Psychology - The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness - Erich Fromm

Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm

This distinction divorces human aggression from animal aggression, in opposition to the widely accepted myth that 'malignant' human aggression has its roots in an animal past.

Don't know much about Fromm, but his distinction between types of aggression doesn't make sense to me. Many social animals have hierarchal communities with structures of dominance enforced by aggression and submission. In people, that drive for dominance may take on odd and dangerous permutations because of how complex our society has become in order to handle all these dozens and hundreds and thousands and millions of people.

My aim here is to take a deeper look at Fromm's The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness.

Quoting Clarky

...his distinction between types of aggression doesn't make sense to me.

Possibly because this sort of aggression:

Quoting Clarky

Many social animals have hierarchal communities with structures of dominance enforced by aggression and submission.

...doesn't seem to fall into category one or two. I agree it doesn't fit.

Certainly, "structures of dominance enforced by aggression and submission" would fail to meet the criteria for malignant aggression, as Fromm understands it:

Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm

... “malignant” aggression, i.e., cruelty and destructiveness...has no purpose, and its satisfaction is lustful.

If I unearth a clue in regard to the categorization of this type of aggression, I'll post it.

Wolves are notorious where I live for killing cattle without eating it. Killing for the sake of killing, it seems.

Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm

This distinction divorces human aggression from animal aggression, in opposition to the widely accepted myth that 'malignant' human aggression has its roots in an animal past.

I would say, it's human intelligence which is the reason of "malignant" aggression.

Quoting Tzeentch

Wolves are notorious where I live for killing cattle without eating it. Killing for the sake of killing, it seems.

Also there is a kind of dogs who kill a rat but do not eat it.
Also cats who kill a mouse but do not eat it.

I had both, such a dog and a cat.

Quoting Tzeentch

Wolves are notorious where I live for killing cattle without eating it. Killing for the sake of killing, it seems.

Would you say these wolves are being cruel?

Reply to SpaceDweller Would you say this dog and this cat were being cruel?

Quoting Tzeentch

Wolves are notorious where I live for killing cattle without eating it. Killing for the sake of killing, it seems.

No they have a reason-- training for hunting. If cattle is made available, that's where they're going to practice.

Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm

This distinction divorces human aggression from animal aggression, in opposition to the widely accepted myth that 'malignant' human aggression has its roots in an animal past.

I agree. No maliciousness in animals, except what's programmed into them such as being head of the pack, scarcity of food, training the youngs to hunt, etc.

Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm

Would you say this dog and this cat were being cruel?

Yes and no.
Yes because they had fun killing the mouse or a rat, not because they were hungry.
No because it's nothing in comparison to what humans are capable to do to other people, like skinning someone a live or burning someone on the stake, animals don't do such horrible things.

So it's intelligence what makes people more cruel than animals.

Reply to SpaceDweller

Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm

Would you say these wolves are being cruel?

Possibly?

I tried to draw attention to why such an act is considered malignant when a human does it, but not when an animal does it.

Quoting L'éléphant

No they have a reason-- training for hunting. If cattle is made available, that's where they're going to practice.

Why is it that when an animal exhibits such behavior we excuse it, but when a human does it we label it as malignant, though?

To name an example; a human being cruel to animals is probably something we'd label as malignant. But we could just as easily argue this person is "training" for rough times that may be ahead, which isn't even that far-fetched.

Quoting Tzeentch

I tried to draw attention to why such an act is considered malignant when a human does it, but not when an animal does it.

Fromm's position is that malignant aggression, as exhibited by humans, is "virtually non-existent" in the animal kingdom. I accept your example of cattle-poaching wolves as a possible exception.

Quoting Tzeentch

Why is it that when an animal exhibits such behavior we excuse it, but when a human does it we label it as malignant, though?

Quoting SpaceDweller

So it's intelligence what makes people more cruel than animals.

I agree the fact of higher intelligence makes this kind of behavior seem more cruel, and more reprehensible, when perpetrated by a human.

Quoting Tzeentch

Why is it that when an animal exhibits such behavior we excuse it, but when a human does it we label it as malignant, though?

So humans need to practice to hunt to survive? What happened to farm animals, manufacturers, distributors, and supermarket stores?
No, I don't see that what the wolves are doing applies to humans.

Quoting L'éléphant

So humans need to practice to hunt to survive?

It's not inconceivable that during our lifetime there will come a point where we must fall back on such things - during a war for example.

So I ask again, why is it when an animal is cruel we excuse it as practice or instinct, but when a human does it we label it as malignant aggression?

Animal aggression: An offering to Thanatos (execution)
Human aggression: An offering to Thanatos (execution) + An offering to Algos (cruelty/torture)

The X factor: Intelligence!

If you can be cruel, necessarily that you've got brains! :chin:

Contrapositively, if you're an idiot, you can't be cruel!

Thus, innocence is associated with naïvety (inexperienced, lacking in worldly knowledge). Hence, God's preference for childlike innocence (re A&E's banishment from paradise).

Quoting Agent Smith

if you're an idiot, you can't be cruel!

So we might say: Thank god there's so many idiots about. :smile:

Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm

So we might say: Thank god there's so many idiots about

Yeah, in a way, on target! Fun fact: Predators are more intelligent than prey (dolphins, chimps, octopi, dogs, cats (small & big), etc.

Reply to ZzzoneiroCosm Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm

This distinction divorces human aggression from animal aggression, in opposition to the widely accepted myth that 'malignant' human aggression has its roots in an animal past

I don’t think ‘innate programming’ is a helpful way to understand aggression in humans , and frankly, I think it covers over complex cognitive attributions taking place in animals as well. We become hostile and angry when a standard or expectation has been violated and we perceive there is a way to modify the others behavior. This is a cognitive assessment , not an instinct. Cruelty and destructiveness is not an inherent feature of anger and hostility. First of all, it is in the r eyes of the beholder , and secondly, the central goal of hostility is the amelioration of the perceived violation , not destruction or cruelty. If the others motives are perceived as deliberately cruel and destructive in their aim , that is generally a function of our own hostility toward them.
We dont see how they can justify their actions to themselves , so we assume their motives are gratuitous.

Quoting Tzeentch

why is it when an animal is cruel we excuse it as practice or instinct, but when a human does it we label it as malignant aggression?

It's not cruelty when animals hunt. Humans hunt for entertainment. Farm animals supply the food.

Reply to L'éléphant Why are hunters entertained by hunting? Why do some animals play with their food?

We've already established that there needs to be no strictly rational reason behind the act of killing in order for animals to be excused, as per the example of wolves killing lifestock for no reason. So why the double standard?

Reply to Tzeentch Hi Tzeentch, I've maxed my limit on disgreeing post, unfortunately. (As a self-imposed rule on my posting habits, when I disagree with a post, I limit my posts to two and that's it.)

Edit1: This is due to the fact that I've been accused twice of picking a fight when my posts had gotten more aggressive. And I already agree that at that point, my post did sound aggressive, though not intentionally. So, here we are now.

Fromm spends a good deal of time and space dressing down On Aggression by Conrad Lorenz:

Fromm, Ibid:Perhaps Lorenz’s neoinstinctivism was so successful not because his arguments are so strong, but because people are so susceptible to them, What could be more welcome to people who are frightened and feel impotent to change the course leading to destruction than a theory that assures us that violence stems from our animal nature, from an ungovernable drive for aggression, and that the best we can do, as Lorenz asserts, is to understand the law of evolution that accounts for the power of this drive? This theory of an innate aggressiveness easily becomes an ideology that helps to soothe the fear of what is to happen and to rationalize the sense of impotence.

Ibid:Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression (K. Lorenz, 1966) became within a short time of its publication one of the most widely read books in the field of social psychology...[On Aggression] appeals to the thinking of many people today who prefer to believe that our drift toward violence and nuclear war is due to biological factors beyond our control, rather than to open their eyes and see that it is due to social, political, and economic circumstances of our own making.

Ibid: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.

Fromm's thesis: Malignant aggression..."is due to social, political, and economic circumstances of our own making."

Fromm contra instinctivism - Lorenz's and others'.

Fromm, Ibid (bolds mine):Paleontology, anthropology, and history offer ample evidence against the instinctivistic thesis: (1) human groups differ so fundamentally in the respective degree of destructiveness that the facts could hardly be explained by the assumption that destructiveness and cruelty are innate; (2) various degrees of destructiveness can be correlated to other psychical factors and to differences in respective social structures, and (3) the degree of destructiveness increases with the increased development of civilization, rather than the opposite. Indeed, the picture of innate destructiveness fits history much better than prehistory.

We couldn't have made it this far without a mean streak: aut neca aut necare (kill or be killed). It's only after we managed to claw our way to the top of the food chain that our innate killer instinct became a major concern (we were turning on each other without an iota of mercy).

Fromm's thesis statement:

Ibid:My thesis—to be demonstrated in the following chapters—is that destructiveness and cruelty are not instinctual drives, but passions rooted in the total existence of man. They are one of the ways to make sense of life; they are not and could not be present in the animal, because they are by their very nature rooted in the “human condition.” The main error of Lorenz and other instinctivists is to have confused the two kinds of drives, those rooted in instinct, and those rooted in character.

Fromm links the spirit of capitalism to instinctivist accounts of human destructiveness:

Ibid:The instinctivist movement based on Darwin’s teaching reflects the basic assumption of nineteenth-century capitalism. Capitalism as a system in which harmony is created by ruthless competition between all individuals would appear to be a natural order if one could prove that the most complex and remarkable phenomenon, man, is a product of the ruthless competition among all living beings since the emergence of life.

An aside on Freud's transition from a libido-centered theory to a theory centered on eros and thanatos:

Ibid:Freud himself never claimed that the libido theory was a scientific certainty. He called it “our mythology,” and replaced it with the theory of the Eros and death “instincts.” It is equally significant that he defined psychoanalysis as a theory based on resistance and transference—and by omission, not on the libido theory...Freud’s revolution was to make us recognize the unconscious aspect of man’s mind and the energy which he uses to repress the awareness of undesirable desires.

Aggression-producing circumstances - for example, crowding - are more prevalent in human than in animal habitats.

Ibid:...animals, too, exhibit extreme and vicious destructiveness when the environmental and social balance is disturbed, although this occurs only as an exception— for instance, under conditions of crowding. It could be concluded that man is so much more destructive because he has created conditions like crowding or other aggression-producing constellations that have become normal rather than exceptional in his history. Hence, man’s hyperaggression is not due to a greater aggressive potential but to the fact that aggression-producing conditions are much more frequent for humans than for animals living in their natural habitat. This argument is valid— as far as it goes...

.

But...

Ibid:But the fact remains that man often acts cruelly and destructively even in situations that do not include crowding. Destructiveness and cruelty can cause him to feel intense satisfaction; masses of men can suddenly be seized by lust for blood. Individuals and groups may have a character structure that makes them eagerly wait for— or create— situations that permit the expression of destructiveness.

From Fromm's thesis statement (quoted in full above):

Ibid:The main error of [the] instinctivists is to have confused the two kinds of drives, those rooted in instinct, and those rooted in character.

So the question of character has become central. How does Fromm define character and why do some human beings have a destructive character?

(If I recall correctly, Fromm deploys the phrase "unlived life" as an explanation for the existence of a destructive character in man. But all in due time.)

The first sign of an answer to this question:

Ibid:The sadistic person is sadistic because he is suffering from an impotence of the heart, from the incapacity to move the other, to make him respond, to make oneself a loved person. He compensates for that impotence with the passion to have power over others.

The arousal of defensive aggression via propaganda and social circumstances conducive to propagandistic coercion:

Ibid:The arousal of defensive aggression by means of brain-washing can occur only in humans. In order to persuade people that they are threatened, one needs, above all, the medium of language; without this, most suggestion would be impossible. In addition, one needs a social structure that provides a sufficient basis for brainwashing.

Character-conditioned passions linked to existential needs:

Ibid:To put it briefly, instincts are answers to man’s physiological needs, man’s character-conditioned passions are answers to his existential needs and they are specifically human.

Existential emptiness as the source of the destructive impulse:

Ibid:Instincts are a purely natural category, while the character-rooted passions are a sociobiological, historical category. Although not directly serving physical survival they are as strong— and often even stronger— than instincts. They form the basis for man’s interest in life, his enthusiasm, his excitement; they are the stuff from which not only his dreams are made but art, religion, myth, drama— all that makes life worth living. Man cannot live as nothing but an object, as dice thrown out of a cup; he suffers severely when he is reduced to the level of a feeding or propagating machine, even if he has all the security he wants. Man seeks for drama and excitement; when he cannot get satisfaction on a higher level, he creates for himself the drama of destruction...

"Character" defined:

Ibid:While the concept of character will be discussed at length further on, it will suffice here to say that character is the relatively permanent system of all noninstinctual strivings through which man relates himself to the human and natural world. One may understand character as the human substitute for the missing animal instincts; it is man’s second nature.

Suggestibility in connection to the existential need for "a cohesive frame of orientation":

Ibid:Part of the answer lies in the suggestive influence of leaders and in the suggestibility of man. But this does not seem to be the whole story. Man would probably not be so suggestive were it not that his need for a cohesive frame of orientation is so vital. The more an ideology pretends to give answers to all questions, the more attractive it is; here may lie the reason why irrational or even plainly insane thought systems can so easily attract the minds of men.

Distinction between the sadistic and normal character types:

Ibid:In a sadistic person, for instance, the sadistic drive is a dominant part of his character structure and motivates him to behave sadistically, limited only by his concern for self-preservation. In a person with a sadistic character, a sadistic impulse is constantly active, waiting only for a proper situation and a fitting rationalization to be acted out. Such a person corresponds almost completely to Lorenz’s hydraulic model (see chapter 1) inasmuch as character-rooted sadism is a spontaneously flowing impulse, seeking for occasions to be expressed and creating such occasions where they are not readily at hand by “appetitive behavior.” The decisive difference is that the source of the sadistic passion lies in the character and not in a phylogenetically programmed neural area; hence it is not common to all men, but only to those who share the same character.

On the existential need to "effect":

Ibid:The adult, too, feels the need to reassure himself that he is by being able to effect. The ways to achieve a sense of effecting are manifold: by eliciting an expression of satisfaction in the baby being nursed, a smile from the loved person, sexual response from the lover, interest from the partner in conversation; by work— material, intellectual, artistic. But the same need can also be satisfied by having power over others, by experiencing their fear, by the murderer’s watching the anguish in the face of his victim, by conquering a country, by torturing people, by sheer destruction of what has been constructed. The need to “effect” expresses itself in interpersonal relations as well as in the relationship to animals, to inanimate nature, and to ideas. In the relationship to others the fundamental alternative is to feel either the potency to effect love or to effect fear and suffering. In the relationship to things, the alternative is between constructing and destroying. Opposite as these alternatives are, they are responses to the same existential need: to effect.

On the existential power of boredom and the profound existential need not to be bored:

Ibid:One may state that one of the main goals of man today is “escape from boredom.” Only if one appreciates the intensity of reactions caused by unrelieved boredom, can one have any idea of the power of the impulses engendered by it.

Usually overlooked in the discussion of the effect of the portrayal of violence is that inasmuch as portrayal of violence has an effect, boredom is a necessary condition.

In either instance the bored person himself produces the source of excitation if it does not offer itself ready-made. The bored person often is the organizer of a “mini-Colosseum” in which he produces his small-scale equivalents of the large-scale cruelty staged in the Colosseum.

The motive for these killings does not seem to be hate, but as in the cases mentioned before, an unbearable sense of boredom and impotence and the need to experience that there is someone who will react, someone on whom one can make a dent, some deed that will make an end of the monotony of daily experience. Killing is one way of experiencing that one is and that one can produce an effect on another being.

Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm

Fromm's position is that malignant aggression, as exhibited by humans, is "virtually non-existent" in the animal kingdom. I accept your example of cattle-poaching wolves as a possible exception.

Does "malignant aggression" consist in taking pleasure in inflicting suffering? The question would then be as to whether predatory animals which "toy" with prey, slowly killing and then perhaps not eating the prey, or even just killing prey and then leaving it, are taking pleasure in inflicting suffering.

Why do they not consume their kill? Are they saving it for later, or is there some other reason? Perhaps they enjoy the 'sport', but do they actually conceive of the prey suffering, of 'punishing' the prey, and take sadistic pleasure in that? I doubt the last is the case.

As to the aggression displayed by social animals, I think that is plausibly understood to be a modified or elaborated form of the "fight or flight' kind of aggression, which is driven by fear or insecurity and by the need to establish social hierarchical order.