the structural functions of human violence

Dawn, in a forest in northern Ukraine, some very young girls, naked and torn, swing slowly from the lower tree branches, hung there by their tortionnaires after having been savagely raped and killed, strange fruit indeed of a planetary tree.

1994, a street in Sarajevo, a young woman and her child lie dying in the street, both shot by a sniper in the stomach, to insure that they will have time to watch each other die.

1956, the Hungarian Revolution, where students battle tanks with stones and are savagely repressed.

1943, Treblinka, a young woman and her child, both naked, wait trembling with fear their death in a gas chamber in the cold winter air of northern Poland.

These four images, all from the eastern Europe of my ancestors, come to me periodically as if mounted on an irrepressible carrousel of horror, calling me to act, to respond, to protest, to protect them in some impossible quest for human dignity. It is to this end that I propose to construct here a general theory of social evolution. The structural functions of human violence are the trame of history and any hope of alleviating human suffering and attending ecological damage is severely compromised by our refusal to confront this problem, both on an individual and societal level.

The growing interest in Occident for personal development techniques and the increasing acceptance of the necessity and social utility of psychotherapeutic and psychiatric methodologies should not hide from us Reich’s observation, now almost a century old, that with our limited means of psychological aid, we can alleviate at best a small pourcentage of the suffering of our populations, while our societies are literally crushing and deforming human beings  in increasingly important numbers.

The problem before us is clearly how are we to eliminate this violence that is transmitted from generation to generation and to create societies where the well-being of our fellow human beings is our principal concern. The four seminal moments in my particular emotional confrontation with my formative years, intuitively perceived as my participation in this gigantic celebration of human violence, have forced me to accept the moral obligation to attempt to alleviate or better eliminate this violence. For many years, I considered this obligation would be satisfied by the construction of a general theory of evolution such as I propose to construct here. But in the waning years of my life, I have  begun to realise that I can only consider myself to have paid my debt in full by confronting this violence in myself as well, in a strictly personal search for the origins of the violence structurally implanted in me during those early formative years of childhood, so difficult to recontact, of such uneasy access.This second quest will only concern us here in so far as it has a bearing upon our theoretical development and may shed light on certain options taken, certain choices made in the construction of our model. 

It is thus that I propose the following texts as preliminary reading before turning to the theory as such:

The introduction: develops the genesis of the theory and provides a general context for its conception

Autobiographical sketches: provide certain idiosyncratic elements which have influenced and influence yet my thinking.

Mind and matter: reflections on the nature of reality, and the pertinence of the debate as to the duality of the human spirit for our theoretical considerations. This critical debate was missing from my model as presented in the first edition and will require much effort still to be harmoniously integrated into our social model of evolution.

On paradigms: A reminder of the implications of any paradigmatic change of this amplitude in terms of psychological resistance, before turning to my theory.