FOUNDATION FOR THE STUDY OF POLITICAL PATHOLOGY

1. The Evolutionary-Psychology Story

Thinkers like Dawkins and Pinker interpret human violence as an inheritance from the “animal past.”

·        For Dawkins, the selfish gene ensures that organisms—including humans—act in ways that maximize genetic survival. Violence is therefore a “strategy.”

·        For Pinker, despite a “decline in violence” over time, the capacity for aggression is seen as a biological constant—a deep, evolutionary legacy. The assumption here is that warfare and aggression are natural, and culture merely tames them.

3. The Cultural Turn: When Violence Becomes Symbolic

The evidence suggests that the emergence of organized violence coincides with the rise of civilization—that is, with the rise of symbolic systems.

Roughly between 800 and 400 BCE—the so-called Axial Age—human societies began to create vast, abstract orders:

·        Imperial states (Assyria, Persia, Rome)

·        Universal religions (Judaism, early Hinduism, Buddhism)

·        Transcendent moral and cosmic systems

These systems all required sacrifice—both symbolic and real. The state demanded loyalty; the god demanded faith; both demanded the body as proof of belief. It is in this historical period, not in the Paleolithic, that we first find mass killing as a form of meaning-production. Violence ceases to be a survival mechanism and becomes a ritual of belonging.

4. Koenigsberg’s Insight: The Right to Kill

Koenigsberg’s work captures this rupture precisely. He argues that human beings collectively grant the state the right to kill in our name—thereby transforming death into a sacred function.

The soldier’s death is no longer an accident of conflict; it is an offering to an abstraction: “the nation,” “the people,” “the homeland.” From this standpoint, war is not an evolutionary adaptation but a cultural invention—a symbolic technology for organizing collective identity through sacrifice.

5. Why the Biological Story Persists

So why do Pinker and Dawkins dominate? Because their story is comfortably naturalistic. It reassures us that violence has a cause in biology, and thus a limit.

If violence is “instinct,” it can be “managed.” But if violence is meaning, if it arises from our devotion to abstractions, then it implicates the very structure of civilization itself. Evolutionary psychology explains violence away; Koenigsberg’s theory explains violence through meaning. The first seeks control; the second demands self-recognition.

6. A Reframing

If we follow Koenigsberg’s logic, human violence is not a residue of animal instinct—it is the symptom of symbolic consciousness itself.

Only when humans began to imagine realities larger than life—gods, nations, histories—did they begin to sacrifice life in their name.

Thus, the history of civilization is also the history of ideological possession.