Animal dislike - yesterday, today, tomorrow
Where does such hostility come from in a person? And why, brought up in a cultural environment, with our intellect, we experience an acute hatred of other people?
A gray-haired man in an old-fashioned beret walks the road from his home university to his home. Frightening thoughts about cruelty, which he could decide on, about revenge, which he would like to carry out in order to finally restore justice, about what he would do with these stupid people, constantly come into his overage head.
He thinks that there are only idiots and cunning young upstarts in the department and it is because of them that he lost his job. He thinks that his wife has a headache for the third month, and he is a man after all. With shame and resentment, he reflects that his son grew up an ungrateful geek. And he curses the unjust world and the idiots, next to whom you have to live, once again putting on a smile on your face.
And here is a much less intelligent person, an office worker, driving a foreign car, did not share the road with a neighbor in the lane. He defiantly throws up his middle finger and bulls, shouting out the most non-literary expressions. In his thoughts, he has already done a lot with the offender. Yes, this time he will only cut the bastard, but next time he will show him …
We are so close to destroying anyone who hinders us in one way or another, we so fervently believe in all rationalizations, why this particular person should be punished, but for now … so far, for the most part, we are holding back with the last bit of strength.
What limits our outbursts of hatred? The first limiting factor is law. The second is culture. Society gives us both in the process of socialization. Until the enmity reaches its peak, the cage of law and culture holds back. But the beast within us is growing and is ready to demolish all restrictions at any moment.
Where does such hostility come from in a person? And why, brought up in a cultural environment, with our intellect, we experience an acute hatred of other people?
What does the mind hide from us?
No matter how convincingly we justify our thoughts, their true reason is hidden from us. The unconscious, like a puppeteer, directs our whole life. And we do not even understand what is happening to us. Where there is a lack of realization of unconscious desires, we begin to be frustrated. Internal stress builds up, and with it irritability grows.
Of course, at this moment, various kinds of rationalizations are born in us: we say to ourselves that "everyone is bad," "the world is bad." And we even blame the time and the country that we feel bad.
How does an animal differ from a person? The animal does not change and does not develop from generation to generation, it is completely at its own level. A person differs from an animal in the emergence of additional desires, additional egoism, which, on the one hand, allows him to develop, and on the other hand, threatens him with self-destruction.
Animals have no consciousness. All their behavior is dictated by the task of preserving the species - the desire to survive and continue oneself in time, and it is provided by innate instinctive programs. An animal does not kill out of anger, out of revenge or out of hatred, it just provides itself with food or protects its life and the life of its offspring.
The animal system is in complete balance. Unlike the human world.
The human species system once got out of balance due to the emergence of increased, incremental desires. The skin vector was the first to break away from the animal world (in the terminology of the training "System-vector psychology").
The skin man felt the urge to eat more than he needed. And our every desire is provided with appropriate thoughts, and then actions. Having wished for more, the leatherman began to think about how to get this "more". This is how the stone ax and spear were created. For the first time, man, created weak, without claws and fangs, armed himself and became stronger than an animal.
In the next step, this increased desire was limited, since you cannot eat ten sticks of sausage instead of one, because the internal volume is finite. And warehouses of food supplies for a rainy day were created.
The increased desire and its limitation create the tension thanks to which a person develops to this day.
Dislike as another person's first sensation
Having wished to eat more, the first thing that a person felt was that in order to satisfy his increased desire he would like to use his neighbor, that is, to eat him. We are all cannibals by nature. But this desire was immediately limited. And in the limitation that arose, we first felt a strong dislike for our neighbor, because he walks very close, and we cannot eat him.
We hate our neighbor because we are limited in our ability to use it for ourselves.
Primary limitation of dislike. Ritual cannibalism
At the first stage of the development of human society, cannibalism was limited in relation to all members of the pack, with the exception of one, especially weak and useless at that time, an individual - we are talking about a skin-visual boy.
Each of us is born with a specific species role, which is determined by individual psychological and physical characteristics, corresponding abilities, inclinations and desires. If they are adequately filled, a person enjoys his activities and at the same time benefits society, ensuring his (and therefore his) survival.
Both in the ancient pack and in its sophisticated version - modern society - each of its members plays a specific role. The leaders lead the flock into the future. Hunters get food (money, resources), then trying to preserve and rationally use what they got. There are cave guards and mentors (couch potatoes who provide protection for the rear and educate children), night watchmen (today - musicians, programmers, scientists, creators of ideas).
There is also a so-called shaman, a gray cardinal, who is hated and feared. He makes every member of the team work hard for the whole, despite the inherent nature of laziness (the action of mortido). With his submission, the elements that threaten the integrity of the pack are eliminated, both inside and outside.
His desire is to survive at all costs. But, unlike all other members of the pack, on an unconscious level he unmistakably feels that he cannot survive alone, only together with everyone. He is not loved and hated for the fact that he makes everyone work for society, but it is he who by all means keeps his species alive. Our survival depends on it.
The olfactory shaman concentrates the general hatred on himself, and at the last moment he is paid off by the victim - the weakest and most unviable member of society, a skin-visual boy. The sacrifice puts on a ritual: a weak tribesman is eaten at a common table, rallying the members of the pack and making them closer to each other. Until now, this method is unconsciously applied in an indirect way.
It is easy to observe the sacrifice in collectives, the “eating” of individual individuals, thus removing the general tension that has accumulated as a result of the failure to fulfill desires. As in cave times, the weakest person, unable to defend himself, is chosen as a victim. The members of the collective, rallying, "are friends" against him, bringing down on the "scapegoat" all their hostility, which in the absence of a victim would pour out on each other, contributing to the disintegration and death of the entire group.
Secondary Limitation of Dislike - Culture
When, in the process of evolution, direct cannibalism was abolished (the unconscious once again reduced the increased collective desires for sex and murder, already weakly restrained by the primary prohibitions), a secondary restriction arose associated with the abolition of the sacrifice of a weak member of the pack. This ensured his survival and development, and gave humanity a culture, thanks to which subsequently appeared not only great works of art, but also humanism, which proclaimed human (hereinafter - any) life as the highest value.
The culture offered an alternative to animal hate-fighting through sacrifice. She provided the removal of hostility in society through empathy and compassion. We began to be guided by the concept of "morality". Thanks to the sense of a neighbor, a cultured person has learned to emotionally respond to the experiences of other people. Secondary cultural prohibitions on human enmity have appeared. In this sense, it is difficult to overestimate the importance of Christianity - the locomotive of culture, which for two thousand years has been restraining our innate animal hatred through the education of love for one's neighbor.
But at this stage of development, culture has practically exhausted its capabilities. The process of growth of our desires, once out of balance, does not stop for a second. Nowadays, their volume is so great that cultural prohibitions are no longer able to contain them. Increased desires require more fulfillment, which they do not receive. At the same time, the depth of our frustrations, the volume and strength of the accumulated hatred increase. Today we will not only be annoyed in response to rudeness, the degree of our dislike can jump to fierce hatred. And there it is not far from direct destruction.
Modern mankind has not yet learned to adequately realize the increased desires, and by acting directly, animal manifestations are able to sweep away all the accumulated primary and cultural restrictions: cannibal people are capable of both figuratively and literally eating each other.
Growing desire
The limitation of primary desires only redirected these drives, but did not make them disappear. Sublimating into socially useful activities, these desires contributed to the evolutionary development of the human psyche.
Desire, once out of balance, does not stop growing: even when it sublimates, it continues to grow and each time demanding even more fulfillment. At the same time, a person does not always have enough strength and living conditions to learn how to sublimate his desires. Internal and external constraints are not allowed to directly implement them. As a result, there is an accumulation of unfulfilled desires, which begin to crush with a heavy burden. Freud called this state of frustration. A person experiences dissatisfaction, which is not realized, but ultimately results in aggression towards other people, and in some cases, towards the whole world.
The danger that threatens the preservation of the human species, as Jung said, comes primarily from the person himself:
The next round
Humanity as a species will survive in any case. The only question is: will it be able to do this going from the stick or to the carrot. If we fail to find a way to cope with our increased desires, then we ourselves will lead ourselves to a war of total extermination, where only a few will survive. Another way is to realize the uniqueness of the human species and our universal interdependence.
Where we learn to feel another person in the same way as if it were ourselves, where we begin to understand the role of each in a single mechanism that ensures the development and survival of our species, we lose the need to limit animal hostility, we become incapable harm other people, in the same way that they are not able to harm themselves.
