Humans are a Violent Species

Admit it… Human Nature is a violent one.  Everything we do is about one of two things… sometimes both.  Sex and Violence.  Those two things rule our world.  The scriptures say someplace that the “Natural Man is an Enemy of God.”  Well, that’s unfortunate because Violence is in our Core Programming.

Our Entertainment… The top money making movies are the ones with gratuitous violence.  The more unique the violence, the better.  Top movie in the last few months.  “The Avengers”.  What’s it about?  Kicking Ass.  Best scene in the whole film – The Hulk grabbing a guy and slamming him around like a rag doll.  People cheered.  That was some delicious violence wasn’t it?  Spiced with humor… oh yeah… we all loved that bit.

You roll past a car crash and you have to look.  What do you want to see? What are you looking for?  Blood.  Gore.  The more the better.  You are disappointed when you see the driver of a wreck sitting on the side of the rode… Ah man… he’s okay.  Dang it… you wanted blood.  Admit it.  That Morbid Curiosity is in you…  You wanted that violence.

We watched confrontations on TV… Jerry Springer is famous for it.  Get people together that act like Sodium and Water when mixed.  Why do people watch that train wreck?  Is it for the story?  Or is it for watching the people jump up off the couch and go all Gladiator on the other guy?  NASCAR… you don’t like racing all that much.  Especially not Round Track stuff.  But you watch it for one thing.  Those hideously violent wrecks.

Even small children are violent.  I watched a small child of some British tourists come through… This kid has never held a firearm, let alone fired one.  Highly unlikely being from Essex.  Yet the little child, 4 years old?  Bragged with pride that he knew how to shoot one of those pistols.  One of my own boys… my oldest.  When he was born we hid all our guns and didn’t watch any violent TV around him.  He had no influences on him for violence.  He chewed a Gramcracker into the shape of a pistol, held it like a gun and made Pew Pew Pew noises.  How did he know how to do that?  He was totally insulated from it?  How?  I’ll tell you how.  It’s in his blood.  Not just my Ogreish blood – but our collective human blood. Just like the little Oliver Twist kid…  It was in his nature, in his DNA, in his blood.  We are violent at the cellular level.

We have Canine Teeth.  What are those for?  Eating meat.  And the best way to get it – to Hunt it.  Find the tasty looking animal you want and your Predatory Nature kicks into overdrive and you visit violence upon the Prey.

And we wonder about the Roman Gladiators and how they could fight to the death… and how people could watch that.  Blood Sports…  Come on.  We still watch that stuff.   Not only that but those Athletes are paid like they were Royalty.  We reward our Gladiators very well.  All of our Sports are all metaphors for Conflict.  Men run at each other, knocking them down, smashing them while all the time chasing the ball.  Forget the ball.  That’s not why we do sports or watch sports.  Football… it’s for the Crashes, just like NASCAR.  Even the NFL puts out a Greatest Hits highlight reel.  We celebrate those most violent moments because above all… We thirst for Violence.

We are a violent species.  We are, as a whole, brilliant when it comes to Violence.  Even the Pacifist type people, deep down inside, want to do violence.  They openly call for a new Civil War and mass executions of Conservatives.  But there is one thing those guys don’t understand… How to do great violence.  Conservatives… We do.  We are the ones in general that get out there and Hunt, Shoot, and we train ourselves doing it.  We excel at violence. It’s in our nature.

Some guys strive to bury that instinct.  But it’s there.  Suppressed and locked away under layers of Reason and Understanding.  But that isn’t who we are and eventually those people erupt.

Sex is a powerful motivator… but they are mere shadows compared to Violence.  With sex… come on, we’ve all seen the girl’s goodies and it’s pretty much all the same… like flowers… different colors sizes and shapes, but they are all pretty.  Sex however is only just the reward for Violence done well.  Sometimes sex has violence in it as well, because we just can’t get enough of it.

As a Nation, America is the best when it comes to violence.  Victors of World Wars.  We even had or own Civil War.  Other countries can be violent, sure.  Murderous and Genocidal… but they don’t compare to the level of Violence that America is capable of.  As a Nation we have a great deal of tension built up… muscles taunt and ready to throw a swing.  We are just waiting for that bell to ring.  We’ve been at “Peace” for too long and these police actions in Afghanistan just isn’t doing it.  We need a real enemy that we can duke it out with.  We need the Germans to rise up again and get us going.  We need an adversary.   Someone to really fight.

God help whoever stands up to challenge us.  We are ready to throw down.

15 thoughts on “Humans are a Violent Species”

  1. We are indeed violent. Biologically it’s how we achieved our place of dominance over all other species. By being the sneakiest, cleverest killers of animals and stuff like that.

    Of course, it doesn’t mean we should shoot or punch anyone that we feel like.

    If you have those feelings, acknowledge them. But just being angry with someone is no excuse to hurt them. Yes, conservatives take firearms training and martial arts training, but what the casual observer doesn’t see is the degree of control that is built into that training. All they see is people shooting guns really fast, or practicing to break someone’s arm at blink of an eye.

    When I took my first shooting class, I fired a shot at a steel plate that had worked it’s way to a 90 degree angle with the ground. As soon as the shot broke, I got hit in the knee by something. When a lead bullet hits steel, it splatters like a water balloon, and one of those little bits of lead had come back and landed in the skin of my leg.

    I learned that in real life, even if I didn’t mean to miss the bad guy, a bullet may miss and impact a hard surface, which may create flying bits of stuff that may hurt people who aren’t even involved in what I’m doing.

    Now, is that knowledge likely to make me more or less cautious while carrying a gun in public?

    But people who don’t train, or don’t think about this because Violence is Bad, won’t ever learn little tidbits like that, won’t know the full implications of applying violence, and tend not to trust normal people who are armed or trained.

  2. Whenever I hear people speak about human nature, I suspect they are speaking more about themselves.

    In many years of martial arts training, I don’t recall ever meeting a fellow practitioner who hadn’t experienced some sort of brutality in their childhood.

    About the only thing we can intelligently say about human nature, is that it’s malleable.

    If humans are violent killers by nature, why does the military have to use psychological conditioning to get people to kill? Even then, 94-96% of the people who have killed feel negatively about it. The other 4-6% are an aberration. Source

    We may fight, but we don’t generally like to kill each other.

    When I was young, I was very violent. As a I get older, I find violence very distasteful.

    I’m not trying to start a flame war, I’m just suggesting a more precise approach to the subject.

    1. “If humans are violent killers by nature, why does the military have to use psychological conditioning to get people to kill?”

      Because humans are naturally violent so, in order to live together, we /teach/ ourselves and each other to suppress that. The strength of that suppression is intense, to counter the strength of the desire to do violence. Therefore, breaking that conditioning requires strong counter-conditioning.

    2. I agree with what you are saying Chris. The birth of my 1st child opened my eyes to something great, unconditional love. I use to love confrontation now nope.

  3. “As a Nation we have a great deal of tension built up… muscles taunt and ready to throw a swing. We are just waiting for that bell to ring. We’ve been at “Peace” for too long and these police actions in Afghanistan just isn’t doing it. We need a real enemy that we can duke it out with. We need the Germans to rise up again and get us going. We need an adversary. Someone to really fight.”

    Violence can be sublimated into other avenues, though. The “Wild West” was much more peaceful than the “civilized” Eastern cities, because those violent humans were able to use that energy to tame natural obstacles.

    I almost wish that some catastrophic level of global warming was real. If we had to tear down coastal cities and rebuild them further inland, that would be a challenge worthy of the energy Americans have been building up in the past few decades of stagnation.

    We need to colonize the moon and the asteroids, or something. We need a new frontier upon wish to spend our energies.

  4. We’re finding out that more and more of human behavior is linked to genetics. Environment obviously plays a huge role as well. But I think scientists will find an Adventurer Gene one day. America was and is settled by crazy adventurers. People who were/are willing to drop everything they know and start anew in a novel and dangerous place. Risk takers. Every society has people like that. I think America just has more of them.

    I think an Adventurer Gene could explain why America has more violent crime than other countries. Proliferation of guns or violent media just seems superficial.

    1. The answer to nature vs. nurture seems to be: Yes.

      Certain genes create predispositions but those genes are switched on or off by environmental factors.

      At least that’s what we think we know for now.

    2. I’ve often wondered what it was that set us apart from the rest of the world. The Adventurer Gene theory is better than any other theory I’ve heard

  5. The thought process that brings us all here is the key. Americans are more in tune with our innate nature than many nations because for most of our history we have not shunned it but embraced it. The violence inherent in our nature cannot be dammed any more than the Hudson or the Colorado can be dammed for any significant span. We recognize it and embrace it and God help the person or political entity that seeks to stopper that bottle.

    There are forces at work here that beggar description by “civilized” people but need no introduction to we “happy few” barbarians. ( raises mug to the Ogre and assembled ruffians )

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