An interesting post from Dave Pollard's blog that's well-worth reading and pondering. He argues that violence and its proximal causes are really responses to critical environmental stressors such as overpopulation.
From controlled animal experiments, there is evidence that extreme environmental stress (in this case overcrowding) does lead to a number of anti-social behaviors, including the following in rats (paraphrasing Pollard's summary):
1. a minority display aggressively dominant behavior
2. passive males avoid both fighting and sex
3. hyperactive subordinates rape females and eat or kill their offspring
4. pan sexual males engage in sexual intercourse with both males and females
5. some males withdraw sexually and socially and tend to be active only while others are asleep
6. females tend to react by acting absent-minded, keeping disorganized nests, and eating or neglecting their offspring
The main thrust to the above is that under excessively overcrowded conditions, animals will respond by engaging in various forms of abuse and neglect of offspring, social withdrawal, excessively aggressive behavior among the dominant members of the species, and what amounts to psychopathic behavior among a subset of subordinant members of the species. Animal species will also show a drop in fertility rates as the population density reaches saturation. Does this appear to describe today's human condition? Perhaps offer an explanation for much of the political and social violence that we are witnessing at interpersonal, national and international levels? I lean towards the answer "yes."
Here's the theoretical model Dave Pollard proposes:
a. Communities/species that are moderately out of ecological balance instinctively and temporarily reduce their population
b. Communities/species that are severely out of ecological balance reduce their population and also exhibit psychotic behaviours (violence, rape, cruelty, bullying, greed, depression, suicide, megalomania) that accelerate, and draw out the period of, population reduction
c. These two self-imposed population control mechanisms are Darwinian, helping to restore balance with the minimum amount of disruption to the rest of the ecosystem, and the mimumum extent of suffering
d. A combination of human technologies introduced in the last 30 millennia has defeated the effectiveness of these mechanisms, perpetuating and institutionalizing the psychotic, violent behaviour that has made modern human society dysfunctional, mentally disordered, and brutal
I think there's some real food for thought here. Worth pondering.
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