Text: Pages 52 and 53

Freud viewed “man as wolf to man” and that innate human aggression would lead to more wars because humanity projected its own destructive unconscious impulses on the evil “others.” At the conclusion of Civilization and Its Discontents, being a nihilist, Freud, in dramatic terms, avoided any reassurance to either the “wildest (political) revolutionaries” or the “virtuous (religious) believers” that civilization could be saved from the innate human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. Because aggression was innate, part of human nature and deeply rooted in the unconscious, the survival of civilization was not only not assured, but was in fact in great peril.