human animals are so concerned about what is good and what is evil not to recognize our own nature which is status, dominance, war and killing, all basic to our natural instincts. I'm not going to moralize about whether or not it is wrong or immoral because those terms are subjective. I know personally, as an animal who wants to live out my life in peace I prefer a world where there is no war, but not everyone does. And the moral question is not even part of that equation which was introduced by philosophies and more specifically in recorded history by religions who preach their particular form of morality while enforcing conformity with war and murder. There is plenty of hypocrisy in that yet somehow we can justify anything, can't we? That kind of morality is subjective and is out of sync with what we are.

We are not the only animals which wages war in any sense of the term. Other animals also wage war on their own species. Our closest relatives, chimpanzees, who share roughly 98% of our genes are also status conscious and they live in social groups and they wage war on their neighbors.

If you were to put a sample of chimpanzee DNA next to a sample of human DNA -- and if you had any idea what you were looking at -- you would see that the samples are nearly identical. Chimps and humans share 96 percent of their DNA, and some new research suggests that chimps and humans may have split off from a common ancestor just 4 million years ago, which is a more recent estimate than the generally accepted time-frame of 5 to 7 million years. This would mean that it took about 4 million years for humans and chimpanzees to become completely separate species. The two are so close on the evolutionary ladder that observing chimps offers real glimpses into the way humans may have evolved. And a new, pretty major observation of chimp behavior may provide scientific evidence of a long-suspected theory about human evolution. (Julia Layton - "Are chimpanzees evolving in the wild?" - March 6, 2007)

We understand ourselves a lot better after studying chimpanzees. Chimpanzees wage war for all of the same reasons humans wage war; for the booty, territory, resources - and rape and murder is not alien to chimpanzees or humans. There is in humans an inherent instinct and natural behavior for war. Denying our inner nature may be our greatest self-deception.

"Life has not been devised by morality; it wants deception, it lives on deception." - (Friedrich Nietzshe)

David Livingston Smith The Most Dangerous Animal, in Human Nature and the Origins of War, (2007) says war is adaptive which enables us to survive to reproduce and...understanding our passion for war. One of these is self-deception, our uniquely human capacity to hide the truth from ourselves...Human beings are able to lie to themselves, and this capacity turns out to be crucial for understanding war."

Chimpanzees have their alpha males just like we humans have our alpha males. How that dominance is established varies but someone rises to the level of high rank and dominates the group. With chimpanzees the most dominant are usually the strongest and those who can intimidate others in the group. In human groups it is through politics, force or inherited aristocracies, that we establish hierarchies.

Tyrannies are shored up with the force of gangs, revolutionary guards, mercenaries, who provide the brawn and since humans are not particularly strong when compared to other animals, power seekers use the force of arms provided by others, or their larger neocortex to acquire dominance.

We humans inherit dominance either through legacy prestige by being born into a high ranking family or acquired wealth. Or we think we elect our leaders which is not nearly that simple nor honest. Democracies are a facade and it is money that influences or steals elections. There are schemes and plotters with lots of money from unsavory backers. Bush had the Saudis; Obama has the Syrians et al.

Some democracies may even be conspiracies to acquire positions of dominance for a secret agenda. Some suspect Obama may be a plotter (and his handlers may be co-plotters) who have their own agenda to take over America from within. That may be an absurdity? That ordinarily would seem pretty farfetched, but anyone contemplating a synchronized attack on the World Trade Towers, the Pentagon with at least four separate airplanes would think that is also an absurdity and farfetched - yet that is exactly what happened. So how farfetched is a "secret" Muslim infiltrating the highest office in the land by selling the idea of undefined change?

Hank Roth

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