In a number of works demonstrating a non-violent society or the results of eradicating violent behavior in a specific person, the essence boils down to the alleged existence of some aggressive stimulus, which is precisely why a person becomes capable of hitting or killing someone, committing brutal crimes, or even starting wars. Having named it the cause of violence, the authors then describe societies in which, to eradicate it, they decided to suppress or literally cut this stimulus out of the person. The results of such a process turn out to be extremely discouraging – we get “castrated” people and a society deprived of all its creative potential.
Let’s start with Stanislaw Lem’s “Return from the Stars,” where people undergo a procedure called “betrization” – the neutralization of aggressive stimuli in the brain and the strengthening of the self-preservation instinct. According to Lem, in a peaceful society, people would become lackadaisical, unable to perform complex tasks, and would stop experiencing strong emotions. Let’s also recall Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange,” where the main character undergoes a complete brainwashing. Being a devout Catholic, Burgess is inclined to believe that man is driven to violence by original sin, however, he possesses free will and the choice of whether to commit violence, and eradicating this freedom would be sinful. One could also briefly mention the anime series “Psycho-Pass,” in whose society certain works of art were even banned for inducing aggression in people, and in one scene, people who did see violence turned out to be absolutely indifferent and emotionless toward the victim’s suffering. There is one more work in which art was also banned for the same reason, but it will be appropriate to mention it a bit later.
All these works make the same critical mistake. In reality, it is not the presence, but precisely the lack of certain stimuli that makes a person capable of violence. As research demonstrates, aggression is often not the result of a loss of self-control, but may even require self-control for the intentional commission of acts of violence. Furthermore, improving self-control in aggressive people does not always help them, and may even do the opposite – it can make them even more effective aggressors. And psychopathic individuals, who commit the vast majority of violent crimes, often experience enhanced development of self-control from adolescence.
The same position can be derived from the theory of the violence inhibition mechanism – the ability of some individuals to cause harm to other people stems from their inability to experience internal repulsion and resistance toward it. They also have reduced empathy and guilt. Moreover, the effect of the most promising means for treating aggressive behavior (agonists of certain serotonin receptors) consists in stimulating and restoring full nervous activity, rather than in suppressing and eradicating anything.
A world in which they decided to fight violence and other evil by cutting something out of a person is most realistically demonstrated in the film “Equilibrium.” Its events take place after a “Third World” war, and human emotions were named as its main cause, which they now decided to suppress using a specific drug. Only, if you look closely at the people in this work, they have become not peaceful and ideal, but unfeeling psychopaths. This is especially evident in the “clerics” – soldiers whose task is to detect people who have shown emotions, destroy works of art, and kill all those who resist the regime.
Violent people need not fewer, but more emotions. They need not suppression, but on the contrary – stimulation of nervous activity. In order not to commit violence, one must feel more strongly, not more weakly. And Lem’s “betrization” in the real world would more likely lead to total psychopathy, rather than to some peaceful but passive society. The nature of violence described in dystopian works has little in common with real violence.
