The nature of man

Beyond mere survival individuals are driven by their four basic psycho-social needs^[1]: the need to belong (Love), the need to own (Control), the need to know (Curiosity), and the need to transcend (Faith).  Each need drives each individual to varying degrees at different times.  Along with these basic needs people are born with a range of predispositions^[2].  Some of these predispositions differ markedly between the male and female of the species.  These gender differences^[3] are the source of a constant tension that has significantly shaped our societies and conditioned our social behaviour over the millennia. 

What are these predispositions?  Take away the external forces that continually modify our behaviour and what remains?  What are the natures of primordial man and woman living without the benefit of external codes of social behaviour^[4]? 

These questions matter because the unembellished answers will help us determine if and how we need to manage^[5] and harness ourselves and others to our long-term collective benefit^[6].  Let's answer the questions as truthfully as we can for males.

Primordial man is amoral as distinct from immoral.  A man may appear moral to himself and to others in the course of his everyday life within the context of his social reference group or "tribe".  But can we think of him as an inherently moral being if that morality is tribe-specific only or if it crumbles away under stress?  Is he moral if it is a subliminal cost/benefit equation that is driving his apparently moral behaviour?

Primordial man is polygamous and casually promiscuous.  It would be wrong to think that only a few dysfunctional males pay to be serviced.  Men all claim that it is other men who go.  And the adult services sector is only the tip of the iceberg.  How many married men cruise on-line dating sites?

Primordial man is generally protective and caring of his dependents.  He is gregarious and tribal.  He is capable of cooperative effort but the competitive trait dominates.  He is hierarchical, ambitious and aggressive.  He defers to his superiors.  He harbours grudges and will exact vengeance when the opportunity arises.  He enjoys wielding power over women and subordinate males.  The primordial male social order is founded on force and maintained by fear.

Primordial man is compulsively acquisitive.  He will not stop gathering when he has sufficient for his needs and those of his dependents.  The amount he possesses and controls beyond those basic needs is a measure of his social power and influence.  The greater the difference between his amassed fortune and those of others around him, the greater his mana, and the higher his place in the de facto hierarchy.  Surplus possessions and their wasteful and conspicuous consumption are not only prima facie evidence of superiority and power; they are instruments of power because they prompt deference in others. 

Man is inquisitive and is driven to rationalise his physical world.  Man is impatient and linear, generally seeking the shortest path between two points or thoughts.  He is continually seeking to impose cause and effect constructs on the world, joining them cognitively with replicable logic. 

On social, economic and political matters man yields to prejudice and intuition, rationalising his beliefs and actions after the event.  However he is generally not conscious of this ex post rationalisation and if he were would not admit to it, relying on the force of alleged reason to impose his implicit prejudices on others. 

Rationale follows predisposition and is used to sanctify and entrench the irrational and the immoral^[7]. 

The rationalisation of an opinion allows the bigoted to bless their opinion with reason, and to reinforce their prejudice.  Reason is used to justify and ameliorate destructive acts by those who have invested emotionally in them.  Reason is used to render the emotionally charged dispassionate, and to dehumanise the victims of coercion and brutality. 

Reason is used to resolve the psychological conflict engendered by behaviour that is at odds with internalised morality - by a lie, a stratagem, a crime, an atrocity.  Reason then coldly ring-fences the intellectually sanctified antisocial behaviour so that it is directed only at the "enemy", the "other" tribe, the rival, the competitor. 

Man is readily able to compartmentalise his cognitive world into independent hermetically sealed realities.  He can create, and live at the same time in several separate and inconsistent realities without significant twinges of conscience.  An habitual serious offender will believe and declare that he is generally a decent person, and a criminal for a few minutes at a time only.  The bigamist is able to love and support two discrete families. 

The limited caring and cooperative traits of our primordial man vanish where human beings from rival tribes^[8] are concerned.  Here he can reveal himself as a sadist deriving pleasure from unmitigated cruelty.  He is capable of enjoying the suffering and humiliation of his victims, returning that same day to his own tribe to cuddle his children with genuine caring and affection. 

The tales of Dracula, werewolves, Jekyll and Hyde, and others like them are not fanciful tales of horror; they are pertinent allegories of man's fundamental nature. 

Power does not corrupt; it reveals.  Power allows its holder to undo the socialisation he has undergone since childhood to reveal the primordial man within. 

What is the basis of this assessment of the base nature of man?  In the first instance it is based on introspection, on an examination of self. 

If you allow your psyche to disentangle itself from the life-vest of morality that has kept it afloat on the surface of socially acceptable behaviour, values, and thoughts; you will be able to watch your psyche sink ever lower.  Wait for it to reach and settle on the bottom, and it is there where you will confront your demons. 

This is a disturbing and disorienting exercise.  Morality channels not just our actions but also our thoughts and impulses which are the precursors to our actions.  Our "dark" side is not one that many will openly admit to having, even to themselves.  It may appear uninvited in dreams.  You may occasionally glimpse it during waking hours – perhaps when you catch yourself trawling through ever more depraved and violent sites on the internet. 

The “dark side” is present in all of us – man and woman. Many will not know it and therefore deny it.  Others will know it but not admit to it. 

In the Christian tradition our base natures have been recognised in metaphysical terms as “original sin” and our salvation depends on the atonement by Jesus for that original sin^[9] and by ourselves for any subsequent sins.  In a less allegorical interpretation, Jesus, and others including Gautama Buddha, have shown us how to overcome the animal within through reason, self-denial and sacrifice. 

The “dark side” manifests itself more obviously in the behaviour of men because historically men have more often been in positions of power and women have been more socially constrained^[10].  Women also possess some predispositions that countervail the masculine base impulses. 

The “dark side” emerges clearly and without fail, when men are given absolute power over others without comeback or adverse consequences, as often happens during wartime. 

In war^[11], young and malleable men volunteer or are taken away from home to be placed in a hostile and stressful environment to do their duty in the name of God, King, country, and such noble causes^[12] as freedom and truth.  They become anonymous entities with rank, file, and serial number.  They are truncated from their loved ones and other conditioners of normal socially acceptable behaviour. 

Instead, they are re-conditioned to obey and, contrary to all the socialisation they have undergone up to that point in their lives, they are instructed to kill, a command they obey with surprising acquiescence.  But by that time the wartime propaganda machine will already have succeeded in dehumanising and demonising the enemy in most of the young men's minds, and the killing of the enemy will have been officially sanctioned not just by the military leadership, but also by the State, and by the Church^[13]. 

No army goes to the front without its chaplain.  The chaplain is there not just to counsel the morally cloven, or to administer the last rites to the young cannon fodder.  He is there to assure the believers among the troops that God is on their side, and that they will not suffer perdition for what they are about to do, thereby removing another constraint on their behaviour. 

The scene is set for the untrammelled emergence of the dark side as it invariably does.  More than that; it may be actively encouraged by the military masters so that enemy populations may be terrorised into submission, but also, and this is recognised less openly, as a motivator for their own men.  Once the taboos have been broken, brutality becomes an opiate: the ultimate in forbidden fruit to be eaten in ever increasing quantities.

History is written by the victors and it is not surprising that the detailed evidence of extensive wartime atrocities almost always implicates the vanquished forces, with only the occasional lapse by our own boys.  But is that credible?  If you are ever able to break the code of silence of a war veteran^[14], you may find that it is not.

Wartime brutality, that violence that goes well beyond what is required to overcome the enemy, creates an unshakeable solidarity among its perpetrators, the solidarity of brothers in torture and rape.  It is backed by an almost impregnable conspiracy of silence to protect the boys and the patriarchy from the stunned disbelief, and then the anger of the women and innocents at home^[15] were they ever to find out the truth. 

Equally, the innocents at home are not as innocent as they may have been conditioned to appear.  Unconstrained children can be intensely and callously cruel – something that is well understood by those who recruit children into informal armies and terrorist bands around the world. 

When we are tempted to judge others, particularly those whom we do not see as belonging to our own “tribe”, as being evil or brutal and deserving of punishment, war, or death, we should remember that we are not inherently better or superior or closer to God than they are.  Would we truly have behaved differently ourselves under the same circumstances? 

This is not to say that we should turn the other cheek or disregard abuses and injustices.  To the contrary, we must act effectively^[16] with humility, with understanding, and without sanctimony.  Without our conscious and pro-active intervention the untrammelled nature of man will undermine our civilisations and may return us to a brutal and elemental future Dark Age at the mercy of the vagaries of Nature and the Cosmos^[17].