11

A World of Trouble

My first wish is to see this plague to mankind banished from off the earth.

George Washington, on war, in a statement of 1785

Step back and view our species objectively from the outside, the way a zoologist would carefully observe any other animal, or see us the way every other creature perceives human beings. The brutal reality could not be more evident or more horrifying. We are the most relentless yet oblivious killers on Earth.

Our violence operates far outside the bounds of any other species. Human beings kill anything. Slaughter is a defining behavior of our species. We kill all other creatures, and we kill our own. Read today’s paper. Read yesterday’s, or read tomorrow’s. The enormous industry of print and broadcast journalism serves predominantly to document our killing. Violence exists in the animal world, of course, but on a far different scale. Carnivores kill for food; we kill our family members, our children, our parents, our spouses, our brothers and sisters, our cousins and in-laws. We kill strangers. We kill people who are different from us, in appearance, beliefs, race, and social status. We kill ourselves in suicide. We kill for advantage and for revenge, and we kill for entertainment: the Roman Coliseum, drive-by shootings, bullfights, hunting and fishing, animal roadkill in an instantaneous reflex for sport. We kill friends, rivals, coworkers, and classmates. Children kill children, in school and on the playground. Grandparents, parents, fathers, mothers—all kill and all of them are the targets of killing. We devise the cruelest means possible to kill other people: crucifixion, burning at the stake, beheadings, napalm, and Nazi gas chambers. We devise unthinkable means of systematic cruelty designed to produce the most extreme pain and agony possible, which we call torture. There is no animal on land, in the sea, or in the air that we do not kill. Many species that have inhabited the Earth for millions of years have been slaughtered to extinction by human beings. We kill whales, dolphins, seals, otters, sharks, and every other fish that swims or shellfish that hides in the sea. On land we kill herbivores and we kill carnivores: deer, cattle, squirrels, elephants, bears, and lions. Since 1970, human beings have killed off half of the entire world’s animal population (vertebrate animals), according to a World Wildlife Fund report in 2014. If a virus had been the cause of this global scourge, there would be widespread panic.

And because of our incomparable brainpower, we are by far the most ingenious killers ever to have evolved. We kill with stones, clubs, knives, rope, spears, arrows, slingshot, gun, cannon. We kill with gas, violent chemical reactions, electricity, atomic fission and fusion, bacteria and viruses, fire, water, and with our bare hands. We kill with every means of transportation we have invented by exploiting their power and speed: horses, motorbikes, cars, boats, balloons, blimps, airplanes, satellites, and rockets. We modify our inventions of transport specifically and for no other purpose than to kill other humans: tanks, warships, fighter jets, bombers, submarines, unmanned drones, and missiles. We kill with passenger airplanes. We kill with fire, gasoline, poisons, cleaning products. We keep weapons for home defense and fortify our dwellings with alarms triggering an armed response from professionals trained to kill other humans. We kill with our tools: icepicks, screwdrivers, hammers, power tools, machetes, and box-cutters. In the passion of battle or in premeditated murderous cunning we can turn any object into a lethal weapon, from a high-heel shoe to a suicide vest. We kill with the Internet, using it to prey upon and trap victims or to indoctrinate and train others in killing, and to broadcast the videotaped horror of this killing to terrorize others. We kill with radio, cell phone, and radar. We kill with rhetoric and with books to instruct and incite violence. We kill as individuals, as friends, and in small teams, as gangs, as armies, and in massive global alliances among countries to wipe other countries off the face of the earth. We do this continually and we have done so for eons. Once we cohabited the world with our sibling species, the Neanderthals, and bred with them. They had bigger brains and larger bodies than Homo sapiens, but they are gone.

Other species—fish, birds, and creatures of the forest—intermingle except when encountering predators or competitors for a limited resource. Violence among animals is engineered by evolutionary design to give each animal a precise role to maintain the intricate food web and sustain the delicate ecological balance of nature, but all creatures in the sea, air, or on land scatter when a human being is present. The sound, smell, and image of a human being is universally feared among Earth’s wild creatures, and for good reason. All animals have been programmed through evolution and experience to know that human beings are killers. Even the lowly lizard with its feeble brain is hardwired to dart away from us on sight.

Our society is structured by violence. Large sectors are devoted to conducting violence or to maintaining control of human violence. In the United States 7.4 people in 1,000 are in prison. The United States houses 25 percent of the world’s prisoners but only about 5 percent of the world’s population. According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, blacks account for 39.4 percent of the total prison and jail population; Hispanics comprise 20.6 percent. Ninety-three percent of all prisoners in the United States are male. One-fifth of our national wealth in the United States is spent on killing in defense and for advantage, and $718 billion of the US federal budget is spent on defense (2011 statistics). This figure does not include the expense of benefits to veterans, another 3.5 percent of the federal budget. Only 2 percent of the national budget is spent on education or on science and medical research. The United States spends more on its military than the next thirteen nations combined.

Genocide in WWII by the Germans, and Japanese atrocities against the Chinese and war prisoners have been reduced to vacuous numbers: 300,000 Chinese killed and 20,000 women raped by Japan in the Nanjing Massacre; 11 million people killed by the Nazi genocidal policy against Jews, gypsies, Poles, and others deemed inferior. The atrocities of war are more easily dismissed when the criminal acts are committed by the enemy, but this mass human violence against other humans is not exclusive to any nation or group of people. Secretary of State John Kerry, when he testified as a Vietnam veteran before the US Senate in 1971, stated that many soldiers had told him of atrocities committed by US servicemen. “They told the stories of times that they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.” Nick Turse, in his 2013 book Kill Anything That Moves, documents many examples of US atrocities on the scale of the My Lai massacre and routine violent crimes against civilians and the enemy by individuals and teams of US soldiers in Vietnam. Vietnam is not an exception; it is cited here because the time that’s passed since this war raged provides a vantage point for objectivity. WWII is too remote and the current Middle East wars are still too raw. Clearly, the majority of servicemen and -women could not commit such war crimes; they risk their lives and engage in violence for the most noble of causes, but such criminal violence in war is an ugly and undeniable aspect of human nature. Homo sapiens do such things to other members of their own species.

Even within the bounds of accepted practice in war, some actions can seem in retrospect unjustifiably brutal. The busiest airport in history is not Chicago O’Hare, or London Heathrow; it was a secret CIA-built airbase in Laos. The small country of Laos, posing no military threat to the United States, was the most heavily bombed country in the history of warfare. More bombs were dropped by the US Air Force on Laos in the 1960s and ’70s than on Germany and Japan combined. The target was not a massive military industrial complex or military base. The Ho Chi Minh Trail, a meandering supply route for Viet Cong fighters into South Vietnam, ran through this region of civilian villages and farmland. From 1964 to 1973 the United States dropped more than 2.5 million tons of bombs on Laos in nearly 600,000 bombing missions—equal to a planeload of bombs dropped every eight minutes, twenty-four hours a day, for nine years. US Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay gloated, “We’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Ages.” Homeless and defenseless, the peasants, villagers, and refugees of Laos spent months or years hiding in holes or trenches dug into the foothills. The terrain remains pockmarked by craters today, and more than 20,000 people have been killed or injured in Laos by unexploded ordnance since the bombing ceased. Twenty million gallons of Agent Orange and other herbicides that were sprayed by the US Air Force over Vietnam decimated the environment and caused widespread birth defects and illness. Forty-two percent of all the herbicide was sprayed over food crops in an effort to starve the civilian population.

Why do we snap? Fundamentally, this is why. We are drawn to carnage, not repelled by it. Freeways are shut down by rubberneckers. Murder mysteries and horror movies are extremely popular forms of entertainment that have wide appeal. Television programs routinely feature guns and crimes of violence. Violence in sport is conducted in a highly structured manner, as in boxing and football, or it is the focal point of its appeal, as in “pro” wrestling and the fistfights accepted and expected in ice hockey. Riots break out after soccer matches, sometimes deadly. Through evolution the parts of our brain that produce violent behavior have become fortified and embellished to the extreme. One wonders if our violent brain circuits may be equivalent to the evolutionary extravagance of the peacock’s tail feathers—pushed by evolution to the brink of dysfunction. These circuits of violence are energized by circuits of cunning and ingenuity into a potent, deadly mix of horrifying cruelty and savage attacks. The unhealthy alliance of these violence circuits, originally essential for survival, seems to have outgrown the circuits that keep them in check. Rather than being activated under circumstances that are strictly necessary and lifesaving, our evolutionary path expanding our ingenuity has transformed our environment such that these triggers of rage are now constantly exposed to release violence.

The prolific author, biologist, historian, and futurist H. G. Wells, who conceived of time travel and foresaw space travel and nuclear weapons, concluded that our species was doomed by its aggressive excesses. Viewed objectively, Homo sapiens, he concluded, must, through forces of evolution that maintain balance in nature, be replaced very soon by a superior species. In his last work, Mind at the End of Its Tether, published in 1945, Wells argues that the human brain has evolved to a grotesque level of violent dysfunction that has already doomed our species: “The bird is a creature of the air, the fish is a creature of the water, man is a creature of the mind. . . . A series of events has forced upon the intelligent observer the realization that the human story has already come to an end and that Homo sapiens, as he has been pleased to call himself, is in his present form played out.”

This dark view of humanity is simple biology, as Wells sees it: “During all this period [of evolution] there has been a constant succession of forms, dominating the scene. Each has dominated, and each in its turn has been thrust aside and superseded by some form better adapted to the changing circumstances of life. Each has obeyed certain inescapable laws that seemed to be in the very nature of things. First of these laws was the imperative to aggression.”

Wells traces the evolution of Homo sapiens from early primates, and attributes our species’s rise to domination to our peculiar unbridled childlike aggression being infused by our creative minds and constantly innovating ever more potent means of killing. “Their semi-erect attitude enabled them to rear up and beat at their antagonists with sticks and stones, an unheard-of enhancement of tooth and claw. But presently their sociability diminished . . . These cursive ground apes [that is, primates who evolved from ancestors like chimps living in trees] were the Hominidae, a hungry and ferocious animal series.”

Our arboreal ancestors “acquired quickness of eye and muscular adjustment among the branches. They were sociable and flourished wider,” but when they evolved to a ground species “the usual increase in size, weight and strength occurred, they descended perforce to ground level, big enough now to outface, fight and outwit the larger carnivores of the forest world.” This led to interpersonal conflict, tribalism, and interspecies combat that annihilated all other lines of Homo except for the most violent Homo sapiens. “Families and tribes may have warred against each other and the victors have obliterated their distinctiveness by mating with captive women. . . . primordial adult Homo [Neanderthals and others], for all effective purposes, faded out, leaving as his successor the childlike Homo sapiens, who is, at his best, curious, teachable and experimental from the cradle to the grave.” (Wells would be amazed by modern methods to track human ancestry through the genetic imprints left in our DNA, as well as the fossil record encased in stone. Most descendants of northern Europeans, including me, as I learned from an analysis of my own DNA, retain up to 4 percent Neanderthal DNA in our genome, indelible fingerprints of the children born to parents whose matings long before recorded history united—either in love or rape—these two early species of man.)

Many dismiss Wells’s pessimistic final book as the dreary musings of a dying old man suffering in sickness and grappling with the end of his life. He died the following year. Wells anticipated this reaction. In this final work Wells concludes, “Ordinary man is at the end of his tether. Only a small, highly adaptable minority of the species can possibly survive. The rest will not trouble about it, finding such opiates and consolations as they have a mind for.”

Look at Homo sapiens through the eyes of any other species in the wild and you see one thing—death.

A Rage Murder Autopsy

For insight into the roots of rage killings, consider this true murder mystery.

The body was found facedown at 1:20 p.m., on September 19, 1991, partly wedged in a rocky crevice. At first the hikers thought it was a pile of trash, but the shocking truth quickly became obvious. They had stumbled upon the corpse of a forty-six-year-old man. He was well armed and carrying a backpack stuffed with valuables. The cause of death was determined at autopsy—homicide.

The man had been shot in the upper back. The entrance wound pierced the victim’s shoulder blade and severed a major artery. The projectile stopped just centimeters from his lung. Since the nerves energizing that limb were severed, the victim’s arm would have been paralyzed, and he would have bled out quickly from the spurting blood pulsating from major arteries exiting the heart. There were defensive wounds on the palm of his right hand, sliced to the bone by a knife blade. The base of his skull was fractured and blood had pooled inside the brain. This cranial injury could have been the result of a fatal fall after being mortally wounded, but more likely it was the murderer’s coup de grâce as he stood over his fallen victim.

Piecing together the forensic evidence, authorities arrived at their conclusion of murder because the perpetrator had taken careful steps to cover up his crime. All traces of the murder weapon had been removed. The man had been shot by an arrow, the tip of which was still lodged in the now-frozen body, but the arrow shaft itself had been pulled out by someone standing behind the fallen body. It was never recovered. That arrow could have been matched to others in the killer’s quiver, providing incriminating evidence. The victim was of high status and he came from a small village, so the victim most likely knew the person who suddenly ended his life of forty-six years. Stomach-content analysis led investigators to conclude that the man had no reason to fear for his life in the time leading up to his death. He had not been fleeing the killer; he had died suddenly. The forensic analysis showed that the dead man had just consumed a very large meal—a generous barbecued slab of meat. This feasting is not the behavior of someone running for their life or engaged in mortal combat. Moreover, the man was very wealthy, but none of his possessions were taken, including precious metal that he was carrying. It was not a robbery. The authorities speculate that the murderer left the victim’s valuable personal effects with the body because they would have identified the killer had he taken them back to the small community where he lived.

The autopsy was performed in July 2001 by Dr. Eduard Egarter Vigl and Dr. Paul Gostner, but the murder had been committed more than 5,350 years earlier, on the cusp of man’s transition from the Stone Age into the Copper Age. The victim, now called Ötzi the Iceman of the Alps, had been interred in an icy glacier at an elevation of 3,210 meters in the Austrian–Italian Alps until one day, centuries after Homo sapiens had passed from the Copper Age into the Electronic Age, after having ventured beyond Europe, across the vast Atlantic, and inhabited every corner of the globe and even reached into outer space to walk on the surface of the moon, the sun’s rays finally melted away the ancient ice and opened a time capsule on an archaic homicide that authorities concluded was committed in a sudden fit of rage for reasons that are lost to time.

The key clue to the victim’s high status was the copper ax he was carrying and which the murderer left alone. Copper was the product of the most advanced technology of the day and only the most elite members of society at the time would have had such a modern tool fashioned from the most precious metal of the era. The murderer dared not steal it and risk becoming identified by the booty. Had the man died in a robbery, or in the course of battle, the copper ax would have been snatched as rightful plunder. The fatal arrow would still have been lodged in his flesh.

It may seem a remarkable coincidence that not only could the mummified remains of a human being from BCE 3000 be discovered intact in the twentieth century, but that the death of this man had been the result of homicide. Perhaps, but the archeological facts suggest that death by homicide was not at all rare for ancient man. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have seen the mass deaths of millions of people in horrendous wars, one after the other, through generations. Since 1914 the world has endured horrific world wars, genocides, mass exterminations, “ethnic cleansings,” riots, murders, and vicious civil wars. A staggering 100 million to 200 million Homo sapiens have been killed in mass battles with other members of the same species. Hitler, Stalin, Mao . . . dictators and warlords the world over have slaughtered millions of people, but these warmongers are only the most recent in a long line of ruthless warriors that can be traced back through Napoleon to Genghis Kahn to the brutal Roman Empire. But measuring the 100 to 200 million people killed in wars of the twentieth century against the 10 billion lives lived in the same period yields a homicide rate from war of 1 to 2 percent. This an astonishing figure, but compare that with the tiny populations that humans inhabited in prehistoric times: Professor Ian Morris of Stanford University calculates that prior to recorded history, human beings died at the hands of other people at an appalling rate of 10 to 20 percent.

When we speak of the LIFEMORTS triggers of rage being tripped by the radical changes in human existence in the modern world, it is important to put it in the proper perspective. Human ancestors developed from other primates in Africa about 5 million years ago. The chimp brain shares the fundamental structure of the modern human brain. “Lucy,” Australopithecus afarensis, lived 3 million years ago. About 2.3 million years ago the first humans (hominids of the genus Homo), with their very large brains, arose in Africa. Some 1.5 million years ago early humans migrated out of Africa into Asia and Europe. And 100,000 years ago Homo sapiens, with the even larger brains that we have today, thrived in Africa, while our sister species Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis lived in different parts of the Old World. Humans lived at this time and for tens of thousands of years later in family groups and small social groups much like nonhuman primates. The first evidence of human culture—cave paintings, body adornment, and elaborate burials—appears only 50,000 years ago. At this time humans were forming larger, more organized societies and developing technology that would rapidly change the world. By 25,000 years ago, all other Homo species except Homo sapiens were extinct. Humans continued to develop advanced technology and large complex social groups, and they spread throughout the Old World. Even the Iceman of BCE 3000, with the same brain we have today—a brain that had developed 100,000 years earlier—is a recent development.

The environment of Homo sapiens is changing radically, at an explosive rate that far outstrips the pace of evolution. Through generations, evolution has been the enduring mechanism by which organisms were matched to their environment. The exponential transformation of our environment by technology in the last few thousand years has made our world utterly alien to the environment that forged the human brain in ancient Africa. Many people alive today lived in a time before computers, space flight, atomic energy, or cell phones. A little over a century ago our species relied on animals for transportation. Knowledge of germs, electricity, and the cellular and molecular basis of life are recent events in human existence. These technological developments that have transformed our environment are so recent they cannot even be plotted on the time line of Homo sapiens ancestry on this planet. It is clear that our species has changed the environment radically, faster than biology can change our bodies to adapt, and that we are an extraordinarily ruthless animal, uniquely separated from the natural world. Since 1980 a staggering 421 million birds have vanished from Europe, according to a 2014 census; a 20 percent population decrease. The deaths are hardly limited to vulnerable exotic species; those were the first to go, but since 1980, 90 percent of the decline is in the thirty-six most common species of European birds. The losses are attributed to humans, primarily by human-caused environmental degradation. Nearly one-third of the world’s amphibian species are threatened with extinction. Amphibians have flourished on the Earth for more than 300 million years, but in just the last twenty years 168 species of amphibians have gone extinct due to environmental changes caused by humans: habitat loss, pollution, and climate change.

Human beings have changed the environment too rapidly for these animals to adapt, but are these mass extinctions “canaries in the coal mine,” indicators of environmental dangers threatening our species? Homo erectus flourished on Earth for about 1.8 million years. Homo sapiens has only been on the planet for 100,000 years. To put this in perspective, if Homo erectus’s time on Earth were one day, Homo sapiens have been in existence for one hour and twenty minutes. From a biological perspective, there is little information or precedence to predict how long this latest offshoot of the Homo genus will survive.

Human beings are violent creatures, with an odd penchant for killing their own. What is clear is that human brains are uniquely equipped for violence and for defense against attack by other members of their own species. In part this is because we are all descendants of the warriors who survived in violent confrontations to pass on their genes. Recent DNA analysis shows that of 3,700 Austrians volunteering DNA samples, 19 percent showed the indelible traces of ancestry leading back to the Iceman who was murdered on that mountain thousands of years ago. The Iceman carried a mutation in a gene, G-L91, which resides on the Y chromosome passed on from father to son over generations after that Copper Age man was murdered suddenly by someone he knew.

History shows that there is little logic to the horrifying mass homicides in war. War is most often called “senseless,” but also inevitable and necessary. Brothers killed brothers in the US Civil War. More Americans died in the US Civil War than in all other American wars combined. Peoples that Americans fought to annihilate in World War II, the Japanese and the Germans, became our closest allies within ten years of the war’s end, whereas our vital WWII ally, the Russians, became our most feared enemy in a Cold War that brought the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust.

Triggering War

In 2014, a US Navy P-8 Poseidon patrol aircraft was flying off the coast of China’s Hainan Island. The large P-8 US surveillance warplane is built on the Boeing 737 platform, and equipped with a bomb bay to drop bombs, torpedoes, and depth charges. Air-to-surface missiles are clutched as if by talons beneath its wings. As the aircraft skirted the Asian coastline, suddenly a Chinese J-11 fighter jet came screaming toward it in a deadly game of chicken. At the last instant, the Chinese fighter jet flashed past the Navy airplane, barrel rolling to miss it by only twenty feet.

Air Force general Herbert Carlisle, head of US Pacific Air Forces, says that China’s naval and air forces are “very much continuing to push,” and they are becoming more active in international waters and airspace in Asia. “They still talk about the century of humiliation,” he said, referring to China’s decline as a world power in the twentieth century and the country’s determination to rise to a great world power in the twenty-first century. In recent years China has conducted more military exercises farther from its shores and pressed into disputed territorial waters, some regions coveted by Chinese oil-drilling companies. “The opportunity for something to go wrong,” General Carlisle warns, increases with the rising numbers of close encounters between the United States and its allied countries and the Chinese Navy and Air Force in border patrols.

Meanwhile, deteriorating relations between the United States and Russia have fueled a resurgence of confrontations not seen since the dangerous cat-and-mouse encounters of the Cold War that brought the world so close to nuclear annihilation. Russia is now conducting long-range reconnaissance and bomber missions encroaching on US territory. On September 17, 2014, two Russian fighter jets, two long-range bombers, and two refueling tankers were skirting the coast of Alaska at the edge of international airspace when US fighter jets intercepted the half-dozen Russian attack force approaching the US border. As with China, General Carlisle attributes the Russian provocations to President Vladimir Putin’s intention “to reassert Russia into what he thinks its rightful place in the international order is, and part of that is continuing to push into the Pacific.” In contrast to the recent incidents with China, where the Asian country’s actions can be characterized as defending (rightly or wrongly) what it perceives to be its territory, the Russian military probes along the Alaskan coast are undertaken to test the borders of US territory. These are aggressive rather than defensive actions. Over the past year there has also been a sharp rise in Japanese intercepts of Russian military aircraft along Japanese territorial borders, and Russian submarines have been lurking off the coast of Sweden, provoking swift reaction by NATO fighter jets. In August 2015, Finland fired depth charges on a suspected Russian submarine in its territorial waters off Helsinki.

One must resist oversimplification of such dangerous military challenges as contests between “good and evil.” Such characterizations are justified in many cases, but the Tribe trigger neurocircuitry of violence in our brain to defend one’s own people predisposes human beings to form herds with their own and to reflexively adopt an “us versus them” perspective in conflicts instinctively. The United States also tests Russian territorial defenses in much the same way that Russia tests ours. In April 2014, a Russian Sukhoi Su-27 fighter jet flew within 100 feet of a US Air Force RC-135U aircraft operating on a surveillance mission over the Sea of Okhotsk. The RC-135U is a large, four-engine jet aircraft with a 135-foot wingspan, designed to collect electronic intelligence on adversary radar systems.

There is reason for concern about possible Russian territorial expansion. In April 2014, Russian president Vladimir Putin closed the entire Sea of Okhotsk—52,000 square kilometers of ocean adjacent to Russia and Japan. Prior to this the Okhotsk Sea had been open to all other countries for fishing and deep-water exploration and was a major fishing area for Japan and China.

Here we see the same LIFEMORTS triggers of reflexive violence wired into the human brain of every individual played out on a massive scale in international conflict. (Stone Age brains with Space Age weapons.) Defense of one’s territory, or the Environment trigger, is the fundamental purpose of any military, and territorial intrusions are very often the cause of war. The Russian expansion into Ukraine is a recent example, but throughout history, wars constantly dissolved and redrew the territorial borders of countries. Perceived insult (the Insult trigger) is reflected in China’s and Russia’s current aggressive reassertion of military power. Fights over resources, such as oil deposits, are often the trigger of war—the Resources trigger. Blockades are an act of war. This trips the Stopped trigger or rage. The Tribe trigger of international conflict is so obvious it needs no further discussion. Populations of people with different religions, races, sects, social status, and political beliefs coalesce around those with similar characteristics and amass into warring factions in wars throughout the ages, as is starkly evident in current events in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. Christian, Muslim, Jew; different sects within the Islamic faith; genocide in Africa and the Balkans; and World War II are examples of brutal conflicts and wars in anger over “tribe.” If not the cause of conflict within and between societies, the Tribe trigger is always at the surface in any military action. The enemy is differentiated and alienated, often with derogatory names that relegate them to an inferior status: gooks, Japs, Krauts, and ragheads.

When any of these triggers or a combination of these triggers results in a violent action, the Life-or-limb trigger to defend oneself is tripped. When this happens, the Life-or-limb trigger provokes the ultimate and irresistible outrage of anger and commitment to war to punish or annihilate the attacker. This is what General Carlisle wisely perceives as the potential spark of a war that could sweep around the globe from a mishap in airspace between aircraft pushing the limits of territorial borders. As in an individual’s brain when the Life-or-limb trigger to fight in defense is tripped, a violent response in populations is assured to erupt to defend against an attack on one’s country, as we saw after Pearl Harbor and after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. The Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor was provoked by the US economic blockade of resources to Japan (Stopped and Resources triggers). The attack on September 11 was provoked by what was perceived by Islamic extremists as US intrusion into the Middle East and a clash of religious and cultural values (Tribe trigger).

Politicians can exploit the LIFEMORTS triggers unscrupulously to provoke the public into support for war. The Vietnam War was sparked by an attack on US Navy Destroyer USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy along North Vietnam’s coast in the Gulf of Tonkin on August 2 and August 4, 1964. The August 4 attack prompted Congress to approve the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on August 7, 1964, giving President Johnson power to conduct military operations in Southeast Asia without a declaration of war. The president assured America that he would not commit the country to a war in Vietnam. “We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves,” he said in his 1964 campaign for president.

History would show that pronouncement to be misguided or disingenuous. The prolonged war eventually took the lives of 58,220 American soldiers and wounded 150,000 more. Approximately 830,000 Vietnam veterans returned home suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The president and his supporters had invoked the powerful Life-or-limb trigger in the minds of American citizens on a false pretext. In 2005 and 2006 the National Security Agency declassified top-secret documents related to the Gulf of Tonkin incident and, together with transcripts released from the Lyndon B. Johnson Library, the two hundred documents reveal that there was in fact no attack on US forces by the Vietnamese on August 4, 1964. This is something many had questioned from the outset of the Tonkin Resolution debate, but the suspicion could not be proven for more than forty years after the events. Quoting from an article by Lt. Cmdr. Pat Paterson, “The Truth About Tonkin,” published in the US Naval Institute Naval History magazine, “These new documents and tapes reveal what historians could not prove: There was not a second attack on U.S. Navy ships in the Tonkin Gulf in early August 1964. Furthermore, the evidence suggests a disturbing and deliberate attempt by Secretary of Defense McNamara to distort the evidence and mislead Congress.”

The Vietnam War failed to unite the citizens of the United States. Instead, the war ripped the country internally into embattled factions, igniting violent protests and riots at home. Some 125,000 Americans abandoned their homeland for Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft. Approximately 50,000 American servicemen deserted. Increasingly, the public, and especially the young men who were conscripted to fight the war in Southeast Asia, questioned the legitimacy of the war and refused to support it. From a neuroscience perspective, none of the LIFEMORTS triggers were engaged in the minds of the individuals called upon to support the war or who were conscripted to risk their life fighting it. Even the powerful Life-or-limb trigger of defensive violence that initially provoked support for the war in the Tonkin Resolution was lost. Insult, the defense of honor, and Tribe, to stop the spread of communism, were the only remaining causes that could be marshaled to motivate US citizens to engage in the violence of the Vietnam War, but the arguments pressing on these defensive responses of the human brain were insufficient for an increasingly large proportion of the population. Eventually even the impartiality of journalism could not tolerate the injustice, and the highly respected news reporter and former WWII correspondent Walter Cronkite argued on air on February 27, 1968, that the war was a lost cause. A month later, President Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection. The country spent the next several years struggling to extract itself from the conflict, ending on April 20, 1975, with the last US Marines desperately escaping by helicopter from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon. North Vietnamese troops poured into Saigon within a few hours of the Marines’ departure. The war was over. The conflict between North and South Vietnam simply failed to provoke the requisite sense of anger in individuals in the United States who would have to carry out the violence. Appeal to rational argument for war was insufficient because the LIFEMORTS triggers had not been activated to provoke sufficient anger and commitment to fighting in the minds of individuals. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter granted a full pardon to all Vietnam draft dodgers.

Some members of Congress and the public found it implausible that the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, could have occurred without US intelligence being aware of the large attack force approaching the Hawaiian Islands, and they suspected President Roosevelt allowed Japan to strike the first blow to rally public support for declaring war on Japan. The Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, headed by Sen. Alben Barkley, which was formed on June 20, 1946, concluded that “The ultimate responsibility for the attack and its results rests upon Japan,” but two of the ten senators dissented even from this delicately worded statement. The purpose here is not to enter into that debate, but rather to demonstrate that the Life-or-limb trigger of defense is universally recognized as a powerful justification for engaging in violence in war, and that political and military leaders can exploit this unconscious provocation of anger unscrupulously.

History would show that World War II united the country in battle, in contrast with the Vietnam War, because many LIFEMORTS triggers were activated by the Axis powers, and that devastating war has come to be cited as an example of a “just war.” The war was perceived as an act of self-defense (Life-or-limb trigger). Halting German aggression and genocide put the United States in alliance with others who shared the principles of defending one’s homeland (Environment trigger) and defending against attacks on groups of people based on ethnic or religious beliefs, and in joining with others who Americans felt an affinity with (Tribe trigger). The accepted rules of international conduct and diplomacy had been repeatedly violated by Hitler’s aggression (the Organization trigger).

To better understand the causes of war, to help avoid them and seek alternatives to violence, and to guard against being defrauded into war unscrupulously by political leaders, it is necessary to understand the LIFEMORTS triggers of violence in the human brain. Regardless of politics, war results from anger in the minds of individuals, which is provoked by the brain pathways that have evolved to promote an individual’s survival in the face of a dangerous threat and to ensure the survival of groups of people organized into societies.

Many who know John Steinbeck from such vivid classics as The Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row may be surprised to learn that in the final year of his life he served as a war correspondent in Vietnam reporting for a column in Newsday. It may be that Steinbeck’s extraordinary ability to bring to life, with such clarity and enchantment, the likes of Lee Chong in Cannery Row provokes revulsion when applied to the brutality of Charlie in Vietnam.

A man suspected of communicating, only suspected, is taken to a village center. His neighbors are forced to look on while he is taken apart little by little, starting with fingers and toes but carefully so that bleeding will not give him quick release, and when they have finished, he is a ghastly mound of butcher’s meat. You don’t believe it? I could show you photographs but no American paper would dare print them . . .

Two weeks later, January 21, 1967, Steinbeck reports:

At about 10 o’clock in the evening two strolling young men paused in front of a crowded restaurant and suddenly threw two grenades in at the wide-open door. One was a dud. The other exploded and tore up the people and their children. There were no soldiers in the restaurant either American or Vietnamese. There was no possible military advantage to be gained. An American captain ran in and carried out a little girl of 7.

Steinbeck’s reports from nearly fifty years ago evoke scenes fresh from the Middle East. The incessant cycle of us-versus-them human violence evokes visceral despair in seeing over and over how human beings seem powerless to escape the ancient tribalistic imperative for brutal violence and aggression wired into our brain for survival in the hostile environment of the distant past.

Last week in a remote village of a northern province of Thailand, a schoolteacher was taken by a band of infiltrating terrorists. He was killed and his head cut off and put upright in the middle of a table. . . .

Steinbeck and his wife were friends with President Lyndon Johnson and the first lady, and he embraced the president’s “Great Society” programs to eliminate poverty and racial injustice. This friendship predisposed Steinbeck to strongly support the Vietnam War from the outset. Both of his sons served in the army. His son John was drafted and he was serving in Vietnam while Steinbeck was there reporting on the war. Steinbeck’s support for the Vietnam War put him at odds with young Americans who denounced the war with raging dissent. They protested daily in the streets and branded the author of such compassionate classics as Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath a warmonger. Steinbeck bristled at the charge but rebuffed the angry critics as hypocrite hippies: “Couldn’t some of the energy that goes into carrying placards be diverted to emptying bedpans or cleaning infected wounds?” he asked. “This would be a real protest against war.”

Over the few months that he reported from the battlefield, seeing it with his own eyes, his strong support for the war began to crumble. “John changed his mind totally about Vietnam while there,” Steinbeck’s wife said, “and he came home to write it and spent the rest of the time dying.”

Steinbeck returned home to New York and died the next year on December 20, 1968.

Steinbeck had grasped what many soldiers on the ground and military commanders had deduced, long before neuroscience illuminated the circuits of aggression and the LIFEMORTS triggers of rage. “We’re the redcoats in this one, lieutenant,” a full colonel quietly advised Thomas Barden, editor of the book Steinbeck in Vietnam when he first arrived in Tây Ninh to take command of a battery in 1970. “Don’t be John Wayne. Take care of your men and get everybody home. We won’t be here much longer.”

The Selective Service proves that the capacity for violence exists in nearly everyone. Nearly anyone can be plucked from their routine and plunged into battle if the appropriate circuits of rage are tripped in our brain. This capacity for rage and violence is a biological imperative for survival. The Vietnam conflict was doomed because it failed to evoke the triggers of rage in the human brain. This contrasts starkly with the rage and commitment that erupted universally among Americans when more than 3,000 citizens were suddenly killed by terrorists on September 11, 2001. If a person could not go to work in the morning in an office building in Manhattan to contribute to society and support their family, then nothing else mattered. The motivation for the resulting fierce rage has little to do with politics; it is biology.

Us Versus Them

Anyone holding the opinion that torture ended when civilization emerged from the Middle Ages is ignoring the facts. An international survey of 21,000 people in twenty-one countries on every continent compiled in 2014 revealed that one-third of respondents (36 percent) believed that torture is justified in some cases to protect the public. In China and India the large majority (74 percent) held this view. In the United States, 45 percent felt that torture was sometimes justified, well above Russians (25 percent), Argentinians (15 percent), and Greeks (12 percent). Torture is in fact a crime under federal law in the United States and in 151 other countries. Nevertheless, nearly half (44 percent) of the people surveyed around the world feared being tortured if taken into custody.

The statistics show that there is good reason for fear of torture in custody. Amnesty International reported torture in 141 countries in the last five years, in many cases carried out by government security authorities against others simply for being perceived as different. Consider this news item:

Pakistani officer kills man over alleged blasphemy: Pakistani police said an ax-wielding officer killed a Shiite man in police custody, claiming he had committed blasphemy.

Torture and violence are often inflicted on others for taking part in antigovernment demonstrations. In November 2014 the body of journalist Par Gyi, who was killed while in custody by the Burmese military, was exhumed from a shallow, six-inch-deep grave with his wife present to identify the body. Par Gyi was one of the first National League for Democracy Youth members, but he had been driven into exile in Thailand, where he began working as a freelance journalist under the pseudonym Aung Naing. His body showed clear signs of torture, a broken skull, and a broken jaw from beatings he received before he was shot five times fatally by his military captors.

Mass demonstrations dividing people into “us versus them” often incite raging brutal violence or torture, as in China’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 or recent pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Hakan Yaman, father of two, was one of thousands of victims of police violence during the 2013–2014 Gezi protests for democratic freedom in Turkey. Yaman was not a protestor. He was simply returning home from work when he was mistaken for a protestor as he passed a peaceful demonstration. Yaman was attacked by a group of police, who beat him with clubs. They dragged him on top of a street fire to burn him alive, but before leaving him to burn one police officer gouged one of his eyes out.

“According to the forensic medicine report Hakan Yaman sustained serious injuries to his head and face. His nose, his cheek bone, and the bones of his forehead and his chin were broken. He lost one eye completely and has lost 80 percent of his sight in the other eye. His skull was fractured from the top of his head all the way down to his jaw and his back sustained second degree burns from being thrown on the fire. He lost consciousness during the attack.”

In Mexico, torture and violence by police is epidemic, because of entrenched widespread corruption among the police, government officials, and drug gangs. Torture and violence in Mexico increased by 600 percent in 2013, compared with 2003, according to the National Human Rights Commission. Between 2010 and 2013 the National Human Rights Commission received more than 7,000 complaints of torture and other ill treatment by Mexican authorities. Victims who do not survive are of course not able to file a complaint. In August 2014, the Mexican federal government acknowledged that more than 22,000 people are currently missing or “disappeared” in Mexico. Bodily remains, when found, often display evidence of torture. On September 26, 2014, the mayor of Iguala, Mexico, José Luis Abarca, ordered that forty-three students at a teaching school, who were traveling in four vehicles, be intercepted before reaching town because he feared they would disrupt a speech by his wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda. Six students were killed on the spot and the others were kidnapped and reportedly turned over to the drug gang Guerreros Unidos. The students were taken to a garbage dump, forced to their knees, and each one was shot. The killers stacked the forty-three bodies into a pile together with wood and tires, doused them with diesel and gasoline, and set them ablaze. The fire burned for fifteen hours. The remaining ashes, teeth, and bone fragments were stuffed into sacks and thrown into the Rio San Juan River.

Sixty-four percent of Mexicans in the Amnesty International survey said they fear being tortured if taken into police custody. In Brazil the fear of torture in police custody was even higher—80 percent—but even in the United States, 32 percent of those polled feared torture in custody, much higher than people living in the UK, Australia, or Canada.

On June 28, 2010, a federal jury in Chicago convicted former Chicago Police Department commander Jon Burge on perjury and obstruction charges related to his denials that he participated in the torture of suspects in police custody in the 1980s. The jury found that Burge lied and obstructed justice in November 2003 when he provided false statements in a civil lawsuit that alleged that he and others tortured and abused people in their custody. On January 21, 2011, Burge was sentenced to fifty-four months in prison.

In July 2009, the state of Michigan agreed to pay a $100 million settlement in a class-action suit brought by more than five hundred female prisoners who alleged that they had been sexually assaulted by prison guards. According to a Department of Justice report on May 16, 2013, between 2011 and 2012, 80,600 inmates in United States jails and prisons experienced sexual victimization by another inmate or facility staff member. This represents 4 percent of the state and federal prison population. More sexual assaults of inmates were committed by staff, as opposed other inmates (2.4 percent compared to 2.0 percent). In 0.4 percent of the cases, the assaults occurred by staff and another inmate operating together. The rates of sexual assault among juvenile inmates in the United States are even higher. In 2013, a report found that 1,720 juveniles in state-owned or -operated juvenile detention facilities experienced sexual victimization (9.5 percent); 1,390 of them (7.7 of the total) were assaulted by staff members.

All of this brutality results from a categorization of “us versus them” made by perceptual circuits in people’s brain. Second, to inflict such horrific pain and brutality in torture or terrorism, the brain must lose all empathy, and in some way cease to regard another human being who is from an “out-group” as themselves being human. John Steinbeck, seeing terrorism firsthand, could not fathom the mind of such people, but neuroscientists are beginning to uncover how this brutality works at the level of automated brain circuits.

Tribe

“I was too young to really understand what was really going on,” actor George Takei, who played Sulu, the helmsman of the USS Enterprise on the television series Star Trek said, recalling an unforgettable moment in his life when he was only four years old. “But I still do remember that day when armed soldiers—soldiers with guns, bayonets on them—came to our home to order us out. I remember that as a very scary day.”

American-born Takei was forced with his family from their Southern California home into internment in 1942 to live in horse stables at the Santa Anita Park. After a few months, the family was sent to Rohwer War Relocation Center in Rohwer, Arkansas, and then later transferred to the Tule Lake War Relocation Center in California.

“When the camp was built we were put on a train and taken all the way across the southwestern desert to the swamps of Arkansas to a camp called Rohwer and I grew up there,” Takei remembers. The Tule Lake camp was even harsher: “There were three levels of barbed wire fences and tanks patrolling the perimeter.”

This dark chapter of recent American history can be viewed as a necessary evil to protect the greater population of the United States at a time of war when German U-boats off the East Coast threatened the homeland, except for one question: Where were the German and Italian American internment camps? Innocent German and Italian Americans were not ripped from their homes and put into prison camps; only Japanese Americans. The reason is racial prejudice, a trait shared by all with a sense of racial identity.

“Immigrants coming to the United States could all aspire to someday becoming naturalized American citizens, except one group of immigrants: immigrants from Asia.” Chinese and Japanese immigrants to the United States could not be naturalized under immigration policy at the time, Takei explains.

“When the war broke out young Japanese American men and women rushed to their local recruitment board to volunteer to serve in the US Army. But because we looked like the enemy—simply for that—we were rejected from service . . . and we were all incarcerated.”

Racial prejudice works both ways: “It would be perfect for Obama to live with a group of monkeys in the world’s largest African natural zoo and lick the breadcrumbs thrown by spectators,” someone said in a North Korean government–controlled media broadcast from Pyongyang in 2014. “Obama still has the figure of a monkey while the human race has evolved through millions of years,” raved the North Korean media in a recent and particularly ugly racist attack.

Many in Japan during World War II held a supremely racist view of the racial purity and superiority of the Japanese, and North Korea holds a similar belief in a pure Korean race and condemns contamination of its purity. North Korean women who escape to China for work and are later forcibly repatriated to North Korea are subject to forced abortions or infanticide if they are pregnant or return with children. Nazis, with their “social hygiene” programs of mass extermination, as well as colonial Caucasian Americans building a new country on slavery, regarded their own race as superior. Even the most enlightened and learned among us—for example, Thomas Jefferson—believed that Africans were an inferior race and he viewed and treated these human beings as property to be bought and sold.

Racial prejudice is wired into the human brain. Stereotyping of people as members of outcast groups is also wired into the human brain, but by somewhat separate circuits. Prejudice is our emotional response toward another group of people based on preconceptions. Stereotypes are conceptual categorizations of people that we group in our mind according to superficial characteristics. The human brain instantly sorts people into different groups along racial and ethnic lines. This may be difficult to accept, but the latest neuroimaging evidence supports this surprising conclusion. Similarly, our brain instantly classifies people into different groups according to ideological beliefs and other more arbitrary categories. This brain processing happens so quickly it is unconscious, but the instantaneous categorization of different people fuels two of the most powerful drives of our species: to affiliate or to compete with others. Psychologist David Amodio of New York University, who has studied human brain waves and used functional brain imaging to identify how our brain forms prejudices, concludes that the “us versus them” categorization of other people happens nearly as instantaneously and unconsciously as we attach attributes to any other object. “Although prejudice stems from a mechanism of survival, built on cognitive systems that ‘structure’ the physical world, its function in modern society is complex and often deleterious.”

John Steinbeck was rejected from military service in World War II for fears that he was a subversive and a Communist. The FBI kept a report of Steinbeck’s activities, writings, and personal connections: “In view of substantial doubt as to the subject’s loyalty and discretion, it is recommended that subject not be considered favorably for a commission in the Army of the United States.” Steinbeck, whom President Franklin Delano Roosevelt consulted for advice, was anything but a Communist. The Communist witch hunts of the McCarthy period are legendary, as were the actual witch hunts in the colonial period. Bias can operate implicitly, without conscious awareness and countervailing against reason or even an accurate perception of the facts. This instantaneous prejudicial categorization by the brain can lead to dehumanizing others to the extent that the human ability to empathize with another human being is lost. The loss of empathy, which is now understood to involve circuits in the insular cortex, is essential for unprovoked violence and torture that take place between individuals and groups of people.

Prejudice and stereotyping appear to alter early events in the brain involved in face processing. fMRI data show that there is greater activity in the fusiform cortex (part of the temporal lobe) in response to seeing the face of a person from one’s own racial group. The difference in response of this brain region underlies the psychological phenomenon that we have better recognition of in-group faces than out-group faces. Brain-wave recordings show that only 170 milliseconds (0.17 seconds) after seeing a face, the brain-wave response is greater for in-group than for out-group faces, even when the definition of groups is defined arbitrarily. Studies show that out-group members are often viewed as threatening, and they elicit our vigilant attention.

Prejudice is not located in the fusiform cortex; prejudice evokes strong emotions of love, pride, fear, disgust, or hatred, so parts of the brain that process these emotions are also involved, including the amygdala, insula, striatum, and the orbital and ventromedial frontal cortex. These brain structures form a core network for the experience and the expression of prejudice. The amygdala receives input from all of our senses through thirteen different nuclei (clusters of neurons). The amygdala receives sensory input from all senses into its lateral nucleus, enabling it to respond very rapidly to immediate threats in advance of the more elaborate processing in the cerebral cortex. The central nucleus of the amygdala is critical for classical fear conditioning—learning to quickly react to a negative stimulus. The outputs of the amygdala, as we have already seen in threat-detection and fear responses, are also sent to the hypothalamus and brain stem structures in response to face recognition circuitry. This causes automatic arousal, attention, freezing, and preparation for fight or flight. Output from the basal nucleus of the amygdala drives actions intended to achieve a desired outcome.

The insula is a large region of cortex adjacent to the frontal cortex that functions to represent somatosensory (internal bodily) states, including visceral responses and emotions such as disgust. Activity in this brain region has been associated in Caucasian test subjects with implicit negative attitude toward black people. It is also associated with positive emotions, including empathy. Another study observed insula activity only when members of liked, but not disliked, out-groups were being harmed. Empathy depends on the victim’s social affiliation, and the insula is where this is evaluated. Interestingly, the insula is also activated when a disliked out-group member is rewarded, suggesting a biological basis for the visceral response of jealousy.

The men who assaulted the women in Tahrir Square, or terrorists who toss grenades into restaurants or brutally torture and mutilate others, can do so because of the insula’s categorization of people into “us” and “them.” Empathy is strongly modified by race and tribe. This is how we coalesce or separate into groups with others. When Chinese and Caucasians view images of people being exposed to a painful or non-painful stimulus (either a needle penetrating the cheek or a Q-tip brushing against it), the median prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) are activated, but only in response to seeing the person of the same race experiencing pain. Men reporting sexist attitudes exhibited lower mPFC activity when viewing sexualized images of women than men with less sexist views. This differential activation of the mPFC is consistent with dehumanizing a person into a sexual object. The absence of strong mPFC activity reflects a lack of empathy toward and dehumanization regarding other races, as well as disliked or disrespected out-group members. There is more activity in the mPFC when viewing pictures of esteemed groups than when viewing low-status groups (for example, homeless persons). This circuitry makes sense, because the mPFC is particularly important in processing social information, and it has prominent interconnections with the ACC, the insula, the orbital frontal cortex, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex—all regions we’ve already encountered in tracing the brain’s fear circuitry. mPFC activity is strongly associated with forming impressions about other people, especially impressions that require mentalizing—that is, considering a person’s unique perspective and motives (also known as theory of mind). mPFC is activated during our judgments about other people, but not in making judgments about inanimate objects.

Because these responses are unconscious and involve implicit rather than declarative learning, they are very difficult to change. According to Amodio, “Most forms of implicit learning are resistant to extinction [wearing down a bias by familiarity]. Implicit racial biases are particularly difficult to change in a cultural milieu that constantly reinforces racial prejudices and stereotypes.”

Pressure Cooker

The eight-year-old boy arrived in New Jersey on a spring day in 2002 with his parents. Together they were fleeing halfway around the world to escape a war-torn land of death, terror, and criminal corruption. Here the parents would start a new life and raise their children in a wholesome environment—a land of promise and opportunity. The family had grasped the golden ring—the American dream. In the footsteps of so many immigrants to this country before them, the young family abandoned their homeland, choosing to embrace a foreign country where everything was strange. The language, culture, food, people, and geography were all alien, but the new immigrants were infused with enthusiasm and driven by dreams of a better life for their children. The three—mother, father, and son—would establish a temporary home so that the rest of the family, an older brother and two younger sisters, could soon follow, and they did.

“Anzor had a job within three days of arriving in the US!” Ruslan said, praising his brother’s talents and hard work ethic in support of his family. The family of six occupied a cramped eight-hundred-square-foot apartment on Norfolk Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Anzor built a business as a car mechanic, fixing cars on the street for less money than shops with expensive overhead costs. Through hard work and skill Anzor built a loyal clientele of customers and supported his family in their new home.

The boy was enrolled in grade school, but placed in a lower grade than his age group because of his lack of English-language skills. A quick learner, he advanced rapidly, skipping from third to the fifth grade. “He had a heart of gold,” one of his teachers, Katie Charner-Laird, recalled. In high school he became an honor student, taking advanced-placement courses on an academic track to college. His destiny, only a few years away, was to become the first in his family to receive a university diploma.

Matching his academic strengths, he was also a natural athlete. He came from a long family line of strongmen, both in body and bravery. These attributes of machismo were embossed on the men of his family through inheritance and harsh environment. Many of the men in the extended family, going back three generations, were amateur boxers. His older brother was to become a Golden Gloves champion with dreams of competing in the Olympics. Their family had been through much, surviving hostility and ethnic wars in which tens of thousands of their people had been killed in brutal fighting and “ethnic cleansing”—a repulsive euphemism. Territory, politics, religion, and ethnic divisions fueled decades of horrors—both outright wars and prolonged guerilla conflicts, kidnappings, and terrorist attacks. But now the family had escaped all of that and started fresh in America.

In his junior and senior year in high school the boy was elected captain of the wrestling team by his teammates. He was awarded the MVP award in a ceremony at the end of his senior year, and he received an academic scholarship to attend college in the fall of 2011. On September 11 of that same year, the young immigrant to America became a US citizen.

Seven months later, two bombs filled with shrapnel exploded, killing three and wounding 260 innocent men, women, and children. Many were grievously injured, their lives forever derailed by a chance encounter with this boy, now twenty years old, who lay curled up in the belly of a boat on a trailer riddled with bullets from automatic assault rifles fired by swarms of police who had shut the entire city down to capture or kill him and his brother.

“Why the Boston Marathon?” Ruslan asked, reflecting on the horror that had engulfed his family in an international terrorist attack. “Why not a nightclub or a police station?”

Ruslan Tsarni’s gaze focused into the distance as if to resolve some faint image in the vanishing point that might explain the incomprehensible scene. Ruslan, the uncle of the Boston bombers, an immigrant from Chechnya who had bounced the boy on his lap as a two-year-old, loved him as if a son, and who’d helped him and his brother and sisters grow up in America, was still grappling with the devastation of the nightmarish failure that had brought his family into the world’s spotlight as a supposed nest of terrorist bombers.

On Boylston Streets

The last time I was on Boylston Street, it was to give a lecture in November 2012 at a scientific meeting in the Westin Hotel. Today, Sunday, I am here again in the spring of 2012 looking out onto an empty street, barricaded; an eerie modern-day ghost town festooned with yellow police tape rippling in the cold Boston wind. I look across an enormous pile of fresh-cut flowers, teddy bears, helium balloons, baseball caps, candles, and handwritten notes. American flags sprout from the mound like brilliant poppies. Grief, still raw, is slipping away, drifting as if carried helplessly on a current, and transforming into something else; defiance, but shaken with bewilderment. Tourists gather now, out of sorrow and the need to understand. “Do we have anything to give?” a woman asks her companion desperately. “Do we have anything to give?” she repeats, and turns back to survey the makeshift shrine empty-handed. It must have begun with a single bouquet. Now it has grown into a mountain.

—

Many tendrils of this tragedy penetrate neuroscience, but underlying everything we all ask the same question. It is the question uttered by President Obama in disbelief: “Why did young men who grew up and studied here as part of our communities and our country resort to such violence?” How does a teenager riding a skateboard and attending college classes suddenly become a violent mass murderer of innocents, committing violence toward fellow citizens, innocent children, families, and others who intersected his sphere only momentarily through fleeting chance?

People often share or differ in political views and goals, but few could conceive or accept this kind of violence. Politics change, but such violence seems eternal. Look instead to neuroscience for insight. All behavior is the product of the brain. It is the challenge of neuroscience to understand the human brain and how it develops in every person to make each one of us unique and develop into a productive member of society—or an outcast.

No one imagines their newborn infant growing up to become a violent gang member, but in certain environments that draw becomes overwhelming. Many adolescents and young adults are unable to resist despite all parental and societal efforts to prevent it. Regardless of the violence and almost certain tragic outcome of gang association, many join gangs and become criminals at a young age. The families of these two brothers implicated in the Boston bombing had acted selflessly to protect their children from growing up in a hostile environment, uprooting themselves from their homeland and fleeing halfway around the world to seek a better life for their family. But their efforts failed horribly. We need to understand what went wrong.

Perversion of the wholesome biological process of forming allegiances and personal identities during one’s late teens and early twenties is the core of the problem. The bombings and robberies committed by the Weather Underground and similar radical antiwar groups in the 1970s, for example, are fundamentally no different, except for the political veneer and the less deadly potency of their weapons of terror. Many of the young members of the Weather Underground who committed terrorist bombings and other acts of violence in the early 1970s went on to live normal and productive lives after being released from incarceration; some were only apprehended after living lives as law-abiding fugitives for decades. What is different now is that gangs have grown from local neighborhoods and pockets of radicals to become worldwide in scope, drawing the most vulnerable and compliant into the domain of the most evil among us. In the past the nucleus of a gang would have been the meanest person on the block; today it is the worst criminals on the entire globe.

The intentions of those who are drawn to violence against society have not changed, but the global torrent of instant electronic information has multiplied the capability for destruction and terror, making their criminal acts far more dangerous. The radicals of the 1970s were amateurs, but today video instructions on bomb-making are available to anyone over the Internet. Ease of international travel enables a disgruntled young person to receive firsthand instruction on making and deploying horrific devices of mass destruction for the price of a plane ticket.

But there have been other changes. In the 1970s we had little hope of understanding the neurobiology gone awry in adolescents who become gang members and criminals. Today there is more than hope; there is data. New information and new methods of brain imaging are nurturing a new field of social neuroscience, which seeks to understand how the brain controls social interactions and, conversely, how these interactions affect the brain. In the past, such questions in brain science could only be tentatively approached through animal studies, a feeble approximation of complex human nature and the unparalleled capacity of the human brain. Today we can see inside a person’s brain at work. We can see the malformations in brain structure that make it difficult for some people with certain developmental disorders to interact socially. We can see how environmental experience in early life augments or undermines normal development of brain circuits that control social interactions, emotion, aggression, propensity to violence, and empathy.

The brain systems that motivate humans to form emotional bonds are being discovered and probed. Many of these circuits of social bonding interact with motivational systems in the brain. Circuits involved in fear, novelty seeking, and modifying behavior based on negative events are influenced by experiences while the brain is forming—a period now understood to continue actively through the first twenty years of life. Altered development of these circuits can lead to increased aggressiveness, diminished fear, and heightened anxiety. In the absence of adequate rewarding interpersonal relationships and bonding to societal and cultural values, alternative means of stimulating reward pathways in the brain are often substituted through sex, aggression, drugs, and by the verbal or physical intimidation of others. Substance abuse during these critical years when the emotional and social brain networks are forming can have lasting effects that increase one’s risk of mental illness as an adult. Cannabis use in adolescence is correlated with developing schizophrenia as an adult, and the molecular and cellular defects can be reproduced in experiments on animals.

Peer rejection in adolescence can lead to depression and leave marks on the brain that can be seen by brain imaging. For a teenager, peer groups are among the most powerful environmental influences. Verbal abuse in the middle school years marks the brain by decreasing connections between the left and right brain (the corpus callosum), leading to psychological problems as adults, including increased anxiety, depression, anger and hostility, and drug abuse. Neural correlates of impaired emotional processing and the neural basis of moral evaluation can be seen at work inside the human brain (including the medial prefrontal cortex, precuneus, and insula—brain regions implicated in introspective processes, as well as brain regions involved in emotion, notably the amygdala). Empathy activates the same brain circuits that process physical pain. “Unmet need for social bonding and acceptance early in life might increase emotional allure of groups (gangs, sects) with violent and authoritarian values and leadership,” concludes psychologist Cort Pedersen, who analyzes the biological aspects of social bonding and violence.

We are beginning to uncover the neural basis of human behavior, violence, social integration, and how experience forms the brain. Psychiatrists today are like the heroic surgeons of the Civil War, desperately working to save lives with a crude and woefully inadequate understanding of the biology involved, but developmental neuroscience is converging with psychology and leading us to biological understanding. None of this scientific insight can excuse horrible acts of violence—many lives will never be the same, and the Boston bombers must face responsibility and justice for what they have done, but this research may help prevent such acts in the future.

A Brotherhood of Terrorists

Cherry trees lining the streets of this Maryland suburb were ablaze with pink blossoms when the pressure-cooker bombs exploded in April. Today, January 2014, the cold, bare, black limbs are encrusted with snow. My eyes, protected by sunglasses, squint from the brilliant sunshine blazing in a cold blue sky and reflecting off sparkling snow as the wheels of my car crunch to a halt in front of Ruslan Tsarni’s attractive two-story home in a quiet upper-middle-class suburb that looks very much like my own.

—

Amid the panic and nonstop frenzied hysteria of the media during the Boston bombing, it was Tsarni who suddenly brought clarity for me. The country was gripped in terror by the bombings. People feared that this was only the first salvo in an organized assault that would bring horrible terror and death to the country again. What terrorist organization was behind it, and what was their next move?

The nation had just seen the security-camera photos of the two suspected bombers in the crowd at the Boston Marathon minutes before the two presumed Islamic commandos planted their lethal bombs. Two fit young men, determined warriors it appeared, were members of a secret army of terrorists intent on killing civilians and bringing the country to its knees. al-Qaida was mounting its counterattack.

But the endlessly looping news scenes were suddenly interrupted by a live video feed. A man standing alone before reporters outside his home in a middle-class neighborhood was denouncing the two men in the security-camera pictures. “He put a shame—he put a shame on our family, the Tsarni family! He put a shame on the entire Chechen ethnicity!”

The uncle’s passionate recrimination was a stunning turning point. These two mass murderers were not the tip of the spear of a new invasion of al-Qaida terrorists. These were two dysfunctional angry young men, Americans.

“Dzhokhar, if you are alive, turn yourself in and ask for forgiveness,” Tsarni ordered. The older brother, Tamerlan, had just been killed in a police shootout.

“We share with them their grief,” Tsarni said of the families of the bombing victims through the throng of reporters clamoring outside his home. “I’m ready just to meet with them. I’m ready just to bend in front of them, to kneel in front of them seeking their forgiveness.”

Six months later I met Ruslan Tsarni at his home. We were both seeking the same thing—understanding.

His wife answered the door and I was introduced to his two polite teenage daughters. Another young boy was sitting on the floor of the living room playing a video game on a large-screen TV. The walls of the living room were encrusted with family photos of many smiling children. Ruslan, middle-aged with an athletic body, neatly cropped hair, wearing brown corduroys and a polo shirt with broad horizontal stripes, took my coat and offered me a seat on the black sofa. His gracious wife brought two clear-glass mugs of hot tea and a tray of treats—dried apricots, figs, crackers, and chocolate—setting the steaming glasses down on white paper napkins.

I had done my research and come prepared with a long list of carefully orchestrated questions, but I never needed them. As we talked freely, Ruslan unfolded his rich, complex story, beginning back in Chechnya in his father’s home before his brother, Anzor, married Zubeidat, the woman who would one day become known as the mother of the Boston bombers. It is an epic story of American immigrants, driven to these shores of promise and freedom to make a better life for themselves, but it is also a tragedy. It is the story of two brothers fleeing corruption and violence in a war-torn corner of the world to seek a better life for themselves and their children in America; one of them, Ruslan, would prosper, and the other, Anzor, would fail horribly. He would fail despite his skill and hard work, and despite the earnest struggles of the extended family to help one another establish a toehold in American soil and climb to the summit of the American dream.

Ruslan never touched his tea or any of the snacks. The tea went cold as he spoke for three hours and forty-five minutes. Tracing from his family’s roots in Chechnya to building a new home in America to helping his brother immigrate with his young family to the horrible events at the Boston Marathon, he carefully described all the family members and how they grew up and struggled together. He spoke as the afternoon sunbeams slanted low through the living-room window of the years of seeing his brother’s family in trouble, watching that trouble ever worsening, fearing for the future of his two young nephews, and actively trying to intervene repeatedly to prevent an inevitable catastrophe.

The room dimmed as darkness fell and the sounds of his wife preparing dinner in the kitchen had long since ended. Ruslan relived the minute-by-minute events of the violent police chase that shut down the entire city of Boston, and the ferocious shootout and death of his nephew, Tamerlan. He spoke of the capture and imprisonment of his younger nephew, “Johar” (Dzhokhar), of the despair he felt for the victims, and his frustration and anger with the older nephew, Tamerlan, for carrying out such a cruel and senseless crime, as well as bitterness toward him for drawing his younger brother into such a wicked path. He ended with the torment of burying his nephew in secrecy and loneliness, because no cemetery would accept the body of the terrorist. The boy’s parents had fled the country, leaving Ruslan to take responsibility for a decent burial.

“The funeral was dear to me. This is all I get.”

This was an entirely different picture from the angry Muslim, religious-crazed terrorist portrayed in the media. This tragedy had nothing to do with politics. This had nothing to do with religion. It had everything to do with a dysfunctional family, and with the failure of two young men to find success in life.

“When you first saw the pictures on the news of Tam and Johar as the bombing suspects, did you find it surprising or possible that they could be the bombers?” I asked.

“My feeling was at first that it was not impossible,” Ruslan said sadly.

“Why did you go on TV and make that announcement?”

“The most important thing first is to deal with the dead.”

Ruslan’s instinctive concern was to care for the victims who had been grievously harmed, even though his nephews were family and he cared for them dearly. The innocent victims needed help, and in a way that no outsider might conceive, I believe Ruslan felt deeply that they too were his responsibility. There is a strict hierarchy of inheritance and responsibility among brothers in Chechnya. By ancient tradition the firstborn male inherits everything, and he then assumes full responsibility to head and care for the extended family. Ruslan, after his older brother died, became the oldest surviving brother, and he took on this responsibility earnestly.

“We loved them, the children,” he said about Tamerlan and his brother when they were born in the war-ravaged Chechnya region that borders Russia. “Tamerlan used to kid a lot. He was good. You should have heard him play the piano.”

Recalling his brother Anzor’s surprise marriage in Chechnya after his service in the army, Ruslan said his father was angry that Anzor had married Zubeidat, a woman from Dagestan. The harsh ethnic divisions inside Chechnya are difficult for Americans to appreciate, but it seems as if the marriage of Anzor and Zubeidat rocked the family the way a mixed-race marriage between a black man and a white woman might have done in Alabama in the 1950s. “Chechens and Dagestanis hate each other. They hate us worse than the Russians do. We were better off in Moscow than in Dagestan.”

Ruslan and Anzor’s father felt that by marrying Zubeidat, a woman of despised ethnicity, Anzor had brought shame on the family. But blood is stronger than bigotry. The birth of their first child, Tamerlan, shattered the ethnic hatred.

Nevertheless, the young family struggled in Chechnya. Zubeidat was regarded by many as an unfit mother. “She never cared for them,” Ruslan said of Zubeidat. “She was total evil.”

Immigrating to the United States failed to heal the difficult marriage. Ruslan’s hope was that by helping his younger brother move out of the hostile environment in Chechnya to join him in America, he could rescue the troubled family. Zubeidat’s alleged destructive gossiping would be undermined in America by her inability to speak English. Her reported inclinations toward thievery would be squelched. “There are cameras in shopping centers so she can’t steal. Even if she goes to jail, here in America you are still a human being,” Ruslan said, contrasting prisons in the United States with jails in Chechnya, where family members must quickly pay bribes to get their loved ones out before they contract tuberculosis or worse.

“All my illusions that America would change her were gone.” Tamerlan and Johar, despite their talents and potential to succeed, were failing. Both young men began associating with unsavory characters. “Johar was into it—marijuana—too,” Ruslan said. Both young men were struggling to enter the mainstream of American life and they were failing at the critical precipice of life to grasp an independent and successful hold as productive members of society. Johar was failing in college. Tamerlan could not find suitable employment. Their sisters were also troubled and in difficult relationships or marriages that were failing. They were having their own trouble with the police.

“These children must be safeguarded against their mother,” Ruslan said of the children when they were young. “She hated us. We despised her. She was a bad mother. She has never been a wife. Not a homemaker. She never worked,” he said.

Although we are hearing only one side of a complex story, no one disputes that Anzor and Zubeidat’s family was struggling. Ruslan took custody of Tamerlan temporarily when the boy was thirteen years old, and Tamerlan stayed with Ruslan in his home for a time, but later he returned to Boston. “He was the nicest kid of all my nephews.”

In the years leading up to the bombing, Johar and Tamerlan, despite their early successes in school and superficial appearance of prospering, were failing miserably. Ruslan said he told Johar after he was having difficulty, “Anything you want, I’ll take care of it.” But an uncle’s ability to intercede in a troubled family is limited; indeed, such efforts are likely to be resented.

Zubeidat, according to Ruslan, was radicalizing her sons, encouraging them to embrace the community of Islamic extremists who were fighting against the decadent society of the United States of America and its corrupt militaristic government. She had never been outwardly religious before; indeed, she’d dressed fashionably for years in Western clothing, but when Ruslan saw her in 2009 in full Islamic dress, he said, “I was shocked. Why did she need to flaunt that religious garb here? What was the point?” The family was completely familiar with Islamic dress from Chechnya, but in America the garb seemed out of place. “It is a way to demand respect and attention. Do you respect God? I am a Muslim,” is what Zubeidat’s new Islamic dress meant here in America, Ruslan concluded. Bella, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan’s sister, soon adopted the hijab dress as well.

“You don’t feel comfortable in college?” Ruslan recalls asking Tamerlan a few years later by phone after he could find neither suitable work nor success in college. “You come here then,” he said. “Just get out of that house. Come here to Maryland.” Ruslan sent him $3,000 to purchase a car to drive to Maryland. Anzor squelched the plan, however, resenting his brother’s actions as meddlesome.

“He was an entirely different person now from the last time I saw him at nineteen years of age,” Ruslan said of Tamerlan when he greeted him at JFK Airport in 2009. “Now he was a twenty-two-year-old man, but he was entirely different. It was a stranger’s face.

“Let’s go to Maryland,” Ruslan urged him. Tamerlan made no eye contact. They met for only five or ten minutes. Tamerlan said he would come, but he never showed up.

Ruslan said, “2009 was the last time we spoke face-to-face. We spoke a couple of times on the phone.” One phone call took place right after his father was attacked in Boston and beaten on the head with a pipe. Anzor was in the hospital with traumatic brain injury.

“Anzor was about to die,” Ruslan told his nephew on the phone. Ruslan told Tamerlan to report the vicious beating to the police, but Tamerlan resisted.

“Do you know he is dying?” Ruslan asked.

“Speak with me properly!” Tamerlan shot back.

In an earlier telephone conversation, Ruslan told Tamerlan, “We have to do jihad,” Tamerlan told his uncle.

Interpreting the word “jihad” in the same way as one would understand “being a good Christian”—that is, taking it to mean working hard and improving oneself—Ruslan pressed his nephew to reveal his intentions.

“He was trying to impress me with his Islam rubbish,” Ruslan said, despising Zubeidat for filling his nephew’s head with the radical Islamic Jihad thinking. “There are many names for God, including Nature and Allah,” Ruslan observed, and he went on to list the many names for God in different languages. “They all mean the same thing—something spiritual, not something religious.” It was clear to Ruslan, though, that the boilerplate rhetoric he was hearing in his nephew’s voice over the phone was the verbiage of hatred espoused by Islamic radicals, and it signaled a threatening turn toward violence.

Reliving the horrible bombing and his nephews’ murderous flight as the two were pursued by the entire Boston police force and federal officials throughout a terrorized city completely shut down, with all residents hiding in their homes, he said, “Johar saw his brother killed.” Evoking that shootout with police on a dark street he jabbed his chest with his fingers over and over as if hit by bullets. Ruslan enacted Tamerlan’s last actions on Earth, stretching his arm up and pointing an empty gun to the police so he could die a martyr. “No ammunition in his gun.”

“Both were very brave men, but why did Tamerlan do that to his brother?” he agonized.

“If I put myself back to nineteen [years old], I would have done anything for my brother,” he reflected (The Family trigger). “He just pulled the youngest one down with him. He should have said ‘run away and I’ll deal with it.’ That is what an older brother should have done. Why did he do it to his brother?

“You can be a murderer without feeling blame, but why sacrifice someone else? I don’t know what that is.

“In a family, brothers take care of each other. In religious fanatics, they call each other ‘brothers.’” It is the same in gangs and in churches, he says. “It is how they get people to do these acts, acting together as ‘brothers’ in arms.” The horrible sight of seeing your brother shot down would traumatize anyone and turn one against the police and toward a gangsterlike affinity with violence, Ruslan imagines.

“I wish he had just killed him,” he said of Tamerlan’s treatment of Johar. “Better than involving him in this horror.”

Ruslan struggles with questions: “Why bomb the marathon?” he asked. “Runners—they are the happiest people. I am a runner!” They (jihadist terrorists and his nephews) hated the marathon runners for precisely that reason, he concludes, because the cheering spectators at the race were happy and successful families. “Why not bomb a nightclub or police station?” he asks, if the bombing were truly motivated by political or religious conflict. Instead, they murdered happy families, something they did not have.

Ruslan recalled the time when he first came to this country and searched for an apartment. He was denied apartment rentals everywhere he went because even though he had excellent credit, the landlords would not allow children. He was perplexed and outraged, “This is life!” He still recalls that when he saw people walking their dogs in front of the apartments that he could not live in, he felt anger rising in his chest. That is how he thinks Tamerlan felt.

The Tribe trigger divides people into battling factions and every single individual must grapple with this powerful imperative. Outcasts coalesce into gangs. If an individual fails to assimilate or succeed in society, he or she will find affinity with another group that will embrace him or her, for whatever reason. If a person, especially a foreigner or racial minority, is constantly regarded as an outsider, that person will naturally be inclined to adopt that persona. It is a hardwired, necessary, and automated function of our brain to spot outsiders quickly, fear them, and dissociate from them. Muslim immigrants today are at greatest risk of being regarded first as outsiders and possible Islamic terrorists. That constant stereotyping can drive the individual to shape his identity accordingly if he is struggling but failing to assimilate and succeed. This germ of human need growing inside us is what infects the feared “lone wolves” who are exploited by extremists to commit terrorist acts or join foreign wars in solidarity with a brotherhood that will embrace them. The faults that can crumble the foundation of successful families are many, and even as they may be evident and growing, they can be difficult or impossible for others to stop.

Ruslan remains tormented by it all. “I will just have to live with this now,” he said with a sigh as he walked me to my car. His words vaporized as his warm breath puffed against the cold night air like steam.

—

Just as light defines dark, night defines day, love defines hate, kinship defines the alien, the LIFEMORTS triggers that protect and bind us together necessarily threaten and separate people from one another. For a mother’s brain to show a heightened response to her own baby’s cries means that her brain shows less response to the cries of others. The triggers that provoke rage in one person’s brain are multiplied when groups of people come together. Republicans/Democrats, police/demonstrators, Muslims/Christians, rich/poor, gangs/families . . . as our brain partitions our environment it necessarily creates divisions, and the borders become battle lines for conflict.

Political, social, and economic analysis of mass conflict is important, but a fresh understanding of terrorism, war, and civil unrest is provided by looking at these age-old horrors through a modern neuroscience perspective. The Insult trigger in the human brain is played out on a societal level as riots, terrorism, and war. Recent examples include the seventeen murders in Paris in reaction to a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad in the magazine Charlie Hebdo, or the cyberattack on Sony Movie Studio by North Korea that was provoked by a comedy movie with a farcical plot to assassinate the North Korean leader. All of this violence over such slight provocation seems senseless unless one can appreciate the fundamental roots of this behavior in the brain. These acts were perceived as insulting. Regardless of how misinterpreted or inadvertent an affront to dignity may be, insult will trigger human violence and it can do so on a mass scale. The violent riots after the shooting of Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old black man, by a policeman on the Ferguson, Missouri, police force; the violent reaction to the choking death of petty criminal Eric Garner by the New York Police; and the cold-blooded murders of two New York police officers in retribution by a suicidal fanatic black man are recent examples of the Tribe trigger of violence being tripped in the human brain: the us-versus-them rage. Street riots in Ferguson broke out long before the forensic evidence with the facts about the shooting was made public. The protests in response to Eric Garner’s choking death were organized weeks before the results of that investigation were released. The specific details of alleged injustice are secondary to the underlying racial and social divisions between the groups that are in conflict. This is the powerful human herding instinct—the Tribe trigger.

Tribalism arises from human herding behavior, which in cognitive neuroscience and psychology describes the alignment of thoughts and behaviors of individuals within a group through local interactions rather than by being imposed upon individuals by central coordination. Human herding behavior is an automatic, unconscious neurobiological process, which evolved in the human brain to enable us to form complex social structures. Herding of individuals into groups is the glue that binds people into social structures according to national identity, religious affiliation, and political parties. In lesser matters human herding causes us to embrace fads and fashions—why else should men fuss over the width of their tie? At its worst, human herding generates mass hysteria, spawns gangs, and ignites mob violence.

An essential element of herding in human society is that individuals often converge by modeling the behaviors and beliefs of the larger group in which they are embedded. A bolo tie and a cowboy hat are fine in Santa Fe, New Mexico, but you could be asking for trouble if you dress that way in certain neighborhoods in Chicago. This same neuroscience driving fashion, however, is what drove German citizens to embrace Nazism, and it drives different religious and political groups in the Middle East in violence today.

The Tribe trigger of rage suddenly unleashed deadly violence between rival motorcycle clubs at a biker bar in Waco, Texas, in May 2015, which resulted in nine deaths from stabbings, brutal beatings, and shootings. Eighteen people were hospitalized and at least 170 were arrested. “In thirty-four years of law enforcement, this is the worst crime scene, the most violent crime scene I have ever been involved in,” said Waco Police Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton.

Although many in the Waco motorcycle gangs were likely violent criminals, the power of tribalism to spark violence between groups of otherwise peaceful people cannot be overlooked. Consider the assault on Alexian Lien that took place on September 29, 2013, on New York City’s Henry Hudson Parkway by motorcyclists, which included New York City Police Department officers. Five off-duty officers were among the motorcyclists, and one ten-year veteran and undercover detective, Wojciech Braszczok, was arrested. “Not only did he fail to protect and serve, he cast his lot in with the assailants,” Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass said at the officer’s trial.

The violence began when Alexian Lien’s wife reportedly tossed a half-eaten plum and water bottle at the bikers, who were holding up traffic, popping wheelies, and slapping the tops of cars as they drove past. (The Stopped and Organization triggers snapped in Lien’s wife’s brain, and in reaction to her insulting provocation, the Tribe trigger separated all parties into warring factions.) One biker responded by shattering the driver’s-side mirror of Lien’s SUV. Another motorcyclist cut in front of Lien and applied his brakes, resulting in a minor collision with Lien’s vehicle. Under attack by the motorcyclists, Lien panicked and sped away, driving over one of the bikers, Edwin Mieses, who was left paralyzed.

Much of the melee was captured on film, and it shows bikers bashing out the windows of the SUV with their helmets and dragging Lien from the vehicle to severely beat and stomp on him. Bystanders eventually stepped in and put an end to the violence.

—

The Tribe trigger of rage is often the spark of violent street riots. On April 19, 2015, riots broke out in Baltimore, Maryland, after Freddie Gray, a twenty-five-year-old African American, died from a severed spinal cord. Gray’s mortal injury was inflicted while he was restrained by handcuffs and leg irons inside a police wagon in the custody of six police officers. At least twenty police officers were injured in the ensuing riots, 250 people were arrested, and thousands of police and the Maryland Army National Guard were marshaled to quell the riots. A CVS drugstore looted and burned in West Baltimore became the iconic epicenter of the mayhem, but many other businesses and automobiles were burned and looted. The city was placed under a state of emergency for nearly a week.

Television footage showed hordes of angry black men armed with clubs and stones, facing off against a phalanx of police in black riot gear, wearing modern armor, helmets, and shields that hark back to medieval battles between knights of the kingdom and oppressed peasants. This angry scene seems to repeat thousands of times through thousands of years of human history. As the city of Baltimore burned, many who remembered the horror of the summer of violence that plunged the United States into chaos in 1968 were sickened.

“Can we all get along?” Rodney King pleaded during riots in Los Angeles in 1992. King, a black taxi driver, was brutally beaten by Los Angeles police officers after a high-speed chase in 1991. That beating by police was videotaped by a citizen who was appalled by the brutality erupting on the street beneath his balcony. After a trial that acquitted the officers of serious charges, Los Angeles was consumed by riots in which fifty-three people were killed, two thousand were injured, and neighborhoods were looted and burned. The military was dispatched to restore order, but many neighborhoods never fully recovered and the violence spread to other cities.

Rodney King’s plea echoes the bewilderment of everyone. Unfortunately, the answer could not be more obvious or more disheartening. Such turmoil and brutality are a deadly consequence of the human mind that within milliseconds of observing another person categorizes the individual into either “us” or “them.” It happens as quickly and as automatically as the brain attaches the color red or green to an apple.

I went to Baltimore during the week of riots, to see for myself the scene at the burned-out CVS drugstore. The heavy thumping of helicopter blades circling overhead resonated in the air, the smell of charred wood, sirens squealing from every direction, echoing hysterically through the alleyways and streets. It was impossible to tell where they originated. In a flash a fire truck, police car, or ambulance would streak past, ablaze with flashing red lights, racing toward the violence or away from it to hospitals or police stations.

Stepping into the neighborhood surrounding the CVS drugstore triggers screeching alarms in your brain that raise hair on the back of your neck. All day, groups of men loiter on street corners, drinking oversize cans of malt liquor from rumpled paper bags and smoking. Others pass the day sitting on the stoops of redbrick row houses as if discarded. The windows of buildings are boarded with plywood weathered into a furry gray, warped and peeling. The homes and businesses have been abandoned for ages. It is a neighborhood of pawn shops, discount liquor stores, mom-and-pop corner markets with bars on the doors and windows, of bail bonds and check-cashing establishments. Faded tent cities rot under overpasses, cluttered with shopping carts and scavenged junk. It is a perilous place of danger, crime, and drugs. Twenty-five percent of the men are unemployed. They have nothing to do. Nowhere to go. Trapped, they have no way out. Children grow up in squalor and poverty.

All eyes followed me. They were the eyes of black men. I am white. There is not a thing in the world that either of us can do about that. Ours is the biological legacy of genetics, mine following a line of descent from northern Europe, theirs from Africa. It shouldn’t make much difference, but it does.

My impression was that the violence by Baltimore police against Freddie Gray and the riots that followed his death were both launched by the Tribe trigger, but it was not exactly the result of racism. It was the result of tribalism, the brain dividing the world into us versus them. This impression was verified when it was eventually announced that three of the six police officers charged with assaulting Freddie Gray are black. The driver of the police wagon, who was charged with murder, is a black officer. An unfortunate result of tribalism can be festering pockets of poverty, neglect, hopelessness, divisions between the haves and the have-nots, good guys versus bad guys, and instantaneous violence unleashed by brain circuits designed for herding, defense, and mutual cooperation in groups.

But during the riots a video camera captured a stunning example of snapping in violence to protect “us” from “them.” The candid video clip showed vividly why this rapid violent reaction can be lifesaving. In this case the Family trigger was tripped. When Toya Graham, a single mother of six children, spotted her sixteen-year-old African American son with a rock in his hand among looters who were confronting police, she snapped. Graham, in her frilly bright-yellow blouse and vest, stormed into the riot in a fury. She made a beeline toward her son, who was wearing a sinister black hoodie and stocking mask. She charged after her son with the same rage and tunnel vision that Kevin Ward Jr. displayed stomping against racecars to confront NASCAR champion Tony Stewart, oblivious to the personal danger. The same neural circuits of rage had taken over in her brain. The teenager stands a head higher than his diminutive mom, but she reached up and clenched her son’s hoodie with both fists. She yanked it and the mask off his face and repeatedly smacked him about the head and face, spitting out salty language that would intimidate a hardened street thug.

“She knows her son and picked him out. Even with the mask on, she knew,” his sister Tameka Brown said.

The crowd of looters parted in deference to a mother’s rage, and the teenager cowered and retreated like money changers in the Bible story whipped out of the temple by the wrath of Jesus.

“That’s my only son, and at the end of the day I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray,” she explained afterward to reporters. This mother had reacted selflessly, instantly, and violently to save her son’s life.

The Tribe trigger can fuel extreme violence because when assembled into groups, people can become unimaginably ruthless. Anonymity and the reduced empathy and compassion of individuals massing into herds drive cruel behaviors in groups, in which individuals participate in deviant behaviors that they could never engage in as an individual. It is not necessary to recount such atrocities as mob lynchings, gang murders, and war; we can see this played out even in interactions between political parties. For example, originally the shutdown of the United States federal government in 2013 was implemented by a faction within the US Congress that was dissatisfied with the Affordable Care Act that had been put in place by a rival party (Democrats). But the shutdown led by the Republican Party soon degenerated into an inexplicable conundrum, because the disruptive action could have no significant influence on the Affordable Care Act itself, which had been implemented through the democratic process. Marc Thiessen at The Washington Post and others began calling it the “Seinfeld shutdown”—a shutdown about nothing, as absurd as the premise for the Seinfeld television sitcom. Thiessen’s bewilderment came from viewing the perplexing government shutdown from a political perspective rather than recognizing that what we saw play out on the national stage was the neuroscience of human herding behavior (tribalism). Many were harmed by the government shutdown in 2013, but would a single congressman or congresswoman personally restrain his or her neighbor from going to work in the morning, a neighbor who was only trying to support his or her family and contribute productively to society in their own way? Would any individual member of Congress personally stand in front of the hospital door to block a mother from bringing her child with cancer to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to receive a potentially lifesaving treatment? Any of these actions on an individual level would be unacceptable or illegal deviant behavior, except for the psychology of herd mentality.

The capacity to understand implicitly other people’s behaviors, intentions, social beliefs, and personality traits is essential for us to form complex societies. Specific neural circuits in the human brain promote these interactions between individuals in a group. Mirror neurons, for example, are nerve cells in our cerebral cortex that fire when we watch another person carry out a similar action to ours. “Mind reading” (from chapter 7), in the form of body language to divine what others are thinking and feeling, is not much different from reading text. Both are highly automated cognitive functions that derive meaning from interpreting visual signs and patterns, but reading literacy is a relatively new development in human history. Using nonverbal tests, such as tracking an infant’s eye movements toward an expected location, scientists have found that mind reading, unlike print reading, develops very early in life. The important point with respect to this chapter on tribe and herding is that both reading text and reading body language are culturally inherited. It is our automatic, irresistible compulsion to mimic the actions and behaviors of others in our group that gives us the ability to communicate through body language. All of this supremely valuable human ability depends on neural circuits in the medial prefrontal cortex, connecting with other cortical regions (temporoparietal and precuneus).

Emotional contagion is also subcortical—beyond the rational mind. Our individual emotions rise and fall with the emotions of others in our group—be it raucous jubilation in a crowd at a rock concert, love among a gathering of people at a wedding, grief at a funeral, or a child’s tantrum infectiously souring the mood of all around him. Laughter, yawning, and the urge to vomit are all individual behaviors that can be triggered automatically by following the herd. Each of these group-induced behaviors has survival value for the individual, but the behavior cannot be comprehended by looking at the individual in isolation. This is the neuroscience of cows and people, animals in which herding is the essence of their being.

Studies of the neuroscience of human cooperation show that people are willing to incur personal costs to punish others who violate what they perceive as social norms. Using a combination of behavioral, pharmacological, and neuroimaging techniques, researchers have shown that manipulating the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain alters costly punishment decisions by modulating responses to fairness and retaliation. Serotonin enhances fairness, inhibits retaliation, raises the threshold for reactive aggression, facilitates harmonious social interactions, and promotes cooperative social exchange by modulating the computation of social value, the authors conclude in their paper. Oxytocin differentially modulates compromise to antagonism from within one’s own group versus rivaling groups, rendering people relatively more benevolent and less competitive toward those seen as belonging to their own group.

Another study published in 2013 showed that transcranial magnetic stimulation to activate circuits in the right lateral prefrontal cortex would manipulate a person’s behavior in following social norms. Another study found that testosterone administration modulates moral judgments that involve the interplay of emotions and social interactions. The study concerned testosterone exposure of males and females while in the uterus, and found that people who showed an increase in utilitarian judgments following testosterone administration had experienced higher testosterone levels in utero, while subjects whose judgments were more related to duty, obligation, or rules had experienced lower testosterone as a fetus.

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An objective neuroscience perspective reveals a striking paradox, showing that this automated neural circuit is a double-edged sword of the human brain. The circuitry enabled our species to coalesce into groups for mutual protection and common purpose and to do so through violence, but these circuits can also make people snap in anger and violence as individuals and with compounded brutality in groups. There can be no patriotism without a foreign adversary, no maternal bonding without seeing other babies differently. Ironically, the same trigger to form tribes, the human herding instinct, while the cause of so much mass violence, is also the reason for human coexistence and progress. This is what drives the Internet; for example, someone somewhere desires to contribute what they know through blogs and asks nothing in return except kinship. We join en masse with others of like mind and interests in online social media.

Paradoxically, peace and cooperation in social and international conflict comes ultimately from the same neurocircuits of defensive rage that launch conflict—but with a realization that the different groups are nevertheless united in a larger context. All citizens of the United States are Americans regardless of political party, for example. At that point of realization, these same circuits unite rather than divide the groups in conflict. This is what makes the seemingly senseless cycles of mass violence so frustrating, because history shows that with the passage of time, people divided by conflict often begin to see themselves as united members of a larger group, despite their differences. Finding this common ground is often difficult, but from the perspective of neuroscience, there is no other solution.