September 2010. This essay was first posted on the Activist Teacher blog.

http://activistteacher.blogspot.com/2010/09/murder-and-genocide-are-natural.html 

Evolution can be societal. Here I argue that we must recognize our primal drive for murder and genocide and society’s propensity for violently oppressive hierarchies in order to react with the needed determined and sustained individual-based rebellion. This rebellion is against the rogue warlords and hierarchies that dominate us. Warring and its hierarchical support serve no useful purpose now that the human species is not ecologically threatened by natural competitors and now that there is no need for genetic selection (otherwise imposed on a small gene pool by an unforgiving natural environment).  

This is a critique of First-World middleclass activism, in the hope that it will start contributing to human evolution.  

I argue that laws and ethical systems are diversions that serve hierarchy and I argue that a victim mentality induced by hierarchy makes us susceptible to the appeal of canned justice and to various escapes into cowardice; rather than allowing us to perceive the otherwise obvious possibility of rebellion and self-defence.

I describe a positive feedback trap in which perturbed activists respond to perceived threats by launching into behavioural rule generation (an anxious quest for the perfect model) which in turn supports the system causing the threats. This leads to off-target and co-opted actions such as ineffective appeals to politicians, lobbying for new laws and regulations, adopting extreme personal lifestyle rules, and extremes in applied political correctness (“inclusive language,” “safe space,” etc.). The more the activists feel threatened the more they spin pseudo-comforting behavioural rules and make requests to the hierarchical oppressors for better rules, thereby increasing their societal isolation and further distancing themselves from effective means. 

The gargantuan failures of First-World middleclass activism in the face of advancing soul-battering corporate fascism, murderous militarism and exploitive finance globalization since the 1970s should be cause for radical self-examination. Canadian queer pride parades (that can’t agree on whether Israel is an apartheid sate), reparationless apologies for aboriginal residential schools, zero-impact demonstrations and petitions, and tolerated and disappeared public musings about proportional representation and parliamentary free votes just don’t cut it; whereas corporate greening counts negatively. It’s like the activism was designed to fail. There is little sign of actual resistance from the First-World middleclass.  

MURDER IS NATURAL AND HEALTHY IS SICK 

Animal rights activists believe that abstaining from killing animals is a higher moral state to which humans should aspire. But is it helpful and productive to aspire to a state that is not natural?  

On the other hand, some animal rights activists internally accentuate the murderous ways of humans and react by acting externally on behalf of other species to concretely oppose the killing. These resistors, such as members of the Animal Liberation Front, are among the boldest and most effective direct action First-World activists around. They act in true solidarity with the animals with which they identify. [1] 

Most other First-World activists prefer to believe that humankind has a natural tendency towards cooperation and altruism that can flourish given a sufficiently humane system such as socialism or communism or constrained capitalism infused with more participatory decision making, and so on. [2]  

But is it helpful and productive to aspire to a state that is not natural? And is it not harmful to be deceptive about one’s nature rather than practice honest self-appraisal? [3] 

Should we not first ask whether or not humans have a natural tendency to practice murder and genocide? After all, genocides are far more common than the Israel lobby would have us believe. [4][5] 

Certainly the spider, with its complex behaviour in hunting, stalking, and ambushing prey, is a sentient being. Presumably the spider could not survive on tomatoes and grass. The spider thrives on killing and devouring (alive) other sentient beings (including birds and small mammals when circumstances permit). Is it immoral for the spider to practice this behaviour? Has evolution privileged humane killing methods in the spider?  

What about the killer whale? Is it not often observed to play with its prey for hours before killing it or simply letting it escape? We’ve all seen the documentary films where a live seal is repeatedly thrown like a rag doll; and the monkeys who torture a captured bird before eating it, or not.  

Among large apes, dominant males maintain harems and violently prevent most other males from reproducing, while expecting complete submission and sexual favours from the females. They kill offspring that are not their own. 

We know that birds mob individuals from their flocks and kill the undesirables for no apparent reason related to flock survival. And we know that human groups also practice mobbing.   

If something is natural can it be wrong? Would it not produce healthier societies to recognize what is natural human behaviour and to make practical decisions based on realistically evaluated primal impulses rather than mask it all with moralistic rituals and myths?  

We determine that an animal behaviour is natural by correctly supposing that animals left to themselves exhibit their natural behaviours. We can supplement this by physiological arguments. For example, we know that carnivores do better when they eat meat and that herbivores do better when they eat grass.  

Let us apply the same rules to humans. Throughout history and as far as we can deduce, humans have predominantly been omnivorous and competitive for territory, resources, and reproductive projection. Clans have killed clans. Families have feuded. Patriarchies have maintained themselves. Nations have invaded other nations and taken slaves and resources at will. Entire peoples have been exterminated or enslaved every time superior war technology or tactics have been developed. The present is not excluded. 

Human history is a story of human carnage. Is this not the first truth about humankind? Stable societies established by military strength are characterized by slavery, serfdom, kingdoms, prisons, mental institutions and every form of domination and exploitation; now including globalized wage slavery and resource expropriation.  

On this backdrop, are philosophical discussions about morals and justice mere camouflage and deception only intended for temporary and superficial relief from reality? Or do they have another utility?  

Canadian society’s crimes include, a continuing genocide against aboriginal peoples [5], a geopolitical war in Afghanistan, support for the US Empire, support for the genocidal and apartheid state policies of Israel [6], overturning the democratic popular government in Haiti, corporate and finance predation throughout the world, an immoral prison system used to maintain social inequities [7], vast structural social inequities with mass public health consequences, mass civil rights violations perpetrated at will and without consequences for the decision makers (e.g., G20-Toronto), mass indoctrination and pacification of the youth [8], continual social engineering manipulation, universal pharmaceutical and medical establishment predation [9] and much more.   

And as I write this there is a cultural and racial global war of dominance raging. Geopolitical alliances are defining boundaries and leveraging control of energy resources. Enemies are formed in the ape minds of our leaders who distribute territory and privilege to their ape friends.  

All of this appears thrust upon us by the natural world where predator species fight for territory and dominance. Don’t ask the lions to get along with the hyenas. A balance of forces is the only justice. The only thing keeping a dominant male from killing another male’s offspring is the birthing female’s teeth and wits.  

THE POINT OF THE LAW 

Is it not therefore somewhat artificial for humans to administer a “justice” system in form as though it related to justice and to criminalize murder as though it was some kind of unnatural anomaly? Is it not a rather cynical farce in our societal politics of the killing machine to talk about God and to pay lip service to morals and to ethics?  

Or do laws and ethical systems play an essential role in justifying some murder and exploitation (war, economic predation) while providing some restraints at home? Such as: Father can go out into the world to steal, exploit and murder but it says he can’t just kill his dependent wife and children when he gets tired of them. 

Or in our hierarchies are laws and ethical systems meant to keep the masses in their place with a false sense of security; an understanding between masters and slaves? The slaves provide servitude in exchange for the promise of safety. They demand to be exploited fairly. They are conned to accept punishment as “justice”. 

In view of the above, laws and ethical systems appear to serve complimentary functions:  

● They provide enforceable mechanisms to facilitate monopoly building by the top corporate and finance predators. 

● They provide enforceable structure and codifications to preserve and strengthen the hierarchy. 

● They codify the impotence of hierarchical underlings and define the place of underlings. 

● They create an illusion of needed master-provided safety to underlings, in exchange for required compliance and servitude.  

● They create the double standard whereby strict penalties for harming or attacking the hierarchical masters are enforced while killing in the service of the masters (military, police, accountants, etc.) is legitimized.  

The Ten Commandments appear to be primarily concerned with nuclear family patriarchy as a basis for society. The Geneva Conventions deal with the rules of war between nation states, thereby legitimizing both war and nation states. And so on. 

We invent morals and ethics to codify servitude and to establish dominance. We develop and maintain these codes and we come to believe that they are natural and that they provide security in themselves. 

As war and exploitation technologies and social systems progress and as hierarchies grow and collide, so-called civil society and the diplomats, law makers and regulators follow explicit and unspoken directives in spinning more and better overarching webs of behavioural codification, in the hope of protecting us all while in fact entangling us more securely into the killing machines that we inhabit.  

These codes, like all laws, are delimited and defined by power – they must be or they would not serve the acting hierarchies. All resource-intensive political endeavours in a hierarchy must serve the hierarchy. 

It is not surprising that organized religions have been used to justify a majority of the most horrendous wars. This is a primary political function of religions, to expand the hierarchy. You have to admire some Jews for their honesty and transparency in this regard [18].  

It is also not surprising and not operationally contradictory that organized religions are used to manage the home front. This is also a primary political function of religions, to maintain the hierarchy. It is natural for organized religion to collaborate with nationalism and to support corporate fascism; such as with the Nazi holocaust and now with US fundamentalist “Christian” support for the apartheid state of Israel – America’s military cash cow and thug in the Middle East.  

POSITIVE FEEDBACK LOOP, DOWNWARD SPIRAL 

In a bad habit gone mental, the more underlings and progressives feel threatened by hierarchies that have tapped into humanity’s murderous tendency the more desperately they strive for “better” laws, rules, and ethical codes; the more they seek to strengthen the very hierarchies that feed on us all. 

Instead of finding the strength within, the warrior instinct that would fend off competing predators, hierarchical underlings beg for a more just master and expect a process that they do not control to wield a better world.  

A now classic example is how the green movement was co-opted by atmospheric CO2 euphoria in which corporate leaders, First-World governments, global financiers, mainstream media, the NOG sector, the service scientists, and environmentalists all aligned to defeat a mythical carbon threat by advancing the largest planetary finance scam and economic development policing code ever conceived, thereby solidifying planetary social injustice in the name of social justice. [9][10][11][12] 

And there is no lack of other examples. The entire apparatus of government is dedicated to spinning laws and regulations that provide more control to power and a continually renewed illusion of justice-from-rules to those underlings fortunate enough to have the luxury of illusions. 

There have been times when governments and laws served to partly counter corporate fascism but these times were episodes during which underlings did find strength within to force some concessions from power. The resulting resistance regulations, laws and rulings have had short half-lives in a social environment of servitude and were quickly replaced and degraded. For example, how long did it take since the 1970s for health and safety government regulators to become corporate whores? [13] How long did it take in Canada since the 1970s for somewhat student-centered public education to become mind-numbing obedience training? [8]  

Now in victim mode, the greater the perceived threat to we privileged middleclass hierarchical underlings, the more frantically we spin and scream, the more diligently we appeal to the humanity of our “representatives”, the harder we work to establish sane alternatives and “safe spaces”, to escape impending disaster.   

INCLUSIVE LANGUAGE AS SICKO 

I see many alternative networks, pathological desires to be isolated in “like mindedness” and extreme expressions of political correctness all around, as ineffective victim-mindset escapes from and shields against a violent and increasingly oppressive hierarchy.  

As a consequence of this perceive-threat/spin-rules positive feedback trap, many of the resulting socio-behavioural escapes can be extreme. Veganism is often originally such a reaction towards an extreme rule-based behaviour, one which is contrary to natural consumption opportunism. There are no economic-underclass vegans in the First World. Other extreme lifestyle rule systems include physical activity ritualism, carbon footprint reduction obsession, off grid fetishism, etc. When extreme, these reactions can be all-consuming and can determine relationships and fundamental beliefs.  

For example, how crazy is a frazzled clique of middleclass First-Worlders that develops and maintains an elaborate social behaviour code centered on “sensitivity/anti-oppression training” emphasizing the enforcement of “inclusive language” and the criminalization of racist expression as “hate speech” while not effectively and directly resisting the very hierarchical structure that so causes it to behaviourally suppress reality rather than physically confront its own immediate oppressors? This latest political correctness extreme social reaction is post-advent of nineteenth century anarchism and is therefore retarded. Academic feminist theorists have done little to stop this sad and regressive phenomenon.  

Even one fully escape-integrated progressive academic [14] has critiqued these peaking political correctness excesses as having gone too far. [15] 

CONCLUSION 

A more healthy and self-respecting activism would be to recognize humankind’s primal capacity and impulse for invasion and murder and human society’s propensity for violent hierarchical oppression and to react in self-defence rather than to escape into isolation and pathology or to grope subserviently for power’s protection.  

Self-respecting activists and anarchists and libertarians worthy of these titles need to practice day to day distributed rebellion as the only defence against our rogue killer-warrior masters who insist on running prison and extermination camps rather than serving as protectors only when needed. The species is no longer at risk from the outside. It’s time for a biological reality check and a vigorous and persistent program to keep these thugs in line. 

There is no “then what?” Murder and genocide will stay alive and hierarchy will always tend to broaden its scope and sharpen its control. Rebellion (direct participation, resistance, sabotage, personal influence, taking back control, having a direct say) is the antidote to hierarchical violence and oppression. Rebellion creates a real and evolving alternative. Our constant rebellion is also our liberation, growth, and connection. Rebellion is anchored in the individual fighting his/her own oppression at the point of strongest individual contact with the control hierarchy – at work, at school, on the street, in the prison, on the reserve; wherever the individual is controlled in his/her own life. [2][3][16][17]