Madam,
There is a difficult truth about human behaviour that many of us would rather not confront: You can never completely know how far another person is willing to go when they feel threatened, humiliated, cornered, betrayed or pushed beyond their limits. We like to believe that discipline, morality, laws, education, religion, culture and social expectations have transformed us into something fundamentally different from the creatures we once were. We build institutions, create rules, establish consequences and convince ourselves that these structures are powerful enough to permanently control human behaviour. Yet beneath all of that is still the human being, carrying emotions, instincts, fears, desires, anger, pride and the capacity for aggression. Most of the time, society teaches us to regulate these impulses and most people do. But the existence of self-control should never be mistaken for the absence of instinct. Sometimes, circumstances reveal just how fragile that control can become.
This is not to say that human beings are incapable of morality or that civilisation is meaningless. Quite the opposite. Laws, principles, compassion, education, accountability and social responsibility are among the greatest achievements of humanity. They allow millions of people with different interests, beliefs, personalities and ambitions to live alongside one another without constantly descending into conflict. But we should not confuse learned behaviour with instinctive behaviour. Much of what we call civilisation is sustained because people have been taught that certain actions are unacceptable and because there are consequences for crossing certain boundaries. Remove the consequences, weaken the institutions, destroy trust or place people under enough pressure and the behaviour we thought had been permanently buried can sometimes resurface. That reality is uncomfortable because it forces us to acknowledge that good behaviour is not always automatic. It often requires discipline, restraint, accountability and a functioning society capable of reinforcing the standards we expect people to live by
Push a person far enough and you may discover parts of them that they themselves never knew existed. A calm individual can become furious. A patient person can eventually lose patience. Someone who has tolerated humiliation for years may eventually reach a point where tolerance disappears. Someone who has been repeatedly exploited may stop responding with understanding and begin responding with resistance. This does not excuse harmful or unlawful behaviour, nor does it mean that people should surrender responsibility for their actions. It simply means that human behaviour cannot be understood without recognising the enormous influence of circumstances. There is a limit to how much pressure any individual can absorb before something begins to break. That is why responsible societies should not wait until people reach their breaking points before addressing injustice, poverty, abuse, inequality, humiliation, exclusion or hopelessness. Prevention is always wiser than discovering, too late, what happens when restraint finally collapses. Perhaps one of the greatest mistakes we make is believing that civilisation has completely removed our animal instincts. It has not. Human beings are animals who developed extraordinary abilities to reason, cooperate, create meaning, establish institutions and regulate behaviour. Those achievements are remarkable, but they do not erase the instincts from which we evolved. Anger, fear, competition, territorial behaviour, survival instincts, attachment, jealousy, aggression and the desire for recognition remain part of the human psychological landscape. What makes society functional is not the complete disappearance of these impulses, but our ability to manage them. We learn when to speak instead of strike, when to walk away instead of retaliate, when to forgive instead of punish and when to seek justice instead of revenge. That distinction matters.
Being human does not mean being naturally peaceful at all times. It means possessing the capacity to choose how we respond to what happens to us.
Ultimately, discipline is not merely about controlling other people; it is also about understanding ourselves and recognising the conditions that make self-control possible. We should never be naive enough to assume that everyone will remain reasonable regardless of what they experience.
At the same time, we should never become cynical enough to believe that people are nothing more than animals waiting for an opportunity to unleash chaos. Both extremes misunderstand human nature. We are capable of extraordinary kindness and extraordinary cruelty. We can build hospitals, protect strangers, sacrifice for people we have never met and dedicate our lives to improving society; yet under different circumstances, human beings can also become destructive, vindictive and dangerously irrational. The responsibility of civilisation is therefore not to pretend that our darker instincts do not exist. It is to build individuals, families, communities, institutions and laws strong enough to keep those instincts from governing our lives. Civilisation survives not because human beings have ceased to be animals, but because we have learned, imperfectly, to govern the animal within us.
Mbuyiselo S Sikhondze
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