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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 2025

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it would imply that trauma is something very different than people generally think.

Yes, absolutely.

How your mind reacts to things is generally up to your evolutionary optimiser with no real constraint besides complexity

It's also up a lot of other things! Like your attitude, like the sort of things you do after the things, and so many other things. Historians have speculated that maybe the reason WWII caused less PTSD in US soldiers than Vietnam was that there was a longer time returning home on ships to process things together and get mental distance from it. I think our postmodern society has lost a lot of helpful rituals like that.

I've read that argument by historians before, but I'd add this: The US simultaneously deployed a huge amount of soldiers in WWII while asking a relatively small number of them to do most of the actual fighting. Something like one in sixteen American soldiers saw serious combat during the war.

By contrast, the US deployed far fewer troops during the Vietnam War and asked those who did to do a lot more fighting. The USMC deployed and lost more Marines in WWII than in Vietnam, but those who did deploy to Vietnam suffered a higher casualty/fatality rate than their counterparts in WWII, with around 3% of those deployed Killed in Action in WWII vs. 5% in Vietnam.