Dear Girija:

I do have a short time this morning to post after all, before I leave to the big city for the day.

I am very impressed by your astute, highly intelligent and so well articulated insight. We humans are social animals. If you observe other social animals who live in groups, an individual that is disapproved of does get bullied, expelled from the group and even killed outright, usually by a group of angry individuals. Individual animals within a social group need to be accepted by the group so to survive. Except for the most powerful, those whose power is well established.

In primitive human society, “craving acceptance and validation” was necessary for the survival of the individual. If an individual, in a power position within the group, did not accept and validate an individual of lesser power, he felt anger and proceeded to maim or killed the weaker one.  Our modern societies are much more complex than the primitive, simple groups: in modern society there are too many people/ agencies in power over every individual that prevent individuals from harming those they disapprove of. In the workplace, a manager maiming or killing a new employee will be fired by higher management. Most people, if they maim or kill another, will be arrested and taken to prison by the more powerful law enforcement and courts. A lesser extreme example: firing a disapproved of, yet productive employee will cause financial loss to the company, so the disapproving manager doesn’t want to lose his power, that is, his profit and does not fire the employee he or she doesn’t like.

We are born with the instincts and emotions of primitive humans/other social animals (“it almost feels ‘life threatening’ when you notice someone looking down at you”). Yet we are also born with intellect that allows us to observe our modern society and realistically evaluate dangers, lessening our fear. For example, an employee can  figure that disagreeing with her manager and asserting herself is highly unlikely to bring about physical harm or death, and if done wisely, is highly unlikely to cause her to lose her job.

Before a human gets into his or her society at large, he/she knows only one mini-society, and that is her family at home, mother, father, the people who live at home. All adults (and older children) are powerful over the young child and often the mother is the most powerful. The child is very scared of a disapproving mother because she needs her mother so much.

Also, everyone (human/another animal) is afraid of anyone’s anger. All animals are afraid of angry individuals because the emotion of anger includes in it the desire to harm, it is a threat of harm or harm-in-progress.

The more disapproving a parent at home, the more angry a parent, the more scared the child of the society at large, once leaving home into the world.

* I will soon be away from the computer and back in about 24 hours.

anita