“There will be time to murder and create/and time for all the works and days of hands/that lift and drop a question on your plate…”
T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
MOB anarchy erupted outside the Great Western Forum in Los Angeles, California after the LA Lakers won the 2000 National Basketball Association (NBA) crown in their championship series against the Indiana Pacers. In another part of the world several weeks earlier, bomb blasts and bomb scares rocked Metro Manila and other major cities in the Philippines, with the perpetrators allegedly Moslem extremists. In Europe centuries earlier, knights bannering the Christian Crusades destroyed entire cities and slaughtered thousands of non-Christians, with priceless treasures of civilization pillaged, razed to the ground, or carried off as spoils of war.
Mass media – a powerful conduit of human expression - satisfies our lust for violence. Newspaper tabloids headline gory deaths and massacre after massacre. Hollywood churns out movie after movie replete with explosions, gunfights, decapitations, blood, gore and fist against flesh. Being an avid follower of professional wrestling matches on television – with all the accompanying (albeit scripted) bodyslams, piledrivers, elbow drops, moonsaults and figure-fours – is a rite of passage for men and young boys.
Anarchy is inherent on the Internet – a product of modern technology introduced by humankind to revolutionize worldwide communication, business, entertainment and education. Viruses of many names and types unleashed on the World Wide Web damage computer systems worldwide. E-bombs overload and shut down e-mail accounts. Flames (net jargon for insults) are lit and thrown at each other by Netizens in chat rooms and chat hubs. Criminal hackers penetrate with impunity personal and company files, with the intent to sell the hacked information – such as private data, identities of people and credit card information, in the open and underground markets on and off the Web.
Chaos at the perfect sense of the word.
English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (and even psychologist Sigmund Freud for that matter) viewed man as instinctively a savage, selfish and murderous brute. Society, Hobbes says, exists so that we may leave our brutish nature chained up at home, that we may aspire for something greater.
In the rise and fall of civilizations and nations – and more significantly, in the evolutionary battle between animal species – the rule of thumb that has always been followed was Charles Darwin’s survival of the fittest. However, it was not Darwin but Herbert Spencer who gave the world an image of evolution as a jungle battle – jowl to jugular – in which the victor received his crown while standing on the head of his opponent.
The Karl Marx school of thought interprets pathological violent behavior as a product of historical materialism; society’s original victim metamorphosizing into society’s oppressor.
German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (who introduced the uebermensch or superman concept before American pop culture turned him into a cartoon hero and fascist Adolf Hitler turned it into an ideological monster that was the Aryan racial supremacy fallacy and the extermination of Jews during World War II) holds a more modern view; that of pathological violent behavior as a person’s intense desire not to reject but to belong to society – a society in which fame is the touchstone to success and where violence of many means is merely the shortcut to its achievement.
The Thomas Huxley school of thought must have had the neighborhood toughie in mind when it proposed a near-similar interpretation, that of modern man still carrying the primitive instinctive image of the cave man contest, a shadowy prizefight – club against skull – with a shrinking woman in the dim cavern’s reaches clutching a wailing babe.
Reflecting on armed conflicts, Spencer meanwhile interpreted nationalism as nothing more than a human expression of the animal drive to maintain and defend a territory.
Properly seen, man’s primitive animal instincts that show themselves in violent behavior are controlled and kept at bay by society. Strip man of his social instincts and we will be left with nothing more than Huxley’s jungle law, with no higher authority than dog eat dog, and no way of existence beyond screams in the night.
The command to love is as deeply buried in our nature as the command to hate and our instinct for dominance, as I see it, is buried deep within our psyche – as deep as the instinct to fight or flee in face of an enemy, as with the drive to defend one’s self from harm and assert control over our environment.
As I pondered on Hitler’s madness in his “Final Solution” ethnocidal campaign against the Jewish people, a neighbor’s radio set (lest you forget that I trashed mine a couple of weeks ago) blared out news of the final government offensive against Camp Abubakar, the stronghold of the Moslem secessionist rebels in the Philippines’ Mindanao region.
The separatist Moslem rebels in Mindanao view themselves as an oppressed people. The roots of the problem go back 400 years, with grinding poverty and a history of neglect etched deep in Mindanao soil.
Which brings me to Nietzsche’s “Frog Perspectives”. The Nietzschean school of thought describes the psychological worldview of oppressed people and even individuals who are victims of physical or emotional violence as “frog perspective” – that of someone or a social group looking from below, upwards – a sense of feeling themselves lower than the others. The concept of distance involved is not physical; it is psychological. It involves a situation in which for moral or social reasons, a person or a group feels that there is another person or group above it.
There ensues the instinct to psychologically rise at par or even above the object of view. And if this cannot be achieved through other means, an individual or group resorts to violence and the elimination of the object of view.
“Wham!” said George Michael.
10 July 2000