Primal Instinct

I have observed that dramatizing our primal survival mechanisms is a source of great pleasure. Not just in humans — animals too. You'll never see our dog happier than when given the opportunity to chase, catch, chomp on the throat, and shake till the neck is broken of a stuffed squirrel, duck, fish, etc. This is good times for our dog. She knows it isn't a real duck but she sure gets a bang out of pretending she's just tracked down and killed her dinner. That's a predator's instinct. What about prey, or "flight animals"? Well, of course they like to run! Like horses. Run horsey, run! See if you can beat the other horses to the finish line! Or our bunny rabbit. He loves to be chased around and around and then make it back into the safety of his hole (or cage, in this case). You can see that he's having a grand time at evading the make-believe coyote.

And so it is with the human animal. Males in particular are programmed for hunting and killing — hence the popularity of violent video games where kids and grown ups alike are offered the safe, legal, and clean opportunity to dramatize acts of violence. Long before the advent of agriculture the urge was developed for use against animals so that man could eat. But genetic programming dies hard. To be happy we need ways to activate this primal instinct. Sports are of course one way. Boys wrasslin' and fightin' like we did when I was a kid is another. Playing Soldier, Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians. Of course we love this stuff because it activates within us the mechanism that has kept us alive.

But the do-gooder lefties can't stand this horrible retrograde behavior. Once I was at a toy store and witnessed a preschool boy asking his mommy for a toy gun. His well meaning (oh, aren't they all...), but utterly misguided, mother chastised him, "Billy, you know you aren't allowed to play with guns." I wanted to kick her ass (but somehow I restrained myself — perhaps because I could take advantage of other violent outlets). I really feel sorry for this kid. He's growing up being denied a central part of his being. I wouldn't be surprised if this isn't the kind of kid that winds up actually committing horrific crimes later in life. Was Seung-Hui Cho denied toy guns when he was a kid? I wonder.

Compared to conservatives, liberals produce less offspring and therefore have far less aggregate experience in raising children (the pre-parenthood of liberal youth, the exercise of "a woman's choice", the childless freedom of blue state sophisticate urbanites, the biological childlessness of homosexuals and trannies, etc.). Yet somehow liberals are qualified to tell me how to raise my kids (let's face it — they think that only they are qualified and the actual parents are not!). These fonts of behavioral wisdom are always making a fuss over the violence of video games ("the average 12 year old has witnessed over 500,000 violent deaths in movies and video games..." or some such horse hockey statistic.) Meanwhile they coddle truly dangerous violent inner-city criminals. For a gang banger, killing someone is a ticket to respect and gangland promotion, unlike what it used to be — a ticket to the electric chair. But, of course, "It's society's fault. These youths are disadvantaged and disenfranchised and they are exposed to too much violence in video games." Funny, my son hasn't killed anyone, despite having been a Grand Theft Auto San Andreas fiend in his formative years. The solution to true (not pretend) violent behavior are prison cells and electric chairs — and not virtual ones.

Certainly, the urge for violence is primarily a male drive in humans. When men were out hunting woolly mammoths with spears, the women were gathering fruits, berries, and other edibles. Skills required: seeking and finding objects of value, discriminating amongst them (ripe? unripe? rotten? poisonous?), and bringing them back to camp. Sounds like shopping to me, and I don't know anything that makes my wife and daughter happier. Personally, I detest shopping — as is common for men. Disappointingly, my son, enjoys it. He's not alone. It seems this is now common among young adult males these days. Admittedly he's a bit of a metro... It's the feminization of America. I keep meaning to take him out to the gun range and teach him a man's activity... Maybe that'd get his attention off of shopping for jeans and shoes.

The left will probably want to genetically engineer a new, superior, peaceful, non-violent man — free from his genetic baggage of violent behavior. I imagine it could be done. I also reckon this new race would be exterminated pretty quickly by the old, violent humans. So much for "progress" (and progressives).