I DON’T much believe the theories of Freud and Jung, those grandaddies of psychoanalysis. Do all men want to murder their father and have sex with their mother, as Freud’s Oedipus complex has it? Are all women gripped by rivalry towards their mother for the sexual attention of their father, as Jung’s corresponding Electra complex claims?

I doubt it. That doesn’t mean that psychotherapy is bunkum, it’s not; or that many of our dysfunctions aren’t found in that creepy old room named "Childhood" - they are. But theories simply remain theories unless there’s consistent proof to establish them as facts.

However, some parts of Freud’s philosophy ring very true, and do appear to have foundation in reality, specifically his thoughts on "the death drive" - the human compulsion towards self-destruction.

It’s always been with us. We’ve torn each other to pieces since we settled down and became "civilised"’. Isn’t that the irony of our species?

It seems, according to prehistory scholars, that as hunter-gathers we were a rather peaceful, egalitarian bunch, seldom getting into much more than minor conflict and happy to share resources. Once we built those first cities, though, we began to enslave and brutalise each other.

Those early city-builders were somewhat like Freud - simply inventing ideas and calling them "reality": why should a shiny yellow metal pulled from the ground confer power and wealth on the owner?

Read more by Neil Mackay

Perhaps it’s part of growing older, but as I reached mid-life I’ve felt humanity’s death drive throb around me in ways I find terrifying. If you know the opening lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy - “Midway upon the journey of life, I found myself within a dark forest” - that’s the feeling I had, and still have, when I look at the trajectory of my species.

I grew up in a war zone - 1970s Northern Ireland - and in a wider world facing nuclear annihilation. So being aware of this dreadful human urge isn’t a new experience. It’s just that age - maturity, maybe - makes its presence more acute.

It’s the sense of humanity failing to learn from past mistakes which really seems to prove the death drive exists. In the lifetime of my parents and grandparents, our species created two world wars, the Holocaust and the Gulag, and flattened Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

For a few decades, we calmed down - if you can call Vietnam, September 11, and the Iraq War calm. Now, as we reprise 1920s hysteria a century on, it seems we’re itching to do it all over again, except this time we really can wipe ourselves out.

Are we just doomed to keep on destroying each other?

Where will Ukraine take us? If the country falls, where does Putin go next? How will the West respond? I’ve just checked the Doomsday Clock - another theoretical device marking our death drive. It’s currently at 90 seconds to midnight.

Where will the Middle East take us? Regional war between Israel and Iran? Regional wars rarely remain regional.

In Ukraine, the Middle East, and that dreadful - shamefully forgotten - war in Sudan, human rights are butchered alongside humans. The Geneva Conventions exist now in name only. Crimes against humanity are carried out all around the world with impunity. The notion of genocide is a staple of our news cycle. How - 80 years after we did what we did as a species - can this be happening again?

Our death drive encompasses the entire planet. We rape and assault the very earth we stand on with as much ferocity as we rape and assault fellow humans. More than one-third of the world’s tree species were found this week to be facing extinction. If the trees die, so do we. We might be very clever hairless monkeys, but we cannot invent oxygen.

The Earth’s carbon sinks are breaking down. Our Government is actually considering passing legislation to allow the use of bee-killing pesticides. So let’s kill the trees while the Earth vomits our filthy pollution back at us, and then finish off the pollinators.

Indeed, the boundaries of our death drive reach beyond this poor planet. We’re currently militarising space. What can you say about a species which would ring this beautiful, little blue rock with lethality?

The Doomsday Clock is set at 90 seconds to midnightThe Doomsday Clock is set at 90 seconds to midnight (Image: PA)

Are we merely one giant suicide cult? Perhaps that’s all that can be said.

We suck our thumbs as billionaires harness AI against us - stealing our jobs, even using it to replace the very facet of humanity which makes us most human: our creativity. We will be spiritually dead if the music we listen to, the books we read, the dramas we watch, come not from us but from machines.

We kill our own pride and gumption also. Humanity seems content for a future in which there’s a few oligarchs, and a world of serfs. That very system has led to the near collapse of the global economy.

We’ve chosen an economic model that’s unsustainable, yet we keep on not simply defending it, but wanting it to mount in intensity. It’s like taking a razor to your flesh and every day making the wound deeper.

Perhaps the greatest "will to death" is found in those who now reject humanity’s shared reality. They kill reason. In America, during recent violent hurricanes, thousands believed the government was using weather as a weapon. This isn’t a mere American disease, though in America the fever runs highest.

Across the rest of the world, some would rather their children died of measles than get them vaccinated; some accuse doctors and nurses of mass murder because they tried to save us during pandemic.

The unwritten rule of column-writing is that solutions must be provided. Here’s problem X, we say, but never fear, meet solution Y. However, arrogance is the principle reason behind this mess humanity is in. So as one solitary, human spinning on a rock in the darkness of space, I won’t dare offer trite answers to the worst affliction of my species.

I don’t have solutions. All I can see is the problem. The answers will only be found through a collective effort by humanity. Indeed, maybe the act of working together - as our so-called "primitive" ancestors once did - is in itself the answer to what ails us.

Neil Mackay is the Herald’s Writer at Large. He’s a multi-award-winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics