The curious thing abut the brain is that when it undergoes a trauma significant enough, especially at a young age, though this can happen at any age, it kicks itself down to a survival mode and orders its incoming stimuli in accordance with this new framework.
One psychologist came up with an elegant metaphor for it: the brain's connections are like flowing rivers, with the information flowing in certain directions and over certain circuits in accordance with necessity. When the brain experiences trauma, it is as if a heavy rain and flood cuts a new, broader pathway for the information to travel through, in this case straight for the brain's survival center.
This results in adaptive behavior that although would be quite useful in the wild (probably excluding schizophrenic and schizotypal disorders), proves to be nonconstructive in a complex, civilized world. Adaptive behaviors and effects can range from radically self-interested and sociopathic behavior, to anxiety disorders and PTSD, oscillating depression, distrust, low self-esteem, drug abuse and more. These behavior patterns can then calcify and form psychological structures that then order much of the individual's behavior, persisting long past the original trauma.
If that isn't enough, the trauma can then be transmitted across generations. Violence begets violence, but even stressful behavior that isn't violent can have adverse effects on the development of a child's mind, as children's brains are incredibly delicate and impressionable. The re-ordering of adaptive mechanisms can also transmit itself through the genes, which can be expressed in people with relatively good childhoods as they become young adults and encounter stressful situations.
Violence then - and this can be hard violence or soft violence, such as verbal/emotional abuse or general cruelty - is incredibly radioactive. Outbursts of violent energy don't just cause sympathetic chain reactions, they take generations upon generations to disperse, and the collateral effects of such a dispersal increases the probability for future patterns of violence and the related traumas.
So, societies held together by violence (police states and warring imperial powers) simply cannot last. A healthy society requires trust and communication among other things to correctly function over a long period of time, and these elements are eroded as damaged individuals behave in ways that alter basic social assumptions.
However, violent societies themselves are formed out of the rending forces of collective historical trauma, so this is an incredibly complex and difficult problem, but well-worth thinking about and deliberating over.
Our conceptions of private property, indefinite accumulation, and radical egotism can be seen to be forged out of the turbulent forces of violence. Scaled out, these phenomena betray a systematic social distrust in which power and control is restored artificially through the rule of law and applied violence. The process of the hyperconcentration of wealth in limited individuals unleashes forces of soft violence, while the legitimization and enforcement of such a concentration inflicts systematic violence via contact with the police state and the necessary generation of poverty, which itself produces a pervasive climate in which violence and trauma is to occur. In this way our society can be viewed in the lens of trauma, both in its relation to itself as it begins to feed on itself, and in relation to outer societies and the increasing catastrophic failure engendered by colonialism and imperialism, though there is much greater complexity beyond this limited reading.
The result of such a state of affairs is a condition of perpetual disintegration that is only slowed by the temporary and illusory establishment of order and control through force, which itself only generates further chaos and division over a longer period of time. The answer to such a state of affairs is a radical redefinition of values and a daily healing practical action which is set against and in spite of the ongoing effects of social trauma.
