Laws of media 369 man began to build for himself at the dawn of culture made many of his animal reflexes useless. (page 43) To put it briefly, man cannot trust himself when using his own artefacts. For example, Konrad Lorenz argues (On Aggression) that if man had more weaponry and armour as an organic part of himself, if he had tusks and horns, he would be less likely to kill his fellow men. Heavily armed animals have strong inhibitions against hurting their own species. Men, however, have few built-in restraints against turning their artificial weapons (extensions) upon one another. Firearms and bombs, which permit deadly action at great distances, seem to relieve the user of responsibility. Anthony Storr in Human Aggression observes: It is obviously true that most bomber pilots are no better and no worse than other men. The majority of them, given a can of petrol and told to pour it over a child of three and ignite it, would probably disobey the order. Yet, put a decent man in an aeroplane a few hundred feet above a village, and he will, without compunction, drop high explosives and napalm and inflict appalling pain and injury on men, women and children. The distance between him and the people he is bombing makes them into an impersonal target, no longer human beings like himself with whom he can identify. (page 112) Lorenz speaks in a similar fashion: Humanity would have indeed destroyed itself by its first inventions, were it not for the very wonderful fact that inventions and responsibility are both the achievements of the same specifically human faculty of asking questions. The deep, emotional layers of our personality simply do not register the fact that the crooking of the forefinger to release a shot tears the entrails of another man. No sane man would even go rabbit-hunting for pleasure if the necessity of killing his prey with his natural weapons brought home to him the full emotional realization of what he is actually doing. The same principle applies to an even greater degree to the use of modern remote-control weapons. (On Aggression, page 242) Quite apart from the use of weaponry at a distance, there is the effect of the changes in man himself that result from using his own devices to create environ-ments of service.9 Any new service environment, such as those created by the alphabet or railways or motor cars or telegraph or