Human beings inherently possess a mixed bag of traits which have evolved through and been finessed over the generations into the specimens we are today. Our ancestors at one time or another where forced to be fierce and fit as well as kind and compassionate, depending on whatever the emerging environment required. This flexibility of our characteristic human traits has been a great advantage and continues to serve those who can use such great powers wisely
Much of what I feel to be true in regards to human nature is speculative musing of an esoteric mind, but much of what I believe seems feasible enough to my own mind to share.....
Great rifts between these opposing sides of human nature can be seen to rise and fall throughout our evolution, they are as present in the homo sapiens of today as they were in our primitive ancestors. Perhaps not long after our split from the chimps and bonobos, our ancestors developed a strong taste for raw flesh, which lead them to use primitive weapons to kill and eat whatever they could, including other subgroups of primates. At the same time there was a huge sociological evolution which extremely altered the degree by which we viewed and interact with others of our own kind. This lead to much stronger egalitarian tendencies of kinship, brotherhood and sisterhood. We must have inherited both the capacity for male dominance hierarchy of the chimps, as well as the free love feminine matriarchal traits of the bonobos, and its only a question of environmental conditioning to determine which traits become active and which remain latent.
Constant shifts and upsets of the balance between our benevolent bonobo nature and our cannibalistic male dominance chimp nature happened within the paleolithic era. During that time the survival of the fittest instinct as well as the survival of those with the friendliest disposition, were equally important to many of our ancestral tribes people.( There may even be other factors much more important, such as survival of the sexiest, which through highly evolved sexual selection has made humans so much more beautiful than the other primates. That increased sexiness could be at the heart of the population issue, but perhaps that is best left for another discussion.)
I believe that our tendency for peace and love may have prevailed into the neolithic age had it not been for one primary game changer. Which in my opinion is the development of highly advanced weaponry fashioned and used primarily by men. Once slings, spears, knifes, arrows, armor, ect were introduced it then became possible for roving bands of sex crazed barbarians with their hellion offspring and snaggeltoothed women to terrorize the more peaceful earth-mother clans of the world. The only way to survive the attacks of violence perpetrated the by male dominance tendency, now backed by deadly weaponry, was more of the same( fight fire with fire). So the peace loving troops eventually where wiped out or had to develop male dominated hierarchies of their own, in order to defend from such invasions...... thus in the game of life, dominated by the fittest(and best armed) our paleolithic ancestors had to forfeit some of their friendliness in order to survive.
This is an extreme illustration and I am sure that many of our ancestors were able to live peaceful lives out on the frontiers, unmolested by savagery, and perhaps some of us alive today are more able to identify with the more tender side of humanity, than others.... but as a general phenomenon barbarism must have had a profound effect upon our evolving psychological make up. Our collective experiences regarding general tendencies of violence, scarcity, threat of invasion,etc could explain why such an advanced civilization as America spends close to half of its wealth on a military industrial complex! Such conditioned fears inherited by the human collective subconscious( both real and imagined) are at core of much of the population control psyop propaganda being pushed by the controlled media.
