Introduction

This chapter introduces the challenges and complexities in understanding the nature of aggression in humans. Often, the aggressive drive leads to destructive effects against its own species in a manner that seems to violate evolutionary theory, especially when it leads to scalable violence within the species or self-destructive suicide. Examples from terror attacks, violent offenders and serial killers, and geopolitical violence are used to introduce the complex and theoretically confusing topic of human aggression. Speeches from Hitler, Putin, PW Botha, and South Africa under Apartheid are used as the data for theoretical discoveries in integration, as are personal experiences of political violence by the author.