The psychological roots of cannibalism in the context of system-vector psychology of Yuri Burlan
It is known that in the animal kingdom cannibalism, or eating individuals of one's own species, is recognized by scientists as one of the manifestations of intraspecific competition and the result of natural selection …
The peer-reviewed journal In the World of Scientific Discoveries, N11.8 (59), 2014, included in the VAK list, published an article on the psychological causes of cannibalism. This is the world's first scientific publication with research on this issue in the system-vector paradigm of Yuri Burlan.
The journal In the world of scientific discoveries is included in the Abstract Journal and Databases of VINITI RAS and is represented in the leading libraries of the country, including the Scientific Electronic Library (NEL).
Impact factor RSCI 2013: 0.265
ISSN 2072-0831
We bring to your attention the full text of the article:
The psychological roots of cannibalism in the context of system-vector psychology of Yuri Burlan
What do we know about humanity that sometimes terrifies us? And we sometimes say: “A man could not do that! Even animals don't do that! Wild fear, chilling horror slowly sinking somewhere along with the stomach - this sensation was probably familiar to each of us when we heard about cannibalism …
What do we know about this? And why did our ancestors eat their own kind? Is cannibalism related to hunger and the need to eat? At first glance, everything is simple - it is hunger, and weaker brothers are always there. The separation from the animal world of a creature that, in its unconscious intention, was already striving to become a man, was accompanied by phenomena transferred from its animal component. Cannibalism is one of them [13].
It is known that in the animal kingdom, cannibalism, or eating individuals of one's own species, is recognized by scientists as one of the manifestations of intraspecific competition and the result of natural selection. The reasons may be unfavorable environmental conditions, lack of food, drink, etc. Cannibalism in humans, or anthropophagy, is the eating of their own kind. Relatives or tribesmen can also become food.
The world is dual. This duality is also expressed in the categories of consciousness and the unconscious. The collective consciousness has yet to rise to the level that is formed from the real awareness of developed and realized individuals. In the meantime, consciousness basically only helps us in rationalizing the unconscious, which produces the desires of a person, constantly increasing their strength. Marked by the symbol of infinity, where the left and right parts (unconscious and consciousness) should ideally be of equal size, the universe through a person affects the relative balance in the world. Ultimately, human desire must grow to final self-awareness.
One of the hypostases in which the generation of human desires occurs is food. The added desire for food also drives civilizations and the development of man as a species. Food becomes a lever of control of the animal essence of man. Food as a global concept for measuring human desires and their realization can determine the level of development of civilizations.
Today in the world the issue of food supplies has already been resolved. And so the nature of cannibalism in traditional science remains a mystery. Using the methodology of system-vector psychology, we will consider 4 types of cannibalism: food is associated with acute long-term food shortages, manifests itself in the form of hunger; ritual, as the sacrifice and subsequent act of anthropophagy for the purpose of performing the ritual; criminal is associated with mental disorders in people - in most cases, carriers of an undeveloped and unrealized oral vector; social cannibalism is associated with the expulsion (survival) of a person from a social group as a result of a slander.
Further in the article, we will reveal our understanding of various types of cannibalism, based on the knowledge of system-vector psychology.
Food cannibalism has happened many times in the history of human development. So, only in Russia in the 20th century there were periods of famine in 21-22, 32-33, 46-47. (not counting the blockade of Leningrad) [1; 3, p. 94].
About the famine of 21-22 there is a forgotten book by A. Neverov "Tashkent - the city of bread". It begins with these words: “Grandfather died, grandmother died, then father. Mishka remained only with his mother and two brothers. The youngest is four years old, the middle one is eight. Mishka himself is twelve … Uncle Mikhail died, aunt Marina died. In every house they prepare for the deceased. There were horses with cows, and they ate, they began to catch dogs and cats”[10]. This book is written about a boy from the village of Lopatin in the Buzuluk district of the Samara province, who at the beginning of autumn 1921, together with a friend, went to Tashkent for bread. The brave boy returned home with bread in late autumn, but by that time only his mother had survived.
In 1922, reports of cannibalism began to arrive in Moscow with an ever-increasing frequency. On January 20, the reports mentioned cannibalism in Bashkiria, and on January 23, the country's leaders were informed that in the Samara province, the case went beyond the scope of isolated cases: “The famine has reached terrible proportions: the peasantry has eaten all the surrogates, cats, dogs, at this time they are eating corpses the dead, pulling them out of their graves. In Pugachevsky and Buzuluk districts, repeated cases of cannibalism were found. Cannibalism, according to members of the executive committee, among Lyubimovka takes massive forms. Cannibals are isolated”[4].
There were reports that the facts of cannibalism were recorded in the starving counties [12]. Such cases of cannibalism occur when there is a mass famine or when a person or a group of people, due to circumstances, is in a situation of isolation from the rest of the world.
This happened in the years of famine in Russia, in Nazi concentration camps, as it was in the besieged Leningrad, as well as in times of famine associated with wars or crop failure in Europe, Africa or other continents.
The animal nature of man manifests itself in the event of an acute shortage of vital needs - to eat, drink, breathe, sleep, first of all, in folk art, for example, in the sayings: "Hunger is not an aunt", "A well-fed will not understand a hungry one", "Not a dewdrop, there was no powder in my mouth”,“There’s not a piece of bread, and there’s longing in the tower”,“The belly is not a basket: you cannot put it under the bench”,“A hungry man would bite off a stone too,”“Do not let a hungry man cut bread () "," Bread warms, not a fur coat. " The memory of hunger (not only genetic, but also in the form of artifacts) is passed from generation to generation because this memory will help preserve the survival of the species. It is in this that the specific task is to preserve the integrity and increase the human live weight, increase the birth rate, preserve the number, and therefore, eliminate the possibility of hunger and losses.
Not only sayings and proverbs express the general anxiety of humanity about hunger and lack of food. Fairy tales are a rich source of folk wisdom and past experiences; they preserve difficult lived states in the experience of generations in order to transfer this experience to the future. In Russian folklore, tales of hunger have been preserved, for example, the tale "The Wolf and the Seven Kids" describes a situation when a hungry wolf breaks into a house and eats its inhabitants, only one goat remains alive. This situation is typical of food cannibalism, when a person loses control over their actions due to prolonged fasting.
Some fairy tales are terrifying with an abundance of cannibalistic situations, for example, in the fairy tale "Vasilisa the Beautiful" Vasilisa went to her closet, put the prepared dinner in front of the doll and said:
- Oh, doll, eat and listen to my grief: they send me for fire to Baba Yaga, Baba Yaga will eat me!
In the fairy tale "Baba Yaga", Yaga turns to her worker:
- Go ahead, heat the bathhouse and wash your niece, look, well, I want to have breakfast with her.
In contrast to the destructive food cannibalism, ritual cannibalism serves as a "social glue", a kind of stabilizer of primitive social relations.
Ritual cannibalism is rituals that are performed with a specific purpose. Which one? Yuri Burlan reveals the unconscious roots of this phenomenon on the basis of system-vector psychology. Ancient man existed in large groups and in order to maintain the integrity of the group, it was necessary to identify various internal and external threats that could contribute to the disintegration of the group.
Everything was somehow more or less clear about the existence of external threats to primitive people - these are predators, other primitive tribes, diseases, natural disasters. But there was also an internal enemy, the existence of which was not realized by everyone, but only by some members of the group. It was a mutual enmity that could grow in the event of an unsuccessful hunt, cold, prolonged forced inactivity. Conflicts within the group escalated and could turn into a scuffle, in which healthy and strong warriors, women and offspring would suffer. A "release valve" was needed for the growing dislike.
Such a feeling of dislike is characteristic exclusively of a person, in contrast to an animal for which the feeling of dislike does not exist. During the hunt, the predator does not dislike the victim, hunting in order to feed and survive, and not in order to relieve the growing tension in the form of hatred. The increasing aggression against members of their group threatened to destroy the overall integrity, and a solution was found.
The rite of killing the weakest member of the group (a dermal-visual boy) followed by an act of cannibalism became the release valve, and subsequently the rite of anthropophagy was replaced by animal sacrifice. The skin-visual boy was the most physically weak and vulnerable in the primitive group. He could not hunt, because his visual vector could not stand suffering and murder, he was useless as a getter, guard or worker in a primitive flock, which is why such individuals were sacrificed in order to relieve tension in the flock itself. The ritual was led by a man with an oral vector - a primitive oral cannibal.
Feelings of hostility, increasing aggression in the group were caught by a behind-the-scenes intriguer - a person with an olfactory vector who guided the actions of the oral cannibal. Such events occurred in the primitive group due to the difficulties associated with obtaining food, when a person perceived other members of the group as competitors in the distribution of food and as potential food itself. People experiencing growing hostility towards their fellow tribesmen also experienced cannibalistic tendencies, while at the same time hating those who forbade them to do so.
It was possible to stop the flurry of aggression only by uniting people on the basis of common hatred, the subject of which was the skin-visual boy, sacrificing which, turning into an object of anthropophagy, was a ritual that unites the primitive group and relieves tension. With the growth of mutual hostility, the cycle was repeated again and again, for the birth rate was not limited [7; 2].
Another type of ritual cannibalism is the desire to acquire the same qualities as the eaten victim. In both the Americas, Africa, Australia, the Pacific Islands and even Asia, there were observations of such cannibalism back in the 20th century [6].
For example, the bodies of killed soldiers or parts of their bodies were burned and eaten in order to acquire qualities that, according to legend, are transferred from the killed - these are strength, cunning, skill and endurance. Evidence of such cannibalism has been preserved in ancient legends, for example, Zeus eats his wife Metis in order to get her wits and cunning. During the game, he asks her to make herself small. Metis fulfills the desire of a spouse, and Zeus swallows it. IV Lysak points in his monograph to a number of researchers of cannibalism [6].
Note that these are isolated studies and in the electronic library Elibrary.ru there is not even a dozen articles devoted to the disclosure of this topic. So, in his work L. G. Morgan "Ancient Society" refers to the English scientist L. Fyson, who describes the cannibalism of the Australian aborigines: "The tribes of the Wide Bay area eat not only enemies who have fallen in battle, but also their killed friends and even those who have died of natural causes" [9].
N. N. Miklouho-Maclay reported on the customs of the natives of the Admiralty islands: “Cannibalism is a very common phenomenon here. The natives prefer the meat of people to pork”[8].
Cannibalism as a common practice has been discovered by ethnographers in Africa, South and North America and other parts of the world. L. Kanevsky notes that the representatives of the African tribes Ganavuri, Rukuba and Kaleri ate the enemies they killed [5]. In some secret African societies, such as the Leopard Society in Sierra Leone, murder and cannibalism were considered necessary conditions for belonging to a group. [6]
Culture has limited cannibalism to the level of a complete prohibition of eating their own kind (even skin-visual boys), although hostility remains in a person and very often "knocks out the doors and windows" of the cultural superstructure, transforming into so-called "social cannibalism." This phenomenon is associated with the generation of a general enmity against group members and is characteristic of a modern person.
Often there is the phenomenon of bullying a child who is unlike everyone in the class, sticking nicknames to children who, for certain reasons, are not able and not ready to rank and compete in a group of children. There are frequent slips of the tongue already in an adult team. Verbalization in colloquial language is very indicative - “they ate someone”, gossiping, spreading negative rumors about people, savoring the details of various stories, uniting on the basis of common hatred and hostility.
The mass media are also engaged in universal "eating", acting in modern society as the oral herald of the olfactory measure. Chewing the news, savoring details, discussing incidents and negative scenarios unites large masses of people on the basis of universal hatred and hostility.
The media, throwing more and more firewood into the furnace of our primitive feelings, limited only by the thinnest layer of cultural prohibitions, thereby serve a disservice, for they themselves act archetypally. Most modern political scandals, often fabricated by the media of all stripes, are nothing more than the transfer of the primitive ritual of anthropophagy - the conditional sacrifice of someone who fell under the gun of the olfactory measure, the main and main player on the political scene of the world.
Unlike previous types of cannibalism, its criminal variety in most cases is associated with mental disorders in carriers of an undeveloped and unrealized oral vector.
In this article, we do not pretend to be an exhaustive explanation of the origin of such destructive forms of behavior as cannibalism. The format of the article did not allow presenting all the modern findings made by the author of the system-vector methodology, Yuri Burlan, on the topic under consideration, which should be the subject of further research by system specialists of various specialties.
List of references
- Andreev E. M., Darskiy L. E., Kharkova T. L. Population of the Soviet Union. 1922-1991. M., 1993, p. 135.
-
Gadlevskaya D. Psychology of personality - the newest approach [Electronic resource].
URL: https://www.yburlan.ru/biblioteka/psikhologiya-lichnosti (date of access: 25.02.2013).
- Isupov V. A. Demographic disasters and crises in Russia in the first half of the twentieth century. Novosibirsk, 2000, p. 94.
-
Magazine "Kommersant" [Electronic resource].
URL:
-
Kanevsky L. Cannibalism. M., "Kron-Press", 1998
www.xpomo.com/ruskolan/rasa/kannibal.htm (date accessed: 22.10.2014)
- Lysak I. V. Philosophical and anthropological analysis of the destructive activity of modern man. Rostov-on-Don - Taganrog: Publishing house of SKNTs VSh, Publishing house of TRTU, 2004.
- Ochirova V. B. Innovations in psychology: an eight-dimensional projection of the pleasure principle // New word in science and practice: Hypotheses and approbation of research results: collection of articles. materials of the I international scientific and practical conference / ed. S. S. Chernov. Novosibirsk, 2012, pp. 97–102.
- Miklouho-Maclay N. N. Coll. cit.: In 5 volumes. Moscow, Leningrad, 1950. T. 2. P. 522–523.
- Morgan L. G. Ancient society. L., 1934. S. 212.
- A. S. Neverov Tashkent is a city of bread / Fig. V. Galdyaev; Preface V. Chalmaeva. - M.: Sov. Russia, 1980.
- Skripnik A. P. Moral evil in the history of ethics and culture: monograph. Publishing house of political literature. 1992. S. 38.
- Central Party Archives of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the CPSU (CPA IML), f. 112, op. 34, d.19, l. 20
- Brown P. Cannibalism // The Encyclopediof Religion. New York, London, 1987. Vol. 3. P. 60.
