The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness

the only misfit in his own society. Why should this be so?

Man is the only species that is a mass murderer,

life-serving and a destructive aggression

dammed-up aggression, is used to explain the murderous and cruel impulses of man, but little supporting evidence is presented.

Lorenz’s assumption of forty thousand years of organized warfare is nothing but the old Hobbesian cliché of war as the natural state of man, presented as an argument to prove the innateness of human aggressiveness.

This picture of the constant war among the “savage” hunters-food-gatherers since the full emergence of homo sapiens around 40,000 or 50,000 B.C. is a widely accepted cliché adopted by Lorenz without reference to the investigations which tend to show that there is no evidence for it.5

explanations of human aggression and felt a need to add another that leads, however, outside the field of ethology. He writes:

But Lorenz argues, the instinct that served the animal’s survival has become “grotesquely exaggerated,” and has “gone wild” in man. Aggression has been transformed into a threat rather than a help to survival.

Aggression can have this preservative function all the more effectively because i

other pillar is the idea that aggression is in the service of life, that it serves the survival of the individual and of the species. Broadly speaking, Lorenz assumes that intraspecific aggression (aggression among members of the same species) has the function of furthering the survival of the specie