The story of biologist Robert Sapolsky, who observed baboons for decades, is quite well known. The alpha males in the observed troop behaved quite brutally, exhibiting extremely high levels of violence toward their peers. But at one point, the troop discovered a human garbage dump, which only these alpha males could approach, as they had to fight alpha males from another troop for access to the dump. At some point, they contracted an infection at the dump and subsequently died, leaving the troop without its excessively aggressive individuals. And the most interesting part begins next: although a hierarchy continued to exist in the troop (replacements for the alpha males were found), the fighting and violence between peers ceased, and this result persisted for decades, long after the original males had already died of old age.

A question sometimes arises: isn’t a certain number of violent individuals in any collective or society a normal state of affairs? If the violent ones are removed, won’t someone else inevitably take their place? An affirmative answer to these questions, of course, has no real basis, nor does it align with the ethological observations demonstrated above. There is no such thing as a natural number of violent individuals; there are only pathological individuals, whose removal (or better yet, therapy for their violence) will lead to the elimination from society of a pathology consisting of a dysfunction in the violence inhibition mechanism.

Moreover, it would be foolish to assume that for non-violent individuals, the disappearance of current violent actors would suddenly suppress their violence inhibitor and that they, who previously felt a repulsion toward harming their peers, would stop feeling it. Only individuals who did not feel this initially but remained hidden might reveal themselves in such a situation. Of course, research demonstrates an increase in testosterone levels in male primates who are no longer under pressure from higher-ranking males. However, the inhibition of violence is a function of the serotonergic system, which testosterone does not contradict, increasing aggressiveness only within clear limits. In a healthy individual, the inhibitory function of serotonin and the pro-aggressive function of testosterone work in parallel, keeping aggression as a functional behavior.