Are human beings bent on violence, negativity, conflict, and war? Is it in our genes?
Vic Shayne
author
13 Pillars of Enlightenment: How to realize your true nature and end suffering
You would think that by this time in our history we would be advanced enough to be past the inclination to murder, hate, and abuse one another. But we aren’t. We have inherited a brain predisposed to very bad habits of thinking, beginning with the way we have separated ourselves from all else so that our lives have become me-centric — self-centered, self-involved, self-obsessed, selfish. No wonder we cannot break the habit of war and revolution. We as a species are stuck!
The Smithsonian Institute reports that “Human evolution is the lengthy process of change by which people originated from apelike ancestors. Scientific evidence shows that the physical and behavioral traits shared by all people originated from apelike ancestors and evolved over a period of approximately six million years…”
Giving us some perspective, Smithsonian researchers say that “the long evolutionary journey that created modern humans began with a single step — or more accurately — with the ability to walk on two legs. One of our earliest-known ancestors, Sahelanthropus, began the slow transition from ape-like movement some six million years ago, but Homo sapiens wouldn’t show up for more than five million years.”
Six million years. That’s a very long time to develop and concretize a habit, isn’t it? Among all of our inherited psychological tendencies is the habit of thinking, acting, and reacting according to fear and self-preservation, including when the self is extended to family, fellow tribal or clan members, and an entire nation. If we delve into these fears a little we find that emotions that still exist today were common way back into the misty history of our species — jealousy, greed, anger, attachments to other beings and possessions, and so on.
Nothing has changed, psychologically speaking
The fact that nothing has changed in the psychological regard is astounding given how much time our species has had to right itself. So powerful is the sense of self that it is still wont to defend itself not only physically, but perhaps more impactfully, psychologically to resist change — especially if change means exploring ourselves and why we are the way we are. I’m not talking about an intellectual exploration stimulated by a university professor or author, but rather an enquiry into our own sense of self. Unless this is done in earnest until we find the answer then we will just continue to be the destructive, conflicted, and violent beings we have always been. if we only engage in an intellectual discussion then we simply take up where we left off once the enquiry has concluded.
Unending violence
Our culture glorifies conflict, killing, destruction, gunplay, weaponry, and war. It always has. Yes, a lot of this has to do with getting young men to risk life and limb in the name of some greater power structure. However, in a larger sense, such glorification has become a habit imbedded in our brains so that we have neural pathways wired to react violently in thought and deed.
Neural pathways. This means that we have generationally trained the brain to include violence, aggression, and many other ills as part of our nature.
Imagine if you can, if an alien came to the United States in his little metallic disk and landed in a quiet suburban neighborhood. The little guy exits his craft and walks up to the living room of a house as the homeowner is flipping through his remote while his TV is set to youtube…
In our little thought experiment, the alien peering through the window sees one video clip after another of human violence — movie trailers, martial arts instruction, UFC and MMA bouts with contestants beating themselves bloody, scenes of war and missiles being fired into countries, ads for video games with themes of war and violence, a school shooting, gang violence, abuse of fellow neighbors by HOAs (homeowner associations), fathers assaulting referees at their children’s soccer or football games, protestors on universities agitated by imported troublemakers, police brutality, commercial farms where animals are tortured beyond imagination, our fellow primates being used for lab experiments, police shootouts and arrests, courtroom dramas, a former president inciting his followers to violence, video games portraying rape and murder, Nazi marchers calling for the annihilation of minority groups, and on and on and on.
These images are present 24 hours a day, every day of the year. Even if we are not purposefully searching for them we are exposed to them. Needless to say, our little alien would come away with the very clear idea that human beings are way down on the list of creatures in their psychological maturity. He’d hop back in his craft and try another world.
There is no end to the violence we are exposed to. It is off the charts and yet we have become used to it and dismiss it as entertainment. All the while our brains are soaking in every pixel and sound, and the violence and hostility is enfolded into our very being. Do you know what this does to the human brain? Our neural pathways make us indifferent to human death, destruction, and suffering.
The television defense that everyone laughed at
In the early 70s there was a famous legal case in Miami, Florida, in which a boy named Ronny Zamora murdered his neighbor. His attorney based his case on the fact that his client, a 15-year-old boy, had been repeatedly exposed to constant violence on television. On trial for first degree murder, burglary, robbery, and possession of a firearm in connection with the slaying of his elderly neighbor, Zamora’s counsel, Ellis Rubin, argued that the boy’s insanity had been caused by “television intoxication.” He lost the case and an entire community laughed at him and defamed him, but with what we now understand about how the brain creates new neural pathways through learning, Ellis Rubin was probably on the right track.
Violent media breeds violent actions and thoughts
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) reports that since the early 1960s research has suggested that “exposure to violence in television, movies, video games, cell phones, and on the internet increases the risk of violent behavior on the viewer’s part just as growing up in an environment filled with real violence increases the risk of them behaving violently.”
“When media violence primes aggressive concepts,
aggression is more likely.”
— National Institutes of Health
Being exposed to violence begins with something that researchers call priming. The NIH reports, “Priming is the process through which spreading activation in the brain’s neural network from the locus representing an external observed stimulus excites another brain node representing a cognition, emotion, or behavior. The external stimulus can be inherently linked to a cognition, e.g., the sight of a gun is inherently linked to the concept of aggression, or the external stimulus can be something inherently neutral like a particular ethnic group (e.g., African-American) that has become linked in the past to certain beliefs or behaviors (e.g., welfare). The primed concepts make behaviors linked to them more likely. When media violence primes aggressive concepts, aggression is more likely.” Following priming are two other stages that are self-explanatory — arousal and mimicry.
The American Academy of Family Physicians reports that, “studies have found that 91% of movies on television contain violence, including extreme violence…Researchers have also noted that the amount of gun violence in top-grossing PG-13 films has more than tripled since the introduction of the rating in 1985. In 2012, PG-13 films actually contained more gun violence than R-rated films.. And violence is present in movies not generally considered to be violent, such as animated films.
Even so-called nonviolent people
regularly watch violent movies and television shows
and play violent video games.
What can be done about the madness?
We are very, very violent as a human culture. And it seems that we are indifferent to the idea of destroying not only one another but also our own species. And the planet that sustains us and promises us a future for our grandchildren and beyond. We have not found a way to eradicate violence from our culture; we have done the opposite. Even as some crimes have dropped over the past few years there is more worldwide violence now than ever before in our history — and most of it is in the form of entertainment.
What can be done about this madness? More laws, tighter gun restrictions, heavier penalties for offenders, more school security, soldiers in the streets, more cameras, strict censorship of all media, banning a convicted and accused sex offender and fomenter of violence from running for public office, killing more convicted murderers?
It seems if we want to tackle our habit of violence, abuse, and suffering we have to go to the root of it even as we allow the legal system to do its job. Otherwise we are only temporarily sating the sense of self that is responsible both individually and collectively for perpetuating the worst habit known to the human species. So what is this root? It begins with each one of us, preferably from childhood. It begins with the self, which is the representative of the entire contents of consciousness — the good, bad, and the ugly.
We have to become so aware and attuned to our inner violence that we see the absurdity and destructiveness of it to the point where we are compelled to change the way we think, react, and are entertained. We have to become like my grandfather who, after two heart attacks resulting from a lifetime of smoking, became the most ardent and obnoxious enemy of cigarettes, smoking, and smoking addiction.
We have to see that we are allowing destruction and violence to occur on a personal level before we can even hope to transform our towns, cities, counties, states, nations, and the world. We have to realize that we are senselessly and mindlessly passing along a legacy of violence and violent media. Seeing this fact doesn’t mean just acknowledging it and then continuing to watch the Goodfellas, Law and Order, or UFC fights. It means looking into your own heart and making it very personal, and by doing so seeing the sheer madness in it.
Is this possible? Are we capable of creating a transformation away from a one-million-year-old habit of violence? Are you?? We will never know unless we try. And if we do not try we will end up destroying not only each other, but the environment, ecosystems, nature, the animal and plant kingdoms, and the earth itself.