I just started reading a book I had bought awhile back just after my breakup with my N.
I bought this book because I was trying to understand what his story was, and this book got great reviews and was mentioned as being a book about extreme males – who, like narcissists – are non-monogamous, prone to crime, aggressive and lacking in empathy, etc. He is bald and very macho and hairy so I always had a theory that he just had too much testosterone.
Anyway, it’s called “The Essential Difference: Men, Women, and The Extreme Male Brain”.
So here is a quote from the first page I opened…
“Agression”
In humans and other primates, males typically attempt to control the sexual activities of their partners through the use of threat. Being willing to threaten your female mate with aggression presumes a low level of empathizing. Hurting another person, or putting fear into then, is not a caring act. If it works, a man increases the likelihood that the child he is providing for is indeed genetically his."
…
Aggression is not only a sign of limited empathy. It is also a very efficient strategy for establishing social dominance or resolving social conflict, especially when other social displays or rituals fail. In evolutionary terms, the bravest and most skilled fighters in male-male competition would have earned the highest social status, and thus secured the most wives and offspring.
…
Is aggressive male competition just something of the past? Are we so very different nowadays? Let’s look again at the Yanomamo [an indigenous tribe in the Amazon], who can be viewed as a model of pre-industrial society. Here we find that two out of every five men in this tribe have participated in at least one murder. This is astonishing to us. I don’t know any men who have committed murder, and I’m guessing you don’t either. So clearly, industrialized societies may make it harder to discern evolutionary pressures.
Worse still, among th Yanomamo, men who kill other men end up with higher social status than those who do not. We know that in an industrialized society murderers lose their social rank, by being imprisoned. Not so in traditional societies. Consistent with evolutionary theory, those who have committed murder end up with more than double the number of wives, and more than three times the number of children, compared to those who have not. This gloomy picture is not restricted to this present-day tribe but has been found in other pre-industrial societies.
The author doesn’t mention that wartime is a time of sanctioned murder in industrialized society…and that war heros are often rewarded for number of enemies killed, etc.
Whatever you think of the values of a pre-industrial society that rewards murder, it stands to reason that traits that we would now label sociopathic and narcissistic are actually bred into the population, as these people had the most offspring.
The author makes another point about the fact that monogamy is not the norm in modern cultures – that the most common marriage system is polygyny.
I did not know that. Seems that our culture is not only a breeding ground for sociopathic traits…but a safe haven as well.