T he desires for wealth and status are even more dangerous and devastating when they are expressed collectively – that is, when groups of human beings act together to try to increase their wealth, power and prestige. This goes a long way to explaining some of the major social pathologies that humania gives rise to, such as warfare, social inequality and oppression, and male domination.
The main motivation of warfare is the desire of one group of human beings – usually governments, but often the general population of a country, tribe or ethnic group – to increase their power and wealth. The group tries to do this by conquering and subjugating other groups, and by seizing their territory and resources. Pick almost any war in history and you’ll find some variant of this cause: wars to annex new territory, to colonize new lands, to take control of valuable minerals or oil, to help build an empire to increase prestige and wealth, or to avenge a previous humiliation that diminished a group’s power, prestige and wealth. One of the root causes of World War II was the humiliation of Germany after World War I, when the Treaty of Versailles punished them severely. The Germans were forced to give up large parts of their territory and pay billions of dollars in reparations, causing massive hardship. The aim of these measures was to ensure that Germany would never become a military power again, but it had the opposite effect, of course. The sense of humiliation gave rise to an intense desire to regain power and prestige, which developed into the ‘Thousand Year Reich’ envisioned by the Nazis.
Until the nineteenth century, European countries were at war with one or more of their neighbors, on average, nearly every second year. Between 1740 and 1897 there were 230 wars in Europe, and countries were almost bankrupting themselves with their military expenditure. (At the end of the eighteenth century the French government was spending two-thirds of its budget on the army, while Prussia was spending 90 percent.) Wars were shorter and less frequent during the twentieth century, but more advanced killing technologies meant that the death toll rose sharply. Whereas it is estimated that ‘just’ 30 million people died in all the European wars between 1740 and 1896, the combined death toll of the two World Wars was around 75 million. 1
Warfare is so common to human beings that there’s a tendency to think of it as normal and natural – and, indeed, there have been attempts to explain it in crudely biological or genetic terms. For example, warfare has been linked to a higher level of testosterone in men or a lower level of serotonin, both of which are associated with aggressive behavior. 2 There’s no doubt, however, that even if there is some genetic or biological disposition toward aggression in human beings (although I believe that even this has been exaggerated), this tendency is massively intensified by humania. Far from being natural, war is a symptom of our insanity. Think of the European countries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: groups of people who spoke very similar languages, who were often ethnically related, but who allowed generations of their young men to be killed, and generations of women and children to suffer poverty and starvation, in an endless struggle over land, wealth, prestige, and power. Think of the perverted ideology of militaristic cultures – such as ancient Sparta, nineteenth-century Prussia and early twentieth-century Japan – which held that killing other human beings (and sacrificing your own life in the process) was a noble and even moral act. Think of the bizarre philosophy of Social Darwinism – advocated by the Nazis and British colonialists – which held that warfare and colonialism were natural and right, since they were an enactment of the laws of survival, part of the evolutionary process by which the ‘fittest’ and strongest conquered and killed those who were weaker.
Social oppression and inequality
Another pathological characteristic of most human societies throughout history – and another consequence of the drive to gain power and wealth generated by humania – has been massive inequality and oppression. The great majority of human beings have always been, effectively, the slaves of a tiny minority who owned and controlled resources. If you had the misfortune to be born in Europe in the Middle Ages – or in Ancient Egypt, feudal Japan or China or any other society with a feudal system – the vast likelihood is that you would have been born into the life of a peasant or serf. As a serf, you would be little more than a slave. Your master would own the land on which you worked, and you couldn’t leave it without his permission. He could transfer you to a different estate, while taking over your property and family. You could be called up to go to war at any time, leaving your crops to rot and your family to starve. It’s also very possible that your master would beat you, punish you brutally for trivial crimes or – if you were a woman – rape you.
If you were slightly more fortunate, you might be born as a peasant, who rented his land from a landowner. But your predicament would still be dismal. Your landlord would most likely exploit you massively, charging you a high rent, in addition to taxes and compulsory ‘gifts.’ The church would want their share of your income too, in the form of tithes, or – if you didn’t have any money – a share of your produce. Your house would be made of wood, mud, and manure, and life would be a constant struggle to survive, with very little water and food and no heating. You would be chronically malnourished, and in constant danger of starving altogether, especially in winter. And on top of all that, you would live in constant fear of being falsely accused of crimes, and being tortured and killed as a punishment. Brutal punishment – and the power of making the accusations that led to it – was one of the methods used by nobles and lords to keep their peasants under control.
On the other hand, if you were born into the aristocracy, or as a member of the nobility or gentry, you would effectively have won the lottery. You might own thousands of peasants or serfs – some Russian nobles in the nineteenth century owned 300,000 serfs – and you would probably consider yourself a higher human type than them, almost a member of a different species. You would think of your peasants as closer to animals than human beings (in estate records, it was not unusual for peasants to be listed as ‘livestock’ along with pigs and sheep). Your class would make up less than 10 percent of the population, but own practically all of the country’s wealth and resources, and have complete control over all its laws and its government. There was no need for you to work, as the food, goods and money you extorted from your peasants or serfs would subsidize a lavish lifestyle. You would be exempt from punishment for most crimes and your life expectancy would be up to 20 years longer than your peasants.
If you were born of peasant stock in Europe during the nineteenth century your predicament would be even worse. After the Industrial Revolution, you would no longer be the slave of a lord or noble, but of a factory, mill or mine owner. You would work harder and live in even greater squalor, while the industrialists prospered just as much as the nobles. But at least the Industrial Revolution had the effect of breaking up the old feudal system, as a new middle class of businessmen took over from the nobility and gentry. Even so, in the UK, the laws and structures of societies were so weighted in favor of the privileged minority that it took decades of protest and campaigning – by groups such as the Chartists and Trade Unions – to slowly erode away the inequalities.
But of course, massive inequality still exists – most notably, on a global scale. When we consider the distribution of wealth and resources throughout the world as a whole, the inequalities are, if anything, even more grotesque than those of feudal societies hundreds of years ago. The richest 1 percent of the world’s population owns 40 percent of its wealth, while 50 percent of the population owns just 1 percent. At the same time, 80 percent of people live on less than $10 per day, over 1 billion people don’t have access to adequate water, and 2.5 billion people lack basic sanitation. 3
The oppression of women
Even when they belonged to higher social classes, throughout history most women have effectively been slaves too. Until recent times, women in Europe, the Middle East and Asia were unable to have any influence over the political, religious or cultural lives of their societies. They couldn’t own property or inherit land and wealth and were frequently treated as mere property themselves. In some countries moneylenders or tax collectors could confiscate women to help settle debts (this was, for example, a common practice in Japan from the seventh century CE onward.) In ancient Assyria, the punishment for rape was the handing over of the rapist’s wife to the husband of his victim, to use as he desired. Most gruesome of all, some cultures practiced what anthropologists have called ‘ritual widow murder’ (or ‘ritual widow suicide’), when women would be killed (or kill themselves) shortly after the death of their husband. This was common throughout India and China until the twentieth century, and there are still occasional cases nowadays.
Even in the so-called ‘enlightened’ society of Ancient Greece – where the concept of democracy supposedly originated – women had no property or political rights, and were forbidden to leave their homes after dark. Similarly, in Ancient Rome women were unable to take part in social events (except as employed ‘escort girls’), and were only allowed to leave their homes with their husband or a male relative.
In Europe the status of women has risen significantly over the last few decades, but in many parts of the world male domination and oppression continue. In many Middle Eastern countries, for example, women effectively live as prisoners, unable to leave the house unless in the company of a male guardian. (Many Saudi Arabian women have only left their houses a handful of times in their whole lives.) And when – or if – they do go outside, they are obliged to cover themselves from head to toe in black, leaving them in danger of vitamin D deficiency and dehydration. They have no role at all in determining their own lives. They are seen as nothing more than a commodity, property of the males of the family, and as owners the men have the right to make decisions on their behalf. Their male owners have the right to have sex with them on demand too. In Egypt, surveys have shown that the vast majority of men and women believe it is acceptable for a man to beat his wife if she refuses sex 4 .
Again, there have been attempts to explain the oppression of women in crude biological terms. For example, in The Inevitability of Patriarchy , the sociologist Stephen Goldberg suggests that men are naturally more competitive than women because of their high level of testosterone. This makes them aggressive and power-hungry, so that they inevitably take over the high-status positions in a society, leaving women to take the more subordinate roles 5 .
There is no doubt, however, that this maltreatment of women is pathological, and another symptom of our underlying insanity. It’s one thing to take over the positions of power in a society, but another to seemingly despise women, and inflict so much brutality and degradation on them. What sane species would treat half of its members – and the very half who gives birth to the whole species – with such contempt and injustice? Despite their high level of testosterone, the men of many ancient and indigenous cultures revered women for their life-giving and nurturing role, so why don’t we?
The oppression of women stems from men’s desire for power and control. The same need that drives them to try to conquer and subjugate other groups or nations, and to oppress other classes or groups in their own society, drives them to dominate and oppress women. Since men feel the need to gain as much power and control as they can, they steal away power and control from women. They deny women the right to make decisions, so that they can make them for them; leave women unable to direct their own lives so that they can direct their lives for them. Ultimately, they’re trying to increase their sense of significance and status, in an effort to offset the discontent and sense of lack created by humania.
The madness of honor
One of the most disturbing and pathological cultural practices generated by humania is ‘honor killing’ – the killing of relatives (the vast majority of them female, and in most cases young daughters) who have ‘dishonored’ the family. This practice is still prevalent in many Middle Eastern and Asian societies – not coincidentally, the same societies that are most oppressive toward women.
Honor killing is linked to the fear of losing status, and the desire to protect it. In the societies where it occurs, there is a pathological insecurity, a constant pressure to adhere to strict social conventions for fear of losing face, and of being ostracized by the rest of the community. (In this sense, it’s linked to social identity and the need for belonging which we’re going to examine in the next chapter .)
The women of the family are seen as representing its honor, so there is massive pressure on them to behave ‘properly.’ This means dressing modestly, not talking to men outside the family, never attracting attention to themselves, and most importantly of all, avoiding sex before marriage (or outside marriage, once they are wed) and agreeing to marry a partner chosen by their family. Other types of behavior seen as ‘dishonorable’ for women – and therefore as punishable by death – include political activism, investigating other religions, and requesting a divorce. There have also been many cases of homosexual boys being killed to preserve the family ‘honor.’
If a family member deviates from this code of behavior, the family’s reputation is sullied. The only way they can redeem themselves is by murdering the relative – again, usually the daughter – who has dishonored them. It doesn’t matter if the relative is completely innocent. It could simply be that she’s attractive, and so has been shown attention by men outside the family; it could be that she lost her virginity by being raped. The fact that she has sullied the family’s reputation is enough to justify murdering her. Amnesty International reported a case in Turkey of a 16-year-old girl who was murdered after her family heard a love song being dedicated to her on the radio. In Pakistan, a girl with learning difficulties was killed after being raped, even though the relative who raped her was prosecuted. 6
The United Nations has estimated that around 5,000 honor killings take place each year, but since many occur in isolated rural areas and aren’t reported to authorities, it’s likely that the real figure is much higher. In many countries, the practice is so socially acceptable that murderers are treated leniently, or not punished at all. In countries like Pakistan and Yemen, for example, police and prosecutors often ignore the killings. In Syria, the legal code states that if a man catches a female relative having illicit sex with another man and kills them (either just the woman or the partner as well), he is entitled to a reduced penalty of just two years in prison.
As I hinted above, honor killings are clearly related to male domination and low female status. It’s only possible for fathers to kill their own daughters – or brothers their own sisters – because they place a very low value on female life. If women were revered and respected, then no one would consider killing – or even abusing – them. It’s no coincidence that many of the cultures that practice honor killing – for example, India and Pakistan – also practice female infanticide. In these cultures, female life has negligible value, and so to destroy it is only a minor crime.
By any objective standards of behavior, it seems incredible and insane that parents are prepared to murder their own children – or brothers their own sisters – for the sake of status and reputation. It’s also incredible that most honor killings are a punishment for completely natural and healthy human instincts: the ‘crime’ of falling in love with a member of a different caste (which is often the cause of honor killings in India), or with a stranger not handpicked by your parents, or the ‘crime’ of feeling sexual attraction and following this through to sex itself. Again, it’s no coincidence that honor killings occur in societies that, in addition to being strongly patriarchal, have a high degree of sexual repression, and a neurotically hostile attitude to sex and the human body.
The lack of empathy
Although it’s propelled by the desire for wealth and status, all of the brutality described above is only made possible by another major effect of humania: a reduced ability to empathize with other people.
Empathy is the ability to ‘feel with’ another person, to identity with them and sense what they’re experiencing. It’s sometimes seen as the ability to ‘read’ other people’s emotions, or the ability to imagine what they’re feeling, by ‘putting yourself in their shoes.’ In other words, empathy is seen as a cognitive ability, along the same lines as the ability to imagine future scenarios or to solve problems based on previous experience. But in my view empathy is more than this: it’s the ability to make a psychic and emotional connection with another person, to actually enter into their mind-space. When we experience real empathy or compassion, our identity actually merges with another person’s. The separateness between you and the other person fades away. Your ‘self-boundary’ dissolves so that in a sense – or to an extent – you become them.
However, our strongly developed ego makes it difficult for us to experience this state of connection. It ‘walls us off’ from other people, particularly those belonging to other groups – the other gender (in the case of female oppression), other tribes, and nations, races or classes. (We’ll look at the importance of group identity in more detail in the next chapter .) The ego encloses us in a narrow world of our own thoughts and desires, making us so self-absorbed that it’s difficult for us to experience the world from other people’s perspective. Other people become truly ‘other’ to us. And this makes it possible for us to inflict suffering on them, simply because we can’t sense the pain we’re causing them. We can’t feel with them enough to sense their suffering.
If you identify with another person, if you have a psychic and emotional connection with them, then it’s impossible to treat them brutally. You recoil from their experience of suffering in the same way that you recoil from your own suffering. In fact, you feel a strong desire to relieve their suffering and aid their development. But if you can’t identify with them, then there’s no limit to the amount of suffering you can inflict. You can’t sense their pain, so there’s nothing to stop you causing it.
This is the major characteristic of psychopaths. They are completely unable to empathize and see the world from other people’s perspective. They are completely self-absorbed and self-obsessed. The whole world, and the rest of the human race, only exists to serve their own desires. Of course, I’m not trying to say all human beings are psychopaths. It’s a question of degree. Psychopaths are people who experience this lack of empathy and self-absorption at an extreme level. But it’s there to some degree in all of us, especially men. Humania includes an element of psychopathy.
In other words, ‘Man’s inhumanity to man’ has two fundamental causes: the desire for wealth and power, and the reduced capacity to empathize. These two factors have propelled most of the terrible suffering, misery and violence that run through recorded history.
Women and empathy
It’s significant that research has shown that women generally appear to have a higher level of empathy than men. For example, studies have shown that women’s friendships tend to be based on mutual help and problem sharing, whereas men usually develop friendships based on shared interests, such as sports and hobbies 7 . Men and women have also been shown to have different speaking styles. Conversations among women usually last longer, because of their use of more ‘back-channel support,’ such as nodding, smiling and other gestures. If they disagree, women tend to express their opinion indirectly rather than making a statement, helping to avoid confrontation. On the other hand, men tend to more blunt and opinionated. They use more imperatives and tend to ‘talk over’ other people more. As the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen puts it, ‘men spend more time using language to demonstrate their knowledge, skill and status.’ 8 Studies have also shown that women are significantly better at gauging people’s emotions purely from looking at their eyes. 9
This makes sense: after all, the vast majority of ‘man’s inhumanity’ throughout history really has been man’s . Almost all wars have been orchestrated and fought by men, and most social oppression has been inflicted by high-status men, seeking to protect and increase their power and wealth. (You could argue that this is partly because women were never able to get into positions of power, and so were never able to wage war or oppress people. But the reason for this, of course, was that men denied women access to positions of power in the first place, because of their own desire for them.)
This also makes sense in terms of women’s role as mothers. Surely their nurturing role encourages empathy, because of the need for a strong emotional connection to children. At the very least, you could say that this emotional connection would have made it more difficult for women to lose the ability to empathize.
If it is true that women have a greater capacity for empathy, this suggests that they generally experience less ego-separation than men. After all, if they have a greater ability to ‘feel with’ other people, this can only be because they are less ‘walled off’ inside their own mental space. And since ego-separation is one of the main characteristics of humania, does this mean that women are less affected by the condition than men?
This would be a controversial conclusion, but I think there may well be some truth in it. Even so, it’s only a case of suffering from a slightly milder case of the condition. Women still experience some degree of ego-isolation, of course, and they certainly do experience at least the same degree of cognitive discord as men. Women are mad too, even if they might not be quite as mad as men.
The madness of environmental destruction
There is a further collective pathology that relates to the issues we’ve looked at in this chapter: our suicidal destruction of our planet’s life support systems. To an independent observer, this would be the final proof – if any were needed – that human beings suffer from a psychological disorder. Would a sane species be destroying the Earth’s plant and animal life so wantonly, and filling the air and seas with such massive amounts of poisonous chemicals? Would they be consuming natural resources so rapaciously, at the same time as tearing up the Earth’s surface in search of more? Would a sane species allow catastrophic trends like global warming, water shortage and overpopulation to intensify without taking any serious measures against them?
Indigenous peoples were in no doubt that our attitude to nature was pathological, and would lead to disaster. They have been consistently appalled by our lack of respect for the natural world, and systematic abuse of nature. Over 150 years ago Chief Seattle compared the white man to ‘a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs.’ With great foresight, he warned President Franklin Pearce that his people ‘will devour the Earth and leave behind only a desert.’ 10 More recently, the Australian Aborigine Anne-Pattel Grey has complained of European Australians ‘raping, murdering and abusing their Mother Earth,’ and warned of the ‘price they would pay for abusing [her].’ 11
Indigenous peoples respect nature because they sense that it’s alive and because they feel connected to it. They sense that all natural things – not just animals but plants, stones, and the whole Earth itself are not just objects, but beings, who are part of the same web of creation as them. They empathize with plants, animals and the Earth, and so are reluctant to damage or destroy them. As the great Native American philosopher Luther Standing Bear wrote of the Lakota Indians, ‘Kinship with all creatures of the earth, sky, and water was a real and active principle. In the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept the Lakota safe among them.’ This meant that, for the Lakota, in anticipation of the modern animal rights movement:
‘The animals had rights – the right of a man’s protection, the right to live, the right to multiply, the right to freedom, and the right to man’s indebtedness – and in recognition of these rights the Lakota never enslaved an animal, and spared all life that was not needed for food and clothing.’ 12
This attitude brought a sense of responsibility. Many indigenous peoples saw – and still see – themselves as the caretakers of nature, with a responsibility to preserve harmony. As Chief Edward Moody of the Nuxalk Nation says, ‘We must protect the forests for our children, grandchildren, and children yet to be born. We must protect the forests for those who can’t speak for themselves such as the birds, animals, fish and trees.’ 13
On the one hand, our environmental destruction is the direct result of the separateness of the ego. In the same way that this separateness makes it difficult for us to empathize with other people – especially members of other groups – it makes it almost impossible for us to empathize with natural things, or with the Earth itself. It means that we experience a sense of ‘otherness’ to nature, that we can’t sense its aliveness and so don’t feel any qualms about exploiting and abusing it.
Or on a wider scale, our ego-separateness means that we don’t feel connected to the web of creation. As a result, we don’t feel a responsibility to the rest of the web, or a duty to preserve its harmony. Instead, our separateness makes us feel entitled to dominate the rest of nature. This is why we feel entitled to own land and natural resources, which is one of the traits that indigenous peoples found most difficult to understand. Ownership implies a position of superiority and dominance. Since we know that we are conscious and alive ourselves, and perceive natural phenomena as not being alive and conscious, we feel that we’re superior to nature, as a master is to a slave, and so feel entitled to dominate it. But indigenous peoples’ sense of the sacredness and aliveness of nature means that they could never take this attitude. Even as communities, they rarely see themselves as owning land or natural resources in the sense that we understand the term.
In this sense, our abuse of the environment is propelled by the same need for power that makes us strive for influential positions. We seek power over nature, to dominate and oppress it, in the same way that we’ve always striven to oppress other groups, classes or castes. Instead of feeling the kinship that Luther Standing Bear described, we’ve traditionally seen nature – and all natural things – as an enemy to be conquered, something wild to be tamed and harnessed. In a fundamental way, our oppression of nature – mostly a male enterprise – is closely linked to the oppression of women. Nature is usually described in feminine terms – for example, Mother Nature, or the womb of the Earth – and women have traditionally been seen as the embodiment of nature, linked to creation through childbirth and powerful natural processes such as menstruation and lactation. And throughout history, the male ego has felt the need to have dominion over both of them.
Our desire for material goods is an important factor too. The Earth is the source of everything material – everything we produce and consume is made from it, and returns to it in some form. If we didn’t have such a massive appetite for possessions, pleasures and status symbols, there would be much lower levels of both consumption and environmental damage.
And of course, overpopulation is another important factor. Naturally, the collective effects of humania intensify with numbers. One thousand years ago, with a population of only a few hundred million, there was a limit to the amount of damage the human race could do the biosphere, and to other species. But now that there are billions of mentally disordered individuals – billions of ‘humaniacs’ – wandering over the surface of this planet, it’s not surprising that its future is in jeopardy.