ABSTRACT
One of the false ways of posing the problem is connected with the currently widespread tendency to ascribe social conflicts and the resulting psychological conflicts to people's innate aggressiveness. The idea that persons have an aggression drive to attack other persans, resembling in its structure other innate drives such as, for instance, the sexual drive, is unfounded. People do have an innate potential to automaticälly shift their whole physical apparatus to a different gear if they feel endangered. The body reacts to the experience of danger by an automatie adjustment which prepares the way for intensive movement of the skeletal muscles, such as for combat or flight. Human impulses that correspond to the m~del of a drive are released physiologically or, as is often said, "from within," relatively independently of the respective situation. The shifting ofthe body's economy to combat-orflight-readiness is to a far greater extent conditioned by a specific situation, wh ether present here and now, or remembered. The aggressiveness-potential can be activated by natural and social situations of a certain kind, i.e., mainly by conflict situation. In conscious contraposition to Lorenz and others who ascribe an aggression-drive to people on the model of the sexual drive, it is not aggressiveness that triggers conflicts but conflicts that trigger aggressiveness. Our habits of thought generate the expectation that everything we seek to explain about people can be explained in terms of isoIated individuals. It is evidently hard to adjust thinking and thus also the explanatory expectation on
Civilization and Violence 1 J 5
the basis of how people are interconnected in groups, i.e., on the basis of social structures. Conflicts are an aspect of social structures. They are, furthermore, an aspect of human life together with animals, plants, moon and sun, i.e., with non-human nature. People are by nature attuned to this life together with other people and nature and the conflicts it entails.
