Most animals, including those that are not predators, use a form of warning aggression as their preferred method of self-defense. Gorillas are not hunters, but they posture by beating their chest, and when elephants feel threatened they posture by making loud noises or charging.
In our society, many people have the misconception that predators in the wild are constantly killing each other. But when predators are not hunting out of necessity to feed themselves and their young, they are actually far more risk averse than many of us realize.* The reason for their aversion to danger is because there are no hospitals in the wild. If a predator is injured and loses the ability to move at full speed or overpower its prey, it cannot go to an emergency room where a doctor will treat its wounds. It will starve to death.
Most carnivores and herbivores posture when they feel threatened, and so do human beings. Our nomadic ancestors were omnivores, a combination of carnivore and herbivore that gave them greater access to food resources in the wild. Just as posturing animals will make noise and try to appear larger when afraid, two men will usually posture before getting into a fight by raising their voices, standing tall, and puffing out their chests.
If human beings were naturally violent, why would warning aggression—which tries to prevent violence—nearly always precede lethal combat between human beings (except in cases of psychotic behavior, which I discuss in chapter 3). In ancient Greece, soldiers wore big helmets and screamed when going into battle. Like posturing animals, soldiers in ancient armies tried to appear larger and made noise as a form of warning aggression.
Because our posturing instinct is stronger than our killing instinct, the inaccurate musket became more popular than the deadlier longbow and crossbow. In his book On Combat, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman explains:
Napoleon said that in war, “The moral is to the physical as three is to one.” That is, the psychological factors are three times more important than the physical factors. In combat, one of the most important of these “moral” factors—or morale or psychological factors, as we would call it today—is noise.
In nature, whoever makes the biggest bark or the biggest roar is most likely to win the battle. Bagpipes, bugles and rebel yells have been used throughout history to daunt an enemy with noise. Gunpowder was the ultimate “roar,” since it had both a bark and a bite. First used as fireworks by the ancient Chinese and later in cannon and muskets, gunpowder was a noisemaker that provided sound and concussion. The concussion was felt and heard, and gunpowder provided the visual effects of flash and smoke. Since a gunpowder explosion and its drifting smoke could be tasted and smelled, it provided a powerful sensory stimulus that could potentially assault all five senses.
This is one of the primary reasons why the early, clumsy, smoothbore, muzzleloading muskets replaced the longbow and the crossbow. The longbow and the crossbow had many times the rate of fire, more accuracy and far greater accurate range when compared to the early smoothbore muskets. Yet these superior military weapons were replaced, almost overnight (historically speaking) by vastly inferior muskets. While they were inferior at killing, they were not inferior at psychologically stunning and daunting an opponent … If you are in a battle going doink, doink with a crossbow and the other guy is going Boom! Boom! with a musket, all things being equal, the doinker will lose every time.
Some observers, not fully understanding the all-important psychological aspect of combat, have assumed that the longbow disappeared because of the lifetime of training required to master it. However, this logic does not apply nearly as well to the crossbow. If training and expense were the real issues, then the tremendous expense and lifetime of training needed to create a mounted knight or cavalry trooper (and his mount) would have been sufficient to doom those instruments of war. If a weapon system provides military dominance (be it the knight, the frigate, the aircraft carrier, the fighter jet, or the nuclear missile), then a society will devote the resources needed to get that weapon system. But if a more effective weapon is found, then the merciless Darwinian evolution of the battlefield will doom the older weapon and embrace the new.
Thus, with the invention of the first crude muskets, the longbow and the crossbow were doomed, and the psychological reasons for this are, in Napoleon’s words, “three times more important than the physical …” You have probably heard of the Big Bang Theory. I call this the Bigger Bang Theory, which states that, “all other things being equal, in combat whoever makes the bigger bang wins.”29
How can a deeper understanding of aggression increase our empathy for human beings? When I was in the army a colonel told me, “In order to think strategically, you must be able to see the world from the other person’s point of view.” This reminded me of a principle from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War where he said, “Know your enemy.”30 If you can put yourself in your opponent’s frame of mind during a chess match and see the board from the opposing point of view, then you have a much better chance of winning.
When waging peace is concerned, the only way to truly know our enemy is through empathy, which causes us to realize they are not really our enemy. As Elinor “Gene” Hoffman, founder of the Compassionate Listening Project, said: “An enemy is a person whose story we have not heard.”31 Empathy tells us our true enemies are hatred and ignorance, not a particular group of people. The most effective way to fight enemies such as hatred and ignorance is with the techniques of waging peace.
Using hatred against hatred is like throwing gasoline on a fire, but when empathy is applied strategically, it has the potential to extinguish hatred like water dousing a flame. As I explain in my other books, the civil rights movement is an example of the strategic application of empathy, and waging peace gives us many effective ways to resolve conflict, which are more reliable than the last resort of violence.
Since empathy and its higher expression of unconditional love offer us the deepest insight into another human being, when Sun Tzu said, “Know your enemy” and Jesus said, “Love your enemy” they were essentially saying the same thing. The deepest way to know another human being is through the unconditional love that Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Elinor “Gene” Hoffman, and many other spiritual teachers taught us to embrace.
Gaining a deeper understanding of aggression taught me that warning aggression (also known as posturing) in all animals is caused by fear or another form of discomfort. The same is true for human beings. When people behave aggressively toward me, I can have more empathy for them if I perceive the fear, frustration, confusion, or other painful emotion causing their aggression. It is easier to have empathy for a fearful, frustrated, or confused person, rather than an angry person.
Psychologist Erich Fromm said, “There are many layers of knowledge; the knowledge which is an aspect of love is one which does not stay at the periphery, but penetrates to the core. It is possible only when I can transcend the concern for myself and see the other person in his own terms. I may know, for instance, that a person is angry, even if he does not show it overtly; but I may know him more deeply than that; then I know that he is anxious, and worried; that he feels lonely, that he feels guilty. Then I know that his anger is only the manifestation of something deeper, and I see him as anxious and embarrassed, that is, as the suffering person, rather than as the angry one.”32
The more deeply you perceive another human being and embrace our shared humanity, the better you can understand the other person’s point of view and the more strategically you can think. By giving us the deepest form of knowledge into the perspective of another human being, empathy creates the strongest foundation for strategic thinking.
Human beings became predators at some point in our primordial past, and we share the posturing instinct with other predators. But we are the most unusual predator in the world, because as far as we know, we are the only predator that