I don't believe that male aggression and capacity for violence is innate; women can be aggressive, cruel, violent and self-centred, and men can be gentle, compassionate, and altruistic.
Because we are innately social beings who learn much of what it means and how to be human, learning is the dominant partner in the symbiosis between nature and nurture.
There may well be some people who, even in the most optimal of nurturing conditions, would be violent and aggressive, a lack of empathy making them incapable of feeling sympathy for the plight or the pain of others, and as a result, capable of extreme cruelty.
In a healthy society, such people would be seen as pathological and be treated accordingly. It is a measure of the possibly terminal sickness of our social world, that such people often become leaders who gather around them, echelons of enablers and colluders.
Those lickspittles form a powerful buffer class which is generously rewarded in terms of status and money for such functions as portraying and feting their leaders’ cruelty and violence as strength and resolve; depicting profound self-centredness and venality as innate and desirable human qualities, the absence of which makes others weak, inferior, and in need of the superior ones’ steady hands on the helms of the state and the economy.
Given most of these pathological humans are male, a necessary function of the enablers is embedding the notion that the qualities required of a leader are those associated with being male.
How better to justify pathological male human behaviour than to ascribe those qualities to an all-powerful creator who made man in His image.
How better to cement that than to argue god granted His creation dominion over the entire world, including over the female human? Create a mass of doctrinal demonstrations of the creator’s capriciousness and cruelty which serve to grant license to those He grants the right to rule, to act in the same way. Briskly sidestep the contradiction inherent in a single, sexless god having created a world in which, for the most part, every species requires both a female and a male in order to reproduce itself, and argue that the creator demands absolute, unquestioning obedience, and His chosen leaders have the devolved right to demand the same of those they rule over.
The inescapable conclusion is, the all-powerful creator of the monotheist patriarchal tradition is nothing more or less than a projection of the pathological human qualities which have come to dominate the social world, and as a result, now threaten the natural world.
We are a strange species. We are capable of being as viciously cruel and exploitative of our own kind as we are of all others, and yet many of us are also capable of acts of creativity simply for the joy of creating, and of being generous, compassionate, and altruistic without thought of earthly or heavenly reward.
In the modern world, many of us now have the capacity to see more widely than ever before in human evolution. That is a burden for too many and a blessing for too few.
People who refuse even to acknowledge let alone engage with the annual holocaust of small children of colour, refer to their pets as “fur-babies”, lavishing the most extreme and anthropomorphised care on them. Many people collude in the mass extinction of other species while weeping over sentimental animal stories, or fly into homicidal rages towards anyone who bursts their virtual feel-good bubbles.
Some of that is an understandable defence mechanism, a sort of self-soothing that helps people to deal with the unbearable horrors of the world our masters have created and want to perpetuate.
I don’t blame them but when they are warned to look up at the powerful because what is coming will not spare them, their human children or their fur-children or any other living thing they value – if they still persist in looking down or sideways to find scapegoats, then I will attach blame.
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