The Q&A Hole: Why Are People So Violent Toward Each Other

War – what is it good for?

Absolutely nothing, a certain song would lead one to believe. And yet, oh my stars and garters, there certainly seems to be an inexhaustible amount of the stuff around all the time, doesn’t there?

All the time. And all well-funded and richly orchestrated with guns and bombs and drones and terror, so frequently enhanced by the mass killing of other humans – an act that we don’t castigate as murder as long as it’s being done to, well, you know. To an enemy. To one of them.

And, regardless of those large-scale abominations and all the horrors and sorrows they wreak, there are endless instances of much smaller, more intimate aggressions across the globe – in the cities and the towns and the villages and the rest areas, the bars and parks and yogurt shops, the bedrooms and the bathrooms and the hidden cellars, all around the blood-spattered clock, 24 fucking 7, all the live-long day and night.

“That horrible sound, dear one?” as someone recently quipped on Facebook. “Only the endless violence of humanity ripping itself apart like wet garbage.”

And so we figured that, for this latest installment of our Q&A Hole series, we’d ask a few citizens what’s up with that shit. Which is to say:

WHY ARE PEOPLE SO VIOLENT TOWARD EACH OTHER?

Lana Lesley of Rude Mechs: I think because we’re just not educated enough to use our words well enough to be satisfied, when we’re in a conflict, that we’ve got our point across. I know that I’m particularly bad at articulating my feelings and being calm and rational and logical about my emotions when I’m in some kind of fight. And I very much often want to hit to feel like I’ve fully expressed everything I need to get out. I think that’s why: We’re just too dumb to do better.

David Fruchter of Typewriter Rodeo: Because they’ve been the victim of violence – it’s just an ongoing cycle. I think shit flows downhill, and people who engage in violent acts do so because they’ve been the victim of violence, for the most part – whether that was emotional or physical – from their childhood. That’s what I believe.

Christopher Brown, lawyer, author: I think it’s in our nature as a certain type of naked ape. And particularly as a type of naked ape that’s obsessed with property and competition over limited available resources. We live in a society premised on the idea that we should appropriate whatever we can around us to be for our own exclusive benefit and consumption. And that competition, over an increasingly limited array of resources on the planet, I think that’s what drives our basic violent nature into new directions. And that’s further compounded by the isolation that so many people experience in our otherwise admirable society: Their acting out, it’s like their last mode of trying to engage. Like an army of Travis Bickles.

Rebecca Schwarz, author: I think there’s a little yin and yang kind of thing going on. You know, you read 18th-century literature and they talk about “violent passions,” they talk about love and empathy. And I don’t know that you can achieve that deep, passionate empathy without having that darker side – which is often violent, expressed in violent actions toward one another. Passion can turn into violence rather quickly, they’re very close to each other. Like football fans watching two teams contending violently for a goal – it’s a tribal, human nature thing. You don’t get the softer, human tenderness without that other, harsher part existing too. You don’t get God without the devil.

Denise Prince, photographer, cultural provocateur: Apologies in advance: I dated a neuroscientist and loved the book The Naked Ape, so I'm fascinated with the way our behavior is traced back to early man. One note: Animals tend to seek to dominate with aggressive gestures, not to kill. The distance that weapons provide makes us less interesting than animals; meaning, if we were mano a mano (or tusk on tusk), perhaps you wouldn't be asking me this. And, more seriously, I think we take in a lot more from culture and news than we realize. What we take in tells us who we are on an unconscious level. My experience with people tells me the world is much different than the media. (Kill your television.)

Andrew Hilbert, author: I think we're obsessed with being right. If someone disagrees, it's a threat to our own belief system. It's insulting. There you go. War. Shootings. From the small scale to the big scale, we can even justify our violence by making arguments for why it's necessary or excusable. Be wrong sometimes. It's okay. Accept that other people can be wrong and still be allowed to live and breath without fear.

Bob Duke of Two Guys on Your Head: What’s interesting is that we’re a lot less violent than we used to be. There’s a wonderful book by Steven Pinker, called The Better Angels of Our Nature, and it’s a very systematic documentation of levels of violence throughout existence. And think about how we get information now – we look at television, listen to the radio, read articles and books. And what people choose to inform us about are events that are dramatic in some way. And we presume that the amount of total news that is that is representative of the amount of that, whatever that is, in day-to-day experience. So we overestimate, to a tremendous amount, just how violent things are in our society. I mean, right now, we’re standing here, I have no fear that someone’s gonna come up and do me physical harm. That wasn’t the case even just several hundred years ago. If I was living in Europe back then, living in a village somewhere, and somebody wanted some of my stuff, it would not be unusual for somebody to hit me over the head with a really big rock and take it. That was the reality then. And living in this comfort that people, at least in modern societies, are able to live in – and I say this as a relatively well-off, white, educated guy – which gives me a different perspective than somebody who’s living in Baltimore or Ferguson or some place like that, who’s African-American – but, even given that, when people say “Why are humans so violent?” – know that what we’ve done is come up with lots of ways to solve conflicts through methods other than violence. That said, we’re not always nice, are we? You could ask another question: Why are we so nasty to each other?