There is no message more powerful, primal, or primitive than the evocation of the need to protect the family and “tribe.” We are genetically primed and culturally shaped to alert, defend, and aggress, and even to sacrifice the self in the service of that protection. In fact, the alert, defend, and aggress system is primary and fundamental to how humans are biologically built, emotionally primed and cognitively programmed. This extends to the protection of our way of life and the fundamental elements of those things we hold most dear—the protective response against threats to our freedom, our nation, our land. The provocation of outsiders raping our women is one of the most primitive and basic of these threats. Rape invalidates the blood line, as the progeny of such an act may not be ours, and the loss of our women or our children translates to the end of the tribe.
Seen this way, the warning of the threat of attack by the “evil other” is a base warning to our built-in, hard-wired protective response system. It appeals to a primal need to protect the tribe and the family from the evil predator, the “other” who, once identified, must be destroyed. Humans are imbued with a deep intellect and the ability to think and process complex information in a rational manner. Even deep emotions can be reasonably understood and evaluated, arriving at fair and balanced conclusions. However, our rational thought and the processing of complex information are very much forebrain activities, relating to what are termed our “executive brain functions,” and is the last portion of the developed human brain in evolutionary time.
More basically, and more substantively, humans are protective animals with deeper brain structures that are more primitive and equally part of our origins, playing a major regulatory role determining how our brains and bodies function. Fight and flight are reflexive responses, and the fight-flight response is nested in deep, more primitive brain structures that developed for survival. Our responses to threat of the self, the family, our loved ones and the tribes to which we belong alert the brain and body to concentrate, act without thought, and ignore the vagaries of sound argument and compassionate consideration that might delay the need to rapidly and decisively respond. They cue hormones, blood, and muscles, and signal tribal affiliation behavior for mobilization of the protective response system.
1.1 We Are Primed to Be Alert and Ready to React to a Dangerous World
Our modern, cultured self is a rather recent evolution in human existence. Any semblance of what we call culture consists of no more than perhaps 20,000 years of our history, when the first towns were formed near the Sea of Galilee during the Last Glacial Maximum. Our biology and our brain had over 2 million years of time to develop prior to this, and during this entire period, and for the most part until a few hundred years ago, the instinct to protect and survive was central to existence.
It is only recently that the threat of attack and loss due to famine, war, criminal violence, and disease was not essential parts of human life. Our built-in sensitivity to loss and threat is a response to our need to defend against disease, attack from neighboring tribes and wandering bands, and internal violence within the group. We are of course aware of the threat of disease prior to more modern public health and medical intervention, principally the introduction of soap, clean water, and penicillin. More surprisingly, the murder rate in Medieval Europe was dramatically higher than today, with scholars reporting rates as much as 30 times higher than modern Europe, including acts of terrorism [3].
We decry the upswing of “modern” violence in the U.S., longing for the “good old days.” In fact, U.S. rates of homicide in colonial times were many times higher than today. The presence of increasing law and order structures in the form of better laws and better policing, and the reduction of poverty, resulted in a drop in homicide from the colonial period, which saw homicide rates of greater than 25 per 100,000 of population, compared to recent national rates below 5 per 100,000, a fivefold decrease [4]. Put in other terms, the rates of homicide nationally from 1700 until the Civil War were appreciably higher than the murder rate in New York City in 2015 of below 4 per 100,000 [5]. In fact, homicide rates today are markedly lower than in the early twentieth century in the U.S. [6]. Clearly, our news media portrays us as living in a dangerous world, but this state of affairs is better than in nearly any prior period.
Because of the saliency and consistency of ongoing, monumental threat throughout human development, we do not need to scratch humans deeply to bring the primitive, protective, and aggressive self to the fore. As an illustration of how close our primitive self is to the surface, we witness how aggressive affiliative behaviors are acted out on the playing field of often violent competitive sports, where teams are followed with a dedication akin to nationalism, and fans dress in tribal colors, carry team flags, and scream for blood. In Europe, fan behavior has actually blended with White supremacy nationalism, in a dangerous mix.
The game of soccer (what the rest of the world calls football) evolved in medieval times, involving hundreds of players in what is sometimes referred to as “mob football.” In these pitched battles, rival villages and towns watched a form of controlled warfare to decide disputes over land, personal arguments, and rights of commerce [7]. Fast forward to 2015, soccer violence has escalated, as economic and national tensions rose. Fans, dressed in tribal-like colors and face painting, ripped out seats in Belgrade, Serbia, and attacked rival Parizan, injuring dozens of police in a bloody melee, hurling lighted flares and metal objects using military-like tactics [8]. Brazilian fans have murdered offending referees and players [9]. Any quick minimization of this as only a phenomenon of overzealous sports enthusiasts, and not related to political process, is quickly dispelled when one understands that the attacks are often perpetrated by White supremacist groups, and that they are intimately linked with “[r]acism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia…[which] are becoming…widespread” [among these fans], according to Moshe Kanto, president of the European Jewish Congress [10].
1.2 Our Brains Respond to Exaggerated Messaging of Loss and Doom
The most effective way to add fervor, strength, and resolve to any political or social argument is to invoke the specter of loss and doom. The hyperbole of threat, and particularly existential threat, is the most powerful fuel of action. Framing in black and white, not shades of gray, is both the means and the terminus for attracting any audiences’ attention, whether at the doctor’s clinic, in the courtroom, or in the world of politics. Reasonableness and carefully weighed argument does not sell newspapers, does not keep the viewer from the remote control, and does not attract donors’ dollars.
Only if the enemy is committed and perceived as capable of destroying us can we advocate, as did presidential candidate Ted Cruz in December 2015, “If I am elected president, we will utterly destroy ISIS.… We will carpet bomb them into oblivion. I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out!” [11]. As carpet bombing is aimed at obliterating human life of civilians, of leveling whole cities, and is an ineffective strategy for undermining military capability of an enemy, we can understand that the true purpose of such bloodthirsty political diatribe is meant to excite some powerful and primitive force experienced by a large segment of the population. It is what they want to hear.
This primitive response is more universally experienced when there are real threats of terrorism, whose purpose is to create a sense of terror far disproportionate to its actual danger. We only require the hint of threat to alert our protective systems. For evolutionary purposes, our brains developed to be loss sensitive [12]. The loss of a tooth, of several females of productive age, of two hunters in the tribe, of a source of water, all threatened end of life, end of the tribe, and an end of our progeny. In contrast, the brain barely recognizes gain. It was not possible for our ancestors to make more than temporary gains during our evolutionary period of development. Indeed, the sole purpose of gain was itself to protect against future loss. This primitive and basic element of our brain shapes our emotions, how we organize our attachment to others, our seeking protection and safety, and the ...