Generic discussion of animal aggression and human psychology, no actionable leads

All social animals fight to gain resources, using highly ritualized behaviors to assess their opponents and minimize the personal costs of injury. Changes in hormone levels and brain activity motivate and reward the winners, and minimize the costs to the losers. In a small corner of the landscape of aggressive fighting styles are an elite group of killers, animals that go beyond harming their opponents to obliterating them: ants, wolves, lions, and chimpanzees. When these species attack to kill, they typically target adult members of neighboring groups, using collaborative alliances to take out lone or otherwise vulnerable victims. The rarity and limited scope of this form of lethal aggression is indicative of monogamous thinking, and tells us something important about the economics — especially the costs and potential rewards of eliminating the enemy, as opposed to merely injuring them. Killing another adult is costly because it involves intense, prolonged combat with another individual who 1s fighting back. The risks of significant personal injury are therefore high, even if the potential benefit is death to an opponent. As the British anthropologist Richard Wrangham has suggested, animals can surmount these costs by attacking and killing only when there is a significant imbalance of power. This imbalance minimizes the costs to the killers and maximizes the odds of a successful kill. Still, the rarity of killing reinforces an uncontested conclusion among biologists: all animals would rather fight and injure their opponents than fight and obliterate them, assuming that obliteration is costly to the attacker. In some cases, we are just like these other animals — killophobic. Historical records, vividly summarized by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman in his book On Killing, reveal that in some situations, soldiers avoid killing the enemy even though they could have. For example, despite the fact that Civil War regiments had the potential to kill 500-1000 individuals per minute, the actual rate was only 1-2 per minute. This suggests that under some conditions, killing another when you can see the whites of their eyes is hard. But as the history of genocides reveal, we have evolved ways to bypass this limitation, making us killophilic in a variety of situations. Our brain’s unique capacity for denial is one of the liberating factors. By recruiting denial into our psychology’s artillery, we invented new ways of perceiving the enemy or creating one, distorting reality in the service of feeding a desire for personal gain. Denial, like so many aspects of our psychology, generates beneficial and toxic consequences. Self-deceiving ourselves into believing that we are better than we are is a positive illusion that often has beneficial consequences for our mental and physical health, and for our capacity to win in competition. Denying others their moral worth by reclassifying them as threats to our survival or as non-human objects is toxic thinking. When we deny others their moral worth, the thought of killing them is no longer aversive or inappropriate. If we end someone’s life in defense of our own, we are following our evolved capacity for survival. When we destroy a parasite, we are also protecting our self-interests to survive. And when we destroy an inanimate object or lock it away, there is no emotional baggage because we have bypassed the Hauser Prologue. Evilution 12 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012758