White people conflating self-defense with violent aggression, then insisting this is an innate human trait is an all-too-common attempt to justify or excuse ab-normal behaviour (especially racism). Personal, first-hand experience tells me that self-defense and violent aggression are not the same thing, they are not interchangeable, and they are not universal human traits.
If violent aggression was an innate human trait, we would ALL be psychopaths, sociopaths, serial killers, and serial rapists. Obviously, that is not true. 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.
Normal human behaviour is to nurture and protect human beings (not hurt them). It is so difficult for normal people to kill other human beings that most people can’t do it. In fact, our innate resistance is so strong, that hundreds of millions of people could not overcome it and succumbed to horrific deaths (e.g. Shark Island and the Holocaust) or enslavement (the Atlantic slave trade). Who shall we hold responsible for these atrocities? The perpetrators of violence or their peaceable victims? I blame the perpetrators.
Normal, peaceable human beings are responsible for survival and all human progress including food, water, shelter, tools, wheels, metal, machinery, books, medicine, electricity, transportation and the transmission of all human knowledge.
That said, protecting ourselves from violent aggression often requires violent behaviour in return — might this explain the tendency to conflate them? Either way, violent aggression is not an innate, universal human trait or even a common one; less than one percent of the entire human population are on the psychopathic spectrum, and even fewer are full blown psychopaths.
Hunting other human beings is ab-normal behaviour. Selling human beings is ab-normal behaviour. Buying human beings is ab-normal behaviour. Using hunted, sold and bought human beings to build private empires is effing insane. While violently aggressive people are rare, the use of aggressive violence to terrorize peaceable people into submission, cooperation, even complicity permeates human history. Nonetheless, we need to remember that aggressive violent behaviour is ab-normal. Why?
In my mind, the answer is simple. Soldiers, warriors, armies and police can NOT support themselves; they can NOT grow their own food, make their own clothing, weapons, or house themselves. Without normal, peaceable people to take care of them, aggressively violent people would die of hunger, thirst, disease, infections and each other. Aggressively violent people drain societies of their means of survival (food, water, peace, land and infants).
We hate to admit it, but we know that normal people who engage in violent behaviour for a living (e.g. soldiers, police officers, prison guards and mercenaries) and the people that they hurt both suffer brain injuries like PTSD. We also know that PTSD is so un-common among psychopaths that scientists are studying the phenomenon. We also know that brain scans of psychopaths are not the same as ours.
The idea that entire cultures are made up of deviants makes no sense to me. Again, less than 1% of the entire human population are psychopaths. One out of every one-hundred people does not a society make.
“Birds of a feather flock together” was my mother’s warning. She abhorred assimilation and fought to keep it from happening to her children, with all her might. “If you don’t want to become like them, don’t hang around them” she would say. After navigating the gang infested streets of my childhood, staying out of university gangs was a breeze. Corporate gangs are far more aggressive and violent than street gangs and I stayed out of those gangs too. Eventually, I went to work against corporate gangs and for those they harmed.
I suspect the invention of racism enabled psychopaths to hide themselves amongst us where they were free to torture, rape, murder, lie, and steal in broad daylight. In turn, normal people protected themselves, by supplying their psychopaths with targets (black people, brown people, gay people, women, foreigners, etc.). In this dangerous game of self-deceit, racism engulfed us all, Today, the symptoms are all around us — mass-shootings, domestic violence, mass incarceration, endless wars, violent 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 white people today, 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 deviants?
If I am correct, and violent aggression is deviant behaviour, we need to stop conflating it with self-defense and learn to keep them separate in our minds.
We simply cannot support too many warriors without sacrificing our children. Trying to figure out how to defend ourselves against violently aggressive people is exhausting. Nonetheless, I agree with you — wholeheartedly — we must prepare ourselves for defense.
Now that I am old enough to be expendable, my shooting skills are more valuable than my cooking skills. You, however, are young and not expendable. Know the difference between self-defense and aggressive violence and take care you do not cross the line, for if you do, I fear you will enter the realm of assimilation (into whiteness). You do not want our world of that I am certain.
