Solving the problem of intermale aggression

In what ways does the instinct of intermale aggression manifest itself in human interactions? Is this a problem that, as a species, we should be concerned with solving? If so, how could we go about solving it? What state of affairs might legitimately constitute the problem’s having been solved?

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Intermale aggression is fundamentally about obtaining mating success. What traits you need to succeed vary from culture to culture, and I’d assume in polygamous cultures that intermale aggression is worse because many males are locked out of the mating game whereas in monogamous cultures even below average men still mate, they just mate with below average women.

If you’re born in the ghetto, you obtain status, resources and sexual access to females by being a criminal. if you’re born into the suburbs you obtain those things by going to college and getting a job (or so they told me).

So creating an environment where people’s innate desires are directed into prosocial directions is ideal. A world where men compete for status and wealth by making the world better is a better situation than one where men compete for those things by doing drive by shootings.

Supposedly crime goes up as economic inequality goes up too. I’m not sure what the connection is.

Also it declines with age. There is a reason most criminals are men in their teens and early 20s. those are prime mating years. Men are a lot less prone to crime after they hit middle age, probably because (among other things) they unconsciously know they are too old to start families.

How are you going to “solve” it? Innate male drives to conquer and possess are a large part of what drive men to achieve if properly harnessed and women often look upon men with those drives with admiration and sexual preference.

You liberate men from Extremist caricature gender roles of Machismo, where they have to be strong, must be Provider for the Family, must be monetary successful, etc., and instead allow men to have human Feelings, to be Imperfect, to be equal Partners, to be succesful outside the narrow measure of Money or corporate ladder.

If men can cry and hug without being labelled gay, if men can follow arts without being labelled sissies, if men can fail without being labelled losers, there will be less Need for Aggression to defend an impossible, hurtful, un-human concept.

If you also improve equality in Society - so that People from the ghetto do have an actual real Chance of getting a good education and actually achieving something with that education - another Need for violence (Frustration and Money) falls away. The best remedy would be Basic income - if everybody gets Money to eat and pay rent, they can do things like art and writing Linux or stories or being good fathers that humans are important for, instead of having to fight to get to the top to survive.

I think humans have refined the act of aggression to being largely ritualistic. If humans are like many other animals it is very possible that aggression or even mock aggression may play a role in testosterone production. Simply standing up in a group conversation of men and making sure you are heard is a form of male aggression. Bullies will often attempt to overpower other men not just physically but in many other ways men establish their position among other men. Sports is another non violent manifestation of male aggression. If what they are saying is true about men having lower testosterone these days it might be attributed to less ritualistic confrontations taking place.

In what ways may we help with your homework?

When people want to pacify unruly male mammals they perform a routine medical procedure that seems to work rather well.

Failing that, in the future scientists could invent a genetic solution so the elite can enjoy the tranquility of a docile populace. Perhaps they would grow natural males for their security forces, although by that time maybe robots will be more practical.

[QUOTE=astro]
How are you going to “solve” it? Innate male drives to conquer and possess are a large part of what drive men to achieve if properly harnessed and women often look upon men with those drives with admiration and sexual preference.
[/QUOTE]

While it is true that male aggression (if that is what you mean by “innate male drives to conquer and possess”) plays some kind of role in today’s capitalistic fortunes and sexploits, it does not have to be the main incentive for achievement and success. For example, see marshmallow’s reply below.

[QUOTE=marshmallow]
[…] In the future scientists could invent a genetic solution so the elite can enjoy the tranquility of a docile populace. Perhaps they would grow natural males for their security forces, although by that time maybe robots will be more practical.
[/QUOTE]

A eugenic solution (in the compassionate sense of eugenics, of course, which does not have to involve gas chambers) is not beyond the realm of possibility. Given how deeply the aggressive instincts are hard-wired into the male brain, it may even be the only possible solution. Einstein himself wrote to Freud on one occasion,

“Man has within himself a fust for hatred and destruction … It is a comparatively easy task to call [this passion] interplay and raise it to the power of collective psychosis. Here lies, perhaps, the crux of all the complex of factors we are considering, an enigma that only an expert in the lore of human instincts can resolve … Is it possible to control man’s mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychoses of hate and destructiveness?” (Einstein: A Life, Denis Brian, 232)

[QUOTE=Wesley Clark]
Intermale aggression is fundamentally about obtaining mating success. What traits you need to succeed vary from culture to culture, and I’d assume in polygamous cultures that intermale aggression is worse because many males are locked out of the mating game whereas in monogamous cultures even below average men still mate, they just mate with below average women.

If you’re born in the ghetto, you obtain status, resources and sexual access to females by being a criminal. if you’re born into the suburbs you obtain those things by going to college and getting a job (or so they told me).

So creating an environment where people’s innate desires are directed into prosocial directions is ideal. A world where men compete for status and wealth by making the world better is a better situation than one where men compete for those things by doing drive by shootings.

Supposedly crime goes up as economic inequality goes up too. I’m not sure what the connection is.

Also it declines with age. There is a reason most criminals are men in their teens and early 20s. those are prime mating years. Men are a lot less prone to crime after they hit middle age, probably because (among other things) they unconsciously know they are too old to start families.
[/QUOTE]

I find your idea of redirecting intermale aggression into pro-social behavior to be interesting, and I would not be surprised if eminent thinkers such as Richard Dawkins would agree with this view. However, I think it can be challenged on a number of points. To begin, it invites the following questions:

  1. Precisely how do we define “aggression”? I’ve seen it defined in some wording as “aiming to accomplish a state of affairs another creature wishes to avoid.” Clearly, this definition can be refined, but the basic idea is that in aggression, someone’s victimization is intended. If that’s how we’re defining it, then attempts at victimization must be reconciled with the concept of “making the world a better place.” Therefore…

  2. Under what standard of valuation are we judging the world to be better off as the result of the pro-social behaviors? The word “better” implies that two objects are being compared. Are we judging the world to be better than it was before the pro-social act was performed, or better than it would be had it not been performed? Further, how do we ascertain the effects of an individual human action, when the state of the world results from the complex sum total of all actions?

  3. Is intermale aggression truly “about” mating success? It is certainly the case that in the animal kingdom, males who emerge victorious tend to have more reproductive encounters. This can be formulated as an observable fact about the physical world. However, to say that intermale aggression is “about” reproductive success is to ascribe additional entities called “purposes” to human behavior, thereby introducing an apparently non-physical element. Indeed, it seems to make sex the exclusive goal of intermale aggression, when other goals (e.g., acquisition of food, or aggression for its own sake) could be equally in the mind of the aggressor. In that respect, it is similar to psychological theories in which sex is the grand aim of all human achievements (Freud et al).

The questions are admittedly technical and concerned with the finer points of language use. But they seem naturally to be the next step of inquiry if we are to get to the heart of the problem, which is, in my opinion, the suffering resulting from victimization in aggressive acts. I would like to see suffering disappear from the world altogether, but that is my own ambition and is up for debate as well.

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Sorry, that should be “lust” in the Einstein quote – I do not seem to be able to edit my posts.

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Well, hopefully scientists don’t take it upon themselves to solve the matter.

How is the world better off? Take three men. A guy who got rich inventing new medical devices, an NBA player and an OG street gang member for the crips.

All 3 will have extremely good mating options, but realistically only the enterpreneur contributed to society. The NBA player contributed entertainment sure, but the world as a whole isn’t better off for it. The gang member has left the world a worse place than it was before.

So creating a society that enforces monogamy, and where women reward me for having stable, boring lives and stable boring jobs would be beneficial. A society where women reward rich and successful men (since generally you get rich and successful by bringing a product or service to market that improves quality of life) would also be ideal.

What makes the world better? More science. More technology. More freedom and democracy. More wealth. More sustainability. More medicine. More education. etc. I’m a secular humanist, and my values align with secular humanism. Not everyone shares that belief (some people feel the world becomes better the more people align their lives with various religious texts). But since we are sentient conscious entities, a better world is one where our consciousness is able to achieve subjective well being, and secular humanism is the best philosophy I’ve seen to achieving this.

As for how do you know if this is about mating, fundamentally it is because we are talking about male aggression. Why are we not talking about female aggression? Women abuse children at the same rates as men, women abuse their spouses at the same rate as men (according to some studies I’ve seen). But fundamentally, a woman doesn’t need to accumulate status, power, wealth, fame, etc. to increase her mating odds the way a man does. Take a man who is totally invisible to women and magically make him a millionaire rock star, and his mating options go from 0 to infinite. The same doesn’t happen for women.

Philip Zimbardo wrote a book about using psychology for social engineering, I think it was ‘Influencing Attitudes and Changing Behavior’. You should look into it.

I’d like to take a shot at how the other two guys besides the medical device inventor could help the world just as much.

NBA player inspires young men to spend free time playing basketball instead of criminal activity, preventing the new and more nasty version of Crips from even forming in the first place. He gives large amounts of his fortunes acquired shooting hoops to his community, making schools better, funding wings of children’s hospitals, buying medical inventor’s new gizmos.

The OG transitions from gang life in his 20s into working as a counselor in his 30s. Since he has truly lived the life of the streets, he is the only counselor in the area that has a chance to get though to “the kids” with his latent honesty and understanding of said streets. Maybe he uses his ill-gotten gains on funding his little brother’s battles with cancer. Maybe little bro becomes governor and passes a law in his state funding medical care that pays for the same medical gizmo.
Without that latent need in these three men to be aggressive in attaining their goals, maybe none of it could have happened.

Could it be that the aggression comes from a bigger need to get dopamine? If we deny this than we might have a lot of depressed dudes milling around.

So the first guy got rich inventing medical devices that didn’t work while hiding the test results that showed that and sent people who used them into poverty trying to pay for them and added to the health care costs of everyone else. The NBA player takes his money and invests in job growth where needed and getting people off public assistance, and the third guy kills a real scumbag gangster who would have killed a lot more people.

I see your point, if the first guy didn’t so aggressively seek to make money without regard to the negative impact on people we’d all be better off.

My prior post had an extra “latent” in it for some reason. The first one isn’t supposed to be there. Missed the edit window.

Get women to stop being attracted to alpha males and start rewarding the nice guys.

I’m surprised how quickly this became the women’s fault.

:dubious:

Heh. I’m not.

He’s not wrong, though (I assume he’s a he :)), except possibly in terms of degree. How many women have ‘bad boy syndrome?’

Unfortunately, they don’t seem to see down the road, where the aggressive male is far more likely to become an abuser, and tends to propagate the same attitudes in their male progeny. I personally know several women who’ve learned that the hard way.

Concentrate power and wealth in the hands of women and we will have no need to look for second-hand authority through mating with “alpha” males.

I think we should look into the question of intramale violence, otherwise framed as “why are you hitting yourself?”