Where does the Heart of Darkness come from?

[Scrivener7]

If you study European history for the last few hundred years, the characteristic described by Conrad as the "Heart of Darkness" is clearly evident.

The need to colonize and enslave, the need to dominate, the lack of qualms about exterminating whole populations of people of different races or customs, the ability to discount the humanity of those they encountered as they moved into North America and Africa.

What do you think is the source of this Heart of Darkness?

I think many will say money, and that is true. But what is it about that particular segment of humanity that allows the desire for money to overcome every other consideration and allows them to leave behind every shred of decency toward other people in the pursuit of it?

Or is this characteristic not unique to European society at all? Is it just a human characteristic? Is it just that circumstances put Europeans in the position to exploit other populations and other populations would do the same if given the chance?

Regardless of who possesses the characteristic, though, where do you think it comes from?

[mopinko]

1. we are a violent species.

it’s how we concurred the planet. both our tendency to take over new territory, and our fiercenesses in protecting what we have already taken.
we ride the tiger.

[Walleye]

3. Yes, Putin is not really an exception historically

[Scrivener7]

13. Do you think it was at some point a necessity for survival?

(To dominate rather than cooperate?)

[Walleye]

2. When people get the upper hand they need to push other people around

Not all people of course, but it’s part of our survivability and adaptability package, I think, it’s up to civilization to keep that in check which we don’t do very well. I would like to say it is a male characteristic, but maybe that’s just because they usually have the upper hand.

[mopinko]

4. it's like w dogs-

we didnt breed the violence out of the wolf, we bred in control.
i think it is very much a male thing. not 100%, but close enough to be statistically significant.

[Walleye]

6. I agree with you on both points there

I also have kind of a weird theory that racism originates in sexism. Because men don’t want their children to be a darker color and prove their wives we’re unfaithful. Kind of a stretch I guess, but I’ve always felt something like that. I mean why was Emmett Till killed, for whistling at a white woman?

[mopinko]

12. well, evolutionary psychology posits

that when men moved from just broadcasting their seed to settling in w 1 family, it was a great risk. an enormous leap. everything about us is aimed at delivering our packet of dna to the next gen. it’s more effective to guide a small number of offspring, but if they arent yours, it’s the genetic death penalty. it’s a male’s deepest fear.
it may be that a darker skin is 1 marker that was around forever. so it could be a bit of that.

i have a different theory about racism. i think it is the other side of the coin of inclusion, of extending tribe beyond clan. there is clan, and ‘good’ others. but you cant include others w/o rejecting the ‘bad’ others.
the basis of all prejudice, all isms, is this concept of other. skin color is so obvious, it makes it ‘easy’. but we find all kinds of ways to divide the world up into ‘us’ and ‘other’.
and that is the root of it all.

[Scrivener7]

15. I never thought of that. Nice.

Good other and bad other.

[cbabe]

26. Evolutionary psychology debunked

https://www.scientificamerican.com › article › four-fallacies-of-pop-evolutionary-2012-12-07

Four Fallacies of Pop Evolutionary Psychology

Psychological characteristics that subsequently emerged during human evolutionary history were built atop that foundation. And we know that some emotional systems subsequently evolved to promote...

[Scrivener7]

30. Great article! Thank you.

Though, disappointingly, it makes a good argument for the idea that we can never answer the question.

This jumped out at me:

Fear, Rage, Seeking and Lust have even earlier, premammalian origins.

[mopinko]

34. good article.

but i must say that for all it’s flaws, it beats freud and the tabula rasa crowd. i find psyche to be the squishiest of the sciences anyway.
the article is a lot deeper dive than i ever took into it. i read ‘the moral animal’ in the clinton years, and a couple other books in that era. so this is a lot more complex than i ever got.

i took away 2 big things-
monkeys invented politics to see who got the girls.
and being a good person is a risky strategy.

the forces at play in growing a human to be altruistic, good, i understand from other sources. i have a fascination w brains. shortly after my 1st kid, the chgo trib did a huge series on new research into fetal development. the big point was about how stressed mothers, specifically the stresses of poverty and big city life, led to shifts in fetal development that pointed to the roots of ‘criminal behavior’. esp the starvation of more complex brain development that is the basis for intelligences. but any kind of stress would apply. stress of a family in crisis is the same no matter how much money you have. money is a cushion but it isnt a shield.
a big chunk of that book is about just that process, in a larger social scope. that’s the part that made an impression on me.

but i dont think you can argue that fear of being a cuck isnt a hardwired part of the male brain. i do take issue w this article on jealousy. saying that gay men see infidelity more like women do, therefore it’s not sex determined but only social, strikes me as quite specious. since we arent talking procreational sex… exception that proves the rule? (no, not a real thing, just saying, you could see it that way.)
other than that, what i know about the subject isnt these deep dives into this behavior or in thst order or any of that. but that’s science for you.


btw- there is a way to change this. not for this gen, maybe but for the next.
the central lesson of all i know is that if all mothers were free of stress, well cared for, fed, not exposed to violence, their babies will be the best they can be.
they wont be hard wired for a hair trigger. for competition. they’ll be hard wired for balance. for cooperation.

[Scrivener7]

10. But is that changing? I'm thinking of the women at Abu Ghraib.

The world is becoming a place where the source of might is control of information rather than firepower. So women will be able, at some point, to equally wield power. I wonder how that will change women's relationship to dehumanizing the other.

[mopinko]

17. yes it is.

no doubt the past ratio is influenced by social norms as much as biology.
it probably is a bad sign that women are getting more violent instead of men getting less so. or maybe that stream goes both ways. more men getting less violent.

hopefully the fact that this stuff doesnt happen in secret any more will help change it.

[Scrivener7]

5. I'm trying to think if I, as a woman, would want to physically dominate people

if I were in a position to do so. My heart says no, but there are plenty of studies (the prisoner study, the brown/blue eye study) that say we are likely to.

[Walleye]

7. I know, but as a rule we physically are superior to children and don't treat them badly

[Scrivener7]

8. True. For most of us.

And maybe that's part of it, too. Maybe it is always a subset, though the racist structure of our society would suggest we all have some of the darkness in us, either bred in or native to us.

[Walleye]

9. Oh yes that's what makes it so fascinating and so frustrating,a giant moral spectrum good to evil

We think about how we keep evolving, and I have to believe that every generation is slightly more evolved than the last, but there are throwbacks

[Scrivener7]

11. And there are backslides. I think we are in a backslide in the US now. That's what prompted the

question.

[mopinko]

21. i've given it some thought from time to time. lol

i own a couple ‘weapons’. i own a framing nailer, which can f u up. and i have an authentic shillelagh. i will tell you, the 1st time i held those objects in my hands, it was a rush.
i also have a skid steer, which makes me feel like a king when i use it.

the most ‘violent’ thing i ever did was key a couple of cars parked on my property. i paid the price for that, lol. dont think i’ll do such again any time soon.

i think women usually arent violent to control someone else, but to keep them from controlling us.

[raging moderate]

14. Europe DID go through dreadful suffering for centuries in the middle ages.

Overcrowding, invasions, massacres, oppression, poverty, starvation, deadly cold weather, crop failures, epidemics...

Some of my early family left Europe to escape hopeless dreadful hunger and suffering. I have sometimes thought that the centuries of suffering must have created terrible widespread anger in the hearts of many Europeans, that was unleashed when the suffering finally lifted a little. Plus those who inflicted the suffering had this oppressive tendency baked into their family traditions. Maybe similar experiences have driven other populations to behave badly.

[Scrivener7]

16. Everything about European psychology does hark back to

the Black Death in some way or another, but I could never reason out the connection to this.

[Scrivener7]

22. And re-reading your post, just as violence goes from parent

to child to child, it is feasible that the anger would be passed from hand to hand and grow as you describe.

[c-rational]

18. Interesting question-I would say it comes from what some call man's original sin - the ego.

[Scrivener7]

32. What do you think were the insults to the ego that caused the "othering?"

As I said below, I know in early New England, the English talked about how physically impressive the Native people were.

And, come to think of it, they were people who thought disabilities and misfortunes were God's punishments. So could their behavior have boiled down to looking at more well-favored people and being frightened and by their own inadequacy?

Fear of one's own inadequacy is a central MAGA characteristic, and we can see how efficiently it begets violence and hatred.

Good Lord. Could the motivation be that banal and childish?

[c-rational]

33. Not so much an insult per se, rather just the existence of an ego which fools you into believing

you are separate from others and/or your surroundings. It is simply not seeing clearly (which includes 99.9% of all people, including me most of the time).

[modrepub]

19. Fear

of a lot of things.

[Scrivener7]

20. Of what, do you think? I know with Native Americans

in New England, the English actually wrote about what tall, strong, magnificent figures the natives were. I often wondered if that contributed to that particular holocaust.

[raging moderate]

23. My first known European American immigrant ancestor married an Algonquin lady in Quebec.

Last edited Fri Mar 24, 2023, 04:44 PM - Edit history (3)

We don't know their names. We only know that he was from France and she was Algonquin. She was said to be sweet and perceptive. That was more than two centuries ago on my mother's side in her maternal line.

My second known European American immigrant married the daughter of this French/Algonquin couple. He was from England. We know his last name was Cooley, which I have since learned is Welsh. They met at a Methodist Camp Revival in Florida (we think maybe Florida, New York?), and they lived in Vermont. They were happy for many years, raising several children together, until she died in childbirth. He encouraged our family to keep speaking a little French in her honor (we still do, a little). He is said to have declared in his grief that she was a "real princess" (please do not misunderstand: calling a woman a "real princess" back then meant that she was so good a person that she would have deserved to be a real princess).

My father's side also has Native American ancestry. About 160 years ago, a man with mixed Irish/English ancestry immigrated to Texas, where he married a lady named Zoe Brant, said to be from the Mohawk tribe in Canada. She was said to be feisty and adventurous. Later, we found out that her father had fought with the Union Army to help free the slaves. Tragically, Zoe died within the first year of marriage, in the childbirth that produced my father's grandfather. The young father, in shock and totally ignorant about babies, accepted the offer of very kind family friends named the Johnsons. He left the baby with them and sent money to them periodically. and came to visit the child a few times. If you are related to these wonderful Johnsons who did this, I still bless them for their kindness.

[modrepub]

24. Of Something Different

There's always that fear that you will get absorbed by or pushed aside by something different. Ideas, people and such.

Visited L'Anse aus Medows in NF, the only known Viking (European) settlement in North America. The first Vikings we not necessarily the best representatives of European peoples. The local Indian tribes basically ran them out of their settlement, probably because they didn't "play nice" with the local population. The Inuit were also suitably hostile to the Vikings settlements in Greenland (and poor relations with them probably contributed to the settlements demise). So it wasn't always a one-sided conflict.

It wasn't all war and conflict when Europeans met the local natives. And it wasn't always a one-sided affair for European dominance. Some Europeans did manage to coexist with the local native populations (William Penn, Conrad Weiser and probably others) but the overall result was not favorable to the native populations in the long run.

The native Americans aren't truly gone, fragments of their existence live on in place names and local stories. Patches of tribes still exist even on the east coast hundreds of years after the Europeans settled here. The story of Natives completely pushed out of their lands is probably not true. Remnant populations remained, sometimes distinct and intermingled, adjusted and overcame. If you listen and look hard enough you will find their shadows still remain.

[Scrivener7]

31. Fear of being absorbed is definitely in there, and we are seeing that surging today.

But what a bizarre concept, when you think of it.

My lived culture is a world away from the culture of my grandparents. And theirs is a world away from their grandparents. Not just in terms of technology, but in almost every value and opportunity and experience. And the difference didn't happen because of any conflict, or any attempt to replace their culture. It was just time and culture evolving.

When the MAGAs show their fear of being absorbed with their "you will not replace us" chant, they seem completely ignorant of the fact that no, we will not replace them. Their own children will. And their children's children.

[Martin68]

25. Conrad believed the origin and true nature of the heart of darkness could never be clearly

determined, expressed, or defined. Certainly it found expression in rapacious capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. But he considered its true nature to be ineffable. He could only hint at it indirectly through the events and characters of his stories.

[Scrivener7]

27. I did not know this. And he certainly made a study of it.

[orthoclad]

28. Pretty simple

Kipling said it best:

we have got
the machine-gun
and they have not

Technically superior weapons, especially from an industry enegized by petrochemicals (coal, steam engine, mass manufacture), combined with the rise of imperial capitalism (think of Shakespeare's Merchant Of Venice waiting for his ship). Add a dash of the Christian attitude of contempt for the world: it's ok to kill and enslave if we're "saving their souls". Convenient excuse for the proto-capitalists to abuse millions and get very rich.

I'd say the deepest heart of darkness was EuroChristianity. Look at the heresy wars in Roman christianity, the darkness goes way back. I think the biggest question is comparing EuroChristians and Islam enslaving the world. They had comparable tech, at least until the steam engine. IIRC, islam was more tolerant of minorities.

Technology-capitalism-evangelism; the difference between Europe and the rest of the world.

[Scrivener7]

29. I see your point. I'm thinking of, for example, the Sierra Leone civil war or the

Irish Troubles. Nearly identical people, the difference being only the weapons available to them and the flimsy excuse to use them.

Which suggests it's endemic in all of us, a characteristic of all humanity, and it's just a flip of the coin whether we end up on the side holding the weapons or the side having the weapons pointed at them.