Why Are Humans Violent? The Psychological Reason We Hurt Each Other [View all]

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http://www.alternet.org/visions/why-are-humans-violent-psychological-reason-we-hurt-each-other



From the crises in the Middle East to mass shootings in U.S. schools to the reckless striving for wealth and world domination, there is one overarching theme that almost never gets media coverage—the sense of insignificance that drives destructive acts. As a depth psychologist with many years of experience, I can say emphatically that the sense of being crushed, humiliated and existentially unimportant are the main factors behind so much that we call psychopathology.

Why would it not follow that the same factors are at play in social and cultural upheavals? The emerging science of “terror management theory” shows convincingly that when people feel unimportant they equate those feelings with dying—and they will do everything they can, including becoming extreme and destructive themselves to avoid that feeling.

The sense of insignificance and death anxiety have been shown to play a key role in everything from terrorism to mass shootings to extremist religious and political ideologies to obsessions with materialism and wealth. Just about all that is violent and corrupt in our world seems connected to it.

So before we rush to judgment about the basis of violence in our world, we would do well to heed the terror management theorists and consider missing pieces of the puzzle. Economic, ideological and biological explanations take us only so far in unpacking the bewildering phenomenon of slaughtering people in cold blood, or playing recklessly with their health, safety or livelihoods. Granted, some violence is defensive and perhaps necessary to protect the lives of sovereign individuals and states. But too often violence is provocative, and when it becomes so betrays a common thread of psychological destitution—the sense of insignificance, the sense of not counting, of helplessness, and of emotional devaluation. We have stories daily about both lone gunmen and soldiers who seek vengeance and “prestige” to cover over their cultural and emotional wounds. Correspondingly, such stories parallel the kind of psychopathy of some in the corporate sector who speculate, pollute and militarize at will.