Why are people so mean? Worse than animals...

The harsh truth is that inhuman cruelty is peculiar only to man. No animal can compare with man in terms of the power of manifestations of hatred towards his own kind. Why are people so mean?

Every day we see examples of horrific cruelty in the media. Beatings, murders, massacres, torture...

The guy killed the girl because she laughed at him in the company. 122 blows were found on the victim's body. The examination found that the first blow was fatal. A psychiatric examination showed the sanity of the perpetrator.

Where does this inhuman cruelty come from?

The harsh truth is that inhuman cruelty is peculiar only to man. No animal can compare with man in terms of the power of manifestations of hatred towards his own kind. Why are people so mean? Let's try to understand from a scientific point of view.

Man is an animal

Nobel Prize winner German animal psychologist Konrad Lorenz, impressed by the horrors of the Second World War, decided to find out the nature of human aggression. As a zoologist and evolutionary theorist, he decided to start by investigating the nature of aggression in animals. Lorentz found that all animals have mechanisms of hostile behavior towards members of their own species, that is, innate intraspecific aggression, which, as he argues, ultimately serves to preserve the species.

Intraspecific aggression performs a number of important biological functions:

distribution of living space so that the animal finds its own food; the animal guards its territory, aggression stops as soon as the boundaries are restored;

sexual selection: only the strongest male gets the right to leave his offspring; in mating battles, the weak one is usually not finished off, but driven away;

protection of offspring from the encroachment of strangers and their own; parents drive away but do not kill offenders;

hierarchical function - determines the system of power and subordination in the community, the weak obeys the strong;

partnership function - coordinated manifestations of aggression, for example, to expel a relative or a stranger;

feeding function is built into species that live in places poor in food resources (for example, the Balkhash perch eats its own juveniles).

It is believed that the main forms of intraspecific aggression are competitive and territorial aggression, as well as aggression caused by fear and irritation.

Are animals kinder than people?

However, after analyzing the behavior of more than 50 species, Konrad Lorenz noticed that animals that have natural weapons in their arsenal in the form of huge horns, deadly fangs, strong hooves, strong beaks, etc., have developed behavioral analogues of morality in the process of evolution. It is an instinctive prohibition against using one's natural weapons against an animal of one's own kind, especially when the vanquished is showing submissiveness.

That is, an automatic system of stops is built into the aggressive behavior of animals, which instantly works on certain types of postures that indicate dependence and defeat. As soon as the wolf, in a fierce fight for the female, exposes the jugular vein in the neck, the second wolf only slightly squeezes his mouth, but never bites through to the end. In the battle of deer, as soon as one deer feels weaker, it becomes sideways, exposing the enemy to an unprotected abdominal cavity. The second deer, even in a fighting impulse, only touches the opponent's stomach with its horns, stopping at the last second, but not completing the final deadly movement. The stronger the natural weapons of the animal, the more clearly the “stop system” works.

Conversely, poorly armed animal species do not have instinctive prohibitions against lethal aggression towards their relative, since the harm caused cannot be significant and the victim always has the opportunity to escape. In captivity, when the defeated enemy has nowhere to run, he is guaranteed death from a stronger opponent. In any case, as Konrad Lorenz emphasizes, in the animal world, intraspecific aggression serves exclusively the purpose of preserving the species.

Lorenz considers a man by nature to be a weakly armed species, therefore, having no instinctive prohibitions on harming his own kind. With the invention of weapons (stone, ax, gun), man became the most armed species, but evolutionarily devoid of "natural morality", therefore easily killing representatives of his own species.

There is one nuance here. We humans, unlike animals, are conscious. This difference hides the root of man's cruelty to man in comparison with the intraspecific aggression of an animal.

Man is an animal that is never enough

The system-vector psychology of Yuri Burlan suggests that consciousness was formed gradually as a result of the growth of our shortcomings. Animals do not have such a volume of desires as a person, they are completely balanced and perfect in their own way.

Man always wants more. More than he has, more than he can get, and if he got it, then more than he can eat. Lack is when “I want, but I can’t get”, “I want, but I can’t”. This lack also gave an opportunity for the development of thought, which became the beginning of separation from the animal state, the beginning of the development of consciousness.

Dislike as an engine of progress

The system-vector psychology of Yuri Burlan claims that a person, unlike animals, feels his own uniqueness, separation from another.

For a long time, experiencing hunger and not being able to fill it (our species was the weakest in the savannah - without claws, teeth, hooves), a person for the first time felt his neighbor as an object that can be used for himself, for food. However, having arisen, this desire was immediately limited. In the delta between the desire to use one's neighbor in oneself and the restriction on this desire, a feeling of hostility towards the other is born.

But that's not all, once bursting beyond the animal volume, our desires continue to grow. They double. Today they bought a Cossack - tomorrow they wanted a foreign car, today they bought a foreign car - tomorrow they wanted a Mercedes. This simple example shows that a person is never satisfied with what he has received.

Our ever-growing desire to receive constantly leads to the growth of dislike. Lorentz proved that animals have an intraspecific unconscious coherent instinct that does not allow intraspecific aggression to destroy the species. For humans, intraspecific hostility still poses a threat to survival - as it is constantly growing. At the same time, it is also an incentive for us to develop. It was in order to limit hostility that we first created the law, then culture and morality.

Why are people so mean? Because they are people!

Man is a lack of pleasure, a desire. Our desires are not satisfied - we immediately feel hostility. Mom didn't buy ice cream: "Bad mom!" The woman does not meet my expectations: "Bad woman!". I feel bad, I don’t know what I want: “Everyone is bad. The world is cruel and unfair! It is not in vain that moral and cultural norms are instilled in a child from early childhood. Mutual assistance, sympathy, empathy for another help us cope with our selfish desires for pleasure.

Today, our desires continue to grow, and the existing constraints on them cease to work. Skin law and visual culture have almost worked themselves out. Today we are rapidly rushing into the future, where a person is no longer moral (because his desires are too high to be limited by morality and morality), but not yet spiritual. Today we are ready to eat anyone, to consume the whole world, if only we were well, real troglodytes - but this does not mean degradation. This is another step in our growth, the answer to which should be the emergence of new level limiters.

The path from animal to human

The system-vector psychology of Yuri Burlan says that in the conditions of increased desires and increased hostility, no restrictions on hostility will work anymore. Our coexistence in the future will be built not on prohibitions, but on the complete disappearance of hostility as such.

In contrast to the awareness of one's uniqueness and the other as an object for saturating one's shortcomings, systems thinking gives an awareness of the other person as oneself, as well as an awareness of the integrity of the human species. This is a new level of consciousness, much higher than the intraspecific animal unconscious instinct. This is the awareness of oneself as a part of all mankind and the awareness of another person as a part of oneself. And, as a result, the inability to harm another. Just as a person cannot harm himself on purpose, so he will not be able to harm another, because he will feel his pain as his own.

In fact, people are not evil and not worse than animals, people are just not yet mature enough. We have grown so much mentally that we invented the hadron collider, but we still have not matured to self-awareness. Daily outbursts of aggression, violation of all norms of morality and morality at the level of entire states are evidence that the time has come.

And stopping aggression is easier than it seems at first glance. You just need to see the underlying causes of what is happening and eliminate them. To understand that the picture of the world around us with cruelty, murders, crimes is the result of the fact that each of us considers himself the only one and feels only his desires. And for the sake of his "I want" he is even ready to kill, if necessary. But the paradox is that even this will not fill a person with happiness. Neither the one who shows aggression, nor the one against whom it is directed, can actually feel joy, and will be equally unhappy.

This can be corrected by realizing the true desires and capabilities of each of us. Understanding the inner potential of a person and his intentions, we will be able to clearly understand what can be expected from our environment and how to most adequately express ourselves among others. When we deeply understand another person and the motives for his actions from the inside, we do not become victims of unexpected aggression, because people's actions become easily predictable and predictable. Moreover, we can consciously choose our environment in which we feel comfortable and safe. It would be ideal if every person in the world could do this and everyone would be happy, but even if this is still far away, it is worth starting with yourself.

You can register for free online lectures on Systemic Vector Psychology by Yuri Burlan at the link:

The article was written based on the materials of the training System-Vector Psychology