The Real Difference Between Man and Beast
via Tariq Nelson
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
[…] man differs from the animal by the fact that he is a killer; he the only primate that kills and tortures members of his own species without any reason, either biological or economic, and who feels satisfaction in doing so. It is this biologically non-adaptive and non-phylogenetically programmed “malignant” aggression that constitutes the real problem and the danger to man’s existence as a species […]
[…] The most ample - and horrifying - documentation for seemingly spontaneous forms of destructiveness are on the record of civilized history. The history of war is a report of ruthless and indiscriminate killing and torture, whose victims were men, women, and children. Many of these occurences give the impression of orgies of destruction, in which neither conventional nor genuinely moral factors had any inhibitory effect… There is hardly a destructive act human imagination could think of that has not been acted out again and again. […]
Quoted from the book The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness by Erich Fromm