Aggression in male animals and men is very often linked to the sex hormone testosterone. Thus, a decrease in testosterone levels should be followed by a decrease in aggressiveness, and an increase in its levels — by extremely high aggressiveness. Of course, aggression is linked to testosterone, but it cannot be reduced exclusively to the action of a single hormone in isolation from all other neurophysiology. Otherwise, one might arrive at certain misconceptions, for example, that if a high level of testosterone in some men is natural, then violent behavior is also absolutely natural. Additionally, such a view contradicts the concept of the violence inhibitor, according to which many species and even humans possess innate restraints on intraspecific aggression.
To begin, let us recall that the violence inhibitor is linked to the serotonergic system, and the activation of certain serotonin receptors (1A and 1B) can suppress attacking aggression without affecting defensive aggression and other forms of behavior. But how can testosterone affect this effect? As one study shows, there is simply no such influence. Testosterone-driven activation of aggression and serotonin-driven inhibition of aggression work independently of each other; that is, the pro-aggressive effect of testosterone does not consist of suppressing serotonin function. And the influence of serotonin on testosterone-induced aggression is apparently carried out via a parallel inhibitory pathway. It is presumed that this influence occurs in brain regions such as the medial amygdala, hypothalamus, prefrontal cortex, and the septum (septal area), where both sex hormone receptors and serotonergic nerve endings are simultaneously located.
Such an influence of serotonin is necessary to restrain aggression so that it does not cease to be adaptive and functional behavior. This aligns with the violence inhibitor theory, according to which certain internal restraints on aggression prevent it from escalating into violence that causes harm to members of one’s own species. And since testosterone does not disrupt the operation of these restraints, it cannot be the cause of uninhibited aggression. Of course, testosterone increases aggressiveness, but normally only within natural inhibiting limits.
Aggressive feelings and behavior are a natural part of human nature. But this naturalness of aggression is often, and absolutely erroneously, perceived as a capacity for its boundless manifestation, up to such violent actions as murder. And from such an incorrect interpretation of the nature of aggression, a conclusion is drawn about the impossibility of eradicating violence from human behavior, since without it a person would become a “willless vegetable,” incapable of many types of activity that require aggressiveness from them. But this absurd substitution of concepts can be easily refuted with one practical example—the statistics of domestic violence in the families of American football players and police officers.
If you believe that aggressiveness is a necessary component of many types of human activity and social communication, then you will agree that American football is a fairly aggressive sport, and a person cannot do without this component to participate in it. Why it is necessary for police officers, I think, does not even need to be explained. But there is one categorical difference between players and police officers. As American domestic violence statistics show, the level of violence in police families is up to 4 times higher than the national average. At the same time, in the families of players, it occurs almost 2 times less than the average.
Why is this so? While players simply need to achieve good sporting results, the immediate task of a police officer is to carry out violent attacks on other people, who themselves often committed no violence at all, but were merely accused of violating some state laws and “victimless crimes.” Obviously, the first profession may attract people who clearly demonstrate their aggressiveness but are still non-violent, and whose aggression is limited and under inhibiting control. The second profession will more often attract precisely violent people, since their official duties require violence.
Using the example of these two professions, we can clearly see the difference between functional aggression under inhibiting control and pathological violence that has spiraled out of control. The former is absolutely sufficient for a person to perform any activity, provided, of course, that it does not consist of committing violence itself. A person will not become some kind of “willless vegetable” if their aggressiveness is limited. Moreover, it is naturally limited in the vast majority of people, who could never intentionally cause serious harm to someone, let alone kill, feeling a strong repulsion toward such acts. Therefore, calling the capacity to commit violence an important trait for many types of human activity would simply be an absurd substitution of concepts.
It has become a fairly established opinion that human beings possess no instinctive behavior. Sometimes, even the instincts of highly developed animals (especially primates) are subject to partial doubt. Priority is given to the crude satisfaction of immediate needs, while all other behavior, it is claimed, is purely social in nature. Based on this position, the idea that humans have innate predispositions regarding social behavior—for example, a tendency toward either violent or non-violent behavior—is also criticized. Thus, human behavior is seen as purely a product of upbringing and environment, unless it concerns certain pathologies already described by medicine. Or even if an individual does have some innate predispositions, they can be easily “overwritten” by upbringing.
To understand whether humans have instincts or not, it is necessary to define the concept of instinct itself, as well as another similar concept—the reflex. An instinct is defined as a set of complex hereditary and preset behavioral acts, whereas a reflex is a standard reaction to a stimulus. It is immediately apparent that the difference between an instinct and a reflex comes down to the complexity of the structure of these phenomena, without a clear boundary being drawn. This can lead to some confusion in the study of innate behavioral predispositions. However, while instincts are generally considered not to be present in humans, no one doubts the existence of reflexes.
Perhaps the most criticized is the maternal instinct. However, it is an indisputable fact that an attachment between mother and child usually does arise. Research clearly shows that during pregnancy and breastfeeding, oxytocin—a hormone that plays an important role in this process—is produced in the mother. However, researchers agree that this cannot be called an instinct.
At the same time, for some reason, the innate human fear of certain threats encountered during evolution is explicitly called an instinct. For example, research has shown that the fear of snakes and spiders is present in 6-month-old infants. In general, the concept of the threat superiority effect, which explains the human ability to react quickly to threats in the environment, suggests a protective reaction to both innate and experience-acquired stimuli, not just the latter.
Let us now turn to the topic of aggression. As ethologists claim, the restraint of intraspecific aggression in animals, expressed, among other things, through the ritualization of battles, is instinctive in nature. However, the model of the violence inhibition mechanism in humans calls the rejection reaction—which arises in a normally developing individual from childhood when observing distress signals (expressions of sadness, fear, pain) from victims of violence—merely an unconditioned reflex. It should also be noted that this mechanism is important in the development of empathy, and children as early as 2-3 days after birth show an empathic response by reacting to the crying of other children with reactive crying, which is more intense than their reaction to other irritating stimuli.
We know that it is primarily the correct functioning of such a mechanism—which causes a feeling of rejection toward violence, plays an important role in the development of empathy, and leads to the development of a number of important conditioned reflexes—that makes a person non-violent, and only after that comes upbringing. Is such behavior instinctive, or is it simply a reflex? It is impossible to say for sure until a clear boundary is drawn between these concepts. However, if researchers nonetheless call the innate fear of threat, which influences the regulation of aggressive behavior, instinctive, then why can the violence inhibition mechanism not also be called instinctive? Especially since in many people it is so strongly expressed that it absolutely prevents the commission of violence, at least in its serious forms.
Libertarian Band has released a video on the ethological approach to defining the concepts of aggression, violence, and self-defense. Ethology, as a science that studies animal behavior and serves as a link between biological and sociological sciences in the study of human behavior, is a fairly precise tool for solving this problem. The ethological approach can provide us with clear answers regarding what should be considered aggression and violence, as well as where the boundaries of self-defense lie.
I recommend everyone watch this video and share it with others, so that there will be less confusion in the future during conversations about aggression, violence, and self-defense.
I have one tiny but lovely channel in my subscriptions, primarily about practical agorism, but occasionally it drifts into reflecting on more abstract things. And not so long ago, it suddenly began a series of posts on the bitarchy theory of restructuring humanity based on a violence inhibition mechanism. Naturally, I couldn’t pass this up; I waited until the series finished, and now I recommend it to you, along with the channel itself.
It begins with this post, and further on, you can read many posts almost consecutively up until this one, the final one. Fortunately, they are mostly short. I usually lack the tediousness to dive into overly detailed breakdowns of complex topics, so I gladly leave those to the men, and then I assimilate the resulting product and recommend it to others if I find it worthy.
The author concludes with a significant remark:
The question remains open: “what would be the most clever replacement for Lorentz’s theory?”. I’m still thinking.
Can Transhumanism Help Eliminate Aggressive Violence?
Ancap-chan, based on the ideas of Bitarch
The Problem
There is an opinion that the means of fighting aggressive violence offered today are treatments of symptoms rather than the problem itself. What is the point of punishing the manifestation of genetically inherited tendencies; wouldn’t it be more reliable to fix the genes?
Aggression is determined by the hormonal background. Several different hormones are involved in the regulation of aggression.
Hormones are released as a response to changes in the body occurring under the influence of both the external environment and internal processes. For example, aggression can be caused by violence, or simply by hunger.
The predisposition to aggression is partially inherited. The predisposition to hormonal pathologies, which can lead to a sharp change in aggressiveness, is also partially inherited.
Inherited factors can manifest to varying degrees under the influence of the environment, meaning that the predisposition to aggression can be reduced or developed through upbringing.
Aggression is a complex behavioral construct linked to other character traits, such as exploratory activity, independence, and the willingness to protect loved ones.
Specific genes responsible for the predisposition to aggression have not been identified. Even less so have genes responsible for the predisposition to specific types of aggression, particularly the predisposition to initiate aggressive violence. It is clear that there are several genes, located on different chromosomes, not only sex chromosomes.
Throughout human history, there is a clear trend toward the reduction of intra-species aggression. This can be fully explained by Konrad Lorenz’s classical model: the higher the ability of members of a species to destroy their conspecifics, the faster the genes responsible for the predisposition to intra-species aggression are washed out of the population during lethal conflicts. With the mastery of tools, human armament increased sharply, and natural selection went to work, weeding out the most aggressive. However, this happened very recently by evolutionary standards, which is why humans still have disproportionately high levels of aggression compared to their ability to kill people. This, essentially, is what is interpreted as the problem.
What approaches can be taken to solve it at the current level of technological development?
Today’s Approaches
Medical. If aggressiveness is treated as a disease, it is effectively cured by barbaric methods such as lobotomy or haloperidol. Along with aggression, everything human in the patient is “cured,” which is hardly different from murder; therefore, an individual approach to each patient using more delicate means must be developed. Complex treatment with an unguaranteed result cannot be practiced on a mass scale, so let us leave this approach only for the most pronounced pathologies.
Educational. Since the genetic predisposition to aggression can be weakened by good upbringing, it makes sense to focus on raising children without the use of aggressive violence. As a result, a child without pathologies will channel their natural aggressiveness into wonderful things, such as research activity or social activism. And for a child with a pathology, it will at least be manifested in a weakened form.
Sexual Selection. This means of reducing aggression in the population is already working quite well. If, for a potential partner, feats performed to win them over are not as important as benevolence and care, then carriers of genes with low aggression have a better chance of having offspring — after which aggressive individuals go off to burn through their lives and get along perfectly well without reproducing.
Acceleration of Natural Selection. When the direct shooting of aggressors in self-defense becomes common legal practice in society, the genes of aggressors are washed out of the population more radically than through sexual selection. The problem here is that the application of lethal self-defense also requires a certain predisposition to aggression; therefore, this approach works well in societies with brutal traditions, contributing to their rapid civilization — after which its effectiveness begins to decline.
Now let’s fantasize a bit to understand what transhumanists might offer us.
Tomorrow’s Approaches
Embryo Selection. A DNA sample is taken from the fetus and analyzed for a predisposition to pathological aggression; if the result is positive, the pregnancy is terminated. This is already how more obvious hereditary diseases, such as Down syndrome, are fought. Convincing the mother to make another attempt at conception is a solvable task, provided there are not too many cultural constraints in society prohibiting the termination of pregnancy.
Gene Modification in Adults. A virus is created that integrates into human DNA and either switches off the genes responsible for the predisposition to aggression or reduces their expression. The technology of gene modification itself has already been created and is actively developing, but which specific genes should be corrected and how is still poorly understood. Direct switching off of genes most obviously linked to aggression currently leads to many undesirable side pathologies in experiments. Moreover, we are talking about a whole complex of genes in different chromosomes, and modern tools are unable to provide such precise and large-scale correction. Thus, I evaluate the prospects of this specific branch of development as modest. But if the methodology can be refined even to the level of modern pharmacological methods of aggression regulation, it could replace them in psychiatry and also be used as a means of rehabilitating criminals instead of the idiotic practice of imprisonment.
Gene Modification at the Embryonic Stage. The method is the same as in the previous point, but it introduces changes to the genome that will subsequently be inherited. The task is much easier since changes need to be made to literally one cell, rather than processing the entire brain of an adult. However, while the forced application of correction to adults can somehow be justified by the fact that they committed offenses, ethical problems arise with children. I assume that the implementation of these methods will occur with a significant delay compared to the previous point, despite the relative simplicity.
Cyborgization. Since aggression is regulated by the hormonal background, it is not absolutely necessary to mess with the genome if the hormonal background itself can be regulated. Currently, this is done with medication, but in the future, implanted hormonal regulators could be used. It is hard to say which branch of development humanity will ultimately follow, but subjectively, the prospect of solving the problem by simply installing an app on a specialized gadget seems very attractive; furthermore, this methodology has minimum ethical barriers — I would gladly acquire such a device for myself.
Conclusion
First of all, I state that the complete eradication of aggression from humanity, similar to the betrization described by Stanisław Lem, is not only technically unrealizable at the current level of capabilities but also undesirable, since aggression is linked to many qualities useful to humans.
Essentially, aggression is a reaction to a stimulus, in which an attempt is made to eliminate the stimulus. Aggression can be opposed, firstly, by patience, that is, a reaction to a stimulus in which an attempt is made to adapt to its effect without eliminating the stimulus itself, and secondly, by flight, that is, a reaction to a stimulus in which an attempt is made to avoid the action of the stimulus. If the entire richness of human reactions to stimuli were reduced to patience and flight, it would close off not only the possibility of self-defense but the general ability to remove obstacles, especially if this involves any small amount of risk.
There is uncontrolled pathological aggression. It is usually associated with brain injuries and diseases or serious hormonal imbalances. The forced treatment of such diseases, in my view, is a special case of self-defense, especially since such aggression is usually identified when a person is already violating the NAP. The more the result of the treatment resembles a natural level of aggression, the better; but if medical intervention produces side effects that make a person’s life difficult (for example, if they are completely deprived of manifestations of aggression), this would be an undesirable but justified result. I am also prepared to consider the presence of a predisposition to pathological aggression in a fetus as sufficient grounds for abortion or genetic correction at the embryonic development stage — provided there are reliable, proven methods of diagnosis and correction.
As for the natural level of aggression, it is already gradually decreasing in humanity, and in recent years, this has been accompanied by a significant decrease in violent crimes. Therefore, measures to force this decrease seem completely unnecessary to me. Non-violent upbringing of children is already becoming an ethical norm. Sexual selection is already working fully in favor of caring partners rather than dominant ones. Civilian weapons, for all their utility, already look somewhat archaic. Not yet at the level of crinolines and frock coats, but somewhere at the level of evening gowns and three-piece suits. Cute, sophisticated, but unusual.
And finally, I will note once more that the optimal solution seems to me to be the ability to arbitrarily regulate one’s own hormonal background. For example, through the use of an implant. It would certainly be useful for suppressing outbursts of aggression, but I suspect that I personally would use it for the opposite: in situations where my level of aggression is insufficient. For example, before using a weapon for self-defense. Or in order to stop procrastinating and sit down to write a long-postponed post.
