Bjarne Timonen

Humans suffer from aggression. We all have it, it’s an evolutionary leftover meant to protect ourselves and our peers from harm. In modern societies we have managed to tame aggression through laws and cultural morality. We have set up our societies in such ways that outer aggression is channeled and any outburst of aggression is punished by law and order. This all by itself is good and quite necessary, if not, chaos would rule the streets and the law of survival of the fittest would count. But there’s an inherent problem to all of this; namely that often our aggression is not tamed at all. Though it might seem from the outside that a society is very non-aggressive, aggression might take place inside the people in heavy forms. This aggression can result in extreme harshship towards ourselves, often expressed through extremely high standards we have set up for ourselves. So the problem is, now that we have tamed the outer aggression, it has now turned towards ourselves, resulting in totally new problems we as a society are still very inexperienced in dealing with. Au contraire, in modern societies being hard on yourself is often seen as a virtue, leading you to obtaining your goals and achievements. The problems that come along with this (burnout, depression etc.) are highly prevalent and many people suffer from this in silence. The aggression we aim towards ourselves then eventually comes out again, but then through catharsis (think of the high school shootings) or in subliminal ways (i.e. religious extremism). Now there is also some sort of quality on sometimes being disciplinate on ourselves, just like it is sometimes good to be disciplinate on someone else (like the Zenmaster to it’s student). It gets the most out of us and we can pour the very best out of ourselves. But there’s a very thin line between striving and harshship. So now that have spend centuries in designing our societies to keep outer aggression stabilized, we now need to focus more on our inner worlds and find ways to deal with our inner aggression. Then there’s no aggression towards others as well as ourselves.