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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.
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