How Finkelstein Broke the Trauma Bond and Beat the Holocaust

Traumatic Memory and the Struggle Against Systematic Evil

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Contents

What Causes Human Aggression, and How it is Disseminated in Society

1.

This book does not promise the reader money, power or happiness, and it is not an inspirational book. On the other hand, it does offer an important kind of self-help — it contains a comprehensive theory of aggression and evil, and shows how certain courageous people have broken free of the cycle of violence in which our world is enmeshed. It explains how aggression replicates itself in human interactions, how victims become aggressors, and how aggression becomes systemic evil — all important insights, to be sure; but more importantly, it also examines how certain individuals were able to break free of this ugly cycle.

It is true that humankind is caught in a cycle of violence, coercion and deceit, but it is the conviction of this author that every individual can find a good way to manage the effects of this omnipresent aggression, and to a great extent break free of its influence. In a great many cases this starts by developing a thoughtful moral code, one that is cognizant of the values of honesty, cooperation rather than domination, and a thoughtful win-win negotiating strategy.

But these are easy things to say, and hard to do. Aggression and deceit have a powerful hold on humanity's imagination, and on the world's most powerful institutions. Why is aggression so powerful in human affairs? Where does aggression come from, and what's the difference between aggression and systemic evil? This book addresses these questions from the micro and macro viewpoints, both the individual and societal points of view. One is able to adopt both viewpoints because the manner in which societies fall under the spell of aggression is essentially the individual case writ large.

Aggression is something we all know when we see it, but it arises from the seemingly unknowable emotional orientations of individuals. How are these aggressive emotional orientations disseminated in society? Victims of human violence tend to internalize the aggression they have endured, and afterwards act out that internalized aggression against others, or against themselves. In other words, the abused child grows up to become an abuser — this insight has become part of the vernacular wisdom of humankind. But what causes that to happen, and what are the implications of it?

Why, in other words, don't people learn from their violent experiences, and chose a different way? A few do, but more don't, because the manner in which they become bonded to aggression is a process that is largely unconscious. So, what exactly is the relationship between psychological trauma, human aggression and the problem of systemic evil? It is precisely this malevolent triumvirate that this book interrogates, ultimately concluding that psychological trauma and traumatic memory is the medium by which aggression is most often internalized, and then acted out.

How does that happen? Victims of human brutality can quickly become trauma-bonded to aggression as the highest and most authentic emotional state, and for that reason seek to rationalize its brutal effects; but unacceptable human aggression — when hidden, rationalized, covered-up or romanticized — becomes a form of evil. When the state or other powerful institutions systematically use this kind of evil it becomes a form of systemic evil. (Think Hitler, Stalin and the six major genocides that broke out in the 20 century. All were all examples of systemic evil.) The key to understanding systemic evil is understanding the way traumatic memory is manipulated by sociopathic tyrants in order to start wars, persecute minorities or cause violence generally — and the way this mass process tends to bond people to aggression on a mass level.

That, in outline form, is the cycle of destruction in which humankind is caught. The pivotal issue is the way aggression changes people, making them more violent, or at least more aggressive, as they internalize the aggression they have endured, witnessed or perpetrated. On the face of it, that part of this book's theory seems simple; but when taken as part of a comprehensive theory of aggression, it threatens popular ideas regarding cognition and behavior. One popular belief is that victims of violence ought to be able to learn from — or even become ennobled by — the violence they endure; people cling to this idea, it seems, partly in order to justify their belief in the progress, ethical and otherwise, of the societies in which they live. (One is reminded of Dostoyevsky's belief, one quite reminiscent of medieval Christianity, that suffering "purifies the soul," whereas in reality suffering tends to corrode the soul and disorient personal agency.)

This book insists that the truth is simple but hard: victims of violent oppression are precisely the ones that seek to oppress others. On some level this is a truth of which we are all aware, but it is also a truth we wish to ignore or suppress. A few individual victims of violence and oppression learn from their experience, and since they are able to escape the cycle of aggression they were previously caught in, these individuals become the teachers of humankind. (One thinks of Gandhi and Martin Luther King.) But many more victims of violence and oppression can hardly wait to start oppressing someone else; and if they are not able to do so personally, they identify with — and support — people who do.

Again: this happens when people are traumatized by human aggression, because they tend to internalize the aggression they endure, and become bonded to it as the centralizing principle of life, wholly or in part. And since that kind of aggressive emotional orientation demands to be expressed, they either seek out new victims, or end up acting out — in a process far more common than people realize — their internalized aggression against themselves. Women very often tend to take out their internalized aggression against themselves, in the form of depression, self-harm, substance abuse, sleep disturbance and self-doubt; men tend to act it out against others. That's how the cycle of violence works.

Of course, there are aggressive people whose particular brand of aggression did not come from being personally victimized by aggression, but those who were so victimized are often the most active — and vocal — in acting out the aggression they have internalized. Find leaders of violent social movements, find the most racist and xenophobic and hateful among them (especially those who demand the right to hurt the weak and vulnerable) and you will usually find people who have themselves suffered great abuse, and who have internalized that aggression. The trauma bond is the electrical charge that holds the entire malignant cycle of societal aggression together.

That being the case, understanding the trauma bond — and then doing something about it — could tip the scales toward survival of the species. The hopeful reality is this: the aggression that victims internalize, and the aggressive worldview to which they become bonded, can be deconstructed over time. This can be accomplished, first, when victims of violence talk about what happened to them with someone whom they trust; and secondly, by participating in some form of socially-beneficial behavior that specifically has to do with the aggression that originally caused the trauma. (For example, victims of rape and violence against women recover more quickly by working with other victims to change the laws to better protect women in the future, and by raising consciousness in general about crimes against women.) In that way victims seek to reverse-engineer the psychological damage they've experienced, by deconstructing the aggression that was internalized, making both it and the traumatic memory manageable.

Traumatic memory is by definition a wound that cannot heal — but it can be managed, and it can be managed well. What is different about this book is its insistence that psychological trauma resulting from human aggression is different from trauma resulting from the earthquake, the tornado or the house fire. Traumata from man-made violence — war, genocide, rape and criminal assaults — create traumatic memories in the form of overwhelming emotions, first experienced during the violence; but they also have the capacity to influence later thought and behavior, because traumatic memory as a result of human violence is a remnant of the violence itself, emotions that are frozen in time in the victim's memory. The result is an aggressive emotional orientation of which the victim may be mainly unaware.

It is because human actors engage in war, genocide, rape and criminal violence that traumatic memories from these experiences influence attitudes toward humanity and society in general. Traumata from natural disasters, on the other hand, tend to trigger chaotic memories and feelings, but not necessarily aggression. It is at the time of the original human violence that the aggression is internalized, so to overcome the after-effects the individual must strive to deconstruct aggressive emotional orientations that were internalized during the traumatizing events. Those same aggressive emotional orientations tend to remain, and can develop a life of their own as part of a traumatic memory. Needless to say, the victim may be completely unaware of the cause of the aggression she is now feeling, especially if she is directing that aggression against herself.

Aggression can be caused in many ways, but trauma bonding is important to understand, this writer insists, because it happens unconsciously, because it is so common, and because its malevolent after-effects can be deconstructed. It also appears to be the main way that aggression is unconsciously disseminated in society, from parent to child, person to person, and institution to individual. The experience of violence, of human aggression, enters the personality in a particularly powerful and behavioraltering way. But it should go without saying, of course, that aggression in societies arises for other reasons than the internalization of aggression during a psychologically traumatizing event. Therefore, before we look further at traumatic memory and aggression, it would probably be a good idea to take a brief look at some other causes of human aggression.

2.

Inherent Aggression. Males tend to be more aggressive than females from a very early age, at least according to specialists in early childhood development; there is a significant relativity between testosterone and aggression, which requires the learning of coping mechanisms and social skills on the part of males. But can we honestly say that testosterone is the problem? No, because that same testosterone can be used to become a superb ballet dancer, a gifted scientist, or a loving husband and father. Testosterone is no more the cause of aggression than alcohol is the cause of alcoholism.

Whether testosterone leads to violence or not depends entirely on how one learns to sublimate one's aggression, and to channel it into socially-acceptable goals. Those who can control and channel their aggressive impulses thrive; those who can't go to prison, or waste their lives in a highly unromantic pursuit of self-destruction. Sublimating aggression is a process that is learned. Some people never get the hang of it, but most do.

But whence comes all this inherent human aggression? From the fact that humans are descendants of violent animals, animals that fought and killed each other, who hunted and ate the flesh of other creatures. Once people developed societies, they sought power and developed empires by engaging incessantly in wars with each other, seeking also to reduce women to sexual slavery, and ritually killing animals and each other to propitiate a variety of angry gods. This violence we inherit in our biological DNA, and in various cultural influences. (Of all the cultural influences that make us more violent, those of patriarchy, nationalism and militarism are probably the strongest.)

At the time of the Neolithic Revolution, humans built huge slave empires of a surpassing brutality, and during the Industrial Revolution approximately ten thousand years later Europeans developed weapons to further enslave vast sections of the earth (what we today call 'the developing world') in order to steal their natural resources, employ cheap labor, and acquire new markets. We inherited the emotional remnants of European wars and imperialism in our cultural DNA, not to mention several centuries of incredibly brutal religious wars, and the European penchant for solving social problems by dominating others. But there's little doubt that the original source of human aggression comes from our collective past as violent animals 'red in tooth and claw' in the forest primeval.

Even right-wing Christian evangelicals who don't believe in evolution of organisms unknowingly acknowledge this fact in their imagery. If you ask them where aggression comes from, they say it came from the Fall in the Garden of Eden. But what lured Adam and Eve into eating the forbidden fruit in the first place? A lowly serpent, that's what. And look at the pictorial representations of the Devil in both religious and popular culture — check out the tail, the hooves, the horns and that hairy body!

This is a creature that is half human and half animal, a ferocious beast that is trying to become a human — which in metaphoric terms is exactly what humanity is doing right now. The struggle with our inherent aggression is what drives the question of human good and evil, partly because it is a fundamental problem that underlies all human thought and culture; but more immediately, if we can't get a handle on it, humankind seems destined to destroy itself. We're violent animals that have somehow acquired the gift of reason, and are going through an especially tumultuous adolescence, in which we're all struggling to make sense of the weird combination of reason and raw aggression that makes up the human personality. The scariest part is that what we believe to be rational decision-making is too often driven by aggressive emotional orientations that are more likely to push us in the direction of self-destruction than enable us to find rational answers to problems. This struggle with human aggression — a fair amount of which is inherent — is the great dilemma of our time.

Situational Aggression. The remarkable documentary film Blackfish tells the disconcerting story of killer whales that are held in captivity in order to participate in carefully choreographed shows aimed at entertaining human spectators. Specifically the film is about Tilicum, a killer whale that was involved in the deaths of three trainers at two facilities owned by SeaWorld. (SeaWorld is a chain of animal-theme parks that feature performances by captive orca, sea lions and dolphins.) Tilicum was captured near Iceland in 1983, and was first taken to 'Sealand of the Pacific' in British Columbia.

Two older killer whales behaved with extreme aggression toward Tilicum in captivity, which the management responded to by putting him in an inappropriately small tank; food deprivation was also used as a training method, which means that Tilicum was first given food and then deprived of it in order to sustain particular behaviors. Tilicum exhibited extreme agitation and aggression throughout his captivity, at times cooperating with and then attacking training staff. Blackfish argues convincingly that orcas — killer whales — should not be in captivity, as captivity makes them profoundly aggressive.

On 20 February 1991, Keltie Byrne, a 20-year-old competitive swimmer and marine biology student, slipped into a pool containing Tilicum and the two older orcas, and was dragged underwater by Tillicum and drowned. Shortly after that tragic incident, in early 1992, Tilicum was moved to SeaWorld Orlando, in Florida. ('Sealand of the Pacific' closed down shortly afterwards.) It was at Orlando, on July 6, 1999, that a homeless man who snuck into the pool after hours was killed by Tilicum, who tore off his swim trucks along with his testicles; the homeless man died of drowning and hyperthermia. On February 24, 2010, 40-year-old trainer Dawn Brancheau was grabbed as she was rubbing down Tilicam as part of their usual post-show routine, and was dragged underwater and mutilated in a particularly horrible way. (SeaWorld Orlando released public statements that Tilicum grabbed her by her ponytail, but witnesses say that he grabbed her by the arm.)