Part I

Ever wonder why there have been so much desire and demand to de-weaponise the society for creating a peaceful milieu? As if just by eliminating the physical presence of weapons, we could restore the halcyon days of yore. Had that been true, the invasion of Iraq by the USA and the allied forces -- to search for and destroy the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) -- would have led to a smooth transition from despotism to democracy.

In countries such as Pakistan, we often lament the ever-increasing levels of violence. Some attribute it to an easy access to weapons and some others find fault with the drug and Kalashnikov culture brought into Pakistan by General Zia and his coteries. But the violence is not manifested only in gun-wielding terrorists and drug-inhaling brats; you find it in streets after a minor accident, you observe it in schools when a child behaves contrary to the teacher’s commands, you feel it when your spouse fumes at both ends without even a fire, and you become a victim of it if you belong to a different community, ethnic or religious group, practice a distinct set of rituals, or simply savour a different potion.

But here we are more concerned with the wider scale of aggression and violence that we have been witnessing; the target of which are innocent people doing their jobs, taking care of their families, and who have hardly ever bothered anybody else. The couple burned in a village in Punjab, the houses torched in Gojra, the places of worship targeted in Lahore, intellectuals such as Saba Dashtyari killed in Balochistan, Narendra Dabholkar shot dead in Maharashtra and secular bloggers hacked to death in Bangladesh, Yazidi women being enslaved in Syria, and Nigerian girls abducted by Boko Haram; all point to increasing aggression and violence, especially in the Muslim majority countries.

On the contrary, we see thousands of the German people welcoming refugees from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan into their country; the same German people who just a few decades ago supported a racial maniac called Hitler and dispatched millions of Jews, gypsies, and others to concentration and liquidation camps. What is it that prompts a group of people turn against another with ferocious zeal? Is it religion or ritual? Is it colour or creed? Are these ideologies such as nationalism and nihilism? Is it a conflict between civilizations and cultures? Or do the aggressors simply have a psychological problem such as neurosis, resulting from frustration, megalomania, or paranoia?

These question call for a multi-disciplinary approach encompassing at least three fields of social sciences i.e. political science, psychology, and sociology. There were social scientists such as the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) and the German social psychologist, Eric Fromm (1900-1980) who explored these questions.

Gramsci propounded his famous theory of Cultural Hegemony that describes how states use cultural institutions to maintain power in a capitalist society. His early death prevented him from observing the hegemony that the Soviet Union imposed on the eastern European countries after its victory in World War II. His Prison Notebooks written during and after his incarceration by Mussolini’s fascist regime are still considered masterpieces.

Eric Fromm was much more prolific and his books from Art of Loving to The Sane Society have influenced an entire generation of readers interested in such topics. But the link of aggression with frustration was psychologically explored as far back as in the first half of the 20^th century when Freud wrote his two seminal works: The Future of an Illusion (1927) and the Civilization and its discontents (1930). Then John Dollard and Neal Miller proposed Frustration-Aggression Theory in 1940, followed by another seminal work by Adorno et al in the shape of a book, The Authoritarian Personality published in 1950.

Here we will first consider Freud’s ideas because they were the result of his thoughts formed after decades of empirical research and wide readings. Freud’s psychodynamic approach sees aggression as a basic human instinct and argues that all humans find aggression pleasurable to some extent. Psychodynamics underplays the role of situational factors in determining aggressive behaviour, but Freud’s ideas with a broader spectrum of religiosity are much more impressive.

In Future of an Illusion, Freud defines religion as an illusion mostly consisting of dogmas and assertions that tell us something which we have not ourselves discovered, and demand that we should give them credence. Freud located religions in our primal ancestors who believed them and forbad us to raise the question of their authenticity. In his words, beliefs present "fulfilment of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind".

According to Freud, human beings crave for fatherly protection both in this life and hereafter, and wish to remain immortal; religion provides an assurance for both. That may be one reason why people tend to become aggressive and violent when their religious ideas are questioned. They feel humiliated at the slightest disagreements with their cherished ideals. It is like robbing them of their security and insurance entitlements for an afterlife. People can give up their present possessions to save their life, because this is temporary and relatively of lesser value in their eyes, but religion promises an ever-lasting bliss and if killing others may guarantee it, so be it. Freud calls it an ‘illusion’ and differentiates it from an ‘error’.

An error can be scientific without any emotions involved, while an illusion is essentially wishful thinking that sometimes becomes a reality and reinforces religious thoughts. The defence mechanism of religious thought is so strong that when wishes come true -- such as victory in a match or cure for an illness -- they are attributed to the Almighty by the believers. But when wishes are not fulfilled, the supernatural forces are not held responsible.

Freud views human nature as anti-social and rebellious with high sexual and destructive tendencies that can only be influenced by individuals who can set an example and whom masses recognise as their leaders. And as compensation for good behaviours, religion promises an ever-lasting reward which no worldly power can do.

He carries his argument forward in his next book, Civilization and its Discontents, where he discusses the fundamental tensions between civilization and the individual; civilization demands conformity and instinctive repression, whereas individuals crave for instinctive freedom. Traditionally, civilization prohibits killing, rape, and adultery by implementing punishments if rules are broken. On the contrary, humankind’s primitive instincts long for insatiable gratification. This, according to Freud, is an inherent quality of civilization that instills perpetual feelings of discontent in its citizens, hence the title of the book.

Here Freud introduces two new concepts: the ‘pleasure principle’ and the ‘oceanic feeling.’ According to ‘the pleasure principle’ when a pleasurable situation is prolonged it creates a feeling of contentment, and for most humans the purpose of life is simply the programme of this principle. And religion provides an ‘oceanic feeling’ of wholeness, limitlessness, and eternity, which Freud himself was never able to experience.

Freud thinks that the fundamental paradox of civilization is that it is a tool we have created to protect ourselves from unhappiness, and yet it becomes our largest source of unhappiness. One reason for aggression and violence in society is that people become neurotic when they cannot tolerate the frustration that society imposes in the service of its cultural ideals. The society has to satisfy the ‘pleasure principle’ but civilization makes compromises of happiness to bring people into peaceful relationships with each other, by making them subject to a higher communal authority.

It seems that the more communal the authority is in favour of one community, the more vulnerable the other communities will be, and the more likely victims they become of aggression and violence from the dominant community.

In Freud’s opinion, the more a civilization circumvents the natural processes and feelings of human development and eroticism, the more discontent among citizens this repression will cause and the more aggressive drive within all human beings will be displayed, and this aggression will be directed against a rival culture. Sometimes this ill-will within the hearts of people becomes so irrevocable that civilization fails to curb and restrain these impulses. Another factor that may come into play is the predisposition of human nature towards death and destruction -- Thanatos.

In Greek mythology, Thanatos is the personification of death, and in psychology it is postulated as ‘death drive’ that allegedly compels humans to engage in risky and self-destructive acts that could lead to their own death. Behaviours such as thrill-seeking and aggression are viewed as actions which stem from this Thanatos instinct. Though it has been difficult to prove that most people have a specific drive toward self-destruction, when one looks at societies currently witnessing extreme violence one feels that Thanatos may be playing a role.

Freud says that all individuals must form some feelings of guilt for their aggressive instincts and learn to suppress them if they hope to be accepted in a civilized society. In violence-prone countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan, it appears that most people have lost all feelings of guilt -- or probably they never had them. Our refusal to confess our own atrocities in 1947, 1971 and even now, is a case in point. At the state level, still there appears to be no remorse or guilt feeling and not even a sign of introspection, as we have been observing a renewed self-congratulatory hype recently.

Read the second part: The prime movers of frustration