(3 of 6)
Who are the violent? Primarily youth: the fatherless Negro boy aching to prove his manliness, the school dropout taunted by TV commercials offering what he cannot have and often incited by what he has learned about the Mickey Spillane brand of violence. Adding to the slum kid's anger is all the middle-class hypocrisy about violence. "Good" people utterly delegate society's dirty work to overworked white cops, few of whom are inclined to be Boy Scouts. The middle class denounces violence but wants the police to use it, and is then shocked when hordes of young hooligans respond in kind—vividly teaching irresponsible elders (most sharply disapprove) that looting is a handy way to grab the possessions they lack.
Of Men & Rats
The fearful middle class, Negro as well as white, can no longer afford to ignore violence, a phenomenon from which no human being is exempt. Freud held that man has a death instinct that must be satisfied in either suicide or aggression against others. Many modern psychiatrists disagree. Dr. Fredric Wertham, famed crusader against violence, argues that violence is learned behavior, a product of cultural influences such as violent comic books. The violent man, he says, is the socially alienated man.
Konrad Lorenz, the Austrian-born naturalist, believes that human aggressiveness is the instinct that powers not only self-preservation against enemies but also love and friendship for those who share the struggle. Overcoming obstacles provides selfesteem; lacking such fulfillment, man turns against handy targets—his wife, even himself. Polar explorers, deprived of quarrels with strangers, often start to hate one another; the antidote is smashing some inanimate object, like crockery. Accident-prone drivers may be victims of "displaced aggression." The once ferocious Ute Indians, now shorn of war outlets, have the worst auto-accident rate on record.
Lorenz points out that men and rats share the dubious distinction of being the only carnivores with no innate inhibitions against attacking members of their own species. Early man was too weak to do so. But as he developed weapons, he learned to cherish the "warrior virtues" of truculent masculinity and pleasure in dominating others. Though he also developed moral restraints against killing, these are not natural and tend to collapse under stress. Seeking a really nonviolent community, anthropologists point with hope to the peace-loving pygmies of the Ituri rain forest in the Congo. Unlike other men, those "primitives" have no male-warrior hangup; they retreat from power-seeking neighbors—and hugely enjoy the sensual pleasures of eating, drinking, sex and laughter.
Modern man is often at his noblest in small-unit war, a caveman hangover. But peacetime culture bars such outlets, and when men fail to achieve the virility substitute of money, power or meaningful work, they can explode in violence. Not that man has a killer instinct; he simply does not fully realize the effect of pulling a trigger and blowing off another man's head. Modern long-range weapons further blunt his sensibilities. Mussolini's son extolled the bombing of the Ethiopians: "I dropped an aerial torpedo right in the center of a cluster of tribesmen, and the group opened up like a flowering rose. It was most entertaining."