Tribalist aggressive mentality vs. enlightement

I think there is a pre-rational level of aggressive self preservation that all humans share, that is active in the absence of higher level abstractions.

Justice is a higher level abstraction than self defense: It involves identifying that other people are like you, and therefore they hurt just as you hurt. They care about their property like you care about your property. That abstraction ultimately leads to a moral conscience and self restraint: A person would not steal or harm others, and would become indignant when witnessing injustice inflicted on others.

But a person who did not perform that abstraction early on, will only care about their own suffering. The mechanism of anger still exists in them, and they will take hostile actions according to how they perceive others' behavior toward them, but they will support any unjust and vile action, so long as it aligns with their self interest (and I don't mean here, some objective self interest, but simply what they want and consider to be desirable).

I think one level above the most primitive form of self preservation exists the group identity. It's one step higher on the level of abstraction, but still includes your tribe vs. any other tribe. I think this level of abstraction is shared by tribe animals.

The next level of abstraction is humanity. A person learns to appreciate human life, regardless of race. They distinguish good vs bad people according to their actions toward others, instead of the color of their skin or the clothes they wear.
I think this level of abstraction collides with more primitive forms of tribe affiliation which exists in our psyche. But that point may be disputed.

Just as a gorilla will hunt and murder gorillas from other tribes, some people do the same.
It's interesting to note that it is likely only possible for humans to develop the phenomenon of psychopathy, in which a single person is stopped from developing an abstraction even on the tribe level, and is reduced to a circle of one. I think it is only human parents that can accumulate enough hate to raise a human beings that can be so defective in its capacity to trust and love. Animals would be driven by biology to care for their young and provide the necessary environment to become social. An animal cannot develop an abstraction of "the value of living things" on a conceptual level (although cross-species rescue behavior has been documented). It is more limited to its tribe of familiar members and genetic bonds.

It becomes confusing for modern, enlightened people to understand tribal behavior of other humans. We can't comprehend things like the holocaust. The Germans were not psychopaths; they did not murder their own kind. They came home at the end of a work day at the Jewish camp to a loving family. That is the horror we struggle to comprehend. They were not animals; they were something worse. Something that had the potential of develop an abstract understanding of the value of human life and justice, and instead chose the level of animals.

But my point is that, we should understand that the highest level of abstraction, the human being capable of valuing life as such, and justice regardless of race - is not a given, it is not a guarantee just because someone is human. It is a potentiality that requires other developmental components to come into fruition.

In the meanwhile, those of us who did develop this way have the burden of leading the world in two ways: one intellectual, of spreading the same values, ideas, and kindness to others; and the second is self preservation, when we are being targeted by those on the animal level of functioning, when they try to harm us.