To ask what human nature is, Nevzorov sets a thought experiment I keep returning to as I read the book for NOX - a vivarium, and one animal you may save.
The choice
Every creature on Earth is dangerous, he grants. "But the worst choice of all would still be homo." A crocodile can kill its benefactor; so can a man. The difference:
A cobra will not dash off a denunciation against its rescuer. And a crocodile will not write its own name into the will.
Nevzorov // The Origin of Genius and Fascism
Why we are like this
Nearly all of human history - "99.8 percent" - falls in the Pleistocene, and that epoch "endowed him with his basic qualities: mendacity, contentiousness, hysteria, and thievishness." They were not flaws but tools. Man was "dramatically weak," and "the best compensator for weakness is vileness. Evolution sighed sadly, but supplied that too. Measuring out, just in case, about five times more than was necessary." A savage world made a savage animal: "he was created by a world bared-fanged and vile."
The hyena mirror
To see the human clearly, Nevzorov says, watch spotted hyenas. Their society's "glue... is made mostly of lust, malice, and fear," and "the more contentious the animals, the higher their need to live together." In their yellow eyes "there is not even a hint of the simplest 'thought.'" Then he rewinds the same African delta two million years:
Before us are not hyenids, but early homo. Our forefathers... Everything that was said about hyenas applies to them in the highest degree.
Nevzorov // The Origin of Genius and Fascism
Switch off the culturological pathos, "knock all the anthropologists' myths to hell," and what remains is "an ordinary animal." That is not cynicism for its own sake. It is the only honest starting point for asking how such an animal ever came to write symphonies at all - which is the question the rest of the series takes up.