Read Online The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect us from Violence by Gavin de Becker - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Gavin de Becker
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seek to preserve and unite, and those which seek to destroy and kill.” He wrote that the phenomenon of life evolves from their “acting together and against each other.”
Proving the opinions of Einstein and Freud is the fact that violence and homicide occur in all cultures. In their book on the origins of violence, Demonic Males , Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson say that modern humans are “the dazed survivors of a continuous, 5-million year habit of lethal aggression.” Those scientific explorers who set out to find communities that would disprove man’s universal violence all came home disappointed. South Pacific islanders were romanticized as non-violent in Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa . The Fijians, correctly perceived today as the friendliest people in the world were not that long ago, among humanity’s most violent. The Kung of the Kalahari were called “the harmless people” in a book by the same title, but Melvin Konner, whose search for the answers took him more than once to study hunter-gatherers in Africa, concluded that “again and again, ethnogrophers have discovered Eden in the outback, only to have the discovery foiled by better data.”
Though we live in space-age times, we still have stone-age minds. We are competitive and territorial and violent, just like our simian ancestors. There are people who insist this isn’t so, who insist that they could never kill anyone, but they invariably add a telling caveat: “Unless, of course, a person tried to harm someone I love.” So the resource of violence is in everyone; all that changes is our view of the justification.
Studying and interviewing those who use violence to reach their goals, I long ago learned that I must find in them some part of myself, and, more disturbingly at times, find in myself some part of them. There must be a place to hook the line before I drop down into the dark mine of some dark mind; there must be something familiar to hold on to.
A man kills a cow with an ax, cuts open the carcass, and then climbs inside to see what it feels like; later he uses the ax to kill his eight-year-old stepbrother. Another man murders his parents by shooting out their eyes with a shotgun. We use the word inhuman to describe these murderers, but I know them both, and they are not inhuman—they are precisely human. I know many other people like them; I know their parents and the parents of their victims. Their violent acts were repugnant, to be sure, but not inhuman.
When a bank robber shoots a security guard, we all understand why, but with aberrant killers, people resist the concept of a shared humanness. That’s because US and THEM is far more comfortable. In my work I don’t have that luxury. The stakes of some predictions require that I intimately recognize and accept what I observe in others no matter who they are, no matter what they have done, no matter what they might do, no matter where it takes me in myself. There may be a time in your life when you too won’t have the luxury of saying you don’t recognize someone’s sinister intent. Your survival may depend on your recognizing it.
Though anthropologists have long focused on the distinctions between people, it is recognizing the sameness that allows us to most accurately predict violence. Of course, accepting someone’s humanness does not mean excusing his behavior. This lesson is probably starkest when you spend time with the world’s most violent and dangerous people, the ones you might call monsters, the ones who committed acts you might think you couldn’t have imagined. Many of them are locked up at Atascadero State Hospital in California. I founded and fund a program there called Patient Pets, which allows patients to care for small animals. Many of these men will be locked up for life without visitors, and a mouse or bird might be all they have.
I recall the way the patients reacted to the death of a particular guinea pig
Proving the opinions of Einstein and Freud is the fact that violence and homicide occur in all cultures. In their book on the origins of violence, Demonic Males , Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson say that modern humans are “the dazed survivors of a continuous, 5-million year habit of lethal aggression.” Those scientific explorers who set out to find communities that would disprove man’s universal violence all came home disappointed. South Pacific islanders were romanticized as non-violent in Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa . The Fijians, correctly perceived today as the friendliest people in the world were not that long ago, among humanity’s most violent. The Kung of the Kalahari were called “the harmless people” in a book by the same title, but Melvin Konner, whose search for the answers took him more than once to study hunter-gatherers in Africa, concluded that “again and again, ethnogrophers have discovered Eden in the outback, only to have the discovery foiled by better data.”
Though we live in space-age times, we still have stone-age minds. We are competitive and territorial and violent, just like our simian ancestors. There are people who insist this isn’t so, who insist that they could never kill anyone, but they invariably add a telling caveat: “Unless, of course, a person tried to harm someone I love.” So the resource of violence is in everyone; all that changes is our view of the justification.
Studying and interviewing those who use violence to reach their goals, I long ago learned that I must find in them some part of myself, and, more disturbingly at times, find in myself some part of them. There must be a place to hook the line before I drop down into the dark mine of some dark mind; there must be something familiar to hold on to.
A man kills a cow with an ax, cuts open the carcass, and then climbs inside to see what it feels like; later he uses the ax to kill his eight-year-old stepbrother. Another man murders his parents by shooting out their eyes with a shotgun. We use the word inhuman to describe these murderers, but I know them both, and they are not inhuman—they are precisely human. I know many other people like them; I know their parents and the parents of their victims. Their violent acts were repugnant, to be sure, but not inhuman.
When a bank robber shoots a security guard, we all understand why, but with aberrant killers, people resist the concept of a shared humanness. That’s because US and THEM is far more comfortable. In my work I don’t have that luxury. The stakes of some predictions require that I intimately recognize and accept what I observe in others no matter who they are, no matter what they have done, no matter what they might do, no matter where it takes me in myself. There may be a time in your life when you too won’t have the luxury of saying you don’t recognize someone’s sinister intent. Your survival may depend on your recognizing it.
Though anthropologists have long focused on the distinctions between people, it is recognizing the sameness that allows us to most accurately predict violence. Of course, accepting someone’s humanness does not mean excusing his behavior. This lesson is probably starkest when you spend time with the world’s most violent and dangerous people, the ones you might call monsters, the ones who committed acts you might think you couldn’t have imagined. Many of them are locked up at Atascadero State Hospital in California. I founded and fund a program there called Patient Pets, which allows patients to care for small animals. Many of these men will be locked up for life without visitors, and a mouse or bird might be all they have.
I recall the way the patients reacted to the death of a particular guinea pig
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