Quote:
Originally Posted by powerclown
I find it helpful to reference child psychology and particularly the "death instinct" when contemplating the propensity human beings have for violence. Observing very young children, one can see how violent they can get, particularly toddlers. It is the very first example of raw, unrestrained aggression...and they all show signs of it at one time or another.
Erich Fromm and Sigmund Freud have labelled this 'urge to destroy' the "death instinct" (or opposite Eros: the loving, nurturing instinct); it could be trying to strangle a spoon, crush a banana, tear the head off a doll, knock over another's pile of blocks, uncontrolled biting, attacking a pet, destructive temper tantrums, etc. They lose total control and literally want to destroy something, anything.
Things get more complicated as one gets older, but I believe human beings are born innately violent and in varying degrees, which eventually leads to societal violence.
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Interesting that you should snap to that so quickly in the discussion. I was thinking along those lines myself. We really aren't that far away, evolutionarily speaking, from the apes. Yeah, we're smarter, but that's (this is a gross oversimplification, but I don't want to get into the finer points of neuroanatomy) mainly because we have a "thinking brain" wrapped around a much more primitive core brain.
Watch a troop of monkeys at work and you'll see that they're quite smart (macaques can figure out just about any lock, which makes keeping them in cages a royal bitch), but they're also incredibly driven by what we would call base emotions. They get pissed off at you, they beat the hell out of you. Something makes them happy, they go (ahem) apeshit with joy.
Anyway, I think it's definitely a factor that we have primitive "destroy it!" instincts that we have to fight against.
However, I think it's a bit more than that, too. After all, 100 years ago you didn't have kids killing each other, their parents, other people, mowing down a school, etc with the regularity that we have it today. Look a little farther back and you have a world in which guns were completely unregulated (I refer to the pioneer days), just about everyone was packing, and kids did have guns because they were expected to put food on the table just like dad. Now, I'm sure there were accidents - kids screwing up with the gun and accidentally shooting someone, but from what I've been able to discover, you either didn't have, or very rarely had, kids sneaking in and blowing people away while they slept.
There are several factors in our modern environment that did not exist back then. Violent media is the obvious scapegoat, but it's not the only one. In fact, violent media was quite common in the olden days as well. Hell, go read a book of fairy tales as they were told before the Brothers Grimm got hold of them. The three bears raped and then ripped apart and ate Goldilocks, the prince woke Sleeping Beauty up not by kissing her, but by raping her, and the wolf tricks Little Red Riding Hood into eating her grandmother, then makes her get naked and join him in bed. Kids grew up reading and hearing those tales, yet didn't run around killing, cannibalizing, or raping people.
But, we're also a whole lot more crowded today than we were years ago. And, there's a whole lot more pollutants in the air, including neurotoxins such as mercury and, especially, tetraethyl lead, which was used in gasoline despite it being fully known that lead is a severe neurotoxin.
Crowding is an interesting factor, and could go to your point about animal instincts. A couple of monkeys hanging out in a field probably won't do much to each other. Stuff 4 monkeys into a small cage and they'll kill each other. We obviously aren't to that level yet, but we are pretty crowded, and we're all fighting for limited resources.
It's the chemical side that I've been interested in for some time, however. With all these pollutants, are some people just cracking due to the neurological damage they cause? What do you guys think?