This was a very powerful reframing of the idea, especially after setting up the biological sources of aggression. Inventing new, accessible, and even useful outlets or ways to exernalize aggression instead of suppressing it could help a lot of people. The very idea that aggression could be a real need that benefits from relief could be a huge breakthrough in helping people manage their general mental health under extreme conditions like long term isolation. It also implies that suppressing aggression may cause depression, which any situation where you've been made to feel powerless is in effect, defined by.
It sort of makes sense that our societies have created social taboos around aggression needs that started as necessary but metastasized over time, the same way we have managed to dement other needs like sexuality, food, and companionship with primative categorical tools that produce versions and understandings of them that are abominations. Analogously, in that framework, depression may also be such an artifact of a similar cognitive abomination.
The idea of "men not talking about their feelings," makes more sense as men suppressing aggression because our societies use disgust taboos as a tool to manage them, in a very similar way that disgust is used to control womens' sexuality. When you view aggression as a physiological need, and then analogize it to how we obviously pervert other needs by managing them with disgust, some conceptual dominoes start to fall.
Admittedly I'm sounding this out for the first time myself, but if aggression is a physiological response to being threatened, creative activities can relieve our aggression needs because they are a reassertion and expression of self that has been threatened. Powerlessness causes aggression, and creativity is often a response to it. The reason physicality "works," on depression because it directs all the faculties that would be an aggression response outward. Lifting weights, running, martial arts, even more advanced yoga, or any exercise is going to provide some relief of that need. It's different from peace, rest, sympathy, or entertainment and it could also apply to things like gambling and substance abuse, where the masochism (def: craving of intensity) is a release for inverted agressive needs.
My close male friends are all type-A giant personalities, and the things we have in common are these intense activities that in effect, manage aggression. We do hyper intense things together like riding motorcycles and horses, snowboarding, lift weights, make heavy music, perform, code, and write (among other things), which are all high intensity activities that are assertions of self, and in effect, relieving a need for aggression.
Viewed as something essential or a need, engineering people (socially or otherwise) to be immoderately less aggressive would be like doing the same for appetite, sexuality, or sociability, and literally make them the expression of the disgust that motivated altering them.
Unbelievable what the reframing of a concept can unlock.
This was a very powerful reframing of the idea, especially after setting up the biological sources of aggression. Inventing new, accessible, and even useful outlets or ways to exernalize aggression instead of suppressing it could help a lot of people. The very idea that aggression could be a real need that benefits from relief could be a huge breakthrough in helping people manage their general mental health under extreme conditions like long term isolation. It also implies that suppressing aggression may cause depression, which any situation where you've been made to feel powerless is in effect, defined by.
It sort of makes sense that our societies have created social taboos around aggression needs that started as necessary but metastasized over time, the same way we have managed to dement other needs like sexuality, food, and companionship with primative categorical tools that produce versions and understandings of them that are abominations. Analogously, in that framework, depression may also be such an artifact of a similar cognitive abomination.
The idea of "men not talking about their feelings," makes more sense as men suppressing aggression because our societies use disgust taboos as a tool to manage them, in a very similar way that disgust is used to control womens' sexuality. When you view aggression as a physiological need, and then analogize it to how we obviously pervert other needs by managing them with disgust, some conceptual dominoes start to fall.
Admittedly I'm sounding this out for the first time myself, but if aggression is a physiological response to being threatened, creative activities can relieve our aggression needs because they are a reassertion and expression of self that has been threatened. Powerlessness causes aggression, and creativity is often a response to it. The reason physicality "works," on depression because it directs all the faculties that would be an aggression response outward. Lifting weights, running, martial arts, even more advanced yoga, or any exercise is going to provide some relief of that need. It's different from peace, rest, sympathy, or entertainment and it could also apply to things like gambling and substance abuse, where the masochism (def: craving of intensity) is a release for inverted agressive needs.
My close male friends are all type-A giant personalities, and the things we have in common are these intense activities that in effect, manage aggression. We do hyper intense things together like riding motorcycles and horses, snowboarding, lift weights, make heavy music, perform, code, and write (among other things), which are all high intensity activities that are assertions of self, and in effect, relieving a need for aggression.
Viewed as something essential or a need, engineering people (socially or otherwise) to be immoderately less aggressive would be like doing the same for appetite, sexuality, or sociability, and literally make them the expression of the disgust that motivated altering them.
Unbelievable what the reframing of a concept can unlock.