Aggression

According to Dictionary.com aggression is "Overt or suppressed hostility, either innate or resulting from continued frustration and directed outward or against oneself. " Jarret Wollenstein says that people blame human aggression on poverty, racism, inequality, overpopulation, alienation and bad genes. Wollenstein thinks that most things people blame aggression for are really caused by "unfulfilled human needs and desires." Therefore, it could be said that that is also the cause of aggression. In the article that I read, it said that the five factors of aggression are neurosis, desperation, envy, greed and collectivism.

Neurosis

Neurotic people act irrationally to harm themselves or someone else. A humanist psychologist named Abraham Maslow wrote that there were seven basic human needs without which people become neurotic. They are:
1. Air, food, sleep, and shelter
2. Safety
3. Belonging
4. High level of self-esteem
5. Desire to become more
6. Desire to learn
7. Beauty
Maslow said that aggression is not something that everyone has or needs, just some people's reaction to frustrating circumstances.

Desperation

Wollenstein says that the government paying trillions of dollars on welfare isn’t going to help end desperation (poverty), it will just create more problems. He says to donate to “voluntary organizations” and get rid of costly regulations.

Envy

Envious people hate other people who are successful and rich just because they are successful and rich. Wollenstein says that China and Iran have problems with this because people there think that wealth is “unfair or evil.” I think Wollenstein likes the idea of wealth because he says that paying everyone the same and trying to make them equal kills their incentive to do better because doing better doesn’t mean anything and they won’t get paid or respected more.

Greed

Wollenstein says wanting to be wealthy is not the same thing as being greedy. He says being greedy is think about nothing by gaining “material possessions” and not caring what the psychological effects on them and other people might be.

Collectivism

Definition: The principles or system of ownership and control of the means of production and distribution by the people collectively, usually under the supervision of a government.

Collectivism might sound like something good that wouldn’t lead to aggression but it’s not. Some collectivist sayings are:
“The needs of the people take precedence over the rights of the individual”
“The common good”
“The end justifies the means”
If the end is “economic equality and social justice”, does that really justify the means? What if, to achieve this utopia, you had to kill 69,911,000 people? It’s estimated that that is how many people the Soviet Union slaughtered. Hitler and the Nazis killed 6 million “enemies of the state” during World War II, just because they were Jewish or Catholic of anything else different from them.

Stopping Aggression

Wollenstein says, to end aggression, we should:
1. Create free societies where prosperity is normal, not extraordinary
2. Give children a good education and explain about aggression, greed, and envy and how they are irrational
3. Forget the idea of the nation, state, or race having an identity that’s different from the individuals that make up the group