1. The Biological Deterrent and the Amygdala’s Alarm
To understand the roots of today’s criminal brazenness, we must return once again to our source code: DNA and the structure of our brain.
Evolutionary biology teaches us that the human being, as a social mammal, is pre-wired to avoid openly hostile and threatening behaviors toward their peers or the community. Why do we do it? Certainly not out of some innate, noble philosophical enlightenment, but due to a brutal and immediate thermodynamic calculation of survival.
Our genome knows perfectly well that a hostile action against another person, or against the group, will be followed by an immediate, violent, and physical immune reaction from the others. If in the tribe or village you steal another’s food or attack a passerby, the reaction of those who see you as a threat will not be delayed: you will be struck, exiled, or killed.
It is the pure and simple fear of the instinctive and physical reaction of others that acts as a biological brake. Neuroscience locates this primordial fear in the amygdala, the alarm control center that governs our System 1 (the instinctive and reactive autopilot introduced by Kahneman). When the amygdala perceives an imminent physical danger (the crowd about to react), it floods the body with adrenaline, inhibits reckless behavior, and dictates fight, flight, or submission. This millisecond fear of System 1 is the most powerful natural “deterrent” in the universe. It keeps the ecosystem in equilibrium, forcing even potentially aggressive nodes to repress their toxic impulses out of pure instinct for self-preservation. The potential predator looks at the crowd, and their predictive engine suggests that the risk of collision is too high.
2. The Translation of the Threat: From Biology to Bureaucracy
What happens when the modern State imposes from above the Immanent Domain of Human Rights, mandating by law that the aggressor is the bearer of an untouchable Absolute Value?
What happens is that the “biological brake” of spontaneous reaction is deactivated by decree. Honest citizens (the white blood cells) are strictly forbidden from reacting on instinct. If they suffer a theft or witness an assault, the law orders them to repress their natural impulse, to not touch the criminal, and to wait for the arrival of institutions.
This amputation of self-defense generates a lethal phenomenon that we will call the Translation of the Threat. The criminal or the disruptor, acting in the real world, “scans” the environment. Their animal instinct immediately perceives that the victim, or the surrounding crowd, is paralyzed. The predator understands in a fraction of a second that they face no immediate physical danger (no one will lynch them).
The threat has literally moved, translated from one plane to another:
- The threat is no longer the Network (biology): The instinctive and lethal reaction of the community or the victim has been annulled. There is nothing to trigger terror in the aggressor’s amygdala.
- The threat has become the State (bureaucracy): The only entity authorized to punish the pathogen is the judicial apparatus, with its law enforcement bound by procedural codes, its slow courts, its endless investigations, and its guaranteeist structures.
3. “Delay Discounting” and the Acquisition of Brazenness
This shifting of the threat from the heat of physical reaction to the freezing cold of bureaucratic procedure clinically reveals why the criminal suddenly feels like the master of the world.
The judicial apparatus does not instill in the criminal the primordial terror that an angry crowd would. Behavioral neuroscience explains this phenomenon through the concept of Delay Discounting. The human brain is pre-wired to give enormous value to immediate events and to drastically “discount” or devalue consequences that are distant in time.
While a punch in the face generates immediate terror in System 1 (the domain of the amygdala), the threat of a trial displaced in time triggers no vital alarm. It is processed by the prefrontal cortex, that is, by the slow and cold System 2, as a mere abstract mathematical calculation.
Consequently, the modern delinquent, the youth gang, or the serial pickpocket willingly accept the hostility of the legal system. They know perfectly well that they could be arrested, placed under investigation, and perhaps convicted. But in the calculation of their System 2, altered by Delay Discounting, the trial, house arrest, and even a few months of future prison time are not a “terrible punishment”: they are simply a Calculated Business Risk. It is a calculated bureaucratic nuisance, factored in just as an artisan factors in the possibility of scraping their fingers while working.
The pathogen feels protected precisely by those institutions that should frighten them, because they know the State will play by guaranteeist rules that will prevent them from suffering irreparable harm on the spot. This awareness infuses the criminal with a brazen self-assurance. They walk down the street or assault a shop with the total confidence of someone who knows they have an insurmountable mathematical advantage: they are the one who decides the level of the clash.
If the criminal decides to lie down in the street blocking traffic, or to punch passing cars, their level of violence ends there. They can rest assured that nothing lethal will happen to them on the spot. Anyone (the passerby or the police officer) who intervenes to stop them knows they must “control” their force, otherwise they will face far more serious trouble than the criminal themselves. By shifting the threat onto the bureaucracy, the State has handed the joystick of the conflict over to the predator.
3.1 Clinical Evidence: From “No-Go Zones” to the Digital Archive of Chaos
That the Translation of the Threat and the zeroing of the biological deterrent are not philosophical abstractions, but the raw bio-mechanical reality of our time, is demonstrated daily by empirical observation. The West is collapsing under the weight of this legal hallucination on three distinct scales of magnitude:
A. The Macro-scale: Islands of Extraterritoriality (No-Go Zones) Let us observe the urban geography of France (banlieues), England, or Italian suburbs. Entire neighborhoods are now under the total control of criminal gangs and narcos. In these territories, the police no longer enter, or do so only with pitched military operations. Why does the State retreat? The answer is purely thermodynamic. Law enforcement, forced to operate while respecting the guaranteeist dictates of the Immanent Domain, know that to regain control of those areas they would have to use massive structural force (System 1). But if they did, they would be immediately prosecuted, dismissed, or condemned by the State itself for violating the “human rights” of the occupants. The result is surrender: the State creates true islands of extraterritoriality, topological black holes where the pathogen is free to proliferate because the antibody is legally deactivated.
B. The Meso-scale: Urban Guerrilla Warfare and the Symmetric Clash The level of brazenness (self-assurance) generated by this paralysis is chillingly visible during demonstrations and street clashes. We observe rioters hurling paper bombs, cobblestones, and Molotov cocktails at police cordons. They act with a relaxed, almost theatrical ballistic and psychological posture, as if they were participating in a clash “among equals.” This is the supreme aberration of the Immanent Domain: the State places the aggressor and the defender on the same legal plane. The rioter unleashes all the animal violence of their System 1, knowing perfectly well that the police officer facing them is forced to use the slow System 2 to calculate the proportionality of their every move. The thug throws the Molotov cocktail with the absolute certainty that, even if arrested, the system will treat them as a “citizen bearing rights,” and not as an enemy to be annihilated. It is a rigged war in which the virus is free to kill, but the antibody must fight with its hands tied behind its back.
C. The Micro-scale: Viral Videos and the Exhibition of Impunity The definitive certification of the collapse of the biological deterrent is offered to us today by the Digital Vector (YouTube, TikTok, etc.). Social networks are flooded with millions of videos that constitute a veritable visual archive of chaos. We see single subjects, often illegal immigrants, drifters, or members of youth gangs, heavily threatening defenseless passersby, committing obscene acts in public places, diving into and vandalizing millennia-old artistic fountains, smashing shop windows with sledgehammers in broad daylight, blocking traffic while insulting drivers, or even hurling boulders from highway overpasses. What do all these videos have in common? The absolute lack of haste or terror in the perpetrator. In past eras, anyone committing such a crime would flee instantly, terrified of being lynched (the crowd’s System 1 deterrent). Today, the aggressor lets themselves be filmed. They act with an exasperating and contemptuous slowness. Their predictive engine has calculated that the dozens of citizens around them are paralyzed by legal terror. They exhibit their crime because they know that the absence of an immediate physical reaction transforms their criminal act into a pure and simple extraction of Status at zero cost.
4. The Neurochemistry of Dominance and the “Sub-Human” Aberration
But the most dramatic aspect of the Translation of the Threat is the effect it produces on the predator’s perception of honest people.
Progressive sociology deludes itself that, by disarming the citizen and forcing them to react in a “civilized and measured” way to aggressions, the criminal will somehow be moved or induced to repentance by the civility of their victim. Evolutionary biology hands us back a chilling truth that is diametrically opposed. Neurocriminologists (such as Adrian Raine) have demonstrated that predatory behaviors activate the reward circuits in the transgressor’s brain. But there is an even deeper genetic motivation that unleashes this sense of omnipotence.
In the Environmental Domain, the human being, faced with an aggression, is programmed by DNA to instantly trigger System 1 with only two physiological reactions: Fight or Flight. If man pre-programs that he might encounter a threat, he prepares to face it (he arms himself, he groups up). The human being is never cowardly by nature, otherwise he would have gone extinct. The only exception to this rule — the moment when man freezes in terror — occurs when he finds himself, alone and unarmed, facing an unstoppable alpha predator (for example, a bear). In that specific case, the brain imposes immobility (Thanatosis or playing dead), because it knows that fighting or running would trigger the bear to attack. We behave cowardly only in the face of an overwhelming, non-human force.
But a thug throwing rocks at a car, or a pickpocket on a train carriage, are not bears. Biologically, the victims could very well overpower them numerically or physically. And yet, due to the engineering of the Immanent Domain (which forces the victim to turn off their instinct and use the exhausting System 2 to calculate the legal consequences of their own defense), the honest citizen locked in the car remains still, enduring the destruction of their vehicle.
How does the animal instinct of the criminal decode this scene? When the predator sees that the person in front of them endures the abuse by remaining motionless, they do not see a “civilized citizen” respectful of constitutional rules. They see a genetic aberration, a sub-human. The criminal observes a behavior typical of docile prey or farmed herbivores. Standing still and allowing one’s vital perimeter to be destroyed without fighting or fleeing is the behavior of an evolutionary dead end: a breed that would have gone extinct in a few generations if genetics had supported such cowardice.
This paralysis of the victim raises a fundamental paradox: if submitting to the predator goes against our pre-wired genetic code, why does the majority of honest citizens do it? The answer lies in another extraordinary function of our brain: the Adaptation Principle and neuroplasticity.
In nature, a radical environmental modification forces the organism to adapt. If a human community moves to an island infested with ferocious beasts, it adapts: it builds palisades, arms itself, and uses fire. The forced insertion of the Immanent Domain into social interactions is, in fact, the most drastic environmental modification ever imposed on the Western social ecosystem. The honest citizen, endowed with extraordinary neural plasticity, desperately tries to adapt even to this new, hallucinatory habitat.
But it is a pathological adaptation, guided by a true reverse artificial selection. In order not to be crushed by the Vertical Vector (the State and its courts), the honest citizen self-trains to turn off their own instinct of self-preservation. They “re-wire” their synapses until they transform, despite themselves, into that docile “sub-human” who accepts being trampled on just to avoid breaking the dogma of rights. Symmetrically, the criminal uses their neuroplasticity to adapt to the same environment in a diametrically opposed way, evolving into a distorted and arrogant “superhuman”: the super-predator who thrives precisely on the ruins of the self-preservation instinct of others.
The moment the victim lowers their head in terror of legal consequences, the criminal’s brain decodes that paralysis as absolute biological inferiority. Flooded by a storm of dopamine and testosterone (the pure neurochemistry of dominance), the criminal elaborates a cynical and inexorable thought: “I am strong, master of my instincts, ready to accept the hostility of the system and risk prison just to do as I please. These individuals around me, instead, are so terrified of the State and its laws that they let themselves be robbed and trampled just to avoid trouble. They are not men, they are cattle.”
Flooded by the hormones of power, the criminal feels infinitely superior. They do not fear institutions, because they know they will only strike them with the slowness and velvet gloves of guaranteeism (the Delay Discounting of System 2). And, simultaneously, they intimately despise those in front of them, perceiving civilized prey as a weak subspecies devoid of a spine.
The ideology of the Immanent Domain, by extinguishing the natural reaction (Fight or Flight) in the name of an artificial, bureaucratized peace, has not elevated the human spirit: it has simply armed the wolves with an inextinguishable biological arrogance and transformed honest citizens into a flock aware of and guilty of its own impotence.
Bibliography
- Ainslie, G. (2001). Breakdown of Will. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Fundamental text for understanding Delay Discounting and the temporal discounting of consequences).
- Raine, A. (2013). The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime. New York: Pantheon Books.