Why Is There So Much Aggression?
An analysis
People are becoming more and more aggressive. In the following, I analyze the causes.
The word aggressive comes from the Latin words ad, meaning ‘to’, and gradi, meaning ‘to step.’ It means ‘stepping towards something.’ Aggression is an emotion. An emotion is an outburst of feeling. A feeling is a body state. Feelings trigger emotions. I provide the details in my article “Feelings Are Not the Same as Emotions.”
A hungry lion uses aggression to catch prey. An attacked lion uses aggression to fight. A captured lion uses aggression to get free. A mother lion whose cub is in danger uses aggression to protect it. Even a cow needs aggression in the genuine sense of the word when eating: it must move towards the grass and it has to bite on it.
Aggression is natural and serves survival. It arises in the face of danger, of which there are three types:
lack of resources to satisfy biological needs, such as food and water,
threat from another life form or the environment, and
imprisonment.
In the event of danger, a life form needs as much energy as possible to avert it. In animal life forms, the body constricts for this purpose. This slows down or even blocks bodily functions, such as digestion and healing; most of the energy is now available for flight or fight, for example.
A constricted body state is denoted as anxiety, because this word has the root *angh- meaning ‘tight, constricted.’ The word fear comes from Proto-Germanic *feraz, meaning ‘danger.’ The greater the danger, the greater the constriction. Aggression serves to resolve danger – and thus fear or tension.
We humans also become aggressive in the face of danger. That’s natural. But unlike animals, we can also imagine being endangered. This imagination comes from social programs. As with real dangers, there are also three types of imagined dangers:
imagined lack,
imagined threat, and
imagined imprisonment.
Suppose you have written a report for your boss. You have worked on it for days; you are proud of the result and expect praise. The desire for praise or recognition is not natural; it is a learned need. I explain how this program arises in my book “Being Free – Get Out of the Box.”
You present the report, but receive no praise. You experience a lack. This lack is imagined because it comes from a program. Nevertheless, you feel it physically. Your body cannot distinguish between a real and an imagined lack; it knows no difference between a real and an imagined danger. It reacts with constriction, and you become aggressive.
Suppose someone calls you an idiot. Most people consider this a mental attack and react aggressively. But this threat is imagined and not real, because it doesn’t jeopardize your physical survival. What do you care about someone else’s opinion? It’s only important to you because you’ve been programmed that way.
99% of your actions and thoughts come from programs. They create a mental prison. This imprisonment is imagined and not real, because you could leave this prison at any time. But most people don’t even know they are mentally imprisoned. If you don’t know you are in prison, you can’t escape it. I describe the mental prison in my article “Why the Question ‘What Am I?’ Is Important and Magical.”
Most of what you do, you do because you have been programmed to do it; you have been programmed to function. But “something” within you doesn’t want to function. That’s why you do many things reluctantly. This creates tension in your body every time and, therefore, aggression. You rarely live out this aggression because you have learned to function. If you don’t release the tension through aggression, it remains in the body. Stored tension is latent aggression.
Imagined dangers are often more harmful than real dangers. You can usually remedy a lack of food, for example. But you often cannot remedy an imagined lack. You can’t force your boss to give you the praise you crave. So you will probably either suppress your aggression or direct it at someone or something uninvolved. Maybe you swear; or you bang your fist on the table; or you numb yourself with drugs, alcohol, or sugar; or you distract yourself somehow.
But the imagined lack remains because you still have a need for recognition; your body remains tense – and you remain latently aggressive. And every time something reminds you of your lack, you become a little more tense and therefore more latently aggressive. If you long for praise, anyone who receives recognition reminds you of your lack and triggers you. If you long for love, every romantic couple and every romantic film reminds you of your lack and triggers you. And the mental prison of your programs constantly triggers you.
Imagined dangers can become chronic. Over years and decades, the body becomes more and more tense ... and the latent aggression becomes stronger and stronger. And one day, a minor event breaks the camel’s back. It creates an outbreak of aggression, the intensity of which is disproportionate to the trigger.
Naturally, aggression is directed against the cause of the danger, such as an attacker or a prison wall. But all imagined dangers have their cause in social programs. You carry these programs within you because you copied the behavior of your parents and other people while growing up; they adopted the programs from their parents; this goes back countless generations. Aggression arising from imagined dangers has no addressee. It can, therefore, only be directed against something or someone that is not the cause of your aggression; or it is directed against yourself.
If your boss does not praise you, he is not the cause of your anger; the cause is the program that makes you expect praise. If someone calls you a jerk, this person is not the cause of your anger; the cause is the program that makes you take this person seriously.
If the aggression is directed outwards, it can range from a punch on the table to vandalism to injuring or even killing another life form. If the aggression is directed inwards, it is directed against yourself. This can manifest as self-harm, such as carving your skin, drug use, or even suicide. You know this harms you, but the aggression is stronger than reason. Long-suppressed aggression can also gradually lead to physical or mental diseases.
There are more and more people on this planet. New rules and laws increasingly restrict us individually and collectively. As a result, more and more people are becoming more and more latently aggressive. As a result, there are more and more outbreaks of aggression – in some people outwardly, in others inwardly.
The only solution is to free yourself from your programs; and everyone must do this for themselves. The fewer programs control a person, the fewer imagined dangers they experience. In my article “How to Become What You Truly Are in 7 Steps,” I explain how to do this.
“If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself,
and make a change.”
(Michael Jackson)
Further reading:
Article “Feelings Are Not the Same as Emotions”
Book “Being Free – Get Out of the Box”
Article “Why the Question ‘What Am I?’ Is Important and Magical”
Article “How to Become What You Truly Are in 7 Steps”
I feel like we learn to read people's aggression (or we can literally pick up on it) behind their mental attacks, like when they call us a jerk or an idiot, and it's innate to physiologically respond to aggression coming at us. But either way, don't we have an innate drive to respond to sociological threats that can affect our social standing and inclusion?
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