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Notes -
I already addressed that - yes, men like the idea of fighting and winning glory. You have provided no evidence that this means we all deep down enjoy causing pain and suffering and wrecking what other people have built. Like all your just-so stories, it's just something you spun out with deepity words.
I think if you actually read journals of people fighting in the Napoleonic era who were not Napoleon, you will find that as in most wars, most of the men fighting it did not actually enjoy it, even if they have fond memories of the camaraderie afterwards. They justified it with pride, with self-defense, with national interest, but not "'Cause it's fun to destroy what other people have." Master and Commander is not about guys enjoying destruction and pillage. The whole point of the movie is that they are trying to defend their homeland; Aubrey's rousing speech to his crew is all about preventing the French from taking over England.
Very devout Christians have always enjoyed fraud to get rich and consorting with whores, too. You are still just making up what you want the Bible to endorse.
It’s very normal in video game culture to say things like “you ruined his night”, “he will cry himself to sleep tonight”, “you made him uninstall” after vanquishing your foe. Why do you believe boys and men say this? Or are these just evil people in your mind? Usually when you make the enemy quit the game, this makes the male player happy. You would have to explain why this occurs, if not for causing misfortune and pain upon your enemy.
Do you really think the soldiers did not enjoy the prospect of taking things from their enemy? Then why did all of Napoleon’s soldiers loot? Why did the British loot the Chinese? Why did the Catholics loot the Byzantines? Why did Rome loot their enemies? It’s possible you have an atypical mind a la typical mind fallacy. Hell, I know a guy who proudly showed of Saddam’s execution sword, which of course he looted in Iraq while in the army. And again, male leisure activity involves looting mechanics for precisely this reason — video games are fun for a reason and the reason relates back to our innate psychology. We like to play the assassin who kills enemies and loots their bodies because deep down we have some kernel of an instinct which comes from prehistory, though of course moral compunction overrides this. What boy didn’t want to be a ninja in his adolescence? Why do people play GTA and not “give out compliments simulator”?
That’s just a speech to give them a just cause on top of their mannerbunding; Britain had declared war first and the ship was off the coast of Brazil. No one is watching the movie because they sympathize with the cause of the King, instead they see themselves in the männerbund who are singularly interested in destroying their enemy through trickery.
No, they are empathizing with defending your home and family.
That’s only two brief sentences in the whole movie. I don’t think they ever really talk about home apart from that. The whole film, the viewer follows the men plotting and fighting against the Acheron. They spend more time romanticizing about the ship and Lord Nelson than their homes and wives. That’s what makes it such a good movie: there’s none of that sentimentalslop that guys don’t actually care to watch.
The whole mafia genre is another case of this. Why do guys love mafia movies? It is not because of the subtle sociopolitical commentary and ironies of the Sopranos.
You have a habit of dissecting things into discrete components that you can fit together into your thesis, and ignoring vast swathes of context and nuance. You are also very guilty of typical-minding what you apparently feel.
You've built your entire hypothesis that "Actually, all men enjoy looting and raping" on the edifice of "We like competitive sports and violent video games." Numerous people have offered you other interpretations with examples, and you reject them because looting and raping sounds like a good time to you and therefore it must be natural to all men.
There was a lot of sentiment in Master and Commander. It was very male-oriented, yes, but the idea that men don't like or feel sentimental about things like home, family, nation, faith, is a stunning declaration.
In fact men did enjoy the sociopolitical commentary and ironies of the Sopranos. That's why it was an award-winning show. The Sopranos was in many ways a deconstruction of the Mafia glamor, and yet it had a very large male audience. Men like Mafia movies in general for the same reason we like all kinds of power fantasies, but most men want the money and the chicks but not to actually go around beating whores and shooting shopkeepers. Apparently you don't understand this. It may be that you are a more typical man and it may be that I am, but I know which way I would wager.
I don’t recall seeing an alternative explanation for the popularity of the violent männerbund video game genre in my replies. I’ll look again. There has been the argument that male video game players actually like a variety of genres, and while this is true, there’s still reason to believe that they especially like the violent genre. The reason this is the edifice of my argument is that it’s a surprisingly strong edifice. If there is one strong argument, there’s not really a reason to reinforce it with additional arguments, which often proves cumbersome in forum discussion imo.
I am curious why you keep bringing up rape. I never mentioned rape in my post. Why do you have rape on your mind? The Conan the Barbarian quote only mentions the lamentations of the defeated women. Very odd.
You’re welcome to peruse the script. They get very sentimental about Lord Nelson (in real life: an impious and vainglorious adulterer, who happened to be exceedingly good at killing the French, and thus became the eternal hero of Britannia). The sentiment is all between the männerbund. Here is what they have to say about the women back home: “(toasting) to wives and sweethearts: may they never meet”.
They do. But that’s not why they enjoy warring. And it’s not why the premiere guy movie is the premiere guy movie. I think the only women are some topless natives.
You must have watched a different Sopranos. Money and chicks factor very little in the show. Tony has, what, one mistress? Two? And an annoying wife? And enough money for a boat and a McMansion. This isn’t Entourage. The Sopranos is popular because it follows the conflict of Tony and his crew as they pursue dominance against their competitors. It’s crew vs crew conflict and inter-crew conflict. Men like to see Tony steal the resources and fealty from rivals. They like to see men act within a männerbund to win resources and power. Does the average male viewer really crave to learn about the sociology of the mafia in the turn of the 21st century? Is he a criminologist who wants to explore the depths of narcissism in Tony Soprano? IMO, no.
Men have power fantasies. They dream of being heroes, of being winners, of being the biggest and the baddest. We are competitive and we dream of glory. But generally speaking, we dream of doing that for a cause, for king or country or our family. Not just for the sheer joy of bashing another guy's skull in. That is the Kulak argument and yours, that we're all just chimps. This point has been made repeatedly to you, that while it may be fun to just blow up pixels in a violent game, it's not actually an urge a healthy person has, to destroy and kill for the sheer pleasure of death and destruction.
It isn't. "My edifice is very strong because my argument is correct because I have said my argument is correct" is not in fact a good argument.
Yet you keep harping on it, especially how much fun it was to isolate some group's girlfriend gamer and make her cry. You keep bringing it up as part of the whole destroy and pillage and conquer thing. I think you're being a little disingenuous here appealing to the dark violent urges you think every man has but pretending to be offended that I point out the obvious consequent.
It's your position that they "enjoy warring." It's my position that they enjoy winning wars and receiving the accolades and benefits of winning. Read the actual memoirs of soldiers from nearly any war in the past couple of centuries, and you'll find very few who really enjoyed the experience of war (some, but not many), and quite many who thought war was a horrible experience, even if they did consider it a noble cause, even if they are proud to have done it.
... You hear that joke made in a toast and conclude "Yeah, this is evidence that Real Men don't actually care about their women and families? They just love killing other men and destroying what others have built?"
Okay.
I said Mafia movies. Then I went on to point out that the Sopranos, specifically, is a deconstruction of the Mafia glamor.
You do this kind of argumentation a lot.
Sure, but they also like to see if Tony is eventually gonna get whacked. Most men don't want to be Tony Soprano, and those who do are people I would not want living near me any more than I'd want Tony Soprano as a neighbor.
And to get fucked up by their dumb choices, or wrecked when their plans go south. Most men aren't saying "Man, I wish that was me holding up bodegas and getting in gunfights with other mobs."
But those elements are what made Sopranos better and more popular than just another mob show.
I think you are very shallow consumer of media.
The problem with “men do not like the sheer joy of bashing another guy’s skull in” is that we literally have “sheer joy of bashing another guy’s skull in: the game”, and it is enjoyed by many men. Mortal Kombat and Tekken are also like that. A couple weeks ago there was “sheer joy of bashing another guy’s skull in: Jake Paul Version”, and this was watched on Netflix by 33 million people and hit #1 in 45 countries, including America. I don’t like these games, or boxing or MMA. But Jake Paul kind of got his skull bashed in. People loved it.
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What is your explanation for the fact that armies need to teach men to kill, and that most men display considerable resistance to it, and require intensive training? The Grossman argument, in On Killing, is exaggerated, but as far as I'm aware it is nonetheless true that using lethal force - or even just maiming force - on another human being is psychologically difficult for most people, and they have to psych themselves up for it. That's one reason why armies need pre-battle rituals, communal bonding rituals, etc., to prepare soldiers to use lethal force.
It's true that boys and men often enjoy dominance or victory to some extent. For that matter, as far as I can tell women have competitive instincts as well. But it is a big leap from "boys enjoy winning" or "games for boys often involve simulated violence" to "all men yearn to destroy and rape and pillage".
I think that study’s theory is likely bunk as this was never a concern in premodernity. Like, I doubt there is a passage from an ancient writer (most of them familiar with war) claiming that men are afraid to kill, though many would certainly be cowards. Then you have the normative duelling culture among nobles for a long stretch of time, eg
which strongly suggests that men, at an insult of honor, would be willing to kill or maim a member of even the same tribe. This is a defensible ritual IMO because it rids your upper class of cowards, though it also has a bad dysgenic effect. The optimal dueling culture would probably involve less accurate pistols so that you still filter out the cowardly and overly-pacifistic while retaining the genes of the nobility.
The really crucial bit is their enemies. In the games they play, men aren’t typically attacking innocent parties, but only enemies. And I do think this is real. It’s just as real in the “civilized pacifist” who wants to levy high taxes on only his political enemies or who wants BLM rioters to target a specific part of a city. I remember how happy the online “pacifist liberal” was to see a police station or a gas station set on fire during BLM.
If the Minnesotan wants any chance of solving a Somali scam epidemic, then they likely must activate the instincts God gave them for solving such things. That means treating them as an enemy, so that every uncovered scam comes with a feeling of victory and pride; it means rallying men around pursuing justice, with rituals and celebrations; it means retribution in some judicial or approximate way; etc. If they don’t activate these instincts then they will never find the energy to actually fix it.
Well, I'd argue that naval officers are firstly already people who've been through military training, and secondly are already selected for martial intent. Pointing out that certain classes of people historically have been willing to use violence doesn't seem like enough, to me, to establish that all or most men throughout history have had high tolerance for lethal violence, and that modern men are uniquely wussy. Is it not just as likely that historical warrior classes were intensely socialised for violence? That seems like, well, an integral part of having a warrior class in the first place.
As regards games, I would tend to agree that men in general (and in fact people in general) have competitive instincts, where they enjoy defeating simulated opponents. I am skeptical that this generalises to real violence, given that simulated violence in video games is firstly fictional and secondly usually extremely sanitised. I think that if I gave the average gamer who enjoys shooting people in Call of Duty a real rifle and invited them to shoot real human beings (and let's say I guaranteed them immunity from reprisal, prosecution, etc.), even human beings belonging to outgroups, that gamer would hesitate.
I'm not moved by high-flown rhetoric about "the instincts God gave them", and I don't need a call to action. I think that kind of preaching is actually against the Motte's rules. Let's try to stay focused.
I don’t believe the naval training would have translated into a willingness to demand a duel for honor from a fellow officer. The training would have been drills, target practice, and so on, rather than making them wholecloth insensitive to death. That’s a big leap to go from “fire at a target when I say so” to “demand that the brother who insulted you show up with a pistol or he loses all honor”. And the fact that they typically lost honor is telling, it was expected that they would duel.
My point is different: they have been trained out of applying their instincts at a young age. Not quite “wussy”. A bear that has been trained not to bite isn’t a wussy, it’s just a trained bear. But really, my main point isn’t even about violence per se, but about all the powerful cognition we have for labeling enemies and wanting to defeat them — cognition which is wasted in leisure rather than being applied toward any Genuine Social Good. This could be expressed with total pacifism! The Somalis express their warrior instincts with total pacifism: they rally in political brotherhood, steal resources, and create propaganda to label their opponents as evil racists. The natives can do the same, or they can use their instincts to rally around and punish them draconically, or do whatever they wish as free men in a free land that their ancestors conquered with blood and sweat. But maybe move beyond the strategy of “complain and game”, which characterizes the youth of every longhouse’d male, myself included.
To me it seems we are remarkably sensitive to death today, and I think it comes from a denial of our own absolute and impending mortality. We refuse to grasp that we will be dead and before we die we will live a number of unremarkable and fleeting years in old age where we watch war movies of men dying honorable deaths. This denial is the drive behind transhumanism, probably. Whereas our honorable and civilization-building ancestors grasped their mortality and did not want to go out as coward or losers, our ancestors like Lincoln and Hamilton who showed up for duels. At any moment our oligarchs — like those in Russia and Ukraine — will demand that we will all just perish in agony in no man’s land, similar to our ancestors in Vietnam, WWII, and WWI, and the civil war, but worse, because of drones. We should accept this. At any moment, we will actually be forced by a corrupt and selfish government to kill people who don’t even deserve to die.
“Fictional” is irrelevant, because people do fictionally what gives them pleasure. There isn’t a fictional homework simulator, or a fictional laundry simulator. There’s no fictional “comfort dying grandmother” or “be broken up with” simulator as this would be unpleasant. And “sanitized” is not my understanding of male video game culture. When a teenage boy sees that he can shoot his enemy’s head off, or that impaling them leads to his moaning in agony, he finds it awesome. That’s why developers put those features in. Out of all the millions of possibilities to have fun, males consistently choose “pretend to kill my enemies realistically with my friends” simulator, which they do because they like to imagine doing that. They could instead play “paintball simulator” or “airsoft simulator”, if they were averse to violence, but those don’t even sell. No one wants to play fencing simulator, they want to play “literally chop my opponent’s hand off” simulator with the blood level set to realistic. And they listen to raw odes to violence in rap (near ubiquitous now, to my displeasure), and they watch movies like John Wick where the protagonist mercilessly kills his enemies under the faintest pretext of justification. And they watch Game of Thrones and find it awesome that Jamie Lannister kills a bunch of people.
That’s because of socialization. This same man will clap as the rebels in Inglorious Basterds execute a surrendering soldier. And that’s also because of socialization.
In my last reply I wrote “if”, as in, cause and effect, a diagnostic thing. That is descriptive, not prescriptive. I am not Minnesota and am not advocating for anyone to do anything, but opining that if they wanted to solve the issue there are certain prerequisite steps.
What is the difference between "men have a natural in-born tendency to violence, and socialisation is required to make them peaceful" and "men have a natural in-born aversion to violence, and socialisation is required to make them militant"?
All people are socialised, and soldiers or military elites of past ages were socialised into those roles. Today people are often socialised into different roles. Obviously socialisation has a huge impact on adult behaviour.
But you seem to be claiming something more than that people can be socialised for violence (or more specifically, for certain forms of controlled violence) or against violence. I understand you to be making a claim about inherent nature or essence. Does the claim that all men have this inherently violent nature stand up?
Yes, I think it's absolutely sanitised. When I was in primary school I thought Turok 2 was awesome, and that's a game where you have a gun that fires a drill that homes on to and burrows into an enemy's head and mulches their brain. But this is not a realistic depiction of such a weapon. It is highly sanitised. The enemy wiggles in a funny way and then their head explodes. That's the kind of thing that young boys laugh at and it is very far from realistic death.
And of course there are very popular non-lethal games? Paintball simulators don't sell? The Splatoon series has sold over thirty million copies. It's paintball. It has live concerts in real life. If you look at the most popular video game series, yes, there are some at the top about violence (Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed), but there are also totally abstract games (Tetris), sports games (FIFA, NBA 2K), games about everything under the sun (Mario), games about building and creativity (Minecraft), games about bug-collecting (Pokémon), games about racing (Need for Speed), games about life simulation (The Sims) and so on. Conflict and fighting feature in most games and I think people do find those enjoyable or exciting, but you suggested that realistically killing enemies is overwhelmingly the most popular thing in games. In the top ten best-selling game franchises, I see maybe three that could fit that description (CoD, GTA, and AC).
Male nature and human nature is just more complicated than you're asserting here. I'm not saying that men in their natural state (which probably doesn't exist, unless you want to get really into studies of wild children) are all harmonious peaceful stereotypes. I think that people in general, both male and female, do have some aggressive and competitive instincts. But I think those are just one part of a larger and more complex mix, that we also have cooperative instincts, including those that make us hesitate to inflict violence.
I don’t know exactly what you mean by “what is the difference” between those things; I assume you’re asking rhetorically? I don’t believe the nobles we were talking about were socialized to enjoy killing; historical military training did not focus on dehumanization of enemies. They were also raised in a Christian environment, although probably one less obsessed with pacifism, and were merely socialized to stop being shamed about violence. You can look at toddlers, who are “violent” in the sense that they constantly hit and throw until corrected.
This seems like a game that is mostly played when parents don’t want you playing a violent game; one study finds the majority of players are under 19. If you look at Steam’s Most Played by Hours, it is all violent games with the exception of Stardew Valley and a cat that plays the bongos. This doesn’t include FortNite which is likely the most popular game among young males by a margin. The reason Tetris is on the list is because of tech limitations in the 80s / 90. Pokémon is popular because of children in both genders (especially in 90s and 00s), not because of teenage or adult men. You’d really have to look at a list of only titles males play since technology has allowed shooters, so since ~2000. Final Fantasy is there because it’s been around since 1987 and played by both genders. I’m not quite sure if “franchise” is even the right thing to look at, rather than genre; if boys play 100 different “war simulators”, but there’s only one hegemonic soccer simulator, then it would seem that they prefer the one soccer game over the hundreds of split up violent video games. Eg Medal of Honor is 40mil units that should just be combined with all shooters
What I mean is that there doesn't seem any compelling reason to believe the story you're telling. Obviously both men in the 21st century and men in the 12th century were socialised into particular contexts and for particular behaviours. On what basis do you say that the behaviour of 21st century men does not reflect natural instincts, but the behaviour of 12th century men does? (Especially since the 12th century men we're talking about, warrior aristocrats, were given a martial education from a very early age.)
On video games specifically: I don't have figures specifically separated out by gender, but I don't see anything in the conversation before now that says that under-18s don't count. I'd take "that's including women" as a valid objection specifically for The Sims, but gaming in general is such a massively male-dominated hobby that I doubt it makes much difference for anything else. And I don't know why you think that pre-2000 games somehow don't count. Aren't you making a claim about innate male nature?
I note that you also skipped over the point about even these violent games being extremely sanitised. You cite Fortnite, for instance, and Fortnite is a heavily stylised cartoon game. Fortnite looks like this. It is not even attempting to show realistic violence. Likewise on Steamcharts, you have games like DotA 2 or Apex Legends, which are similarly cartoony. Even the 'realistic' games are heavily sanitised. Here's Counterstrike 2 - while it's higher-fidelity than Fortnite, it is still obviously cutting out most of the gore, grime, and terror of war. I feel the violence on display here ranges from what you'd be happy to show to primary school children to PG 15 or so.
That young boys like to play war isn't really contested - but none of this play-conflict bears much resemblance to real war.
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I think you're the one typical-minding. If your mindset is that it's fun to hurt people and take their stuff, I can see why you'd project that onto others and even construct justifications for it under your religious frame, but I do not think that is in fact the natural default psychology of most men. Most men want to be respected, to achieve things, and to defend the people and things they care about. War is a means to an end and we sing songs about it, but it's not the end. It's not our reason for being.
Your philosophy, like KulakRevolt's, is that everything else is all just a veneer over our desire to rape and kill. If that's true we'd never become a species capable of epic poetry, of grand architecture, of space travel. You and Kulak would have us never evolving beyond chimp behavior. Yes, we all have a bit of the chimp in us. That's why we teach boys that you shouldn't hit people because they hurt your feelings, and that fighting should be a last resort, not your first recourse. People like Kulak who say no, violence is the first and only answer, and people like you who say, but violence is fun and everyone wants to do it, cannot be trusted to build and maintain the very societies whose decline you bemoan.
"What was the epic poetry about?"
War. Why do you think this is a gotcha?
Coffee_enjoyer has a rather simplistic view of this stuff, but yours is pure denial. Epic poetry was born as a means of exploring and understanding violence, not moralizing about it (see, for instance, Odysseus's slaughter of the suitors). Grand architecture was born as a means for the projection of power and the defense of strongholds, space travel as a complement to/substitute for nuclear war. The veneer you mention isn't a thin one. In fact, it's the thick crust built over those instincts that makes civilizations great, but the desires to take and to destroy, even the desire for sadistic violence - and, above all, the need to get better at those - are some of the core drivers of civilization. It's only with fairly advanced civilization we even get the concept that this violence could be bad in itself, instead of merely situationally unacceptable (you can rape the Sabines, but you can't rape Lucretia).
Now, there are many ways to deal with it, like the introjection of sadism Nietzsche mentions as the root of guilt cultures, or the sublimation of male energies into productive effort that Freud prefers, but it's not some mere chimp impulse we should beat down in boys. Our schools/phones produce enough castrati as is. Let 'em take it to sports, the arts, the boardroom - when necessary, the military - and remind the world that homo sapiens is the apex predator even when he isn't killing.
No.
Yes.
I don't deny we glorify and celebrate war, but as a means, not an end.
That was my point.
Chimps do violence for the sake of violence (and because their instincts tell them to, because there's a lot of evolutionary hardwiring).
We should prefer not to live in a society of chimps. That doesn't mean castrating men. We can still acknowledge the evolutionary hardwiring.
I don't want to "beat down" boys, but anyone who celebrates violence for the sake of violence and revels in pain and suffering and destroying what others have built is a chimp.
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You’re not coming up with any direct or circumstantial evidence to forward your theory, though. Your worldview lacks explanatory power.
This is a poor misreading. My theory is that men have an instinct to dominate alien or defecting groups and thus find it gratifying. American men waste this instinct on video games and have been wrongly taught that they can’t express it politically. Somalis express it politically, which is why they are stealing the Swedes’ resources and replacing them in Minnesota. The Somali allows himself to feel joy at his victories, just like the Puritans felt joy upon vanquishing their enemies, but the modern American male is only told to feel such joy in worthless video games.
And yours is just "My feels."
I think you have no idea what either the average Swede or the average Somali feels, only just- so stories to flatter your preconceived notions. You just make stuff up, throw it at the wall, and pontificate about "explanatory power" when you're just starting at a desirable conclusion and working backwards to construct a theory.
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