On the other hand, even the most dominant and brutal leader — the strongest strong-man — doesn’t have the endurance to stay strong forever: he will reach a capacity that will weaken his dominance. If he’s only able to create fear of physical harm in his constituents, a human leader will never even achieve full brutalism.
Not really true of the nonhuman animals. Ethologists can speculate, but I think that nonhuman animals are simply more perceptive to microlevel psychological changes and their corresponding indicators in fellow nonhuman animals, as the main means of psychological survival: to me an oxymoron, an organic/algorithmic “choice” to treat fear as an empty indicator, move your hand away from the flame before you feel the pain or fear; then ignore the pain signal.
Is that all that’s left in a brutalist? A signal that tells to kill without emotional consequence? Shut the kill switch on; shut the emotion switch off? Doesn’t this bleed over into the domain of the ostensible royalty of the animal kingdom: the human animals?
Matt Maday 