We were all shocked when we learned of the brutal gang rape of a 15-year- old girl on school property, while other teens watched and took pictures; no one called the police.   What can we make of all this?  The only way to make sense of heinous acts such as this one is to – look in the mirror.  When you do, looking back at you will be your own image.  Look deeper and you will see the human nature that we all share.

At the deepest, most fundamental level of our human nature is something we share with all life forms on this planet – survival instincts. These instincts tell us how to find food, reproduce (sex), and compete to the death for survival of the fittest. We must credit our survival instincts with allowing our species to defeat all competition and dominant the planet.  The reason these instincts are so effective is because they are not moral or immoral. They are amoral and underlie our potential to do evil. Psychologically, they manifest as wanting to control, which is the driving force underlying rape.

The rapists acted like animals – Homo sapiens variety.

We find it easy to point the finger at a few individuals and wonder how people can commit such horrendous acts, such as gang rape.  We don’t like to acknowledge that the actions of both rapists and spectators were not unusual. Nor can they be attributed to mental illness.

You might recall a time when, for years, rape, torture, and murder were the order of the day, and the perpetrators were – ordinary people.  And who were the watchers who saw people being beaten in the streets, saw their neighbors being dragged away from their home, and moved into the now empty houses? Who were the French/Italian/ Hungarian policemen who rounded up the victims, and the Polish farmers who saw the skeletal victims peering through the barbed wire of concentration camps. Throughout Nazi occupied Europe, “normal” people, bakers, housewives, judges, and bankers participated, watched – and did nothing.

In America, the government watched and did nothing.  In Italy, the Vatican watched and did nothing – except help Nazi war criminals escape to South America and pray for the Jews – to convert to Catholicism.  Compared to the rape, torture and slaughter of millions, what’s’ one more rape?  It’s not as though women and children are not raped every day America. As for the pictures the teenage spectators took of the rape, the Nazis took tens of thousands.  Why should this rape matter?  Poet John Donne:

Each man’s death diminishes me,
for I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls.
It tolls for thee.

In letters to the editor about this gang rape, some people suggest that morals and compassion should be taught in the schools.  However, morality and compassion cannot be taught; they emerge from within the individual. Our cultural indoctrination gives us a code of ethics, which tells us what is right and what is wrong. The problem is, as Shakespeare said:  “It is neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so.”

Slavery, burning people alive, and the subjugation of women, were once considered ethical by men who appointed themselves society’s moral arbiters – religious leaders.  Not that long ago, the Catholic hierarchy judged it morally correct to protect child abusing priests.   If we can’t trust the moral judgments of other people, if we consider”I was following orders” a moral cop out, whom can we trust? The answer is simple: look in the mirror.

When we look at our human nature in depth, we see that in addition to our amoral survival instincts, we have a higher potential, a level of psychological maturity Abraham Maslow called “self-actualization. “  Individual freedom, individual power, courageousness – and   morality, are among the abilities that characterize this state.  When we become self-actualized, we become moral animals, who can live in a society that finds torture, racism, theocracy, and environmental destruction “normal,” and decide for ourselves: “this is wrong.”

If we don’t become self-actualized as part of the normal maturation process, our DNA s gives us a simple way to achieve this “enlightened,” state, which is really only the beginning of a mentally healthy, mature, adult consciousness.

When you bring your true self into being (self-actualization), when you look in the mirror, you would see a self image that is half dark and half light, reflecting your potential to do evil and your potential to do good. Paradoxically, only when you accept your potential to do evil do you access your higher potential and have the courage to bash a rapist over the head with a tree branch, call the police, and testify in court.

The problem is not that we have a dark side to our human nature, but not being aware of it. No matter how “enlightened” we become, from day to day, the best any of us can to is lean toward the good – which is all it takes to tip the balance.

Why did Jaycee Lee Dugard, held captive for 18 years, not leave, or even use the phone, when she had the chance? Why do battered wives keep returning to the husbands who beat them?  Kidnapped by domestic terrorists, why did Patty Hearst help them rob a store?  Why did Stalin’s brutal dictatorship produce good Communists and the Inquisition produce good Catholics?  Why did so many people cooperate with the Nazi’s?  Why do people who are taken hostage by terrorists quickly identify with them, a phenomenon known as the Stockholm Syndrome?  All these events have a common denominator: our human nature.
 
We are primates, and like other animals we have survival instincts that tell us how to find food and shelter, reproduce and compete for survival of the fittest. They also tell us how to respond to dangerous situations: physically, we can flee or fight; psychologically, we can get control of the situation or seek the approval of those who have control.  If you are the one with a gun, then you control the situation and decide who lives and who dies. If you don’t have the gun, but get the approval of the man with the gun, he may shoot the person next to you, but maybe not you.  These powerful instincts are unconscious and are not moral or immoral, but amoral; our normal human nature allows us to do anything to survive. 

Physically weaker, confined, isolated, dependent and brutalized, Jaycee’s only survival option was to seek the approval of her captors and accept her life as “normal.”Just as Muslim women, who live in similar circumstances, accept their lives as “normal.” Just as, when Western Europe was a brutal theocracy, from the Pope on down, people came to accept the burning alive of people in the village square as “normal.” Just as, for centuries, we accepted slavery as “normal.” Just as the “bad cop” creates fear in a suspect, who then bonds with the “good cop” and cooperates. Just as today, politicians attract supporters by warning people of imminent terrorist attacks or losing their health insurance.

Our survival instincts are all-inclusive.  Not only do they help our bodies survive, they also help us survive mentally.  To prevent a mental collapse, when our experiences are too traumatic, last too long and we can’t make sense of them, the brain automatically separates out information associated with the experiences and stores it in our unconscious mind — out of sight, out of conscious mind.  We shut down emotionally, adapt – and survive.

And then the police find  the kidnap victim, the gates of the concentration camp are opened,  a prisoner is released  from jail, soldiers return home from the war and an abused child grows up and leaves home – with heads full of repressed memories, what quantum psychology calls unintegrated information.  Because this information concerns our survival, our brain has red flagged it as too important to forget. If phase one is managing to survive, and phase two is adapting to the situation and accepting it as “normal,” phase three, which completes the experience, is retrieving the information – and the body gives us a simple, efficient  way to accomplish this.
  
To remind us that we have unfinished business and to motivate us to take action, the body generates stress and causes us to repeat the past.  Then, rather than talking about our problems, we retrieve this information in the form of pictures, which is the preferred language of the unconscious mind.  When we do, the brain responds immediately, producing immediate results in freeing us from the past and stimulating normal personal growth, which includes enjoying life, accessing our individual power and achieving higher consciousness.
 
When a bone fracture heals, the new bone that is generated at the site of the break is stronger than undamaged bone. So also, we can emerge from traumatic experiences not only stronger but also wiser. Like psychiatrist Victor Frankl, who survived three years in Nazi concentration camps, at some point, as we progress, we also will conclude that we would never have chosen the experience, but we don’t regret it, because of what we learned.  Now that Jaycee’s “normal” has changed, and she is free to begin the healing, within her are the means to turn something horrendous into something magnificent.