Agressiveness, Violence, Ostentation and Image în Actual Romanian Society

I. Introduction

People are accustomed to violence for a long time. Throughout history, wars seemed to be natural misfortunes, like plagues, famine or hurricanes. In all civilisations people have been tortured and sacrificed, humans were chased, deported, abused, starved and destroyed as cattle, and left to die on battle fields or from exhaustion – all by other humans. The victims were slaves and workers, natives and minorities, children, women and men.

Such massive and recurring aggression between humans begs for justification. Aggressors uphold that their actions are rightful and meaningful, a step towards an improved world, the warding off of evil worse than all the victims sacrificed. But the other party tells the same story the other way around. While it is wrong to accuse all parties equally, it remains surprising that no one ever waged war with motives that were wicked from his own point of view. While each warrior claims to make the world a safer place for his kinsman, the world becomes an ever more dangerous place for everyone as long as wars are fought. While politicians on all sides claim that only a strong army can secure peace, wasted wars proliferate together with arms and armies.

However, violence functions at all kind of levels. We are ourselves, individually, responsible for how we live, for our noble acts as well as for the atrocities we commit. We are not dependent on the examples of prehistoric people, on animal behaviour, on prophets, genes or economic law.

Aggression is a critical part of animal existence, which is an inherent driving force to humans, as we, too, are animals. The source of aggression within humans is a long summative list, but before trying to understand its source one must apply a working definition of aggression. Encyclopedia Britannica as any action of an animal that serves to injure an opponent or prey animal or to cause an opponent to retreat defines aggressive behavior.

David G. Myers states that aggression is any physical or verbal behavior intended to hurt or destroy. There are many types of aggressive behaviors, which can be differentiated from the factual act to the hidden motives. For example, an aggressive behavior can be negative or positive, accidental or intended, and physical or mental. Aggression can take numerous forms, the act of hitting a wall to release aggression has some of the same roots as playing football and enjoying hitting the quarterback.

What might seem like a terribly aggressive act to one person, most often the victim, might seem like an induced response to the perpetrator. Psychologist Arlene Stillwell performed an experiment where she assigned ordinary college students at random to play the role of a victim or a perpetrator in a small incident. Then she asked the students to describe the situation that had just transpired. What she found was that both victims and perpetrators deformed the truth equally to present their sides in a better light. Victims would dwell on their lasting traumas from the incident while the perpetrator might make the act seem like a one-time action provoked by insurmountable circumstances. The resulting implication is that aggression is in the eye of the beholder.