Word: instinctiveness
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...splendid deadpan pomposity, reinforced by the fact that he refers to himself throughout in the third person. The reader first meets him in his Brook lyn Heights apartment, picking up a ringing telephone as if it were a pistol loaded for Russian Roulette. "On impulse, thereby sharpening his instinct as a gambler, he took spot plunges: once in a while he would pick up his own phone. On this morning in September, 1967, he lost his bet." The caller is a militant antiwar organizer and old Harvard classmate, who extracts from Mailer a promise to participate in the Washington protests...
...ribaldry and humor-which puts today's youth one up on him. This tirade is directed again at humanity in general. Specifically, Wylie's complaint is that man does not live as the animal he was in tended to be; instead he has buried his natural instinct under phony shibboleths such as religion, capitalism, Communism, belief in progress and blind faith in science...
...fearful middle class, Negro as well as white, can no longer afford to ignore violence, a phenomenon from which no human being is exempt. Freud held that man has a death instinct that must be satisfied in either suicide or aggression against others. Many modern psychiatrists disagree. Dr. Fredric Wertham, famed crusader against violence, argues that violence is learned behavior, a product of cultural influences such as violent comic books. The violent man, he says, is the socially alienated...
Konrad Lorenz, the Austrian-born naturalist, believes that human aggressiveness is the instinct that powers not only self-preservation against enemies but also love and friendship for those who share the struggle. Overcoming obstacles provides selfesteem; lacking such fulfillment, man turns against handy targets-his wife, even himself. Polar explorers, deprived of quarrels with strangers, often start to hate one another; the antidote is smashing some inanimate object, like crockery. Accident-prone drivers may be victims of "displaced aggression." The once ferocious Ute Indians, now shorn of war outlets, have the worst auto-accident rate on record...
Modern man is often at his noblest in small-unit war, a caveman hangover. But peacetime culture bars such outlets, and when men fail to achieve the virility substitute of money, power or meaningful work, they can explode in violence. Not that man has a killer instinct; he simply does not fully realize the effect of pulling a trigger and blowing off another man's head. Modern long-range weapons further blunt his sensibilities. Mussolini's son extolled the bombing of the Ethiopians: "I dropped an aerial torpedo right in the center of a cluster of tribesmen...