The evolutionary reset that occurs when symbolic systems of power lose correspondence with biological reality.

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When hierarchies ossify beyond adaptive function, violence becomes a mechanism of reorganisation, or a reassertion of homeostasis through entropy.

In this sense, political violence is not the opposite of civilisation, it is its renewal mechanism.

Biologically, it is sometimes inevitable when perceived inequity, resource scarcity, or dominance instability cross neurocognitive thresholds that no longer yield to negotiation.

Evolution doesn’t moralise, it equilibrates.

Whether political violence is justified truly depends on which layer of explanation one privileges.

Ethically, it is rarely defensible because it corrodes cooperation and multiplies suffering.

Primate data show precisely this with serotonin, oxytocin, and cortisol modulating moral emotion not universally but contextually, enhancing empathy for allies while blunting it for rivals.

Political violence exploits the same circuitry on a grander scale.

The moral circuits are extensions of coalition psychology.

This means moral justification is not an abstract ethical calculus, but a form of tribal cognition or the brain’s attempt to reconcile aggression with self-concept when violence favours one’s in-group.

Those that have studied the human brain know it does not assess violence symmetrically. Neural imaging shows that the same act - killing, punishment, coercion, activates radically different cortical patterns depending on perceived legitimacy and in-group alignment.

Virtually all political order is violence domesticated with its energy channelled through law, military deterrence, and moral narrative. Every empire defines its own violence as “stability” and its opponents’ as “terrorism.” Both are strategic adaptations to power asymmetry.

Every state is, at its core, the monopolisation of violence. The difference between the bandit and the emperor is retrospective legitimacy - one kills illegally, the other constitutionally.

Now what we call “political violence” is simply the macro-social analogue of that ancestral function.

Where the individual once used aggression to reconfigure hierarchy, groups now do so collectively through institutions, or when those fail, through revolt.

The prefrontal cortex which is our organ of restraint, evolved not to erase violence but to strategically time it. A human capable of suppressing immediate aggression could plan deferred dominance or as you can imagine, politics in embryonic form.

Across species, the neuroendocrine substrates of violence which is elevated testosterone, amygdalar reactivity, reduced serotonergic inhibition, are deeply conserved.

Homosapiens did not transcend this machinery, instead we merely cognitively repurposed it.