Intraspecific Human Aggressiveness

(Rebellious Angels Fourth Part)

Born to kill

No reason may be valid for a homicide, but homicides committed by very young people are the more terrible because they are apparently unjustified. What Angela D’Arpa, a psychologist who works with misfit young people in Harlem, tells is appaling: five boys, since they are bored, ignite a tramp in a park.

After a week, since nothing has happened, they stone another one to death. Eventually episodes like these have become more and more frequent. In twenty years the number of homicides committed by young people under eighteen years of age has increased by 200%.What is new is that, if before people would kill for some reason( for the territory, revenge), now they do so because they are bored. Two American very young girls, after killing an old man who had given them hospitality, give a party to show their friends the bled man’s corpse.

Underage murders

The attempts of interpreting these events are, in my opinion, quite inadequate under a scientific point of view. Benjamin Spock[1], who all through his life had asserted children’s complete anarchy, when he was ninety years old says:“But is it possible that parents, politicians, priests don’t realize we are feeding our youth with a brutal diet? Television, movies,music, the ones that should warrant entertainment propose violence as a great outlet, as a lively display of vitality: sooner or later we will pay for it”.

Personally I think we can draw out of man just what he has deeply rooted inside himself. Aggressiveness is genetic and has a precise function: to warrant survival in a world where predation has completely been absorbed by competition.

However it’s competition, which is continually exalted by media in its more extreme aspects, the one that urges subjects without critical skills to express aggressiveness in criminal actions.

Over the centuries aggressiveness was subordinated to the instrument of war with demografic and economic purposes. When resources became insufficient for all, conflicts where the aggressive aptitudes of genetically predisposed subjects were canalized, started.

Aggressive subjects

The demografic drop after a war, the numerical reduction of “aggressive people“, the greater quantity of available resources, the numerical proportion, again favourable to”peaceful people“, warranted peace for some time. In time of peace aggressiveness genes and the number of subjects giving them hospitality tend to increase and when their tendencies can’t be canalized in a war they express themselves in criminal actions.

Tianamen-square

Metaphorically the movie” Born to kill” expresses just this:”born“ not “Brought up“ to kill.

In Palermo the children who crucified some small dogs to pull their eyes out and make marbles out of them hadn’t seen to do so on television; the boy who, in San Diego(California), wiped out his family of five members and then set fire to his house; the two youngsters who, in Franklin in Sussex, order some pizza and kill the pizza-boys, had certainly “something more” as to the others of the same age who have never fancied to do anything like that.

To this we could object the twenty-year-old young man who, in Long Island, fired with his father’s revolver to test what one feels killing, had seen the movie” Born to kill” about ten times, but nobody had forced him to do so.

The movie had been the trigger factor of an inner cause[2] to the boy(innate aggressiveness[3]).

When patriotism and militarism were on fashion, a lot of movies were inspired by these values; actually there is no difference between killing anybody or massacre Indians, Germans or anyway bad people.

More recently, lacking those values, the most different reasons were found out to justify the violent reactions of Silvester Stallone-Rambo or Schwarznegger-Terminator, but however the result is always a massacre.

Rambo

Changing ideology doesn’t mean to change the reality of killing our fellow men. The fact that these actions, however criminal, are approved or even exalted by current morals, may be patriotism or tendency of the moment, shows how, beyond hypocrisies, is acknowledged an” instinctive”( genetic) predisposition to them. These tendencies may be exploited by power for personal necessities (wars) or by media for the market.

[1] A paediatric, very famous in the seventies to have supported, in children’s field, the liberating thesis of”youth protest” of those years.

[2] If we put a match by a candle a flame, pleasant to be seen, springs. If we put it by dynamite, the latter blows up. In this case the responsability of the explosion depends on dynamite, not on the match. The movie Born to kill in a pacific boy, probably, causes only disgust.

[3] To arrest Woody Harrelson, the main actor of the movie, who, in London, after wrecking a taxi and running away had taken another one, five police cars and fourteen policemen were necessary.

Translated from “Il Virus Intelligente” by Enrica Narducci

To be continued:

V) Intraspecific Human Aggressiveness (Rebellious Angels Fifth Part)

VI) Intraspecific Human Aggressiveness (Rebellious Angels Sixth Part)

VII) Intraspecific Human Aggressiveness (Rebellious Angels   Seventh Part)

VIII) Intraspecific Human Aggressiveness (Rebellious Angels Eighth Part)

IX) Intraspecific Human Aggressiveness (Rebellious Angels Ninth Part)

X) Intraspecific Human Aggressiveness (Rebellious Angels Tenth Part)

See also:

I) Intraspecific Human Aggressiveness (Rebellious Angels First Part)

II) Intraspecific Human Aggressiveness (Rebellious Angels Second Part)

III) Intraspecific Human Aggressiveness (Rebellious Angels Third Part)