Violence and anger generally is a reaction to fear. In the correct settings this can be a useful tool to us. We all have the capacity for violence, and it’s a good thing in one way because it has kept us alive as a species. It is only comparatively recently that we have become the apex predator on the Earth and if you look at how many simian species societies conduct themselves, you will see that on a more basic level they work in a very similar way in terms of how their social structure and interactions work on a day to day basis. They too will often have the capacity for violence, either within their own group for status, or towards another group for space and resources, or towards a dangerous predator, for instance a group of monkeys chucking rocks at a big cat. As human beings we have to deal with the result of layers upon layers of evolution, often working in contradictory ways, and in ways that contradict how we feel about how an enlightened society should work. For instance, there is a reaction that we all share to threat that doesn’t really help us in many modern settings, we all have a freezing behaviour that manifests itself when we are startled, like when we’re about to get ran over and oftentimes the first reaction is to freeze to the spot and pull a stupid face, possibly in an attempt to hide from the danger or play dead. This I think is a very ancient behaviour that predates when we were human beings by a long, long time, but is a behaviour we all share that oftentimes doesn’t fit with what we think the logical behaviour should be. By the same token I think we can safely say that violence and aggression (Which I believe is a later layer of evolutionary behaviour than the freezing type reaction) are behaviours that we use when we perceive threat, and are rooted in fear.
The problem comes when these reactions don’t fit with societal norms or perceived acceptable behaviour. For instance, I can become fearful and aggressive in large groups, supermarkets or generally busy places (I think I’m a bit Asperger’s), I know this is wrong, and I’m reacting to a threat that only really exists in my mind, but none the less, it feels real and the reaction is something that I can manage, but not control. Triggers will vary based on your genetic make up, personality type, and the environments that you have grown in (Yes I appreciate there are a myriad of factors at play here, but lets keep it simple) which means that it seems that we all have the capacity for violence, certainly i know from my own experience that when i have been struggling with life in general that my behaviour changes, and i go into what i call survival mode, which when i was in dangerous environments where my survival wasn’t certain, or where i was hungry then my behaviour became much more selfish and potentially explosive if i feared for my own personal safety or ability to gather the required resources to stay alive. This is perfectly natural behaviour, and in a world where animals eat other animals or compete for resources makes a great deal of sense. I think we all have the capacity for both types of behaviour, however the degree, how it manifests itself and the triggers vary from individual to individual, although we are all bound by many of the same fears and expectations. It is true to say though, that whilst we are all capable of extreme acts of violence possibly resulting in murder, on the whole, if you give somebody a gun and ask them to kill somebody else, they will be extremely reticent to do so. As we have learnt from wars past, and army conditioning techniques the process of getting one human being to willingly kill another one is actually really difficult, and only a very small percentage of soldiers will find this kind of action comes reasonably naturally to them. It varies from person to person, the ‘need’ for one person to be violent compared to another changes based on what the perceived threat is and how one person reacts to compared to another, although it is also true to say that a collection of individuals can be manipulated en masse to be bastards to another group of individuals for a number of reasons, usually based on perceived threat and competition for resources. There are times where i would advocate violence, to protect my own or somebody else’s life against a predator/violent individual for instance. I know though, that in an ideal world, there would be no need for me to do this, but just because we decided to be civilised one Thursday morning as a society, doesn’t mean we can just overwrite millions of years of genetic code, genetic code that has kept us alive as a species. Oftentimes this contradicts what we think a civilised society should consist of, but the idea of a civilised society is a reasonably recent manifestation and for a vast majority of our existence as modern humans we were hanging on by our fingernails, shitting ourselves at the idea of being eaten by predators unable to live in groups of more than 100-150 individuals.
I think the point is here that we can be neither but both simultaneously. The idea of violence repulses me, however i have been violent in my past, and i enjoy watching boxing. This is a mix of necessary but contradictory factors that weigh down on us all of the time and whilst we are all bound by the same fears much of the time, how we react to that can vary on an individual basis and i don’t think there is any way we can say for sure that humans are predominantly either violent or non-violent. Both behaviours come quite naturally to us, but are based on the individual stimuli from situation to situation and person to person. I very rarely see violence on a day to day basis, but i know that on a day to day basis, somewhere in the world for a myriad of reasons, people are shooting the shit of each other, being cruel to each other and generally acting like dicks and i guess you’ll see similar contradictory behaviour in any city centre on any given Saturday night. I don’t think this is any either or situation, but rather a neither but both.