1972c Eng PDF

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The Erich Fromm Theory of Aggression
Erich Fromm
(1972c-e)
The Erich Fromm Theory of Aggression was written to introduce in Fromms book The
Anatomy of Human Destructiveness and was first published in: The New York Times
Magazine, New York (27. 2. 1972), pp. 14-15, 74, 76, 80-81, 84 and 86. - Numbers in
{brackets} indicate the next page in the first English publication.
Copyright 1972 by Erich Fromm; Copyright 2011 by The Literary Estate of Erich Fromm,
c/o Dr. Rainer Funk, Ursrainer Ring 24, D-72076 Tuebingen / Germany. Fax: +49-(0)7071-
600049; E-Mail: fromm-estate[at-symbol]fromm-online.com.
What with international and civil wars, the increasing use of torture, rising violence in
the cities and the threat of nuclear war, no explanation is needed for the lively current
theoretical interest in the problem of human violence and aggression. In fact, if there is a
question it is why it took such along tine for aggression to be recognized as a major
psychological problem.
Freud alone, in the early nineteen-twenties, became so impressed with the crucial
role of human aggression (perhaps as a consequence of the first World War), that he
undertook a radical revision of his whole theory. He substituted for the polarity of the
two governing passions--sexuality and self-preservation--a new polarity: the life instinct
(eros, including sexuality) and the death instinct, the drive for destruction of oneself or
of others. The change failed to impress the public, and instead, Freuds increasing
popularity was largely based on his theory of sex; in the period of conspicuous
consumption, sexual consumption, too, became respectable.
But forty years later, another author, Konrad Lorenz, the eminent student of animal
behavior (ethology), succeeded where Freud had failed. In his book On Aggression,
first published in German in 1963 and translated into English in 1966, he postulated a
hypothesis similar to Freuds in its results--that aggression is a force inherent in the
human organism--but different in its theoretical premises. Man, Lorenz argued, like his
animal ancestors, is motivated by a phylogenetically programmed,
1
spontaneously
flowing spring of aggression, situated in certain areas of his brain; this aggression, if not
expressed, accumulates and eventually explodes. In this hydraulic mechanism of
aggression the organism seeks stimuli which release the aggressive drive; but the more
aggressive energy is accumulated, the less appropriate such a stimulus has to be, even to
the point where aggression explodes without the presence of any adequate stimulus.
This is only a simplified version of Lorenzs complicated and sometimes fuzzy
theory; he has given a number of different explanations for human aggression. Since a
fuller description is not possible here, it may help to consider an example which Lorenz
himself gives. He speaks of his old Viennese aunt, who used to engage a new maid
about every 8 to 10 months. Each time she did so, the aunt was full of enthusiasm about

1
That is, an innate programming, based on the evolution of the species.

Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of


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the maid, who seemed to fulfill all her expectations. Soon, the aunts enthusiasm cooled,
and at the end of the cycle, she discovered such hateful qualities in the maid that she
eventually fired her. Lorenz interprets this cycle in terms of his hydraulic model: When
enough aggression had been dammed up in the aunts nervous system, she had to
explode, especially under circumstances where nobody else was available as
scapegoat.
Many people--laymen and professionals-.will prefer a more sophisticated
interpretation: The aunt was apparently one of those narcissistic women who want their
servants to love, admire and serve them because, in their narcissistic self-images, they are
such extraordinary mistresses, and such love is their due. When the servant does not
behave according to this expectation, the aunts narcissism is wounded, and, as usual,
the wounded narcissism results in intense fury; since the aunt cannot shed her narcissism,
she tries with a new maid and the same cycle occurs--as long as there are available
servants.
This difference in the interpretation of the aunts behavior is the main topic of this
article. Is her aggression rooted in an aggressive instinct, with its own energy source
relatively independent from outside events, or is the source to be found in the aunts
character? Both interpretations seem to be present in the history of the term ethology
itself: John Stuart Mill called it the science of character, Lorenz, the science of animal
behavior.
A few remarks on the present reception of the instinctivistic theory seem to be in
order. This reception offers a somewhat bewildering picture. Most professionals--
psychologists, neurophysiologists and anthropologists--disagree with the instinctivistic-
hydraulic theory; it is well received only among classic psychoanalysts, ethologists and
some anthropologists. Even Nikolaas Tinbergen, one of the most eminent ethologists
and a former collaborator of Lorenzs, has rejected the hydraulic theory. (Lorenz himself
modified it in 1966, although the English translation of On Aggression shows nothing
that would indicate such revision.) The educated public, on the other hand, which
usually follows scientific majority opinion, seems to favor Lorenz, if the great success of
his book and of others that have followed its lead is any indication.
There are good-reasons for both reactions. Perhaps because people had failed to
recognize the force of aggression for such a long time, they were all the more shocked
when they could ignore it no longer. What could be more soothing to their feelings of
fright and powerlessness than a theory which claims that war and violence are primarily
psychological problems, but that they are motivated by a spontaneous drive for
aggression that can be little controlled, if at all?
If we all perish, the theory implies, we can do so at least with the satisfying
conviction that our animal nature forced this tragedy in us and that we know precisely
why everything had to happen as it did. In addition, Lorenz and his followers facilitate
the acceptance of their theories among liberal and anti-war intellectuals by expressing,
no doubt very sincerely, their own horror of nuclear war, and their desire to find the
means to avoid the dreadful consequences of the aggressive instinct. Lorenzs own
suggestions in this direction are painfully banal.
As to the scientists, the reasons for their reactions to the instinctivistic theory vary
depending on their respective fields of research. Perhaps {74} the most persuasive critical
data are those offered by the neuroscientists. Briefly, most neuroscientists agree that



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mans aggression is essentially defensive; that it arises in phylogenetically programmed
brain areas, and that these areas of the brain mobilize the impulse for fight or flight
when the animal (or man) is or feels threatened. In this view, aggression is normally an
idling impulse, which is mobilized for appropriate behavior only in the service of
surrival. As Vernon H. Mark and Frank R. Ervin have shown in their brilliant rencent
study, Violence and the Brain, the concept of spontaneously flowing and self-
propelling aggressiveness holds true only for people whose reactions have become
abnormal through brain disease. It doesnot hold true for normal brain functioning. To
conclude from the normal readiness for aggression that man is constantly driven by
aggressive impulses is no more valid than the assumption that a man will commit
murder because he carries a gun for his protection.
The behaviorists, in turn, reject instinctivism because they hold that the question of
the gun--i. e., of the instinctive motivation for aggression--is scientifically irrelevant.
Their interest lies in human engineering--in the means by which a person can be made
into a killer or a saint by conditioning, or, in Skinners more sophisticated system of
neobehaviordem, by positive reinforcements. According to Skinner, his system does
not need to be built upon a basic science of the nature of man, as, for instance,
engineering is based on physics and chemistry; whether Skinner has proposed more than
a sophisticated system for the art of manipulation is not under discussion here. Whatever
the merits of behaviorism, it is hospitable to neither Freuds nor Lorenzs theories of
aggression.
Anthropology, the science from which we might expect a great deal of information
about human aggression, is somewhat disappointing. Some anthropologists claim that
man is by nature a killer; they propose that hominid ancestors of man, the
Australopithecinae, living almost two million years ago in Africa, had become a
predatory, carnivorous species and that man inherited his aggression from them.
Sherwood L. Washburn, the eminent investigator of human evolution, dissents from this
thesis; he assigns the role of a rehistorical Adam, responsible for mans fall, to early man
himself, to man the hunter. Hunting behavior, according to Washburn, is characterized
by pleasure in killing and cruelty: since man for almost all his history was a hunter,
Washburn concludes that destructiveness and cruelty were built into mans basic
equipment as a result of the evolutionary process of selection during roughly a million
years of his existence.
However, these views supporting Lorenzs thesis are contradicted by the work of
many distinguished anthropologists. The investigations of Ruth Benedict and Margaret
Mead are well known to a wide audience, they have shown that cultures characterized
by peacefulness, cooperation and lack of exploitation, like that of the Zuis, are just as
natural as others that are hostile, treacherous, exploitative and cruel, like the
Dobuans. The most interesting material has begun to be analyzed only in recent years.
Colin M. Turnbulls studies of contemporary primitive hunters in Africa, the Mbutis,
portray a society characterized by absence of war, marked aggression, private property
and hierarchy, and by the presence of economic and sexual equality, cooperativeness
and friendliness. The findings of several outstanding investigators of human prehistory
show that hunting behavior, rather than being conducive to destructiveness and cruelty,
requires generosity, cooperation and reciprocity, not to speak of a great deal of
observation and thought. Marshall D. Sahlins has even called primitive hunters the first



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affluent society, because they have what they need and have much more leisure than
their richer descendants. In addition, the picture presented by V. Gordon Childe,
Sonya Cole and others of the earliest agricultural societies in the Neolithic age, between
9,000 and 4,000 B. C., based on recent observations, point to the fact that these
societies were characterized by cooperation, a relative lack of aggression, and,
furthermore, by a matriarchal social order and religion.
It is hard to escape the impression that there is a certain bias among some older
anthropologists. It seems they are so impressed with the destructiveness to be found in
mans history--which is, after all, a very short period of less than 6,000 years--that
they find it hard to consider the rich evidence of peaceful and cooperative living in
mans prehistory; and this bias is of course reinforced by the many primitive tribes living
today which do show a great deal of aggression and cruelty. Nobody has seen this bias
more cleanly than Lewis Mumford, who has analyzed the existing evidence in The Myth
of the Machine and other works. He and the anthropological. investigators mentioned
earlier seem to have initiated a new trend in the study of mans aggression which goes
beyond the older, naive man-is-good approach as well as the equally biased man-is-
bad stage. It is to be expected that hitherto neglected data will find a fresh appreciation
and contribute to a more balanced analysis. Even now, on balance, the anthropological
data do not tend themselves readily to the instinctivistic interpretation.
Let us return from our digression on the reception of the instinctivistic theory to the
main topic, the alternative between instinct end character as the source of mans
aggression. The two key concepts, instinct and character, need some explanation.
About instinct I can be brief. For many years it was used as a flag, around which
some scholars rallied and against which others fought. A certain fanaticism was usually
observable in this discussion; when this happens in a scientific argument, the reasons
usually lie in the emotional and political overtones of the respective positions. To stress
the innate character of aggression corresponded to conservative or reactionary attitudes.
If aggression was innate, there was little hope for lasting peace and radical democracy.
On the other hand, if environment was {76} responsible, there was no fundamental
obstacle to democratic, pacifist or socialist visions. A sociological study confirmed this
very neatly in 1944. The socio-political views of 24 psychologists, biologists and
sociologists were compared with their opinion concerning the nature-nurture problem.
Among the 12 liberals or radicals, 11 were environmentalists and one a hereditarian;
among the 12 conservatives, 11 were hereditarians and one an environmentalist.
Fortunately, the climate of the discussion has cooled off in the last two decades. In
the first place, a growing number of investigators recognized that one does not get
anywhere by framing the question in terms of yes or no, but that it was more
fruitful to look at the problem in terms of a continuum--i. e., in terms of more or less.
As one formulation put fit: Most of mans behavior is learned, whereas most of a birds
behavior is not learned. Furthermore one recognized that man is also endowed with
powerful impulses, such as hunger and sexuality, which can not be ignored because they
do not fit a narrow definition of instincts.
The concept of character requires a much fuller explanation. We have to start out
with some fundamental considerations about man, as a species different from all animals
in spite of so many physiological similarities. Man can be defined as a primate in whom
two trends, both present in animal evolution from the lowest to the highest level,



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reached their fullest development: the decrease of instinctive determination of behavior,
and the increase in size and complexity of the brain, particularly the new brain,
substratum of self-awareness, symbol-formation and language. Through the fusion of
these two trends a unique new constellation arose; the birth of man had begun. This
process of birth lasted about 2 million or 500,000 years (depending on various
definitions of man) and was completed around 50,000 years ago, when modern man
made his appearance. Man during this protracted process of birth was a rather helpless
animal, lacking strong organs for attack as well as sufficient speed for defense. His reason
was not an effective guide for adequate behavior, either; it did not function fast enough
and its judgment was much inferior to that of the instincts.
If man was to survive, he needed to act immediately and decisively. How could he
do this without the help of instincts and an adequate reasoning power? What enabled
him to go beyond the stage of the prehuman primates, like the chimpanzees described
by Adriaan Kortlandt as hesitant, lacking the characteristic decisiveness of human
behavior?
O propose that mans development depended on the formation of a second na
ture, human character. What is character?
In everyday life we know what character is although often only dimly; our
understanding of men rests on our capacity to distinguish behavior traits from character
traits. When we observe a person who is very friendly to everyone, we may be aware
that his friendliness has its roots in his wish to gain favor, and that it would be naive to
take it for the manifestation of a friendly character; our judgment is confirmed when
we see all his customary friendliness lacking in his contact with persons who can be of
no use to him. Or, to take another example, we do not consider a poor person as
having a stingy character because he is very careful even with small expenditures. But we
may discover the characterological stinginess of a rich man when we observe how his
face lights up when he can make a saving.
We may not be experts in the understanding of character, but we can learn much
from the great writers and dramatists who are. Balzac, for instance, portrays not just a
persons behavior but the forces that, unknown to him, are behind it and motivate it.
Balzac, like other great writers, shows that man acts and feels according to his character;
that his character determines his behavior and is, as Heraclitus said, mans fate.
Indeed, Shakespeare, Balzac and Dostoevski are better teachers of the understanding of
mans character than most professional psychologists. (The crucial weakness of Skinners
system is that he does not appreciate the difference between behavior and character; to
him a smile is a smile, and the smiling person is of no scientific interest.) Freud is the
great exception. Although limited by his concept of sexuality, he created the foundations
for the scientific understanding of character. He showed that what we believe to be our
motives are largely fictions (rationalizations) while the forces which do motivate us
are largely unconscious.
In a more general, theoretical way we can define character as an energy-charged
system of strivings by which man regulates both his relations to others and his method
of assimilating nature, for the satisfaction of his material needs.
Character is a system; that is to say, every character trait is interrelated with every
other, and a single trait cannot be changed without changes in the whole system. That is
why to change the character of a person can be compared to splitting an atom; to



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change only his behavior can be done by conditioning.
The character system is the mainspring of behavior, and it is the factor by which
individuals differ from one another. What all men have in common are the basic
physiologically rooted impulses, Paul Macleans famous four Fs: feeding, fighting,
fleeing and ... the performance of sexual acotivities. But the mode of satisfaction of
these impulses is mediated by the character, and not only of these physiologically
conditioned drives but also those strivings which are rooted in the specificity of the
human condition, such as the need for a frame of orientation and devotion, the sense of
identity, the feeling of being able to move somebody or something, to make a dent.
In recent years an increasing {80} number of social scientists have come to believe that
while the satisfaction of the physiological needs is a necessary condition for physical
survival, their satisfaction is not a sufficient condition for happiness, nor even for mental
health or sanity.
Character has a biologically important function. It enables man, with his behavior
no longer determined by instinct, to act decisively, spontaneously and consistently; it is
a substitute for the lost instincts, a second nature which is specifically human. It is an
expression of the malleability of mans nature--yet not of an unlimited malleability, as
the behaviorists believe.
The formation of character depends on two sets of given factors. One set comprises
mans innate physiological needs and those transphysiological needs which are
specifically human; the other set constitutes the environmental conditions which are a
given in any society or social class. Character is primarily social character, shared by
most members of a society or class. Its function is to mobilize and transform general
human energy into specific forms of energy that are necessary for the proper functioning
of a given society, for man functions reliably only when he desires to do what he has to
do. The social character represents social necessity transformed into psychical
motivation. The social character is transmitted to the individual in the first years of his
life through the parents, who are the psychical agency of society; the variations
among individual characters are due to the individual factors of life history, and to
constitutional factors.
A simple example of the existence of social character is a tribe of warriors. Such a
tribe, which lives through aggression and war, could not function unless most of its
members had an aggressive and warlike character; characterological deviants will try to
behave according to the social pattern, although they might develop neurotic
symptoms, like getting sick when they ought to go on the warpath. With a tribe of
peaceful, cooperative hunters or farmers the same holds true, vice versa. A hundred
years ago the wish to save was an important trait of the social character of the middle
class; today its place is taken by the wish to spend and consume. Both traits
corresponded to different economic needs; saving was necessary for capital
accumulation, spending for increasing production.
There is, however, often a lag between social conditions of the moment and the
contemporaneous social character, because the latter has been molded by earlier social
conditions which have determined ideas, values and the character of the psychic agents--
i. e., parents. Thus in times of rapid social change individuals often meet new situations
equipped with a dated character, and find it difficult to adapt themselves to new
constellations. The present period is a good example of the difficulties and confusion



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arising from this lag.
Character is a specifically human phenomenon. Its formation required the presence
of language, symbols, values, ideologies, and tradition needed for indoctrination. Hence
only when man had fully emerged from the prehuman primates could he develop his
second nature and thus a substitute for the weakened instincts.
As I said, men are not essentially different in regard to their physiologically
determined impulses. That holds true for aggressive impulses also; mans brain, like that
of his animal ancestors, mobilizes aggressive behavior (or flight) in response to threats to
his vital interests. Human aggression on this score is only more frequent because man
can do several things which the animal cannot do: He can foresee future threats; he can
be persuaded into seeing threats where in reality none exist. Eventually, his vital interests
are not only life, food, access to females, etc., but also values, symbols, institutions,
which are a condition for his mental equilibrium. However, mans extra aggression,
that which can make him more destructive and cruel than most mammals, is rooted in
his character. (The sudden outbursts of mass destructiveness and cruelty that took place,
for instance, in Indonesia some years ago and recently in East Pakistan are not of an
instinctual nature, but are expressions of a human tendency to transcend oneself in an
orgy of blood or hate, and in that respect are similar to all other attempts at orgiastic
self-forgetting. They are too complex a phenomenon to be dealt with here.)
There are character structures in which there is very little aggression; there are others
in which various kinds {81} of aggression are the outstanding features. Such persons give
the impression that their aggressiveness is a spontaneous and constantly flowing passion.
They are chronically aggressive and their aggression is unleashed at the slightest
provocation or even without any. This type of character was probably the model of
which Lorenz thought, when he described aggression as a spontaneously flowing energy.
But the study of human individual and social character shows that while people with an
aggressive character seem to act according to Lorenzs model, there are many others is
whose character aggressiveness does not play a dominant role and who do not fit this
model at all. In fact, a simple example from psychiatric practice illustrates this. If a man
came to a psychiatrist, telling him, Doctor, I hate my wife, I hate my children, I hate
everybody and wish they would all die; he has not given an example of the aggressive
instinct, but he has made his own diagnosis, that of a deeply disturbed person. The
psychiatrist will then have to decide whether he deals with a psychotic person or with
what psychoanalysts call a neurotic character, that is, a character who is not sick in a
conventional sense, but has more difficulties in living than realistic circumstances would
account for.
The three most aggression-prone, neurotic character structures are the sadistic
character, the necrophilic character and the bored character.
Sadism is not primarily the wish to inflict paid nor a sexual perversion: In essence, it
is the passion to have absolute control over another living being. One of the most
drastic forms of control is torture and the infliction of physical pain; the less obviously
drastic and more widespread forms of sadistic control are to humiliate, to dominate, to
make another being part of oneself. Sadism is conditioned by a sense of vital
impotence, and the wish to have power over others is a compensation for the sense of
inability to have the power to create or to love. The person who suffers from emotional
impotence compensates for it by forcing, hurting and controlling another person; a



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living being becomes his thing Because he feels impotent he needs to feel omnipotent.
The character of Himmler is a textbook case of sadism: an obsessional-hoarding
character, of concentrated subalternity as Carl J. Burckhardt desribed him, filled with a
deep sense of inadequacy and impotence, submissive and cowardly, compensates for
this impotence, given certain circumstances, by the emergence of a passion for absolute
control--i .e., sadism.
By necrophilic character I mean the character attracted to all that is dead, sick,
unalive or purely mechanical. He does not want power over others as the sadist does,
but he hates and wants to destroy life. Clinically, he can be recognized by fantasies or
dreams of dismembering bodies; he frequently also dreams of feces, skeletons and
tombs. He can be diagnosed in Rorschach protocols and in interpretive questionnaires,
as Michael Maccoby has demonstrated.
He can also be recognized by the deadness of his skin, and a certain constant facial
expression which looks as if he smelled a bad odor. His craving for destruction is so
intense that he may eventually destroy himself. (A classic example is Hitlers character, as
Albert Speers description of him makes {84} particularly clear.) The necrophilic person is
also characterized by his unfailing capacity to transform everything he touches into
something dead. His own conversation is boring and his presence kills all aliveness in the
conversations of others. His opposite is the biophilic character, the person who is
characterized by his love of life and by the alive attitude with which he approaches
everything he touches. Of course, there are many blendings of the two tendencies.
Biophilia and necrophilia are in many ways similar to Freuds concepts of the life
instinct and the death instinct. There is, however, an essential difference. For Freud,
both tendencies are normal parts of the biological equipment of man, while in the view
presented here, this holds true only for biophilla. Necrophilia is a pathological outcome-
-of a mans failure to develop into a productive and alive person. In terms of Freuds
libido theory it can be identified as the malignant form of the anal character.
Perhaps the most important source of aggression and destructiveness today is to be
found in the bored character. Boredom, in this sense, is not due to external
circumstances such as the absence of any stimulation, as in the experiments in sensory
deprivation or in an isolation cell in prison. It is a subjective factor within the person,
the inability to respond to things and people around him with real interest.
In some respects, the bored character resembles those in chronic, neurotic depressed
states. There is a lack of appetite for life, a lack of any deep interest in anything or
anybody, a feeling of powerlessness and resignation; personal relations--including erotic
and sexual ones--are thin and flat, and there is little joy or contentment. Yet, in contrast
to the depressed, chronically bored persons do not tend to torture themselves by
feelings of guilt or sin, they are not centered around their own unhappiness and
suffering, and their facial expressions are very different from those of depressed persons.
They have little incentive to do anything, to plan, and at most can experience thrill but
no joy. To use another concept, they are extremely alienated. For these reasons it seems
preferable to establish the concept of the chronically bored character as distinct from the
depressed character.
Milder forms of characterological boredom are usually not conscious, as long as the
boredom can be compensated for by ever-changing stimuli. This seems to be the case
with a large number of people in industrial society for whom the compulsive



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consumption of cars, sex, travel, liquor or drugs has this compensatory function,
provided that the stimuli either have a strong physiological effect, like liquor and drugs,
or are constantly changing: new cars, new sexual partners, new places to travel to, etc.
This consumption pattern keeps people from nervous--and industry from economic--
breakdowns, and precisely for this reason they are addicted to consumption.
However, it seems that among the younger generation traditional consumption has
lost its attraction--especially among those with an affluent background and among the
poor, who cannot afford it. (It is also worth considering whether the existing culture has
ceased to provide the younger generation, as a whole, with credible norms for living.)
Among the younger generation one finds several ways of coping with the problem
of boredom. Some join groups. which permit them to share common ideals and
personal contact; they compensate in this way for their boredom (sometimes with the
help of drugs) but often are able to overcome it characterologically by the development
of genuine interests in politics, or nature, or art, or by the emergence of genuine love
for life. There are others who remain isolated, who suffer more or less silently, do not
know what to do with their lives and may develop serious psychic troubles.
However, for a large number among the affluent as well as among the poor, there
is one other way of compensating for boredom; and that is aggression, to the point of
violence and destructiveness. While love and interest are the outcome of the full
development of a person, requiring {86} concern and effort, violence and
destructiveness provide an immediately available relief from boredom for those who
have failed to develop more productively.
Boredom as serious pathology is slowly finding proper recognition. This recognition
has been stimulated by the classic sensory-deprivation experiments at McGill University
and was expressed by one of the main investigators, Woodburn Heron, in his 1957
paper, The Pathology of Boredom. Among psychiatrists, Dr. Robert Heath at Tulane
Medical School was the first to study the problem of boredom as a phenomenon of
severe pathology, to be distinguished from the classic depression. Over the last five years
I myself have seen a number of young patients, aged between 17 and 24, who showed
the traits of the boredom syndrome in an unmistakable way, and my observations are
confirmed by a number of psychoanalytic colleagues who were as impressed as I was
myself by the uniformity of this syndrome.
Harold Esler has observed a number of young people in an institution for juvenile
delinquents. Those adolescents seem to have acted criminally because it was the only
way to overcome their boredom and to experience their existence, to make a dent.
Some, reporting their experience of stabbing or killing people, described a feeling they
had never had before. They had felt the excitement of making somebody respond to
them; the response was the victims anguished face, and his groan of pain. Reading the
statements of some of the defendants in the Manson murder case, I have the impression
that one of the main motivations for the stabbings was the sensation of making oneself
feel alive in the act of killing, a feeling that was connected with sexual excitement for
one of the girls. There are other examples of spontaneous killings by previously well-
behaved and seemingly normal young persons in which it seems that uncompensated
and extremely painful boredom was the root of the unexpected destructive behavior.
There are good reasons to assume that the increase in boredom is one of the factors
responsible for the increase in aggression. The increase of boredom is brought about by



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the structure and functioning of contemporary industrial society. It is by now widely
recognized that most manual work is boring because of its monotony and repetitiveness;
much white-collar work is boring because of its bureaucratic character, which leaves little
responsibility and initiative to the individual. But leisure, meant to be the reward for
boring work, has become boring too; it follows by and large the consumption pattern,
and is in fact managed by industry, which sells boredom-compensating commodities.
The difference is that boredom in work is usually conscious, while leisure boredom is
unconscious. Among the answers to the question of how violence--and drug
consumption--can be reduced it seems to me that perhaps one of the most important
ones is to reduce boredom in work and in leisure. This requires drastic changes in our
social and economic and moral structure.
Man is a passionate being, in need of stimulation; he tolerates boredom and
monotony badly, and if he cannot take a genuine interest in life, his boredom will force
him to seek it in the perverted way of destruction and violence. I believe that the further
study of what has become the illness of the age--boredom could make an important
contribution to the understanding of aggression.

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