Cultural Disintegration | J. D. Haltigan

Okay, so I'm going to tell you a frightening story and you tell me what you think about it.

This is maybe too pessimistic, but I'm still working that out. You know, to what degree do we have moral instincts, let's say, that are in keeping with the self-sacrificing ethos of a complex civilization? How much of that is part and parcel of our inborn conscience? You know, Kleckly, of course, defined the psychopaths as some without a conscience or with a very underdeveloped conscience.

So I read two books in quick succession. One of them was a book by the Dutch primatologist who unfortunately is recently deceased, Frans de Waal. One of his books on chimpanzee behavior, I don't remember which one because I read a number of his books, but he detailed out the phenomenon of chimpanzee war, essentially.

This was first discovered, I believe, by Jane Goodall, who was pretty flipped upside down by the revelation, as she should have been. Because, of course, the sociological types, the lefties and the cultural constructionists, like to think that the human proclivity for warfare is a consequence of corrupt social structure, a theory which is shot to hell by the fact that chimpanzees go to war. This indicates that it's much more an inherent part of our primate nature than anyone wants to think.

So what happens with the chimps is that the juveniles, in particular, will go on parties around the borders of their territory. Let's say they have a fairly acute sense of territory, and if they come across chimpanzees from another troop and they outnumber them—because they have a rudimentary sense of amount—anyways, they can't count, but they have a sense of amount—they'll attack them.

So sometimes with juvenile females accompanying them, and they tear them to shreds. Right? So what seems to be the case is that in the absence of a social hierarchy that limits aggression, so if a male gets too aggressive in a troop, the rest of the troop gets upset, and generally the alpha male will step in to quell it, or the rest of the troop will.

So you could think about the troop's level of negative emotion as an inhibitory function. It has an inhibitory function; it clamps down on male aggression, which might otherwise have no limit. Okay, so why would I say “no limit”? Well, because when you look at the chimpanzees go to war, when they’re attacking a troop member that has no social standing, which would be a member of another troop, there's no limit to what they'll do.

Now chimpanzees are capable of hunting. They hunt 40 P. B. C. B. U. S. monkeys and they'll eat them alive while they're screaming. So it isn't obvious that the distress of another primate has much inhibitory force. And so they'll use their jaws to castrate the other chimpanzees, for example, and literally tear their skin off. They're very, very powerful; they're very, very strong—about six times as strong as the typical adult male. So look the hell out if you're attacked by a chimpanzee.

Okay, so the hypothesis there would be our closest primate relatives have no inhibition whatsoever on their capacity for aggression once they're outside the confines of a well-constituted social hierarchy.

Okay, so soon after that, I read "The Rape of Nanking," which is a book about as brutal as any book you might ever come across. It details the magnitude of Japanese atrocity in the city of Nanking just prior to World War II. There isn't—you would have to be one pathological person indeed to imagine, even in the wildest extremes of your most vicious fantasies, anything worse than what happened in Nanking.

You could take the worst possible chimpanzee troop and equip them with a much more sadistic imagination and then set them free to do anything they could possibly imagine. And that's what happened in Nanking.

And so then I started thinking, "Oh my God, does that actually mean that there's no limit on human aggression outside of social hierarchy essentially?" Because, you know, there were a lot of normal Japanese soldiers that were involved in this. It was certainly contagious. Now undoubtedly, it was led by the bloody psychopathic sadistic types, and it was certainly the case that the Japanese government had instilled in their troops a sense of ethnic superiority with regard to the Chinese and dehumanization of the Chinese.

But that in itself isn't enough to account for this stunning sadistic brutality. And so, you know, that would indicate that—well, what does it indicate? It indicates that that psychopathic and sadistic tendency might be a lot more transmissible than we think. At minimum, yeah, I think the abolition of hierarchies has led to worse hierarchies in almost every situation and historical circumstance we can think of.

Hierarchies are an ingrained part of human behavior, and when you try to replace them with some other utopian scheme where there is no hierarchy or dominance hierarchy, what you end up with is what you just described. And I think that's really what the tyranny of structurelessness is all about.

When there is no hierarchy or guiding set of principles to create a hierarchy, you just have complete structurelessness. And to think about it, that's what you see in all this cluster B behavior—it's completely disregulated. There's no structure to any of their behavior.

And that's really what's at the heart of, I think, the cultural malaise that we're living through. All these ideologues want to abolish structure or categories—whether that's categories in mental health diagnostic classifications or in society.

You see this with some of the LGBTQ plus world things—they want to abolish any type of constraint. And as Reef, one of the cultural commentators, Philip Reef, who is no longer with us, once said, once you have a culture in which man is allowed to express anything, you have a culture in crisis.

You have no constraints on the ability of anybody to live any pathology they want or to do anything they want. There's nothing—no hierarchy, no containment at all—to some of the underlying tyrannical behavior that can be given rise to when you have a lack of structure or containment.

So we have a culture in crisis right now because they're trying to abolish all structure, all containment, all hierarchy. And that's just a recipe for cultural disintegration.