The Evolution of Rage

Rage is a major survival device. The feeling of rage overrides our need to survive. It thereby augments our ability to attack and destroy dangers. Four million years ago, our early ancestors descended from the trees. They were small animals that lacked long canines and claws. Slow-moving on land, they clustered for mutual support and became social animals. They chased away predators by throwing stones and wielding sticks.

Natural selection augmented human rage. The angriest of pre-humans out-survived and out-bred the others by attacking most-convincingly. Predators can’t afford injury. They are more likely to retreat when attacked by convincingly enraged primates than by primates who pretend that they will attack.

How did the gatherer-scavenger-hunter groups cope socially with their particularly angry individuals? Ingenious and elaborate mores effectively repressed or deflected their Oedipal needs and behavior. Intra-group competitive-aggression and competitive-sexuality were largely avoided. Antagonistic individuals were assigned to different hunting groups. A remarkable memory for lineage prevented inbreeding, but non-competitive sexual behavior was otherwise freely indulged.

They feared change. In 180 thousand years, they never feathered their arrows or improved their digging sticks. Their friendly cooperation and essential avoidance of active-oedipal functioning suggests that of pre-oedipal children.

Paganism—Oedipal/Phallic-Pagan Development

With the advent of agriculture, we became pagans. Aggressive and competitive-sexual needs emerged from repression—and they were freely acted out for the first time. Military threat supported hierarchy and controlled intra-group aggression.

Collective pagan libido was expended in almost automatic warfare, cycles of conquest, cultural flowering, decadence, defeat, ruin, and the sweeping away of cultural artifacts by the new, primitive conquerors. There was no fundamental (i.e., psychosexual) progress for the ten thousand years of paganism. Pagan philosophers viewed history as little more than the rise and fall of states. They had no reason to believe otherwise. War became a

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major selective process, which exploited inter-group aggression and protected groups by externalizing collective rage. Scapegoating channeled intra-group rage and increased group unity. Demonizing the enemy increased rage, which increased military effectiveness.

The Christian Era—Collective Latent-Oedipal Development

Two thousand years ago, the “Christian Era” replaced pagan thinking. In theory, we could wage wars for unselfish reasons—God, family, tribe, or nation. That need for an unselfish emphasis limited the incidence of war.

Aggression was further controlled by increased repression, obsessive-compulsive thinking and behavior, and other ego-controls. Sublimation channeled and transformed some aggression (and much sexual fantasy and impulse), which found expression in art, science, and ongoing progress.

While fighting for a god and against heretics sometimes led to fanaticism and savagery that exceeded the brutality of many pagan wars, collective moral thinking also evolved. The Christian Era sublimations evolve into increasingly empathic behavior.

Current Attitudes Regarding Rage

This is still the Christian Era, and we see remnants of the acting-out of rage for god in some militant Muslim groups today. They know that they alienate collective sympathy by their murderous and sadistic behavior. But their rage often overrides practical considerations (as with road rage, impulsive assaults, some suicides, etc.).

The almost simultaneous emergence of the sexual revolution and women’s liberation movement created a crisis in relationships and instabilities to which we are still trying to adapt. The sudden respectability of sexual pleasure, race, ethnicity, and gender choices have all added to social stresses.

At the same time, our increasing self-acceptance and the erosion of—and evolution beyond—traditional restraints have loosened controls on the expression of rage. The greater freedom in expressing our needs and the availability of guns make both murder and self-destruction easier.

School shootings are one example of that. Emotionally troubled students have always hated others who are successful academically and socially. The availability of guns and our greater freedom of self-expression as we evolve collectively toward ma-

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turity now enables students to kill classmates they hate and envy more easily.

Poverty and economic instability stoke fear. Fear generates intra-group rage, wife and child abuse, homicides, and suicide. More Americans kill themselves every year.

The Future Hope

We are a problem-solving species. Societies rarely mobilize to take effective action until disasters happen. Their problem-solving abilities have then tended to be formidably effective. We are moving from our latent-oedipal mindsets toward early-mature mindsets; we have grown increasingly sophisticated over the past two millennia. As Freud wrote, the tendency of libido is to move upward toward mature psychosexual development. A most-mature understanding of human issues is, in fact, evolving.

Communication technology increasingly escalates the extent and quality of global education. Our current population of 7.3 billion will produce an unprecedented number of problem-solvers. We can now focus on rage and violence more effectively than ever before. I’ve noticed that, especially since the Columbine massacre, people—and our media—are more openly asking for psychodynamic answers to problems. Collective thinking had previously been more likely to obey Christian Era injunctions to avoid psychodynamic determinants. Increasing numbers of people are in therapy with rage issues among other problems. New anti-fear and anti-rage medications are evolving. Perhaps for the first time we will be emotionally able to mobilize in time to prevent disasters instead of having to depend on disasters to mobilize us.

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