You only serve to further advocate my initial point of contention. As yourself this: How does being a member of society override the fact that we are still animals? How does being intelligent (even though human beings being intelligent is merely by virtue of relative observation) override our animalistic tendencies?,...it does not .
Animals also display tendencies of love, justice and pride. There is nothing entirely unique about human behavior that separates us from animals. You cannot overcome the laws of causality and that is action and consequence no matter how much you attempt to justify such behavior since the underlying consequences do not change.
The news report only serves to illustrate (in case you have missed it amidst this wall of ambiguity) is that when pressed for survival human beings will discard moral and other notions that society postulates and will resort to murder even. How is this not instinctual behavior? Were these social values not discarded in lieu of survival?...we only hide under the garb of values when we deem it as being 'convenient' and it is a necessary pre-requisite for social acceptance. (This is at the very heart of the nature of social dogma) or risk consequential punishment.
We have seen it in the eyes of a mob...or in case of a solider caught in the heat of battle...the animal surge within....it is why wars happen and it is why there exist borders among nations since bigotry and prejudice are inherent to the human persona. I have never stated that human beings are 'evil' since evil is merely a perspective and as such a vague human conception. The ideation of morality is a human concept and is an example of how we are held asway by our whims and fancies.
Take insanity for instance, especially in cases where the human brain does not cease its normal functioning and underlying brain cells are still healthy and capable of trenchant thought and imagination.... and yet we find that people are rendered insane...because they crave a sense of importance and when reality does not grant them their wishes they seek solace in the their delusions. The Joker, even though a fictional character makes a very trenchant point, what you mistakenly dismiss as being drama..that 'human beings' have an inflated sense of importance and place too much value on the notions of order and morality when these are but human created delusions. In that sense we are no different from that of those mad men relegated to mental asylums. It is just that in the latter scenario, the nature of the affliction is more pronounced.
Dolphins are stated by scientific conjecture to be capable of imbibing a complex speech mechanism on par with humans. Elephants hold funerals. Ants can build complex structures and cities on par with humans. Several insects and animal species have depicted hierarchical structures similar to human society. Animals too are trained and domesticated....None of this negates the fact that we as human beings exhibit animalistic tendencies, they exhibit a herd mentality. Our intelligence is still clouded by bias and we do not act like beings that are the outcome of a million years of evolution. Perhaps 'animal' is too good of a word...human beings are like that of a cancer.
Telika: The newspost is absolutely not "telling anything" for a huge variety of reasons, starting with the nature of the cannibalism taboo : it's a strong taboo in our culture for purely symbolic reasons, and would be an objectively absurd psychological barrier in the described situation (many societies, before being acculturated by christian churches, were featuring anthropophagy -even though not as an animalistic nourishment tool- without it to be a problem on any level). If anything, the ongoing psychological problems of that survivor nowadays illustrate how hard it is to get rid of social values and taboos that have been too deeply integrated. His act of cannibalism ends up being a trauma, even if there is no objective reason for it (it was merely a symbolic breach with no practical consequence on anyone, no harm done).
As for the rest, no - no seasonned anthropologist would leap to such extrapolations by simply witnessing mobs behaviours. On the contrary. It raises a series of questions that you discard, such as who (and thus who not), through what process, and with what validation : it is not a "lack of humanity" or a "lack of value", it is the expression of a specific set of values, not shared (or not to that extent, or counter-balanced by others) by the non-participants that you ignore, but actualised in that mass manifestation, which meaning (there is a meaning) has to be explicited.
Genocides (and other forms of more ordinary deshumanization, from mobbing to witchhunts or various discriminations) also happen in "civilized" places and are driven by "educated" people. Again, they don't happen in the void, they are not a "default" or a "lack of" (nothing is, in humans, except for the rare anecdotical "feral kids" who weren't socialized at all), they are -just as the rest- a "product of". If you want a society to shift from a state of general social peace to a state of systematic extermination of a given minority, you have to work on it. You have to establish the normality of a specific representation (define and stigmatise the target minority), you have to train people to put aside some general values (that they had accepted so far) when it comes to a certain category of people (that you must present as unworthy of it, making these values irrelevant in the specific case of that minority). On a wide scale, this is a process that takes years of mass propaganda, whether we're talking of 1930 Germany or 1990 Rwanda. And even when you reach the critical mass necessary for action, the individual behaviours remain erratic and unpredictable (in all these cases you have many exemples of citizens who would still act the opposed way, or, more precisely, a whole range of behaviours that conflict in varying degrees with the general trend). In all cases, the drive is not animality. It is a specific configuration of beliefs, a specific negociation with fears, social pressures, legitimacy, self-validation, etc... Reducing it to a nothingness, a basic instinct or a "human nature" is an incorrect description of the phenomenon, that skips all the causalities, and erases all the deviances.
When it's on a smaller scale (like xenophobic deathsquads, or riots and pillage), it is the same problem, in a given subculture : people being driven by a set of beliefs (values, representations of the other) that can be described aswell. Neonazis are not humans in a blank state, neither are self-righteous lynch mobs or witchhunters. There are stakes (self-identity, moral conceptions, fears, glorified and shamed behaviours, conformity, etc) that drive the phenomenon, and in front of which people are not equal (because they don't share the same sets). And the way these values or outlooks are distributed doesn't necessarily have much to do with the job - it can be subcultural values, beliefs, worldviews, shared by a dentist and a plumber. The point is, precisely, to identify these shared subcultural elements and their vehicles. Even riots and pillage show sets of values (anti-establishmentism yet materialism and consumerism when "leftist" rioters break into shops to steal the last super fashionable good to which they feel access was denied).
What I'm getting at is that reading collective violence as humans being stripped of "culture" is simply false. Collective violence is still a product of culture, it's still driven by worldviews, norms, values and beliefs - even if implicit. If you deny it, then you don't ask yourself "which ones" and "why there", and you can't denounce what, in a society's implicit discourses and hidden contradictions, enables (or even glorifies) such behaviours in such situations. Plus you blind yourself to the diversity of individual attitudes by simply defining a given group as "the people" (both homogeneising this group, and denying the existence of those who aren't part of it - and the reasons why).
Humans aren't either "naturally good" nor "naturally evil" ("underneath culture"), and I go as far as saying that, nowadays, there is no such thing as "underneath culture". Because humans, everywhere, get too deeply socialised, and their drives are too deeply cultural (or culturally channeled). All human attitudes derive from self-perceptions and assimilated notions of acceptability - even where the collectively glorified values are individualism, self-reliance, and domination of others. My point is that the interpretation of human (especially collective) violence as a manifestation of freedom in an absence of social norms is a fallacy : it is still the expression of norms, and there is no "freedom" (from whatever contradictory cultural elements we're incorporated) but simply diversity in which ones and how respectively deeply we're incorporated them.
In other words : murderous mobs are still society.
