Article 17
The Freedom and Responsibility to be Human - Part 2
by Wendell Krossa
(From the series "Creating A Horizontal God", Copyright, W. Krossa)

Aggression In The Climb Up

In regard to aggression and the hierarchical status or position that it attains, it is important to note some valuable research being done on this ancient animal drive. Aggression is too often viewed positively and even praised as a necessary characteristic in order to move up in society or in hierarchical status. In this valuation of aggression we see once again residual animal drives being viewed as essential elements of the human person and therefore valid for human existence.

 

But there is a dark side to aggression ideology and it should serve as a serious warning to anyone considering making it part of their strategy for moving up in some social hierarchy. While the use of some of this material may require a new stretch in thinking, we feel it offers another way of understanding the callous disregard of some people in dominating and thereby harming others.

 

Conventional wisdom says that hierarchies presuppose the natural superiority of leaders and the natural inferiority of subordinates (4). But we need to remember that the hierarchies of status we create in human society do not in any way reflect the quality or greatness of the people in them in an ascending order. In fact, hierarchical strata may reflect the worst people in a society in an ascending order. It is possible to sit at the top of some world straddling hierarchy and yet be a complete animal, as far as true humanity is concerned. Conversely, a person can live at the bottom of society and still be a great human being. Jesus, Mother Teresa, and others like them are prime examples of this.

 

Hierarchies, in reality, often simply reflect positions attained as the result of expressing very animal-like drives to dominate others. Hierarchical position, then, may be the reflection of a very base animal-like effort- the aggressive drive to get ahead of others and to dominate others. Such positions do not reflect the quality, value, or greatness of the people found at any given level of hierarchical strata.

 

In regard to aggression in the pursuit of dominance in hierarchy, recent studies on the brain and brain function are raising interesting questions regarding the influence of the human and the animal parts of the brain in different people. This material is very helpful to note in terms of the widespread pressure on people to use aggression in order to move up or to get ahead of others in the world. It is now understood, for instance, that aggression is an impulse arising from the hypothalamus which is part of the ancient animal brain.

 

Kipnis even states that "underlying aggressive behavior... is an instinctual apparatus that propels humans into violent encounters with others" (5). He continues, noting that physiological research dealing with the brain's functioning has uncovered evidence to support the contention that older areas of the brain contain regions (i.e. the hypothalamus) that control the expression of aggression.

 

In most people there is response and activity in the cerebral cortex and particularly in the frontal part of the brain which operates to restrain and overrule aggressive animal impulses. This more recent and advanced (in evolutionary terms) and more human part of the brain operates to control the more animal areas of the brain where aggressive impulses to harm others originate.

 

However, in some people there is a distinct lack of frontal brain activity or true human emotion to control aggression. In its most severe form, this inability to control aggression is known as psychopathy. This term describes society's most predatory individuals, according to Robert Hare, one of the world's leading authorities on psychopathy (6). Psychopaths, says Hare, do not form deep or meaningful human relationships and they often hurt others, even those closest to them.

 

Then, in an incredibly revealing statement, Hare says that many psychopaths "find wealth and success as highly manipulative corporate careerists, as thugs on professional sports teams or as unscrupulous politicians" (7). Whether criminal or careerist, says Hare, all psychopaths "share a profound lack of empathy and remorse for the harm they do to others" (8).

 

Another researcher from Scotland reported to the British Psychological Society's annual conference that "his three-year study shows that politicians have significant behavior patterns in common with criminal psychopaths" (9). Politicians as psychopaths-this would be hilarious were it not for the immense suffering and damage such people cause to those below them in the lower strata of our hierarchically oriented societies and institutions.

 

Psychopathy has long been associated only with the most savage and extreme criminal behavior such as that found in the lives of serial killers like Ted Bundy. But this one-sided view of psychopathy has led to the ignoring of other forms of psychopathic behavior which may be less violent but are just as cruel and inhuman. We need to remember that Hare has estimated that fully one percent of the population has psychopathic tendencies. Only one in forty thousand of this subgroup will become serial killers. The large majority of this group will treat others in less violent but still cruelly inhuman ways. This would include heartless managers or leaders who aggressively climb organizational or social ladders to insensitively dominate others.

 

Unfortunately, psychopaths, who have no hesitancy in expressing destructive aggression, may be in some of the top positions in our social hierarchies. This may explain in a variety of situations the insensitive cruelty of the people occupying those positions. Upper hierarchical positions often demand the type of people who are callous, aggressive, and even brutal in their treatment of others. These traits are believed to be necessary in order to coerce large numbers of people to function efficiently according to corporation or state institution standards.

 

The skills required to function successfully in the upper strata positions of organizational hierarchies often have nothing to do with being a great human being or even with being human at all. The control or domination skills necessary for top organizational positions are useful for making organizations more efficient and competitive but the human cost can be immense. And tragically these positions often do operate mainly to serve competitiveness and profitability with only a marginal trimming of concern for members or workers. Hence, in a financial crunch, thousands of workers are fired while top people continue to take huge benefits and fatten company coffers.

 

I am reminded of one corporate specialist who is called in to trim corporate payrolls. He has fired up to 6000 employees at a time in a single company. His cold response to criticism is that corporations exist only to make money. They are not social institutions. But that cruelty gains efficiency at the cost of immense human suffering.

 

How wrong the above corporate ax is. Every human organization and institution must respect first and foremost humanity, including its own workers, and not just exist to serve the animal greed of an elite few. Other companies have taken a much more human approach and shown respect and concern for their own members, with product and profit taking a secondary place. These companies have also shown strong productivity and successful operation but with far better morale and less cost due to turnover.

 

Cruel corporate leaders dispense with thousands of workers while at the same time taking huge benefit packages for themselves. Another corporate ax known as "Chainsaw Al" has fired up to 11,000 people in one company- a third of the workforce. On leaving that company he was given $100 million US. He currently has a three year contract for $70 million. His attitude toward business is expressed in one of his fond sayings: "The meek not only won't inherit the earth, they won't even get mineral rights" (Sun News Services. 1998. "Chainsaw Al Dunlap chopped from Sunbeam" in The Vancouver Sun, June 16, p.D9).

 

It is worth noting that the wages and benefits given to these corporate executives are more than enough to employ the thousands of people they lay off and still reward the executives handsomely.

 

While not suggesting that all people holding positions above others in organizational hierarchies are psychopathic, it is clear that those who aggressively climb above others to control them are exhibiting animal-like tendencies to dominate and thereby harm others. Whether psychopathic or not, such predatory behavior is definitely more animal-like than human. Climbing above others to hold power over them seriously dehumanizes both the dominated people and the powerholder. That is condemnation enough.

 

Far too many people are into aggression as part of their self-development. But aggression is a distinctly animal drive which operates to dominate and disenfranchise others. It has no part in true humanity or truly human development.

 

Any control over or power over others is very damaging to the well-being of those being controlled. Controlled people suffer immense harm- emotionally, mentally, and even physically. Efforts to control others reveal an insensitivity and callousness on the part of the person controlling. Such behavior is perilously close to the lack of empathy and remorse for the harm done to others that Hare associates with psychopathy.

 

The above research calls into question the widely held view in hierarchical societies that only the best people are found in the higher positions of hierarchies. If mainly aggressive people climb over others to gain positions of power and control and if these positions and functions of control inevitably harm those below, then perhaps we are seeing some of the worst people in society rise to the top.

 

These social climbers are perhaps the most predatory, animal-like, and even psychopathic of society's members. Instead of hierarchy revealing society's best, it may be revealing society's worst, those unable or unwilling to control aggressive animal impulses. Hierarchy, then, may not reveal the most human members of society, but rather, the most animal-like.

 

Hierarchical institutions or status's- whether political, corporate, or other- do not deserve human loyalty or respect. They are destructive and dehumanizing structures of authority and domination with roots in patterns of competitive animal relating.

 

Hierarchically oriented societies and institutions present us with a vivid example of the paradox Jesus spoke of when he stated that the last would be first and the first would be last. The apparently best may turn out to be the worst, and the least may be the greatest in terms of true humanity. Bertrand Russell said the same in stating that any group feeling themselves to be better than others tend to sink lower than the rest.

 

The widespread problem of psychopathy also raises the question of the possibility of elements of psychopathic thinking and behavior being built into institutions and states. If psychopathic individuals aggressively climb organizational ladders to dominate others and if these people then take part in shaping institutional and state policy, ideology, and patterns of behavior, then you may have in our societies forms of institutionalized psychopathy. Cruel, callous, and inhuman ideologies, policies, and practices may be due to the influence of these cruel, callous people.

 

As an example we think of economic policies which result in the laying off of millions of workers in the name of principles such as competitive efficiency. These policies create immense human misery but are coldly justified as necessary for competitive advantage. There are even legal contexts designed to support such policies. Contemporary economic ideology also justifies the brutal and callous hoarding of resources by the elite few while hundreds of millions of human beings suffer and die for want of basic resources. There is nothing human in such policies or practices. The tragedy is that decent people who join societies and organizations adhering to such policies are often forced to follow these callous practices in order to survive in such institutions.

 

 

Just a further note on the cerebral cortex operation to restrain and overrule aggressive animal impulses. The United States military found this humanity or human emotion of the pre-frontal cortex to be a real problem in World War Two. Most American soldiers simply would not fire their weapons to kill others. There was only a 15% firing rate. A few were doing all the killing.

 

But the military found a way around the frontal cortex check on harming others. Their new approach enabled them to develop zombie-like killers. They developed a training system that would teach soldiers to bypass conscious thought and enabled the trainers to directly control behavior. It was a system of conditioning where soldiers were trained to respond like pigeons to stimulus by using rifle targets shaped like humans which popped up, were shot, and then dropped down again.

 

Endless repetition short circuited the conscious thought process. Where normally people would ask "Should I do this?", "Is this the right thing to do?", after US military conditioning, people would just fire reflexively when the people targets popped up.

 

The system was considered a real success in Viet Nam where the firing rate improved to 90%.

 

In hand to hand combat training, where people instinctively resist killing even more, the military uses the same method of ingraining the killer response. They train the body's muscles to overcome the mind by physically ingraining the motions of killing. Soldiers are pushed repetitiously until too exhausted, until they forget the consequences and just act. It is called muscle memory.

 

A tough system of reward and punishment is also used to coerce soldiers into obedient and mindless response. Good killers are told they "have the heart of a warrior". Ones who resist killing are called cowards.

 

Now the US military can successfully train 100,000 new killers a year. But they still can not make people like it. The sad result is widespread post traumatic stress syndrome- a lot of really messed up people. When you destroy people's humanity, then you can expect psychopathology.

 

This new approach to controlling human beings raises some questions. If you can damage young lives by abuse and that leads to violent adults, then what is the military doing to human brains on a massive scale? Are they training people to shut down the frontal part of the brain that acts to prevent inhumanity toward others? Is this not the creation of a condition similar to psychopathy? (Discovery Channel, Nov. 2, 1998, 7 p.m. PST).

 

The Vertical Always Corrupts

Kipnis also thoroughly exposes the callousness of powerholders in his well documented book (10). He has argued effectively that people in positions above others are inevitably transformed into viewing themselves as better than those below them and they inevitably tend to devalue people below themselves in the hierarchical strata. It is impossible, he argues, to move up in a hierarchy or in social status (e.g. in wealth, fame, or power) and not be corrupted in some way as a human being.

 

Kipnis repeatedly notes that those in positions of power over others inevitably grow to feel superior to those below them. These people then tend to treat others as less than fully human, as mere objects of manipulation. Kipnis also notes that it is mainly aggressive and power hungry people who seek such positions over others. This raises the same concerns Hare raised about psychopathy.

 

This material has been noted in order to clearly make the point that it is impossible to become fully human and to relate humanly in hierarchical relationships or institutions. It is impossible to experience and to express genuine human love in vertically oriented relationships. Any vertically oriented relationship with its attendant control inevitably destroys true human feeling, human relating, and human development. Kipnis has noted this in showing that the entry of power into any human relationship inevitably precludes the expression of compassion in such a relationship. Vertical arrangements of relationships simply must be ended if we are ever to grow and progress toward true human existence.

 

Control in any form over another person is one of the most perverted and inhuman things that a human being can ever do to another human being. There is no way that control can be validated or made to appear less destructive by labeling it as leadership or social influence or persuasion. It is simply ugly animal-like behavior that always harms the person controlled.

 

In view of this, it is a great waste of effort and expense to constantly send managers and directors to training seminars to try to make them better leaders in the hope this might improve employee relationships and thereby improve company performance. This only avoids the essential issue at the root of much organizational and group conflict which is the human demand for uncoerced relating and for full control over personal life and destiny. It is a waste of effort to try to improve power relationships. The only humane thing to do is to eliminate them entirely from groups.

 

Humanity as Wimpiness

Kipnis notes that Jesus' message of renouncing coercion and control to treat people humanely is today considered naive and even half-witted (11). His example of not aggressively climbing the hierarchical systems of his day is so out of step with the aggressive machismo of current world culture as to be seen as absolutely wimpy, if not stupid. It is behavior so alien to an aggressive and competitive animal-like social order that it simply is incomprehensible to most people.

 

This may explain why Jesus was eventually transformed by his followers into a powerful Lord ruling his subjects from the pinnacle of all hierarchies. This view of God more naturally suits the animal drive in people to control others. Such a view of God also can be readily used to validate the most inhuman domination and treatment of others.

 

In societies which promote aggression, achievement, success, and winning over others as natural behavior essential to survival and success, it is hard to see the point of unselfish and nondominating lives such as those of Jesus, Ghandi or mother Teresa.

 

Also, the self-esteem of most men today is so entirely linked to aggression and strength, says Kipnis, that most men only consider themselves real men through aggressive domination of others whether in the workplace, the home, or at play (12). Consequently, the contemporary warrior God who brutally and omnipotently crushes all opposition with his iron fist quite nicely suits the tough attitude of modern males. This is the God often called upon to help winners crush their opponents in sports, war, and the business world.

 

But winning is not an idea or practice that is inspired by the human God. Winning is often just another expression of animal-like aggression and domination. We must be careful that we do not defile ideas of God with these animal-like traits. Prayer to God to help beat an opponent is wasted air and energy for it violates the essential nature of God as nonaggressively human.

 

This supreme value of Western culture- the drive to win- needs to be thoroughly questioned. This aggressive drive has produced an obsession in Western cultures with categorizing people and their performance. We label people with first/second/third etc., winners/losers, success/defeat, and so on. Why categorize people in such a manner? Why not just accept and enjoy the diverse contribution of all people without making them feel that they are failures because they did not aggressively compete to beat all others?

 

In this regard, it may be useful to note that the answer to male aggressiveness is not for men to discover their feminine side. Nor is it a solution for subservient women to break free of their subservience by learning the aggressive ways of their male counterparts. These solutions only promise more polarizing conflict. Instead, all of us need to leave animal behavior behind and learn what it means to become more human. That alone unites humanity.

 

Kipnis urges the development of culture and changes in genetic makeup to restrain man's aggressive nature (13). He notes, as Hare does, that more aggressive people have abnormal EEG brain patterns. But he holds forth the hope that "the growth and strengthening of the intellect will eventually master instinctual life" (14).

 

One final thought on aggression. Many people aggressively scramble to the top in going after wealth, fame, or raw power and then thank God for their success. The implication is that God is somehow responsible for their 'success'. It was predestined by God. This is a severe distortion of the human God and it merely reflects the age old practice of validating animal drives and greed by claiming God as the sponsor. It is a terrible perversion of God and a blatantly selfish abuse of the idea of God.

 

The human God never inspires anyone to aggressively climb over others to dominate and greedily hoard resources and privileges not available to everyone. That behavior is a denial of all that the human God stands for. Jesus taught the opposite in revealing a God who heads for the bottom to serve and share equally with all others. The responsibility to be human is a responsibility toward others.

 

This truth Jesus revealed about God serving, also renders nonsense all the talk of politicians about serving people. With excessively fat guaranteed pension plans and abundant benefits at the expense of hardworking taxpayers, political suits are not serving anyone but themselves. The human God has never climbed to the top of any social order to occupy a position of power over others. Contemporary political office too often represents the very opposite of true humanity.

 

Just a word for political and managerial types used to access to sufficient benefits, security, and resources for a comfortable lifestyle. If you have any genuine human feeling left, then try to get a feel for the insecurity and desperation of this citizen below, who lives in the bottom strata of one of our hierarchically oriented social orders.

 

Her letter was to the editor of a local paper to complain about pay raises for city councilors who sit in control of taxpayers hard-earned dollars. Try to feel her frustration and helplessness and maybe, just maybe there is still hope that you may try to change and give up that selfish control over resources and opportunities not available to people like her, living powerlessly at the very bottom of society.

 

She says in her letter entitled "Get Real About Jobs, Councilors": "Maybe the members of council should get in touch with the 'real world' and realize that unemployment is becoming the biggest and most serious issue this country (Canada) is facing. There are many of us who are actively and in some cases, desperately either looking for work or afraid we will lose what work we have now.

 

"There are also those of us who would rather die than go on welfare... and because we are unable to find full-time work, we are trying to balance at least two part-time jobs, and may do many other things such as housecleaning, baby-sitting, and if there is room, taking in foreign students.

 

"Does council have any idea how much time and work that type of survival takes? Perhaps council should look at how much part-time jobs are paying lately... Why doesn't he (a council member wanting a raise) try and raise a family on between $7 and $8 per hour, the going rate in jobs today. I suggest to council that most of us would give anything for a full-time job that pays (the current rate council members were getting)" (15). Her struggle reflects the powerlessness and frustration of many others at the bottom of contemporary social orders.

 

Love, Love, Love

In thinking of the idea of the quality of people being reflected in hierarchical positions, we need to remember exactly what it is that makes any person great or good. Only a relatively few people possess the skills, heritage, or luck which give them an advantage in the modern competitive social orders and therefore a chance to climb social hierarchies. Those skills enable such people to use the hierarchical arrangement of our societies to dominate others through access to increased power, wealth, or fame. But those competitive skills do not make them better persons.

 

All that is necessary to make one a decent person and a success in life is equally available to every human being. That thing, as noted earlier, is normal human love. It is the most humanizing of all emotions and practices.

 

Love is the only thing that ultimately matters in life. Everyone can attain fully to this one essential for true human existence. Special training or education are not required to become an expert in love, to excel in love. And there is no limit to the growth any human can experience or how far they can creatively explore in the area of love. There are also no prerequisites in terms of special status or resources needed to accomplish love.

 

We need to always remember that you can gain immense wealth and power and yet abjectly fail at human relationships which then makes one a total human failure. Conversely, if you succeed at loving others, even without gaining any wealth or power, then you are a human success, a true winner at humanity, which alone matters in life.

 

Love can be expressed in infinitely unique ways by every person. It need not be expressed through an institution or some special office, calling or vocation such as in religion. These are not more special or sacred forums for expressing love. The only forum necessary to express human love is daily life.

 

The above mentioned religious avenues have only tended to distort human love by placing it within hierarchical relationships and arrangements of domination. But love in a vertical orientation is no longer human love. In fact, enough evidence now exists to prove that love can never exist and operate in any relationship where power or control enters. Love is a purely horizontal reality.

 

Denying Self

Jesus radically redefined love during his few years on earth. In doing so, he exposed the animal-like nature of a human existence that was oriented toward a selfish, competitive struggle to gain more material good or power for one's self and one's family.

 

 

Jesus revealed that true human greatness did not lie in the endless striving to move upward in status or in the endless struggle to accumulate more material resources. Rather, true humanity was to be found in the denial of this animal urge to control more resources or opportunities than others. In the God we see in Jesus, true human feelings and drives would lead people to work for the greater good of all human beings and all life.

 

Aside from the humanity of selflessness, on a personal level self-denial offers some very healthy benefits. One wise old preacher once said that for people with a personal problem, such as depression, to focus on that problem through such things as praying about it, may only intensify the problem instead of leading to healing. Too much self-focus on how I am feeling and doing can be harmful. Instead, in many cases healing is to be found in becoming involved in helping others, in becoming concerned about other's needs and feelings. Why does this work? Because in becoming interested in others, we are fulfilling the true nature of our humanity which is to be community oriented or oriented to others. To focus too intensely on ourselves to the neglect of others can actually cause damage to ourselves. Great healing and liberation from personal problems can be found in getting involved with the greater good of human community.

 

The book, The Art Of Intimacy, also notes that too much focus on oneself leads to destructive imbalance in human psychology.

 

This teaching about denying oneself in order to sacrifice and contribute to the greater good is almost unheard of today from wealthy religious leaders who control massive fortunes within religious organizations. The only time it is ever heard, is in the context of berating followers to contribute more to the religious organization. It is also rarely heard from the wealthy in any area of life except as a token tax break measure.

 

But if we are ever to deal realistically with poverty and the suffering of billions of human beings, then we must take radical action to end this perverse trend in our societies of the elite few controlling ever increasing resources far beyond what they need for their own comfortable survival. More damaging is the fact that control of wealth or resources gives some people tremendous power over others.

 

Also, if we are going to save critical resources for future generations, then there will have to be more serious effort at radical sacrifice in terms of decreases in consumption by everyone, especially decreases by those of us living in relatively more affluent western nations.

 

We are obligated to create better mechanisms to ensure that all members of our societies receive a more equitable share of all those resources important for their well-being and more equal access to or control over those resources. There is simply no other way to avoid the ongoing destructiveness of the competitive struggle for control of resources that now possesses and divides most societies. The end result of that struggle will only be the insanity of more war.

 

In thinking of decreasing consumption in order to preserve this earth for the future, we have some ideas and suggestions for those who control (own) more resources than they need for their own comfortable survival. This advice is based in part on some ancient tribal experience and wisdom which may help shape our own view of life.

 

Just by way of explanation, we understand from some 10 plus years of living in a tribal society in Southeast Asia that so-called primitive or traditional societies are not always pretty places to live. There was and still is much brutality, violence, disease, starvation, and many other serious problems. In referring to such societies, no one is urging a return to such existence. But as Robert Wright has said, "to say we wouldn't want to live in our primitive past isn't to say we can't learn from it... We don't have to slavishly emulate, say, the Old Order Amish, who use no cars, electricity or alcohol; but we can profitably ask why it is that they suffer depression at less than one-fifth the rate of people in nearby Baltimore" ("The Evolution of Despair" in TIME, Aug. 28, 1995, p.34-35).

 From the series 'Taking The Vertical Out Of God'
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