I’ve been disturbed by the number of people insisting that violent aggression is innate (or universal human traits). The same people also insist that in-group hostility towards outsiders is innate. Since these two ideas are connected to articles on racism, I think these people may be conflating violent aggression with self-defense.

If violent aggression was innate, we would all be psychopaths, sociopaths, serial killers, and serial rapists. The innate human response is to protect ourselves from these people – not become one. In fact, our brains automatically enable self-defense by releasing chemicals that prepare our bodies for fight, flight or freeze. That said, protecting ourselves from violent aggression, often requires violent behaviour – might this explain the tendency to conflate them?

I suspect racism enabled psychopaths (aka anti-social personality disorder?) to hide themselves amongst us where they were free to torture, rape, murder, lie, and steal in broad daylight. In turn, white-Christians supplied their psychopaths with targets (black people, brown people, gay people, women, foreigners, etc.).

Is this true? Has white-Christian culture’s embrace of racism, cultivated deviant behaviour, instead of weeding it out of their societies? Today, the symptoms are all around us – mass-shootings, domestic violence, mass incarceration, endless wars, far-right extremism, white-supremacy and the hero worship of police, soldiers, prison guards, vigilantes, mercenaries, billionaires, and corruption – etcetera and so on and on and on.

However, in my mind, the most disturbing symptom of all is how many people honestly believe that violent aggression is an innate feature of their own human biology. Why are these people so willing to believe they are violently aggressive?

If violent aggression is deviant behaviour, we need to stop conflating it with self-defense and learn to keep them separate in our minds.