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What are the seeds of violence? Freud found "a powerful measure of desire for aggression" in human instincts. He added: "The very emphasis of the commandment 'Thou shall not kill' makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood, as it is perhaps also in ours." Further, Freud held that man possesses a death instinct which, since it cannot be satisfied except in suicide, is instead turned outward as aggression against others. Dr. Fredric Wertham, noted crusader against violence, disagrees sharply and argues that violence is learned behavior, not a product of nature but of society: "The violent man is not the natural but the socially alienated man."
The fact is that if violence is not innate, it is a basic component of human behavior. The German naturalist Konrad Lorenz believes that, unlike other carnivores, man did not at an early stage develop inhibitions against killing members of his own species—because he was too weak. As he developed weapons, he learned to kill, and he also learned moral restraints, but these never penetrated far enough. Writes Lorenz: "The deep emotional layers of our personality simply do not register the fact that the cocking of a forefinger to release a shot tears the entrails of another man."
The yearning for nonviolence is as real as the yearning for love but, East or West, no religion has succeeded in establishing a society based on it. When trying to point to a really nonviolent community, anthropologists are usually forced to resort to the Arapesh of New Guinea or the Pygmies of the Ituri rain forest in the Congo. The human impulse to violence cannot be completely denied or suppressed. When that is tried, the result is often an inner violence in man that can burst out all the more fiercely later. At times the U.S. displays a kind of false prudery about violence to the point where, in the words of Psychiatrist Robert Coles, "almost anything related to forcefulness and the tensions between people is called violent." While this attitude (including Dr. Wertham's frequent blasts at anything from military toys to Batman) is plainly unrealistic, there is no denying that a gruesome violence on screens and in print is threatening to get out of hand. According to one theory, such vicarious experience of violence is healthy because it relieves the viewer's own aggressions. But recent tests suggest the opposite.