Hier zie Roeland, ik vind niks interessants aan Dawkins maar kom toevallig net een verwijzing naar Dawkins' boek dat jij een meesterwerk vind tegen in het recentste boek van psychiater Stanislav Grof'.
Stanislav Grof verwijst naar meer verfijnde gedragsmodellen ontwikkeld door pioniers in de ethologie en vooral naar het baanbrekende boek "Anatomy of Human Destructiveness" van Erich Fromm, wat ik 33 jaar geleden al verslonden heb.
XII Roots of Human Violence and Greed:
Consciousness Research and Human Survival
Since time immemorial, the propensity toward unbridled violence and insatiable greed have been two elemental forces driving human history. The number and nature of the atrocities that have been committed throughout the ages in various countries of the world—many of them in the name of God—are truly astonishing and shocking. Countless millions of soldiers and civilians have been killed in wars and revolutions and other forms of bloodshed. In the past, these violent events had tragic consequences for the individuals, who were directly involved in them, and for their immediate families. However, they did not threaten the future of the human species as a whole and certainly did not represent a danger for the ecosystem and for the biosphere of the planet. Also during this time, hunting, gathering, and farming were sustainable human activities.
Even after the most violent wars, nature was able to recycle all the aftermath and completely recover within several decades. This situation changed very radically over the course of the twentieth century due to rapid technological progress, the exponential growth of industrial production and pollution, the massive population explosion, and particularly the development of atomic and hydrogen bombs, chemical and biological warfare, and other weapons of mass destruction.
We are facing a global crisis of unprecedented proportions and have the dubious privilege of being the first species in history that has achieved the capacity to eradicate itself and, in the process, threaten the evolution of life on this planet. Diplomatic negotiations, administrative and legal measures, economic and social sanctions, military interventions, and other similar efforts have had very little success; as a matter of fact, they have often produced more problems than they solved. It is obvious why they had to fail: the strategies used to alleviate this crisis are rooted in the same ideology that created it in the first place. And, as Albert Einstein pointed out, it is impossible to solve problems with the same level of thinking that created them.
It has become increasingly clear that the crisis we are facing reflects the level of consciousness evolution of the human species and that its successful resolution, or at least alleviation, would have to include a radical inner transformation of humanity on a large scale. The observations that have come from the research of holotropic states of consciousness provide new insights into the nature and roots of human aggression and greed, and may lead to effective strategies for alleviating the destructive and self-destructive tendencies of the human species.
Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
The scientific understanding of human aggression began with Darwin’s epoch-making book on the evolution of species in the middle of the nineteenth century (Darwin 1952). The attempts to explain human aggression from our animal origins generated such theoretical concepts as Desmond Morris’s image of the “naked ape” (Morris 1967), Robert Ardrey’s idea of the “territorial imperative” (Ardrey 1961), Paul MacLean’s “triune brain” (McLean 1973) and Richard Dawkins’s sociobiological explanations interpreting aggression in terms of genetic strategies of the “selfish gene” (Dawkins 1976).
More refined models of behavior developed by pioneers in ethology, such as Nobel laureates Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen, complemented the mechanical emphasis on instincts through the study of ritualistic and motivational elements (Lorenz 1963, Tinbergen 1965).
However, as Erich Fromm demonstrated in his groundbreaking book Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (Fromm 1973), any theories asserting that the human disposition to violence simply reflects our animal origins are inadequate and unconvincing. Animals exhibit aggression when they are hungry, competing for sex or defending their territory. With rare exceptions, such as the occasional violent group raids of the chimpanzees against neighboring groups (Wrangham and Peterson 1996), animals do not prey on their own kind. The nature and scope of human violence—Erich Fromm’s “malignant aggression”—has no parallels in the animal kingdom.
The realization that human aggression cannot be adequately explained as a result of phylogenetic evolution led to the formulation of psychodynamic and psychosocial theories that consider a significant part of human aggression to be learned behavior. This trend began in the late 1930s and was initiated by the work of Dollard and Miller (Dollard et al. 1939). The authors of psychodynamic theories made attempts to explain the specifically human aggression as a reaction to various psychotraumatic situations that the human infant and child experience during the extended period of dependency—physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, lack of love, sense of insecurity, inadequate satisfaction of basic biological needs, emotional deprivation, abandonment, and rejection.
However, explanations of this kind fall painfully short of accounting for extreme forms of individual violence, such as the serial murders by the Boston Strangler, Geoffrey Dahmer, the Son of Sam, or Ted Bundy. They also do not have a plausible explanation for “running amok,” the indiscriminate killing of multiple people in public places followed by suicide (or killing) of the perpetrator. “Running amok” was long considered to be an exotic culture-bound syndrome limited to Malaysia. In the last several decades, it has been repeatedly observed in the western industrial countries, including mass killing among teenagers on school campuses.
There also is no plausible psychodynamic explanation for the religiously motivated combination of violence and suicide. In WWII, Japanese kamikaze warriors conducted suicidal missions to destroy American battleships and sacrifice their lives for their Emperor, whom they considered to be God. In recent decades, Muslim fundamentalists have been committing mass murders, expecting to obtain blissful existence in the Muslim paradise as the reward for their actions (see pp. 284, Volume I).
Current psychodynamic and psychosocial theories are even less convincing when it comes to bestial acts committed by entire groups, like the Sharon Tate murders of Charles Manson’s gang, the My Lai massacre of more than five hundred unarmed Vietnamese villagers by American soldiers, the torture and abuse of prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison, and atrocities that occur during prison uprisings.
They fail completely when it comes to mass societal phenomena that involve entire nations, such as Nazism, Communism, bloody wars and revolutions, genocide, and concentration camps. Psychoanalytic theories do not explain Hitler’s Holocaust, Stalin’s Gulag Archipelago and the mass murders of many millions of farmers, Ukrainians and Armenians, Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China and genocide in Tibet.
Perinatal Roots of Violence
There is no doubt that traumatic experiences and the frustration of basic needs in childhood and infancy represent important sources of aggression. However, psychedelic research and deep experiential psychotherapies have revealed additional, much more significant roots of violence in the deep recesses of the human psyche that lie beyond (or beneath) postnatal biography. The feelings of vital threat, pain, and suffocation experienced for many hours during the passage through the birth canal generate enormous amounts of murderous aggression that remains repressed and stored in the organism.
As Sigmund Freud pointed out in his book Mourning and Melancholia, repressed aggression turns into depression and self-destructive impulses (Freud 1917). Perinatal energies and emotions, by their very nature, represent a mixture of murderous and suicidal drives. The reliving of birth in various forms of experiential psychotherapy is not limited to the replay of the emotional feelings and physical sensations experienced during the passage through the birth canal; it is typically accompanied by a variety of experiences from the collective unconscious portraying scenes of unimaginable violence.
Among these are often powerful sequences depicting wars, revolutions, racial riots, concentration camps, totalitarianism, and genocide. Spontaneous emergence of this imagery associated with the reliving of birth suggests that the perinatal level might actually be an important source of extreme forms of human violence. Naturally, wars and revolutions are extremely complex phenomena that have historical, economic, political, religious, and other dimensions. My intention here is not to offer a reductionistic explanation replacing all the other causes, but to add some new insights concerning the psychological and spiritual dimensions of these forms of social psychopathology that have been neglected or received only cursory attention in earlier theories.
...
Fragment uit: The Way of the Psychonaut Volume Two: Encyclopedia for Inner Journeys
'Copyright © 2019 door Stanislav Grof, M.D., Ph.D.'
Goh, ik snap kennelijk echt niets van Advaita Vedanta!
