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According to the revealed preference of their favorite leisure activity, men really love raiding enemies and aliens. Your counter-hypothesis needs evidence, and it will have a difficult time explaining why men pay for the opportunity to recreate what they did in the past. And why men loved to do it in the Napoleonic Era, or during the 1527 Sack of Rome, or the 1850 sacking of the Summer Palace. Or during any of the completely normal raiding activities during the Age of Sail. And why it comprises the subject of the most popular “guy movie”, Master & Commander, which is literally just about a hierarchical männerbund seizing a trophy ship through trickery. Is it okay because the authority says it is okay? This would not be a very masculine take, as the King himself was established through men simply willing it.
The Psalms which were inspired by God are filled with curses of destruction for enemies, so the eseigesis isn’t completely impossible. But you don’t have to do exegesis, you simply have to understand that very devout Christians have always engaged in the joy of taking from enemies. If this is a sin, okay, it is probably less of a sin than the one your critic is engaged in, so they can be quiet and criticize themselves + repent for seeing a speck in his brother’s eye, which is a much worse sin.
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.
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
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