Abstract
This work examines the unsettling continuity between human violence and the instinctual behaviors of our primate and mammalian kin, arguing that what we call “civilization” has failed to evolve the emotional and relational capacities necessary to sustain the power we inherited. Through a metaphysical anthrozoological lens, the essay traces how humanity’s fracture is not a cultural aberration but an evolutionary reversal: a species regressing into unregulated instinct while possessing tools far beyond its maturity.
By holding human brutality beside the ritual grief of elephants, the cooperative intelligence of wolves, and the moral intuitions of non-human primates, this work contends that the virtues we claim as uniquely human, empathy, restraint, dignity, and communal responsibility, are not only found elsewhere in the animal world, but are often expressed there with greater integrity. Violence, then, becomes evidence not of human nature but of human devolution: the collapse of relational intelligence, sovereignty, and ethical instinct in a species that has forgotten what it once meant to be alive.
I. On Violence and the Lie We Tell About Animals
The essay was triggered by two events that should never be described as “random.”
A young woman, riding public transportation, stabbed without provocation, no struggle, no survival imperative, no threat that required force. A mother and her children surrounded and attacked by a group of teenagers, a collective assault, laughter, spectacle, the ease with which dominance replaced restraint.
These incidents were not remarkable because they were rare. They were remarkable because of how quickly they were consumed, debated, replayed, and forgotten.
Before violence can be understood, it must be defined, and this is where the human story already begins to unravel. Animals cause harm. They do not commit violence.
Violence is not force, injury, or death. Violence is violation, harm severed from necessity, force abstracted from function and infused instead with meaning, dominance, humiliation, or spectacle. Violence requires symbolic cognition. It requires the ability to override ecological restraint and choose harm as expression.
No non-human animal does this.
A lion does not kill to make a point.
An elephant does not strike to degrade dignity.
A chimpanzee does not attack for entertainment, ideology, or profit.
Animals act within reality. Humans violate it.
Calling animals “violent” is not descriptive. It is deflective. It projects uniquely human failure onto beings that never left the natural order. The result is a profound misdiagnosis: the problem is not animal instinct leaking into civilization; the problem is human consciousness severed from regulation.
II. The Primate Mirror: Inheritance Without Completion
Humans are primates. This biological fact is often treated as insult rather than context. Yet primate research reveals not depravity, but continuity.
Chimpanzees form alliances, experience jealousy, compete for mates, defend their territory, and engage in collective aggression when threatened.1 These behaviors are not violence; they are relational force-bound, situational, and intelligible within ecological limits.
What distinguishes humans is not the presence of instinct, but the absence of completion.
When symbolic cognition, language, and technology emerge without a corresponding maturation of emotional regulation, instinct does not disappear. It escalates. Force becomes narrative. Aggression becomes identity. Conflict becomes theater.
The danger is not that humans are like apes.
The danger is that humans are apes with tools and no restraint.
III. From Fratricide to Spectacle
The earliest human violence recorded in Western myth is not predation. It is fratricide. Cain kills Abel not to survive, but because envy, comparison, and wounded worth could not be metabolized.
This pattern never leaves us.
Roman arenas transformed killing into entertainment. Gladiators died not for survival, but for the applause of the crowd. Power demanded witnesses.2 Violence became a ritualized spectacle.
Modern culture did not abandon this impulse. It digitized it.
Violence now circulates as content: news loops, viral videos, gaming simulations, cartoons that teach children to laugh at annihilation. Humans are not uniquely violent; they are uniquely entertained by violence.
No animal watches another animal kill for pleasure.
No animal reenacts suffering for stimulation.
Only humans abstract harm into story, and stories can be enjoyed.
IV. Humanity Beyond the Human
If violence were animal nature, the elephant would be its exemplar. Instead, the elephant exposes the lie.
Elephants mourn their dead. They pause, touch remains deliberately, grow silent, and return to the burial sites months or years later.3 Herds gather. Families linger. Memory persists.
When a mother dies, others search for the calf. Aunts and grandmothers adopt. Entire groups will slow their migration to protect the vulnerable.4 Unrelated herds stop to acknowledge death that is not their own.
No law compels this. No ideology explains it.
This is moral instinct without abstraction.
If humanity were defined by empathy, restraint, communal responsibility, and reverence for life, elephants would qualify without argument. The comparison is not sentimental. It is diagnostic.
Animals have not lost relational intelligence.
Humans have.
V. Devolution: When Consciousness Breaks Alignment
Devolution is not regression into animality. Animals are already aligned.
Devolution is consciousness severed from responsibility.
A devolved human:
- possesses power without restraint
- meaning without grounding
- identity without regulation
This is why slavery exists.
Why trafficking exists.
Why torture exists.
No non-human animal enslaves its own kind. No animal commodifies suffering. No animal builds systems to extend harm across generations. These acts require abstraction, ideology, and the ability to override recognition.
Violence is not animal behavior.
It is symbolic behavior gone wrong.5
VI. Sovereignty Versus Supremacy
Animals do not seek supremacy; they seek balance.
Supremacy is a human invention born of insecurity. The belief that domination is required for existence. Sovereignty is its opposite: self-regulation, restraint, presence, internal authority.
Violence proliferates where sovereignty collapses.
When a group overwhelms a defenseless woman and her children, it is not a primal force. It is supremacy without sovereignty, collective dysregulation masquerading as power.
Animals do not need sovereignty.
They already live within limits.
Humans must learn it or fracture further
VII. The Species at the Threshold
Evolution is not guaranteed. Consciousness is not a prize. It is a responsibility.
Animals have retained what humans abandoned: alignment, restraint, relational intelligence. Humans mistake power for progress and spectacle for meaning.
The path forward is not transcendence of the animal.
It is remembrance.
Violence is not our inheritance.
It is our warning.
Footnotes
Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970).
Cynthia Moss, Elephant Memories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
Joyce Poole, Coming of Age with Elephants (New York: Hyperion, 1996).
Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973).
Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah. On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970.
Bekoff, Marc. The Emotional Lives of Animals. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007.
de Waal, Frans. Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
de Waal, Frans. The Age of Empathy. New York: Harmony Books, 2009.
Fromm, Erich. The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973.
Moss, Cynthia. Elephant Memories. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Poole, Joyce. Coming of Age with Elephants. New York: Hyperion, 1996.
Sapolsky, Robert. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. New York: Penguin Press, 2017.
Safina, Carl. Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. New York: Henry Holt, 2015.
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