Last week, I was in Denmark camping. I set up the tent in the far back corner of the grounds where there were fewer people. The grass had died here. There was only hot, dry sand left. Hence the fewer tents. The only other people who braved the dust-bowl was a family of six.

“So, what do you do?” I asked the mother, sitting in a deck chair around their plastic fold-out table.

“Air-hostess,” she said. “Have been for 30 years.”

“You must’ve seen some things.”

She nodded. “Human’s are bizarre. Just last month, we had a man who began hitting and kicking kick the chair in front of him because the passenger had reclined back. And I mean he was really whacking it.”

“How’d the guy in front of him respond?”

“He just held his ground.”

“Geeze. What happened?”

“I walked over as he was thumping the back of this thing and said, ‘Sir, you just can’t do that.’ And he said, ‘But he put his chair right into me.’ I told him, ‘Yeah, he’s allowed to. You can do it too.’ He didn’t listen though. He kept kicking. So I said, ‘Sir, if you keep doing that, I’ll have to call the police.’ And he responded by looking at me dead in the eye and belted the chair again.” The mother demonstrated this by holding up two open palms and thrust them forward, the same way a child might when trying to push his nemesis over in the sandpit. Actually, that's a weak comparison. The aeroplane scene conjures an image far more primitive than children in a playground.

When I was nine, my auntie took my cousin and me to the zoo. After looking at the lions, elephants and a Sumatran Tiger, we moved to the monkeys. In one of the habitats, there was a group of monkeys playing together—feeling each other up, talking, picking food our of each other’s fur. They seemed to get along splendidly, except for one monkey by himself in the corner. The isolated primate was fondling a branch, hunched over. After watching the lone monkey for five minutes, an employee walked in and placed a bowl of fruit next to a climbing pole. The group gravitated to the food and ate in harmony. Then, the monkey who was sitting alone scurried over and, instead of going for untouched fruit in the bowl, pushed another monkey (the same way man on the plane did) and snatched his banana.

We like to think humans are more advanced than socially inept monkeys. In many ways, we are, of course. But in just as many ways, we’re prone to the same survival instincts and irrational outbursts. If I described the two scenarios—the banging on the chair and the stealing of the banana—but didn’t specify the setting or the subjects, you probably couldn’t tell which were the monkeys and which were the humans.

The rationale behind the man's behaviour is hard to imagine: Me no like chair in face. Me angry at man who put chair like this. Must bang chair. Must intimidate man. Then man will pull up chair.

I do not mean to undermine the man. After all, I’ve summoned up the same primitive response when a customer clicks her fingers at me to demand service or when someone has cut in front of me in traffic: Fancy Land Rover cut in front. Me feel pushed around. Must assert dominance. Must stick middle finger out window. Shout until head turns red.

While this approach to solving conflict has merits (there’s something cathartic about letting loose on a stranger), attacking another for a minor misdemeanour was probably better suited to the times when encroaching on others personal space involved a fellow caveman spearing you in the upper thigh, not a gentleman reclining on an aeroplane. Yet, this animalistic itch continues to live on, hiding behind the curtains of the unconscious.

Perhaps that is the challenge of being a human being. We get pulled in two directions, a tug-a-war between our hairy ancestors and our more evolved and sophisticated conscious. A passenger in front just reclined his chair. Should I fly kick the headrest? Or should I just recline too? I’d like to think I would choose the latter. Then again, the man on the plane probably would’ve said the same. I’m sure he didn’t mean to cause a big enough scene the flight attendants had to call security. And I’m sure, upon landing at the destination, the man didn’t want the Federal Police to escort him out of the plane, just as I’m sure the monkey didn’t want the zoologist to escort him to another cage.

. . .

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