Had we Institutionalised the Instinct of Violence …!

Ayn Rand says, ‘man is the only species capable of self-destruction. No other animal can commit suicide.’

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Sigmund Freud has noted that man is born with two very DESTRUCTIVE instincts. The first is ‘SEX’ and the second is ‘VIOLENCE’. Both have the strength to annihilate the very existence of the human society.

Freud says that human beings could progress on the path of social evolution and civilization only because?‘institution of marriage’?could have been invented. Very early, this helped channelise and control the instinct of sex in a structured manner.

The institution of family owes its origin and existence to the institution of marriage. Family gave rise to the system of kinship. Kinship got extremely successful in channelising and creatively using the instinct of sex. Not only that, it also very successfully shielded the human kids from the vulnerabilities of sex and helped them to move on the long march of higher and higher cultural and civilizational accomplishments – in the realms of science, arts, and culture.

Human child is the most vulnerable and helpless youngster in the entire animal kingdom. Though man is the most intelligent animal, the newborn human child has been found to have lower intelligence than even a newly hatched chick.

The vulnerability of human child progressively increases as the degree of civilization increases in society. It also means the period of dependence of the child on family and society gets successively elongated.

I will come back to this point after quickly dealing with the instinct of violence that I have mentioned earlier.

As of today, society faces a minuscule danger from the untamed ‘instinct of sex’ but is gravely endangered by the’ instinct of violence’.

If you look around, you will find that one very destructive force that still works on us and threatens our peace and existence is the instinct of violence and its sustained expression in small and large measures all around us. At the highest level is war and then at lower levels are terrorism, racial riots and downright individual violence.

Each one of us is born with lots of violence inside us. The human brain starts functioning from the sixth week of foetal development. Since then, each incident of discomfort to the foetus, like mother not eating and foetus remaining hungry, mother getting mentally and emotionally stressed and foetus feeling uncomfortable etc. Each discomfort leaves a strand of unpleasant memory, and many such incidents fill each one of us with many strands of discomfort stored inside us as potential violence. Sub-conscious mind records everything. It is one inexhaustible pool of energy and memory. All the discomforts get accumulated. Each human child thus enters the world as ‘a hugely disruptive ball of violence and destruction’.

It is this that had prompted Freud to say – quite contrary to Church’s belief that every child was an angel and a true form of God – that each human child was a black hole of violence, and its mind was black and dark with disruptive instincts. He said that by socialization and enculturation family and society put layers and layers of whitewash of goodness on the deep black under- surface.

This is one reason why each of us is different in our degree of civility and gentleness but deep down we are all ‘equal in our monstrosity’! It is unimaginable how violent each one of us is …deep within. So violent that we are all almost equal in our cruelty and destructiveness almost the same that we are in our sexual drive!

It is this instinct of violence which the society has not been able to channelise, regulate and ‘institutionalise’.?There is no social institution that has been able to address this ‘instinct of violence’.

On the other hand, the institution of?marriage?has been successful in regulating ‘the instinct of sex’.

How precious is the institution of marriage! Heterosexual marriage.

Must we not pledge to save it from disintegration? Must we not pledge to strengthen it?

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