License for Bullies

When I was a teenager and young adult, I got into many fights. I was brought up in a tough neighborhood. Often the only way a young person in my community could get respect from others was by testing pugilistic skills upon foes. For a while I was thrilled to strut through neighborhood streets with confidence of being the “toughest”. But as I grew older and more intelligent, I also began to recognize the intense struggle for dominance I had allowed myself to become a participant. The realization for all of us is that we have all become a party to a vicious struggle, whether we are the brut or the one brutalized or the prize (the groupies). I soon learned we are inadvertently driven by ways of thinking transferred to us by previous generations. One of the ideologies mentioned frequently and affects greatly is that of “Natural Selection”, i.e. “Survival of the Fittest”.

Though during my early years I was unknowingly an agent for this concept, I have come to detest this belief about life forms because it simply is not true. Nonetheless, people adhere to these phrases, most unreasonably because they simply do not understand what system of belief they accept and some others typically use it as a justification for their abhorrent and sometimes sociopath behaviors.

The progenitor Charles Darwin noted suggestions of why animals react the way they do distinguishes his observations as a comparison to man in his likeness of combat for food, copulation and territory. But many of the animals he had an opportunity to observe do not act solely in the manner he noted. One theory as discussed in the book Don”t Go Ape, Darwin! addresses the issue of life forms not instinctively following a drive to narcissistically survive, but most life forms (with exception of the most intelligent) are social and therefore follow after social patterns.

There is no doubt conflicts occur among similar and other species. But what Darwin proclaimed was merely the surface of a more complex social system. He failed to note that with most conquerors come with the victory social responsibilities. And with these responsibilities are attached sacrifices for the entire social group, of which might often lead to serious injury and/ or death of the conqueror. With these conditions the concept of “survival of the fittest” has no meaning. Merely, the life form’s social group continues because of the stronger conqueror’s sacrifice.