Why do humans harm the harmless?

[Eldorado]

Humans are the glory and the scum of the universe, concluded the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal, in 1658. Little has changed. We love and we loathe; we help and we harm; we reach out a hand and we stick in the knife.

We understand if someone lashes out in retaliation or self-defence. But when someone harms the harmless, we ask: “How could you?”

Humans typically do things to get pleasure or avoid pain. For most of us, hurting others causes us to feel their pain. And we don’t like this feeling. This suggests two reasons people may harm the harmless - either they don’t feel the others’ pain or they enjoy feeling the others’ pain.

Full article at The Conversation: Link

[HandsomeGorilla]

Honestly, there are probably a lot more sociopaths than people realize. There are people who simply derive pleasure from others' pain, and you have a lot of people who are incredibly insecure about something in their own lives, so they feel a need to be in control of something, all the better if it's another human being. People become defensive and would much rather expose someone else's weaknesses (bullying, insults) than confront their own. 

[XenoFish]

The feeling of power plain and simple. 

[zep73]

IMO compassion is what makes us human. So if you don't have it, you just pose as one. You are not one.

[TigerBright19]

Chemical imbalances, crazy hormones, and a touch of insanity.

 

 

[the13bats]

5 hours ago, Eldorado said:

Humans are the glory and the scum of the universe, concluded the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal, in 1658. Little has changed. We love and we loathe; we help and we harm; we reach out a hand and we stick in the knife.

We understand if someone lashes out in retaliation or self-defence. But when someone harms the harmless, we ask: “How could you?”

Humans typically do things to get pleasure or avoid pain. For most of us, hurting others causes us to feel their pain. And we don’t like this feeling. This suggests two reasons people may harm the harmless - either they don’t feel the others’ pain or they enjoy feeling the others’ pain.

Full article at The Conversation: Link

Great example, look how some treat others in political here.

[openozy]

We shouldn't be too hard on ourselves,a lot of other creatures do similar things,just that we do it on a grand scale.

[MissJatti]

Why do toddlers stomp on ants?

[Hankenhunter]

Human's have created a dog eat dog society. Where the rich get richer, and evil gets away with it more often than not. Next up, hell on earth. A man made construct that is becoming reality.

[openozy]

55 minutes ago, Hankenhunter said:

Next up, hell on earth

I think we will have this sooner than later.

[Duke Wellington]

13 hours ago, Eldorado said:

Humans are the glory and the scum of the universe, concluded the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal, in 1658. Little has changed. We love and we loathe; we help and we harm; we reach out a hand and we stick in the knife.

We understand if someone lashes out in retaliation or self-defence. But when someone harms the harmless, we ask: “How could you?”

Humans typically do things to get pleasure or avoid pain. For most of us, hurting others causes us to feel their pain. And we don’t like this feeling. This suggests two reasons people may harm the harmless - either they don’t feel the others’ pain or they enjoy feeling the others’ pain.

Full article at The Conversation: Link

Humans are led by their emotions, traumas, and psychological needs.

What they tend to do is use other people to cope and get their needs met. Some do it constructively, some do it to the harm of others. When you come across someone who is abusive and sadistic towards you for no valid reason, then they have a trauma that happened to them hidden from sight, and distorted perceptions of the world and other people. Their behaviour is their way of coping with their related emotions.

With bipolar they are like a roller coaster of ups and downs, and with borderline they are hypersensitive to negative emotions. Both can go down the route where they discover being abusive, sadistic, and controlling can be used to make themselves feel better. Its a route into anti-social personality disorder.

I dont remember his name but there is a psychologist who discovered that hierarchical standing and being brought up in an adverse or abusive environment impacts a persons serotonin levels. Genetics and the tendency of some to obsess over traumas makes it worse.

What the bipolar, borderline, and ASPDs, are doing with their behaviour is giving themselves a serotonin boost to make themselves feel good. If you experiment when you are stressed (as an example) with being controlling and dominating you will discover it makes you feel good. Increasing your own hierarchical standing while pushing other people down the pecking order gives you a serotonin boost. Thats what they are up to as a means of coping with their issues.

Such people are challenging to be around because they are reducing your serotonin levels for you by pushing you down the pecking order. Lower serotonin levels makes you feel stressed, angry, upset, etc.

If someone wrongs you and you do something back to them then you will also discover the sadistic kick it  gives you also makes you feel good. It too gives you a serotonin boost. But with the crazies they do that to people who haven`t done anything to them from our perspective. You have to remember that they have distorted perceptions of other people, the world around them, and themselves too.

With the crazies they will have had a horrendous childhood. That normally happens at the hands of their parents, although historically there have been problems with it in the Catholic Church. The trauma that happened to them occurs a such a young age that their minds and understanding of themselves, other people, and the world around them, haven`t developed yet. They go wonky giving them some quite distorted perceptions. With the sociopaths they come to believe the universe is a dark, evil, corrupt place.

They hate everything and everyone, although they try to hide that when around other people. They can be controlling and sadistic to make themselves feel good. And, because they are essentially denied any happiness in life because of what happened to them then they dont think anybody else should be entitled to it either.

They target happy people, confident people, popular people, intelligent people, successful people, anybody that has something positive about them or in their lives. They try to control and dominate them, they abuse and bully them, ultimately its like a depraved version of jealousy where they want to destroy their targets to make them as negative, bitter, and unhappy in life, as they are.

Best advise - keep your distance from them and if they try it on with you complain and expose.

[jethrofloyd]

[TigerBright19]

People are evil because deep down they are angry at themselves and hate themselves for their own failures, which they don't confront and sort out, so they blame everyone else instead.  So to keep up the charade that it is everyone else's fault they build up a fan base to get attention and hear what they want to hear i.e. your great and everyone else is wrong.  Much like a bully and his gang of hoodlums.  Their strength is in numbers, which is why when they are alone they crumble as they feel completely vulnerable and insecure when alone.  So they make war with everyone around them, even themselves, and turn to violence to shield themselves from the true reality of their situation that they feel insecure as an individual based on their own merits.  That insecurity makes them aggressive until they have nobody left to blame but themselves.  In other words, it is a chemical imbalance that makes their senses go nuts.  Insecurity does crazy things.  A dog growls, a snake shows its fangs, a scorpion raises its tail. and an insecure human does.....everything bad in human history.

 

 

Edited September 27, 2020 by TigerBright19

[XenoFish]

So simply being angry makes you "evil"?

[lightly]

12 hours ago, XenoFish said:

The feeling of power plain and simple. 

That's what I thought ..... I think maybe that need for some sort of, any sort of, Control arises from a sence of helplessness .... basically, Fear.      .          .                   .     ?

[XenoFish]

14 minutes ago, lightly said:

That's what I thought ..... I think maybe that need for some sort of, any sort of, Control arises from a sence of helplessness .... basically, Fear.      .          .                   .     ?

Probably not even fear. Simple control and dominance. We've evolved technological, but mentally not so much. We still have our primate drives.

[Duke Wellington]

1 hour ago, TigerBright19 said:

People are evil because deep down they are angry at themselves and hate themselves for their own failures, which they don't confront and sort out, so they blame everyone else instead.  So to keep up the charade that it is everyone else's fault they build up a fan base to get attention and hear what they want to hear i.e. your great and everyone else is wrong.  Much like a bully and his gang of hoodlums.  Their strength is in numbers, which is why when they are alone they crumble as they feel completely vulnerable and insecure when alone.  So they make war with everyone around them, even themselves, and turn to violence to shield themselves from the true reality of their situation that they feel insecure as an individual based on their own merits.  That insecurity makes them aggressive until they have nobody left to blame but themselves.  In other words, it is a chemical imbalance that makes their senses go nuts.  Insecurity does crazy things.  A dog growls, a snake shows its fangs, a scorpion raises its tail. and an insecure human does.....everything bad in human history.

I disagree with several points in there.

A young child hasn`t been through their development yet where they see other people as separate from themselves and distinct from each other. Its a bit like autism in a sense.

When that young child gets traumatised then they see themselves as good, and the rest (which is one thing to them) as evil. Their development going on from there is messed up due to their fixation on the trauma so they never move beyond seeing everything else as one, big, bad, evil, thing.

That soon to be sociopath doesnt hate themselves, doesn`t perceive themselves as a failure, and therefore isn`t taking these two things out on other people. Their behaviour is an attack against the big, bad, evil, universe, that wronged them and messed up their lives. It is envy that drives them, envy of happy people, people with something going for them, envy at those getting on and doing well in their lives. The young emerging sociopath wants to extinguish the light that exists because they cannot have it themselves. They want to drag the entire world down to their level.

When around one you have to hide the light in yourself or they will target you. Wearing your strengths on your sleeve gets you targeted, if you seem happy it gets you targeted, doing well in life gets you targeted. They account for only 2% to 5% of the population but in a group environment people who cannot cope being around them will cave to them. They will bully the target too, act miserable in life, and pretend to be just like the sociopath.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is different although its produced by abuse at a young age too. So its common to find ASPDs have narcissism in their disorder. NPD is when the young child didn`t figure out who they were due to parents mocking, humiliating, belittling, and pulling their perceptions of themselves all over the place. Its an identity disorder why the person never developed stable identity.

As such the things that people say and do around them, and the life experiences they have, are able to pull any notion of an identity they have all over the place. If the information about themselves is negative, they get a negative identity making them feel distressed. Hence, the NPD person spends every moment of their lives trying to be perfect so they can feel good.

Anything you say or do around one, which from the NPD persons perspective has negative connotations about them, causes them distress. The reaction is to punish the person that did it and this is why they bully and abuse. From a healthy persons perspective a NPD person is challenging to be around which makes them want to keep their distance. And when they try to keep their distance the NPD persons perception of themselves is pulled in a negative direction causing the same volatile response and abusive response.

NPD is running at about 15% of the population in the US/UK.

[Duke Wellington]

11 minutes ago, XenoFish said:

Probably not even fear. Simple control and dominance. We've evolved technological, but mentally not so much. We still have our primate drives.

We have evolved in such a way that our serotonin levels are heavily influenced by our social standing.

It is low serotonin which causes control and dominance. Those two strategies raise a persons serotonin levels making themselves feel better.

[XenoFish]

2 minutes ago, Cookie Monster said:

We have evolved in such a way that our serotonin levels are heavily influenced by our social standing.

It is low serotonin which causes control and dominance. Those two strategies raise a persons serotonin levels making themselves feel better.

Evolved monkey brain go grrr.

[Duke Wellington]

1 hour ago, XenoFish said:

Evolved monkey brain go grrr.

Basically, yes.

But at a very young age so it does way more damage, and it isn`t currently known how to reverse that damage. They recon by the age of 5 most peoples personalities are 95% set in stone.

[Jon the frog]

18 hours ago, Eldorado said:

Humans are the glory and the scum of the universe, concluded the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal, in 1658. Little has changed. We love and we loathe; we help and we harm; we reach out a hand and we stick in the knife.

We understand if someone lashes out in retaliation or self-defence. But when someone harms the harmless, we ask: “How could you?”

Humans typically do things to get pleasure or avoid pain. For most of us, hurting others causes us to feel their pain. And we don’t like this feeling. This suggests two reasons people may harm the harmless - either they don’t feel the others’ pain or they enjoy feeling the others’ pain.

Full article at The Conversation: Link

It's just a normal animal behavior.... we are just a species of mammals after all. 

Hurting the ones that are presenting lower abilities is a way to assure natural selection and give ressources to the fittest. Sad but it is...

 

[TigerBright19]

All you need is love.  People who don't feel loved or appreciated will act negatively.  In your mind think of somebody that hates you and pretend they are right in front of you.  Now tell that person that you love them and forgive them.  You will find all the hostility that was building up inside you has gone, and you can get on with your life without it bothering you again.  If it happens again, just repeat the exercise.  Schools should offer mandatory lessons on therapy so that kids will learn to overcome hostility easily when they grow up.

 

 

[XenoFish]

23 minutes ago, TigerBright19 said:

All you need is love.  People who don't feel loved or appreciated will act negatively.  In your mind think of somebody that hates you and pretend they are right in front of you.  Now tell that person that you love them and forgive them.  You will find all the hostility that was building up inside you has gone, and you can get on with your life without it bothering you again.  If it happens again, just repeat the exercise.  Schools should offer mandatory lessons on therapy so that kids will learn to overcome hostility easily when they grow up.

 

 

I get so tired of seeing that. Like love is this magical cure all to the worlds problems.Love causes more problems than anything. You need understanding, knowledge, and some compassion. People are barely domesticated animals as it is and you suggest some type of pavlovian conditioning. FYI I like my hostility and anger, it cause me to get a lot more done than some dopamine high. Too many soft people in the world. Life sucks, deal with it. 

Personally I don't care if anyone hates me. Let them. I won't "love them" nor should I forgive them either. I got a lot of people on my list, and none of those people are on the forum. In a world where people feel threatened by a glance, there is something extremely wrong. 

[the13bats]

12 hours ago, Hankenhunter said:

 Next up, hell on earth

Next up? Its here 2020 hellapalooza year featuring trump,

People are able well some to decide do i want to be a dbag to that person or not, sure some have mental issues but some are just lazy or as a great mind said,

"Some people are only happy making others feel terrible and im tired of making others happy"

Tigerbright or xeno one extreme or the other, ill take a shade of candy apple grey.

[XenoFish]

2 minutes ago, the13bats said:

Next up? Its here 2020 hellapalooza year featuring trump,

People are able well some to decide do i want to be a dbag to that person or not, sure some have mental issues but some are just lazy or as a great mind said,

"Some people are only happy making others feel terrible and im tired of making others happy"

Tigerbright or xeno one extreme or the other, ill take a shade of candy apple grey.

I'm just keeping it real. If you have a problem with that deal with it.