Wired to Steal: The Behavioral Production of the Colonizer

 

Yoav Litvin

Image courtesy Yoav Litvin.

“The only possibility of regaining one’s balance is to face the whole problem, for all these discoveries, all these inquiries lead only in one direction: to make man admit that he is nothing, absolutely nothing—and that he must put an end to the narcissism on which he relies in order to imagine that he is different from the other “animals.””

~Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (trans. Charles Lam Markmann, Grove Press, 1967)

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), the Martinican psychiatrist, political philosopher and revolutionary thinker, provided invaluable insight into the minds of the colonizer and the colonized. Writing through the lens of colonial violence, Fanon delineated the psychological wounds inflicted on the oppressed with brutal precision and moral urgency. In The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Black Skin, White Masks (1952), he detailed how colonialism dehumanizes both oppressor and oppressed, albeit in different ways, destroys and then constructs identity, sustains a sense of inferiority, and ultimately produces submission. Crucially, Fanon implicated a phenomenon among colonized people who, in a bid to reclaim agency, redirect aggression downward in the hierarchy of colonized society, thereby reinforcing the oppressive structure.

Fanon’s insight rested on a crucial scientific reality: stripped of the narcissistic exceptionalism manufactured by colonial structures, the human animal is subject to the same behavioral and neurological mechanisms as other social mammals. “Regaining one’s balance” is contingent on dismantling this construct.

Fanon’s notions, together with more recent contributions of scholars such as Lara Sheehi, whose psychoanalytic work investigates colonial subjectivity, and Samah Jabr, whose complementary clinical work explores the psychological realities of occupation and resistance, correspond with what W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963), the American sociologist, historian and activist who pioneered the study of race as a structural rather than biological phenomenon, called a “public and psychological wage”: the social status, deference and institutional privileges conferred by racial belonging which bind the most economically marginal in-group members to the hierarchy rather than to those below them (Black Reconstruction in America, 1935).

Several thinkers have further shed light on the potential motivations behind cruelty and subjugation, though their focus has fallen more on how ordinary people become capable of violence than on the structural dynamics of oppressive systems themselves. These include, among others, Hannah Arendt’s (1906-1975) analysis of how ordinary people can perpetuate atrocity within a bureaucratic system; Erich Fromm’s (1900-1980) analysis of aggression and the psychological structures authoritarian societies produce; Stanley Milgram’s (1933-1984) experiments, which showed how readily people inflict pain on others when instructed by an authority figure; Philip Zimbardo’s (1933-2024) account of how institutional power can convert ordinary people into punitive sadists; and James Waller’s (1961-) extension into behaviors during genocidal events, including dehumanization, in-group preference, and moral indifference toward atrocity.

What remains inadequately addressed is the behavioral and neurological architecture through which colonial violence is produced, transmitted, and sustained.

The Wired to Steal model

The W2S model presents a novel neurobehavioral framework. Drawing on neuroscience and evolutionary biology, it analyses propaganda and rhetoric as instruments of conditioning that service domination and recruitment, rather than accepting them at face value and thus reproducing them. It identifies which behavioral dynamics recur across settler colonial projects, how ruling classes mobilize entire populations as accomplices, and how systems of power perpetuate theft and inequality by manipulating psychological drives.

The model proposes that greed drives a self-reinforcing, escalatory cycle in which manufactured identity, fearmongering, selective privilege, and conditioning to aggression, produced through intermittent reinforcement, enable genocide as a means of dispossession. Violence escalates, then normalizes with consistency and efficiency, until entire societies are destroyed.

What drives warfare associated with colonial expansionism and how are entire populations recruited to serve agendas which benefit only a privileged few? What distinguishes those who resist from those who comply or become active perpetrators? How are colonial narratives constructed and systematically maintained to override empathy? And perhaps most critically, under what conditions does the cycle break, and what does behavioral science inform us about dismantling the colonial psychology, in individuals and in societies?

Addressing these questions first requires examining the nature of warfare itself.

The origins of human warfare 

War is a form of violent social aggression. Unlike interpersonal violence or homicide, war involves organized, cooperative and often armed conflict, sanctioned by societies and waged by one group against another with the intent to kill. In its basic form, warfare is a political instrument in which coalitions collaborate aggressively to seize and defend resources vital for reproduction.

Is warfare an expression of “human nature,” a collective behavior rooted in early human or even primate ancestry, or is it a relatively recent cultural construct which emerged with the development of modern human societies?

The question reaches back millions of years in evolutionary history, yet carries profound implications for modern life, human well-being and the future of humanity and the planet.

If war is indeed human nature, then understanding it requires a thorough investigation of human evolutionary history and perhaps that of our primate ancestors. Overcoming the injustices of war would mean the daunting task of transcending our own innate programming. If, however, it is a recent cultural construct, then examining its origins may reveal pathways to mitigate and perhaps even dismantle this phenomenon in the pursuit of a more just and equitable society.

Historically, reactionaries have promoted the notion that war is innate, making colonial violence appear inevitable rather than constructed, thus disguising their culpability. Further, it has been used to justify domination and expansionism and villainize resistance by falsely depicting Indigenous peoples as violent savages who may benefit from subjugation “for their own good.”

The available evidence, however, points elsewhere.

Comparative studies of mammals, including non-human primates, do not support the idea of sustained, organized warfare as an innate collective behavior. Archaeological and anthropological research on early human societies, as well as ethnographic studies of existing hunter-gatherer groups, similarly suggest that large-scale, coordinated collective violence is not a universal feature of human societies.

Though not universally accepted and subject to ongoing debate, the weight of evidence indicates war is a relatively modern cultural construct. War emerged around 10,000-12,000 years ago during the transition from migratory hunter-gatherer collectives to sedentary lifestyles involving agriculture, animal domestication and pastoralism, which enabled the accumulation of resources and consequent emergence of social inequalities (the Neolithic Revolution).

War is not inevitable. It is a ruling class construct driven by greed and resource accumulation, and thus the engine of the W2S model. Yet greed alone does not explain how colonial violence operates on the ground. For that purpose, we need to examine the two forms of aggression the ruling class deploys and why their duplicitous conflation promotes colonial aims.

Defense and offense: the behavioral manifestations of war

Throughout the animal world, aggression manifests in two forms: defensive and offensive. Though these forms appear similar to the untrained eye and are thus frequently conflated, defensive and offensive aggression are driven by different motivations and serve distinct purposes.

Defensive aggression originates from fear, while offensive aggression with control and domination. Defense is typically directed at eliminating threats, as when prey responds to a predator, and offense at subduing opponents within a hierarchy, as when two animals vie for dominance. Defensive aggression may be lethal because it is motivated byֿֿ survival by any means necessary. Offensive aggression is typically oriented toward submission, not death of an opponent because hierarchies depend on preserving membership.

Defensive and offensive aggression also differ in their neurobiological and neuroendocrine correlates. Defensive aggression activates systems associated with fear and survival, including stress hormones (e.g. glucocorticoids) and fear-related neural circuits. Offensive aggression engages systems associated with dominance, reward and sociality, including testosterone and dopaminergic pathways.

These two forms of aggression have independent neural circuitries, neurotransmitters and hormonal profiles. Conflating them, as colonial propaganda consistently does, obscures the nature of the violence being committed and its ruling class origins.

The W2S behavioral cycle 

Colonizers deploy both forms simultaneously. Greed, which is addictive through repeated rewards, drives a ruling class to employ offensive aggression as a means of theft, manufacturing a tribal collective identity which demarcates in- and out-group boundaries. The in-group enjoys the fruits of social belonging and the theft of land, resources and labor; the out-group is excluded, exploited and ultimately eliminated. Fear and the defensive aggression it produces in the dispossessed is then reframed as existential necessity, justifying the oppression and dispossession that greed initiated.

Because most humans naturally feel empathy toward others and broad populations are reticent to sacrifice themselves, their families, friends and resources for the interests of a privileged few, offensive aggression is rarely sustainable on its own, particularly in collectivist versus individualistic societies and in the post-WWII era of international law, where such aggression is viewed as morally and legally indefensible. Ruling classes, therefore, employ propaganda narratives to reframe offensive aggression as justifiable lethal defense.

The European conquest (“discovery”) of “the New World” makes this plain: the quest for riches came first and the narratives followed. Racial hierarchies, manufactured identities, religious and ideological justifications, are all engineered to serve continued resource extraction through segregation, violence and suppression of empathy.

Colonial propaganda suppresses empathy through at least five mechanisms: dehumanization — through religion, racism, economic rationalization (the claim that Indigenous peoples were not making productive use of the land), civilizational and developmental reasoning (the claim that Indigenous peoples were at a lower stage of human development and required European tutelage), or the portrayal of Native resistance as savage aggression — which lowers the threshold for invader violence; threat inversion, which recasts the dispossessed as aggressors; divine mandate, which removes moral agency and lowers the bar for “permissible” violence; historical erasure, which denies the out-group’s existence and culture; and fear conditioning, which activates defensive neural circuitry, making violence seem necessary.

Dehumanization changes who you see, threat inversion changes what you think happened, divine mandate removes your choice for violence, historical erasure removes the victim entirely, and fear conditioning changes how your nervous system responds. They work together because they target different systems simultaneously, making the whole more resistant to disruption than any single mechanism would be.

In-group members who uphold the hierarchy through aggression are positively rewarded across three simultaneous tracks: material gain, status, privilege and other social rewards and the neurological pleasure of humiliating the out-group (intergroup schadenfreude). Military service and periodic wars ensure this schedule is reinforced across the population, not only in those who would seek it out.

Within the in-group, investment in the oppressive structure, as well as individualism, competition and consumption are promoted, keeping members focused on personal accumulation and social positioning rather than collective questioning of the structure itself. Those who dissent face exclusion, demonization and ultimately threats to their physical safety, with fear of these consequences keeping most of society in perpetual acquiescence.

Fanon observed that violence can function as a release valve, particularly among the lower classes within the perpetrators’ in-group hierarchy. The stress physiology literature now explains why: colonial propaganda installs chronic fear, producing sustained physiological stress that is attenuated by redirecting aggression toward those perceived as lower in the social hierarchy, particularly out-group members constructed as threats. This behavior is negatively reinforced; it produces relief from an aversive state. The same pattern is documented in social primates other than humans.

Repeated positive reward across all three domains, plus negative reinforcement, delivered on intermittent schedules, produce a conditioned appetite for violence that persists and escalates. This is the same mechanism that makes slot machines highly addictive: variable-ratio reinforcement schedules are the most powerful conditioning systems known, and the most resistant to extinction (a process by which reward is withdrawn, and the conditioned behavior ceases).

Violence is an essential tool to enforce an inherently unjust hierarchy, which creates resistance by those it dispossesses. This violence can be direct, whether military, police, or paramilitary force, or structural, embedded within institutions that limit movement, access to resources or political rights.

A greedy ruling class requires a population to engage in offensive aggression to seize resources and accumulate wealth. Most people, however, have no stake in that seizure. What’s more, natural empathy resists violence against those who have done them no harm. The ruling class therefore reframes offensive aggression as defensive necessity. To do so it manufactures identity, constructing segregated in-group and out-groups, with the out-groups designated for dispossession. Fearmongering, dehumanization and selective reward then deepen the divide and justify the violence. When resistance occurs, escalation follows, and each escalation, once normalized, becomes the new baseline, feeding back into the conditions that serve greed. The cycle is self-reinforcing and, without intervention, self-perpetuating, comparable to dynamics of addiction.

Colonial systems reproduce themselves through three interlocking forces: structural incentives, social normalization and neurological conditioning. Legislation, media, education systems and promises of impunity institutionalize aggression, while repeated fear and reward cycles normalize violence across generations.

Figure 1. The Wired to Steal Model. The Wired to Steal model depicts a self-reinforcing cycle through which systems of domination reproduce themselves. Greed drives the pursuit of power and control over land and resources. Societies are shaped through psychological conditioning, mobilizing fear, identity and selective privilege and rewards, which produce hierarchical social orders. These hierarchies are maintained through violence and coercion. Over time, inequality becomes normalized through institutions, laws and dominant narratives. This normalization reinforces the conditions that allow greed to persist and grow, completing a positive feedback loop that perpetuates the system across generations (Interlink Books; with permission).

Why the model matters

Conventional political and historical analyses treat colonial narratives as alternate interpretations rather than as emotional recruitment and normalization tools, that is, as arguments to be refuted rather than conditioned responses to be understood and addressed. In doing so, they can grant propaganda legitimacy, sustaining and even reinforcing the narratives it seeks to challenge. Colonial narratives do not engage the reasoning areas of the mind, they work on emotional centers of the nervous system, particularly the relatively primitive fear and reward circuitries which determine what feels true before any logical argument begins.

One would not argue rationally with Pavlov’s dog to stop salivating. This is not because the dog has no language skill, it is because the behavior was not produced through reasoning. The same principle applies to humans with phobias: no amount of rational persuasion can relieve them. What is necessary is behavioral intervention targeting the conditioned response directly. Colonial conditioning requires the same kind of intervention, such as exposure therapy, in which gradual contact with the feared stimulus rewires the conditioned response without the necessity of rational convincing.

W2S approaches colonial narratives as behavioral endpoints and tools serving dispossession. By identifying greed as the primary driver, sustained and escalated through intermittent reinforcement across manufactured identity, social reward and conditioned aggression, as well as punishment of dissent, the model distinguishes between offense by the colonizer aimed at control and domination, which includes the construction and deployment of narratives, and defense by the colonized, necessary for survival and protection of resources. It explains how ruling classes manufacture violence for theft and how ordinary people are recruited as accomplices.

Because the model is grounded in behavioral neuroscience and evolutionary biology rather than the specifics of any single historical case, it identifies recurring patterns across vastly different settler colonial contexts, making it comparative, predictive, and considerably harder to dismiss as partisan. In doing so, it dismantles propaganda, obstructs divide-and-conquer strategies, and builds solidarity between all those oppressed by similar systems of domination.

The W2S model clarifies why systems such as colonialism, apartheid, slavery and other forms of authoritarian control can endure for generations, even when their injustice becomes widely visible.

Further, the same framework also identifies where interventions can be useful. Empathy is innate and moral disengagement is conditioned, and therefore reversible. Those who resist can maintain or recover empathy circuits through exposure to the humanity of the out-group, counter-narratives (such as W2S) and alternative social community. Solidarity through co-resistance becomes the neurological, behavioral antidote to the rewards and privileges the oppressive system installs.

Further, the model points to empowerment of the oppressed, disruption of segregation and propaganda narratives, and withdrawal of rewards, from within and outside the system, as effective means of resistance. The histories of anti-colonial resistance demonstrate that struggle and solidarity can reclaim a humanity in which the liberation of the colonized frees the colonizer as well. Disrupting the mechanisms outlined in the W2S model requires cultivating their neurobehavioral opposites: sociality, critical education, and intersectional solidarity as alternative rewards. This cultural transformation must be grounded in real material needs, adaptive rather than rigid and led by the oppressed.

Zionism and Wired to Steal

Each element of the W2S cycle is observable in Israeli expansionist and genocidal behavior, before and since October 7th. Within the W2S framework, the Zionist project is not exceptional. It follows a white supremacist dynamic common across other settler-colonial projects, including the United States, Australia, and South Africa.

The same cycle driven by greed is fully operational in Israel’s actions in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Iran today. The actions of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and U.S. President Trump are natural expressions of a ruling class which acts with impunity, while being perfectly aligned with and enhancing the violent cycle the model describes.

Greed is expressed through systematic land and resource theft, including looting; collective identity is organized through narratives of divine entitlement; fear is stoked through the decontextualization of Hamas’s actions as genocidal and uniquely sadistic; selective privilege rewards settlers with land, status, and impunity while punishing dissent. The intermittent reinforcement schedule propels the destruction of hospitals, photographing of degraded prisoners, torture in myriad forms, the burning of olive groves, and so many other atrocities; all acts that service displacement, terror and genocide, consistent with a humiliation reward track conditioned through decades of impunity.

Crucially, these behaviors are products of a constructed Zionist culture; they are conditioned rather than expressions of innate human nature. Thus, these same processes can be reversed, enabling populations to reconnect with their shared humanity and capacity for empathy, laying a foundation for co-resistance with Indigenous Palestinians against domination, genocide, and theft.

This piece first appeared at Mass Review.

Yoav Litvin is a Doctor of Psychology/ Behavioral Neuroscience and author of Wired to Steal: Zionism and the Shaping of the Western Mind with Ilan Pappé (Interlink Books, Fall 2026). For more info, please visit yoavlitvin.com  

   https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/08/25/wired-to-steal-the-behavioral-production-of-the-colonizer/?fbclid=IwY2xjawT7ob9wZG9mBWV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkEDIyMjAzOTE3ODgyMDA4OTIAAR5alLc_McctYMa6aAGJZUir5FxNeKJYuxNcOKwwxAnrvh-A8y-PgmikpUV52Q_aem_nnWqqUFhtbbzOwqCrrIlpQ