While researching scholarly perspectives on violence and psychology for my upcoming book, I came across a paper that piqued my interest and then pissed me off. Although published nearly two decades ago, the attitudes and thesis presented in it paint the picture we still stare at blankly while ignoring the blood on our hands.
“Culture as Culprit”
In his 2006 essay, Culture and Collective Violence, Michael Harris Bond from the department of psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, asserts that culture is both the cause and solution to this issue. He says, “Without culture, there is no collective violence.”
He goes on to explain that group violence comes about through a series of circumstantial and cultural preconditions. First, a difficult cultural situation potentiates societal distress. Local cultural values and expectations then determine how distressing the challenging situation is to that specific culture’s members. Finally, if that culture’s ideology can be characterized as “antagonistic” and if its authority figures and the institutions they govern are willing to enforce that ideology, they can, under all these circumstances, intentionally intensify and mobilize collective distress into group violence, justifying the need for it with the irrational sanctioning of violence by the in-group as “good” and demonization of the very existence of the out-group as “bad.”
Building off his thesis that culture causes violence, Bond concludes that culture itself is therefore responsible for delivering a solution. He explains how democratic societies are statistically less likely to engage in collective violence than other forms of government and posits that this is due in large part to its ideological foundations of liberty, tolerance, and equality. He expresses the hope that, through the continued spread of democracy around the world, collective violence will one day become a grizzly but thankfully closed chapter in the history of humanity. He closes the essay by showing his support for the creation and operation of a transcendent, unbiased global institution responsible for “suppressing” antagonistic ideologies and mediating global conflicts.
Meta-Scapegoating and the Ideology Police
While his analysis of the involvement of culture in collective violence provides interesting insights into the social cascade of conditions, reactions, and ideas that lead to violence between groups, I disagree with Bond’s assertion that culture is the root cause of collective violence and am disturbed by his proposed solution.
Yes, “Without culture, there is no collective violence,” but it is equally true that without individuals, there is no culture. It is as easy for privileged academics to blame culture as it is for oppressed societies to blame other societies for the atrocities some of us are lucky to only witness while others of us are forced to directly endure.
Regardless of the ideologies any given culture expresses, all cultures are created and upheld by agreements between individuals. Mass murder is not performed by culture, but by singular human agents who have agreed (with varying degrees of consciousness) that murder is the solution to their current collective problem. To blame culture and not hold its individual members accountable for their choices and behaviors is no solution to violence at all.
Rather, this strange meta-scapegoating of culture itself only gives rise to the irrational, and frankly alarming, idea that the solution is to institute a global ‘peace-keeping’ regime, wherein the very ideologies of world cultures are policed into conformity by a ‘superior’ ideology, in hopes of being able to infinitely keep a lid on the instinctual urge to violence that has plagued humanity since long before the emergence of culture. If Orwell’s 1984 took place on a global scale, this is how it would start.
Individual Clemency and the Predatory Adaptation
Despite his assertion that culture is the cause of collective violence, in his paper, Bond contradicts himself by recognizing how deeply (and biologically) ingrained the human propensity for violence is, citing the “development of the predatory adaptation” in pre-human primates during the Palaeozoic period as the evolutionary origin of modern human cruelty.
Counter to Bond’s blaming of culture, the logical conclusion to draw from evidence of such an adaptation is that (pre-) human violence emerged as an experimental solution for survival. Because of the immediate nutritive, protective, and biochemical rewards early humans discovered in acts of violence, it caught on like wildfire and has never stopped burning the world since. Even as we become increasingly aware that the behavior that once helped our species survive now threatens to destroy us and a new adaptation is in order if we want to continue surviving, the costs of collective violence continue to rise as we perpetuate it ad infinitum, seemingly possessed by its ancient grip on both our psychology and biology.
Culture is neither the cause of nor the solution to violence– it is merely a vehicle for its ancient, unconscious power to manifest at scale. Bond’s thesis is therefore akin to imprisoning a car for manslaughter instead of its driver after running down a pedestrian and then instituting a global task-force responsible for regulating killer cars.
Instead, I propose we put individuals back in the driver’s seat. I argue that radical self-accountability on an individual level is a more lucid, accessible, and ultimately efficacious response to the problem of collective violence than blaming culture and hoping “democracy” will save us.
Messianic Democracy and Suppression
As those of us who live in democratic cultures can attest, while we do enjoy greater political, economic, and social freedoms and protections than nations governed by extremist dictators for instance, our supposedly superior cultural ideology has succeeded only at suppressing, not solving, collective violence. I guess this is in part due to the failure of those who concern themselves with this topic to holistically assess the cause, scope, and realistic potential solutions to the issue. Viewed solely through evolutionary and cultural lenses, it can indeed seem like suppression is as good as it gets, but as a professor of psychology, I feel like Bond should have known better.
It is well known in the field of psychology that suppression of emotion in an individual is a pathological response to unprocessed trauma, leading in some cases directly to increased aggression– why should it be any different at a collective level?
Take one step outside the privileged dimension of theory and into the trenches of ordinary reality and Bond’s ideas fall apart immediately. Democracy has made collective violence less overt, but it hasn’t saved one in four women from domestic abuse. It hasn’t kept us from sending millions of young men to their deaths on foreign soil. It hasn’t protected multiple generations of people of color from systemic and social persecution. It hasn’t delivered countless children from pedophilic predation.
Individual Guilt and Power
So, if culture is not the cause of collective violence and neither democracy, nor suppression, nor evolutionary insights have helped us solve the problem, and if we are to instead hold individuals accountable as I propose, then how? What can we do with our individual agency to solve the problem of collective violence?
I suggest we start by noticing how violent we are toward ourselves. We burn our time, attention, and hearts’ desires on the altars of capitalism as the status quo, most of us never receiving the reward we were promised in return. We betray our self-worth to the pursuit of the transactional arrangement we call “love,” wasting years of our lives giving to get. We force our bodies, evolved for physical movement, to sit in chairs and our minds, hungry for expansion, to repeat rote mental tasks all day, every day. We hurt our own feelings and then accuse them of hurting us. We make choices that feel wrong out of fear of losing the privilege we have. In the democratic West, we normalize internal conflict and fail to recognize collective violence as an amplified projection of our secret self-enmity. In a culture where cruelty is condemned in the light and indulged in the shadows, the predatory adaptation has mutated, turning inward, consuming us from the inside out.
By recognizing our individual, internal participation in the greater forms of violence that surround us, we are faced simultaneously with the crushing revelation of both our guilt and our power. We realize that culture changes when we change, not the other way around. Now, from a new, more sober, responsible perspective, we can begin to make choices that will eventually lead to a truly nonviolent global culture, starting with the way we treat ourselves.
However, be warned. My proposed individual path to a nonviolent culture is not in itself peaceful. To stop the ancient cycle of perpetration and victimization in our species, we must each repossess the emotions, qualities, and behaviors we have suppressed and projected onto “evil” others. We must step into true self-leadership by organizing a militia of the wounded innocence in us and mobilizing it to revolt against the internalized archetype of the oppressor. We must reclaim our sovereignty and free will from the parts of ourselves that are cruel, not from one another.
Responsible Revolution
The Individual Solution to Collective Violence
Should each member of a culture agree on the value of radical self-accountability, our world would begin to change very quickly. Instead of scapegoating each other to escape our own darkness as a knee-jerk reaction, we’d begin to practice meta-cognition, making a habit of observing and questioning our own perceptions and behaviors. We would seek out, rather than avoid, our responsibility in creating the world we don’t want because we’d understand that this is precisely what gives us the power to create the one we do. Conflicts between nations would be broadly understood as a wake up call to individuals, an archetypal out-playing of suppressed fragments within the collective unconscious, encoded with symbolic information about our individual roles in perpetuating this deadly drama. Our cultural and political revolutions would be won by the collective maturation of consciousness, not by bloodshed.
Obstacles to Solving Collective Violence
I’m under no illusion that radical self-accountability is currently unpopular among those of us who are privileged enough to be able to afford to expand our consciousness beyond survival. Few of us are willing to fight for our wholeness, both as individuals and as a collective. It is easier to break into a thousand pieces, blaming and projecting our way through our pitifully luxurious lives while lamenting our unconsciously self-imposed powerlessness, than it is to reclaim our power and incite a cultural revolution from within. Radical self-accountability requires willingness to experience emotional difficulty and to train our consciousness to behold itself in total. The average member of Western culture finds this too intimidating and overwhelming to agree to, even if they can cognitively understand the ultimate benefits of doing so.
As members and beneficiaries of democratic societies, we have the opportunity to spearhead the expansion of consciousness through deep inner work and blaze the trail to a nonviolent cultural paradigm for everyone. As we reclaim our individual sovereignty in tandem, we can extend our power into the systems we previously allowed to oppress us and uplift those who still struggle to survive, giving them the opportunity in turn to begin to heal from the violence they’ve endured. If our action has this much power to generate peace, it is our apathy and cowardice that passively sustains war.
So, if you feel overwhelmed and frightened by facing the violence in your own heart, take strength from those who suffer more. Think about the starving children who somehow keep waking up in the morning although they’d rather perish than persist another day through the hellish landscape of democracy’s shadow. Think about the young mothers who are raped, beaten, and tortured by their husbands as a matter of daily routine and still muster the strength to cook, clean, and care for their children. Think about anyone whose suffering you can emotionally connect to and ask yourself again if you are too afraid to confront the violence within your psyche. Ask yourself if it's worth it.
Bond’s essay framing “culture as culprit,” while written almost 20 years ago, still represents the collective attitude of the West toward violence. We still point fingers at anyone or anything but ourselves. We still project our power to do anything about it onto supposedly transcendent authority figures and institutions, and millions of people still suffer and die needlessly because of our unconscious complacency.
If you are one of the few who is ready and willing to take up radical self-accountability, stick with me and look for the upcoming release of my current work-in-progress, Revenge of the Sacrifice: A guide to wholeness for those who no longer consent to suffer their fate. In it, I share my journey from unconscious fragmentation and possession by internalized violence into psychological sovereignty and free will, illuminating the steps I took to reclaim my power to create the world I want to see so that you can do it with me.
References
Bond, M.H. (2006) Culture and Collective Violence: How good people, usually men, do bad things. Retrieved April 21, 2024 from
University of Texas at Austin. (2011, March 24). Psychologists find the meaning of aggression: 'Monty Python' scene helps research. ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 21, 2024 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110323105202.htm