Essay on "On Aggression" by Konrad Lorenz

To All God's Children,


-->I was reading this book by Konrad Lorenz who is this famous natural scientists whose work has been studied by psychologists as well. I remember studying about him in Intro to Psychology and how he studied “imprinting” which is the effect of newborn animals when they believe the first being they see is there mother and they follow behind it. Imprinting doesn’t happen in humans; however, imprinting does occur in ducks. There’s a famous picture of Lorenz with a set of ducks following him believing him to be their mother.
The reason I mention him is because the book he wrote was about aggression. There’s an interesting observation he makes about fish of alike colors in certain species. When put into the same fish tank they will battle each other until the last one living takes over the tank. If fish of different species are put into the same tank there is no battle over resources. This more than likely happens in humans as well and I’m certain there’s evidence for it (when I finish reading the book I'm certain I'll know).

In the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the 2003 movie), for example, there’s a scene where the crazy killer guy is chasing after the main character. He searches through lockers for her trying to kill her and hears a noise in one of the lockers. He busts open the door and there’s a pig sitting there – it was a meat packing plant I think. He leaves the pig and goes to find the main character. I remember thinking, what the hell, he would kill a human, but not a pig? The pig is no threat to his existence or his resources – so yes, he would rather kill a human.

This could be another explanation for people’s migration across different countries with the understanding that we all came from the same Mother tribe in Africa. Like the fish, if we were held in a tank, humans would probably fight and kill each other disputing over the limited resources. You could think of our “fish tank” as the world or on a smaller scale you could think of our fish tank as the countryside where our tribe was. In a natural setting the fish do not all kill each other because some of the weaker ones can escape and migrate to another location.

People must have done the same thing. I would suppose that some of the more peaceful cultures who have been living the same way as they did thousands of years ago as they do today are some of the people who escaped the more tyrannical races of people who threatened to kill them. We’ve been fleeing the wrath of other humans for centuries moving from one country to the next trying to stay alive, but also our more aggressive adversaries or the “conquering races” have also sought to expand their territory and resources by moving to new lands and killing the residents and raping the women spawning a new generation of people.

But, there was at least one to survive and escape and take her children or his people to a new land. This obviously explains wars because some people were prepared to battle for their land and resources. This could explain genocide also, which never assume that what Hitler did was the first or worst mass killing in history – in modern history maybe (i.e. he competes with Stalin who also murdered millions of his countrymen), but since people have existed they have been killing each other en masse.

Peace be with you

Angels Book Series by D. C. Cowan