In connection with the recent anniversary of the terrorist attacks committed by Anders Breivik in Norway, I would like to remind you of the importance of fighting violence. Although such a tragic event is not a global catastrophe, it is frightening to imagine what future Breiviks might present to us, especially considering what fruits of scientific and technical progress could end up in their hands. Perhaps it will be another shooting, which is very bad, but it will most likely not affect you personally. Or perhaps such a person will decide to use some high-tech means to cause as much harm to people as possible—for example, by constructing a dirty bomb, releasing a previously unknown strain of a very dangerous and deadly virus (a scenario I described in the material “The Reality of the Viral Threat“), or using some other extremely destructive means unknown to us now.
But the capacity to commit violence is not the norm for a human being. On the contrary, 98% of people experience disgust at least toward brutal violence, and all brutal violence is committed by no more than 2% of people. This is because a natural part of human nature is the violence inhibition mechanism (Lorenz’s mechanism (LM) according to Konrad Lorenz’s theory, or VIM according to James Blair’s model). A person with a strong version of LM/VIM will never be able to commit violence. It is committed only by those who suffer from a pathology of the violence inhibitor. Violence is a pathological state. Therefore, it must be fought in an appropriate manner.
If violent tendencies were noticed to a sufficient extent in childhood—when a person is unlikely to be able to make a decision to intentionally hide them until the time they can organize a terrorist attack—or if mass testing for the congenital variant of LM/VIM were practiced in society, both in childhood and when conducting relationships with people in adult life, and if gene therapy treatment were then applied to those in whom the LM/VIM pathology was discovered, many terrorist attacks, as well as much violence in general, could have been avoided.
Perhaps in the past we did not have a sufficient scientific and technical base for this. But now the time has come; biotechnology and gene therapy are developing at a rapid pace. And now it is not too late to start fighting violence to avoid a catastrophic scenario in the future and finally completely rid human society of pathological violence. Does anyone really want the appearance of a new Breivik, and one who is even more heavily armed?
