Baboons are violent, scheming, hierarchial, and cause unnecessary mess. It happens in baboons societies that the dominant ones create ruckus, the lesser aggressive ones are the recipients of their man(key) handling. They in turn wield their power that are less powerful than them. So every baboon plays, “I piss you because you are less than me” game.
There’s a case study. A nearby tourist lodge started dumping its remains in a dump yard miles away from a baboons place. They found it. The most aggressive baboons went there, because only they can wrestle with baboons from the other group for food. They’d eat, sleep on the trees nearby rarely visiting their home group. This was going on for sometime. There was an outbreak of tuberculosis in the baboons living at the food dumpyard. It killed all of them living there in a short time.
After few years, the dynamics of the home group of the baboons, aggressive ones of which stayed at the dumpyard and died subsequently, changed remarkably. The group is now left with less aggressive ones. They started playing, grooming each other, with significant reduction in overall aggression, that has never been witnessed in any baboons’ troop.
Baboons are placard holders for malice. You can observe that in baboons, malice is transmitted, that is, malice breeds malice. Pain breeds pain.
Malice is remarkably reduced when the baboons are treated nicer. The newer baboons which joined adapted to the changed group’s dynamics.
So, Intergenerational trauma.
You might say, “Well, I had great parents and siblings.” That wouldn’t usually be the case upon deeper probing. The inhibitions, inability to share your emotional pain as a kid leading to suppression, shame tactics your teachers employed, parents making you feel abandoned, various punishments meted out to you in order to make you conform to their ways, unwittingly creating anxiety in your primitive brain by being unpredictable, resulting in you getting disconnected from yourself…so on and so forth.
Self-protective mechanisms you developed in order to cope with distress, feeling powerful via malice could also be one.
Why didn’t other kids exhibit the belligerence you did? (They were conditioned would be a simplistic answer)
What prompted you create unnecessary suffering when you didn’t get anything out of it?
How can you say the high you got was not you attempting for a compensation due to the sense of lack or a way to cope your suppression?
Malice for no reason rarely happens in animal world, where there is no police or justice and predators are free to kill their preys, atleast when they are easily available. But they don’t, usually.
I doubt intraspecies malice in pack animals happens in the animal world.
“Lust to kill” seems to be an importation from films.
So you don’t know whether malice is inborn, except what Peter might have said. It’s very easy to take defensive and cynical stands.
And what Peter said regarding sarcasm is blatantly incorrect, in my experience.
What you know is, malice happens as a result of existing unhappiness, which is also everybody’s experience. Keep aside how much of it is inborn.
Work on happiness and see where it leads.
This is a note to myself as well. I gladly welcome any suggestions.