I have been thinking more about the theories I discussed a couple of FSWs ago about sparrows going psycho with aggression.

Briefly, some researchers set up a stuffed male sparrow so it could tweet and raise its wings, which is basically sparrow for “I fucked your mother, you homo!”, and stood back to see what would happen.

And the sparrows went completely psychotic, to the point of actually ripping the head off the cyborg intruder and forcing the scientists to end the experiment.

My theory was (and is) that this makes sense, because aggression is only stopped by the aggressor either winning, which is signaled by their opponent submitting and/or fleeing, or losing, and choosing to submit and/or flee themselves.

The cyborg sparrow could neither submit nor retaliate, and so there was no “off” switch for the aggressive response until the cyborg was destroyed, and the threat signal was turned off that way.

What I feel I missed out on in that explanation was a more thorough explanation of the role of escalation in this kind of scenario.

The aggressor does not simply repeat the exact same attack when the first one does not resolve the conflict with either victory or submission. It escalates. It increases the aggression level of its attack, which increases the odds of the next encounter resolving the conflict.

It also means increasing the risk of harm to the aggressor, however, which is why most species have a pre-violence phase to their aggressive cycle. In this phase, the aggression involves threat displays but no violence… yet. If displays of aggression can do the trick, the conflict is resolved and nobody gets hurt. It is only when the combatants are roughly equally matched that it escalates to actual violence.

This is especially important in very powerful animals that, if they were to simply fight tooth and nail as a first resort, could easily kill one another. That would not be very good for the species as a whole, especially socially cooperative species like lions or wolves. The point of aggressive competition is to
resolve the hierarchy and possibly mating rights.

Important, but not worth dying over. Usually.

Going back to our sparrows, what seems like an unbelievable level of violence for any species was actually just the product of an artificial scenario unlikely to be repeated in nature.

Any real, living male sparrow is going to give up and submit/flee long before the aggression escalates to the point of decapitation.

But how does all this relate to us complicated naked beach apes? What can we learn from animal aggression about our own darker side?

Well first off, a lot of what us makes we humans so complicated is that we have multiple conflicting systems that determine how we act.

We have our reptile brains, which governs the really primal aspects of sex, aggression, dominance, fear, and so on. We have this in common with all animals more complicated than a fish.

And that works fine for solitary animals with no social structure that only get together to mate. But we human beings were social primates at one point, and our aggressive tendencies had to be modified to fit into an ongoing social structure where not only is their a top-down sexual hierarchy, but the increased proficiency that came with grasping hands and clever brains made murder by aggression all too easy, and we therefore, like other social species, had to develop an extensive pre-violence aggression system.

So far so good. Our primate ancestors rarely murder one another. Often all that is needed is threat displays like shaking tree branches and screaming to resolve hierarchical conflicts.

But then we moved out into the plains of Africa and our loose primate sexual hierarchy had to change into the tightly coordinated and stable hierarchy of the hunting primate. We had to become more like wolves, and our aggression system was further complicated by on the one hand having to further suppress intra-species aggression while also teaching us the necessary aggression to be successful hunters.

This lead to us not just become sexual pair-bonding animals (no more primate harems), but group-bonding animals. We instinctively band together with the rest of our group to protect it from outside threats.

Those threats include the incursions of other groups, and that leads to one thing : war.

But what I really want to cover is how this escalation of aggression shows itself in modern politics.

So let’s talk Barack Obama, and liberal leaders in general.

One of the defining characteristics of conservatism, in my opinion, is something I will call primitivism, that is to say, a mistrust of complicated higher cognitive and emotional brain functions and a strong preference towards the simpler, more primitive systems.

Hence, they relate well to things like competition and aggression and fear, but distrust and dismiss more complicated things like compassion, cooperation, and community.

Their response to a liberal opponent, therefore, is an aggressive one. They try to defeat their opponent via human threat displays, like anger, brutal language, aggressive body stances, and so on.

And when that does not work, they escalate.

But what happens when they lose? When the liberal wins the election because the populace stopped seeing their aggression as dominant and started seeing it as being a threat?

Their primitive mind cannot process that, especially if we are dealing with an aging conservative movement with its members losing their higher reasoning faculties. So all they can think to do is just what those male sparrows did : escalate.

And they literally cannot believe it when it does not work. The enemy is neither responding with superior aggression and resolving the conflict that way (not an option if you are a liberal), nor are they capitulating and ceding their position to the victors (also not an option when you are, you know, the duly elected leader of a country. )

And so their aggression levels rise and rise and they get angrier and angrier, and look worse and worse in the process, but are completely incapable of understanding how increased aggression can ever be a bad thing.

It is the definition of insanity : doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Only they don’t just do it over again.

Each time it fails to work, they do it again harder.

This, then, is why seemingly quite mild and harmless, moderate left leaders like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton inspire such incredibly high levels of vitriolic hatred. Their right-wing opponents just keep escalating their anger/aggression levels in an attempt to dominate them.

It is, paradoxically, their very harmlessness, their lack of aggression, that breeds this extreme aggression, which is quite counterintuitive, especially from a liberal point of view.

The liberal leadership track is based on seemingly nonthreatening, friendly, benevolent, and conciliatory. This appeals to the more developed liberal voter, who values cooperation and other social virtues over the more primitive virtues of strength and power.

The problem is, this limits their ability to meet aggression with aggression. Ergo, they cannot check the aggression of their opponents with aggression of their own, and hence, it spirals out of control.

In the short term, this is very ugly, and results in some truly terrible government as increasingly incoherently angry conservatives get into power.

But their escalating aggression and declining faculties eventually leads to their political ruin as they lose their ability to put a pretty face on their evil, and they scare away all the moderates.

We are seeing this happen now.