I was in the infantry for over a decade. I joined before 9/11, but I did reenlist some years afterward, and I deployed a bunch, and fought many times. The thing about the article is that he says right there in the first couple paragraphs... Nobody that hasn't been there will understand the core message here. Worse, it's not socially palatable to embrace your innate human violence, despite it being such an intrinsic biological function of survival. And so even if some people might understand something of what this guy is talking about, they'd never admit it openly, and generally the most appropriate response our culture expects is some kind of pearl-clutching. So that's what people do. Even if they're genuinely curious and want to understand. Even if they do understand this universal truth to some degree. The one thing I discovered that surprised me the most when I joined was how normal everybody was. Soldiers are people, too. Sure, there are psychos and shitheads and scumbags, just like any community. But we were all born on planet Earth.
What I mean to say is this: Violence is built into every human being. Or as one of my favorite quotes of Captain Picard goes, "The seed of violence is within each of us". When I joined the army, I realized the most dangerous thing that could happen is for regular people to think that they're not capable of the things they read in the news.
About violence: I often feel that there's an "art" or a skill to master violence. As you say it's incarnation of survival; but emotionally and socially too. As a guy who naturally submits peacefully even if I feel aggressed. At some point I had enough and started to be able to embody my internal violent reaction. Not as an act but as a communication device. You're pushing me, you're about to get pushed, you can read it on my face, my tone, my posture / body language. If you didn't mean it then fine, let's keep it at that, apologies are welcome. That's something that most people can't really learn and get stepped on by others. (the recent woman movement displayed part of that, they stood silent, now they stopped doing so).
Society tries to tame violence, all good, but by supressing it we're not really improving things, we need people to master it in a way.
ps: a few years back some guy wrote a piece about why he loved war; title being counter intuitive, you'd expect a violent idiot but it was not. His point is that war is mentally easier than society, where every body lies, and confusion is normal. In war he said things become binary, friend or ennemy, inaction = death, decision = life. I found it very interesting.
Art or skill is an interesting way to look at it. There are a couple somewhat opposing social skills that seem to make like easier, or more bearable, for those who possess them. One is the ability to schmooze people, or even just remember their names and faces, easily.
The other is what you describe: not taking shit from others. But in the more artful way you described. I still think being a schmoozer a more useful superpower. But being able to signal that pushing you will be more trouble than it's worth seems to help avoid trouble.
I often think about the violent climax of Do the Right Thing. There's the melee in the pizza parlor which ends with the police killing Radio Raheem. Then, as things seem to be calming down, Spike Lee's character, who works at the parlor, picks up a trash can and throws it through the parlor's window. It leads to a full-scale riot.
The first time I watched the film, I was a bit puzzled by his action and even put off by it. Now I feel like it is the right thing to do. For the reason you described here: not as an act, not even as an act of catharsis which is how I expect it often gets read. But as a communication device. As an argument on behalf of violent resistance.
"In war he said things become binary, friend or ennemy, inaction = death, decision = life. "
Well ... not in every war. Also mentioned in the article, when you face guerilla and not a clearly marked enemy, things get messy.
Btw. the most effective war tactics are to create confusion in the enemy, that they don't know anymore where they are and where their friends are and how many enemys etc.
Also people struggled a lot when they fough in a war they don't believe in. But even then, you are right, things are simple when you are with your comrades and under fire.
Nobody signs the dotted line to sit in a tower or stand around at a checkpoint for twelve hours a day, but even the gunners have to go to the motor pool to PMCS the vehicles every once in a while. Perhaps the specific, historical role of "concentration camp guard" was a job fulfilled by a specific section of the SS, but the underlying point remains. They were not any less human than you are. This makes people uncomfortable, so they don't like to agree with it, instead using some other factor in their denial (e.g. "They were psychopaths, I am not"). But they were the same animal that you are. The same animal your children and grandchildren are. We like to think highly of ourselves, but it's a grave mistake to believe that you (personally) are not capable of those things. You absolutely are. You are just taking completely for granted that you've won the most amazing lottery in the history of the universe: The gift of a violence-free life in which you've never been pushed to the point of doing those things.
> Nobody signs the dotted line to sit in a tower or stand aroun
Few people sign the dotted line for what's described in the article either, it's something that happens after they get there, and doesn't happen to a guard in the middle of controlled territory.
> They were not any less human than you are.
But for completely different reasons than the thrill of violence and war-fighting.
The military is a huge community of people in the United States -- about two million people -- and we can't talk in any other sense than the general one. But my experience directly contradicts your first assertion. Were you in the military? It would be useful to tell us about your experience. Because I would say most people join combat arms specifically for what's described in the article. Nobody joins the infantry for any other reason (or perhaps a few with a family tradition or something). Even then, I never met a soldier in almost fourteen years that joined for the minutiae of guard duty or peeling potatoes or mopping floors. Combat, "adventure", college money, steady paycheck, service to country, family tradition, getting the hell out of town. Those are the big reasons people join.
I think you're still trying to put the Nazi SS concentration camp guard into a category of his own -- which is what most "normal" people want to do, to sort of implicitly deny that they could ever do such a thing. And I'm not sure how else I can address this denial other than with what's already been written, except to say that you don't know what you're capable of if you think that you or your family members or your friends couldn't ever be a party to these kinds of things. People are animals and products of their environment. Add a layer of abstraction, and you are ever bit as dangerous as the Nazis you've read about. This may seem astonishing and shocking, but it's true. Hitler was a human being. Genghis Khan was a human being. There will be another person like this in the future, and perhaps it will shock you to learn that they, too, will be a human being.
> Because I would say most people join combat arms specifically for what's described in the article.
Interesting, because the article strongly implies that it's strongly something you find on the battlefield, not go there for it.
>I think you're still trying to put the Nazi SS concentration camp guard into a category of his own -- which is what most "normal" people want to do, to sort of implicitly deny that they could ever do such a thing.
Why do you think that when I explicitly agreed with you? I'm not trying to deny it at all. I'm saying it's not what the article is about.
Well, you take what you want from the article, but it does not in fact say (or imply, to me) that people don't join looking for this experience. People do go looking for this experience specifically. I'm telling you this is the case because it's one of the reasons I joined personally. My best friend joined for similar reasons -- incidentally, there is only one person I consider a close friend who was never in combat, and he spent time in prison (it's no coincidence the old Stoics have been popular among soldiers and prisoners). One of the main reasons I joined was specifically for the chance to experience combat, even though before 9/11, it wasn't a very big one. People have different names for this ("kill terrorists" and "kick some ass" are pretty common), but it's what pretty much everybody joins the infantry for.
Now, what people find when they get off the plane could be anything. It's hard to quantify this complex experience even with the many varied perspectives shared by people who were right there with you. So you're going to have to understand that while the article is broadly true, nobody has perfect insight into what this experience is all about, myself included (perhaps especially me). Nobody in history has ever known all there is to know about war, just as nobody in history has ever known all there is to know about love. It's no different here, even if he's exposed a universal truth of combat. Exposed the kind of open secret that war fulfills a basic male impulse.
Either way, you replied to a comment in a thread about the innate human capacity for war and the danger of people denying or not recognizing that capacity, so that's why I'm talking about it here.
This article resonated with me. I was a Marine (no combat), didn't like it, but knew and respected the hell out of people who made a career out of it.
I learned several lessons in the service, many of which people don't want to talk about.
It takes only a few armed and motivated men to dominate hundreds, perhaps thousands of people. So disarmament and pacifism is not a workable strategy until the day we start programming people as if they were machines. Somebody has to have the job of being the most violent person in the room.
Everybody is violent. We are violent as a species. I think this is the thing that bothers so many people. They'd rather just turn away, pretend it's only others, and so forth. There is a ton of disgust and denial about who we are. We confuse who we aspire to be with our actual state. There may be Ghandis and Jesuses in our midst, but they are an extremely small percentage of the population. We are monkeys that kill things.
War is bad because of what is does to all participants, not just because it involves hurting and killing others. War slowly erodes our civilization, making more and more extreme things "normal". It doesn't matter who wins, who loses, or what the cause is. War harms everybody -- perhaps especially the ones who win, who view war as a logical remedy for whatever the next problem that they have. Those who have served avoid war not out of kindness for others, but because of the terrible destruction it will bring on our own society every time it is used.
(This, by the way, is another argument for the citizen soldier. Making war a separate profession that most people never experience just makes the self destruction that war does to civilization even worse, by isolating it and keeping it hidden. It also causes all sorts of misunderstandings and prejudices. The volunteer armed forces was a hack in the middle of Vietnam. It worked for a while, but it is having horrible long-term effects. Very bad stuff.)
I think the analogy that stuck with me most about this was that war may be the male version of motherhood, that is, the closest we come to being true to our biological selves. Somehow this feels right, although that's just intuition on my part.
Note: I am as non-violent as a person can get. I'm not trying to say that any of this is okay, simply that it appears to exist, whether it's okay or not.
> Everybody is violent. We are violent as a species. I think this is the thing that bothers so many people. They'd rather just turn away, pretend it's only others, and so forth. There is a ton of disgust and denial about who we are. We confuse who we aspire to be with our actual state. There may be Ghandis and Jesuses in our midst, but they are an extremely small percentage of the population. We are monkeys that kill things.
I agree with the sentiment of your post about the denialism in the modern world, but I slightly disagree that people are one or the other in extreme proportions, I feel like a good analogy is to view those potentials more as phenotypes that can be expressed to varying degrees along side each other (simultaneously), and a phenotype can change from one moment to the next depending on the environment. In other words - I think we are both Gandhi and the violent monkey and many other things.
I say this not from philosophical or psychological musings, I say this simply because with the slightest introspection I feel the potential for it all in me simultaneously - there's the part of me that arrogantly "knows" he can be the most bad ass muthafucka alive if needed, and part of me who has a more rationally minded world view and looks down upon mindless and pointless violence, and a great many things in between.
> I think the analogy that stuck with me most about this was that war may be the male version of motherhood, that is, the closest we come to being true to our biological selves.
Absolutely, I don't think I need to argue this one for any man, but perhaps I can just resonate this: i'm not a very social person, I didn't learn these traits, but I definitely feel the propensity for violence given the right conditions, be it something admirable i.e "protective", or not i.e "vengful".
As usual understanding these things rather than rejecting them out of some miss-placed shame of humanity is the correct way to move forward, accept who we are and understand why. Understanding them should gives us the power to either follow or reject the emotion that drives them to be expressed, rather than being led by them blindly like an animal.
Thank you for that clarification. I agree. We have all of that inside of us. I meant in comparison to what we wish we were, we are monkeys that kill things. My point was made poorly. Nice catch.
> I think the analogy that stuck with me most about this was that war may be the male version of motherhood, that is, the closest we come to being true to our biological selves. Somehow this feels right, although that's just intuition on my part.
I've just started reading Robert Sapolsky's book, Behave, and this is how he frames his study of human biology. Around violence. From the introduction:
We are always shadowed by the threat of other humans harming us.
If that were solely the way things are, violence would be an easy problem to approach intellectually. AIDS--unambiguously bad news--eradicate. Alzheimer's disease--same thing. Schizophrenia, cancer, malnutrition, flesh-eating bacteria, global warming, comets hitting earth--ditto.
The problem, though, is that violence doesn't go on that list. Sometimes we have no problem with it at all.
This is the central point of this book--we don't hate violence.
> It takes only a few armed and motivated men to dominate hundreds, perhaps thousands of people. So disarmament and pacifism is not a workable strategy until the day we start programming people as if they were machines
This is was a lot people don't see. How easy it is to create a dictator ship with a "system" like that
The same phrase you quoted resonated with me. South Africa does have some violent crime. I don't know how it relates to other countries. We are fourth on the list when it comes to expenditure on private security per capita[1]. That's not all we spend money on. Next week a contractor is coming to fit an electric fence around our block of flats. Most homes now have high walls, alarms, sensor of all sorts. I grew up in a small town there were hardly fences. Fences were probably to protect against pesky kids stealing fruit and prevent cows eating up people's gardens.
To your point, it is just a small group of violent thieves that have the rest of us under siege. Everyone is security conscious and not at ease. I don't think trying to talk sense into these gangsters is going to work. It makes me mad that another man is making live life in a manner that I loathe.
Why don’t vigilantes solve this, assuming the State refuses to do so? It would certainly be cheaper to redirect some of the passive and defensive security expenditure to intelligence and targeted killing.
See that's the thing. vigilantism is illegal, society as a whole frowns upon violence. Thus good healthy men end up building fences and hoping another man (the thief) cannot attack them. The government has its challenges solving the crime issue and I would venture that the criminals are more motivated/organized/have less red tape than the cops. Not everyone is lying down and accepting the status quo. Neighborhood watch committees exist. Some neighborhoods have put up boom gates which have caused a stink because it is perceived as limiting people's movement.
More to your question. Occasionally frustrations boil over and communities take the law into their own hands [1][2]. This is the other extreme to the criminals.
Statehood and by extension society is pretty much defined by the "monopoly on violence" [1]. As much as I dislike it, it is a pretty much a law of physics, if you you don't have a monopoly on violence someone else will, some one must wield it, power vacuums will be filled.
"However, this monopoly is limited to a certain geographical area, and in fact this limitation to a particular area is one of the things that defines a state."
International relations is a manifestation of multiple monopolies on violence in different geographic areas interacting.
They either find some sort of equilibrium for a period of time or they war and new boundaries are defined.
The law of physics statement was hyperbole, but my point is anarchy doesn't last, it is quickly replaced with a monopoly of violence, because it has to be.
The book, "War," from Sebastian Junger is well worth a read. I read it before seeing "Restrepo" (which I also recommend). On Goodreads, I wrote this about Junger's book and his take on men and war after finishing it:
"[T]he experience of warfare seems to strike a chord deep within the psyche of the men in combat. The bonding among men, the heroism, the swinging extremes of victory won only by the palpable threat of mortal danger, the adrenaline rush and flood of endorphins during and after battle seem to be almost overwhelming to the human animal, eclipsing any larger moral considerations or even the rest of what we might call everyday life. To the men in the thick of the fight, it's an unrepeatable experience that they find themselves strangely missing years afterwards. What they miss doesn't minimize the horror of what they've experienced, and that's what they find so strange. In some respects once the shooting starts, the soldiers have all the justification they need to continue indefinitely. The immediacy of the experience provides satisfaction enough and requires no further rationale. In some ways it creates a microcosm of life and packs more than a lifetime's worth of living into its fleeting moments. How can life afterwards compare?"
> I heard a interview with a vet and climber once who described the appeal of alpinism as "all of the good parts of combat, without the shooting or any conscious thing trying to cause me harm".
He was doing his best to self medicate. That’s him trying to convince himself the medicine is good.
Nothing comes close to combat. Nothing. There’s such an ocean between the sickening frantic chaotic competition with Death and “oh shit if this rock slips I’m going to end up a paragraph on page two of the morning paper”.
Plenty of us combat vets climb, and for the same reasons. Don’t be confused. Climbing can kill you like cigarettes, combat is like smoking crack while trying to land a jet on a carrier deck at night in a storm.
I think saying team sports is a good substitute for war is like saying that if you need a good substitute for afternoon tea, just eat a bag of mushrooms. At first blush, this might seem like a funny joke, but there are times in combat that feel almost psychedelic: Colors seem brighter and you get a kind of tunnel vision, your senses are not only highly engaged but more sensitive, your heart is pounding, your mind is racing, you're overcome with a kind of euphoria from the adrenaline, and the bottom of your stomach drops out at the existential overload. Playing a team sport is not a substitute for going to war. Perhaps there are some superficial similarities, but nothing on this Earth compares to the experience of combat. Incidentally, this is why training is the difference between life and death: Without the aid of muscle memory, you could be trapped cognitively, and being trapped in any sense of the word will get you killed on the battlefield. Actually, this is why I find the ending of the play/musical "Hair" to be so shocking and believable: Going to war with no training would almost certainly be a death sentence.
I feel like you’re arguing the obvious, something your OP almost certainly understands.
Actually I think your point would be stronger if your agreed with them—that sports do substitute for war in important ways, and use your knowledge and experience to show specifically where and when that stops being true.
For my arguing something so obvious, you sure seem to have missed what I said. You think my point would be stronger if I agreed with the parent instead of disagreed... Except that my point is that I do not agree with his post at all and it's obvious that he does not almost certainly understand the difference. Suggesting team sports as a "good substitute" for wartime experience plainly demonstrates a lack of understanding, really a true failure to grok. This suggestion has some features in common with the idea that Call of Duty somehow captures what combat is like. It's immediately recognizable as something a distant spectator would say. Someone that watches sports and war on television, for example. But it's not a good comparison at all, and certainly not a good substitute. Since you think this is such an obvious thing, perhaps you can compare and contrast your own combat experiences with his proposition to get what you were hoping to get out of my post. If you're not speaking from experience, then I'd ask that you not add noise by trying to oversimplify something you're only guessing at. If you don't know what it's like, that's totally okay, but I'd suggest not trying to shoehorn posts that do come from experience into the narrative you want to find, which is that it is somehow possible to "substitute" team sports "in important ways" for war. I'm telling you that they are only superficially, vaguely the same shape if you squint across a dark room. Add a few layers of abstraction, and they share cosmetic similarities. Otherwise they are not comparable in any way, let alone important ways, and I do not agree with the parent I replied to.
I'm inclined to agree with you. I just want to add something I heard said by a retired NFL player in an interview. He said that when he was on the field playing football, he "knew he was alive, on planet Earth."
I'm guessing he was talking about an immediate, all-consuming experience—a Zen kind of thing that he experienced, playing a physically tough and dangerous game at the world class level.
I cannot believe that that compares with what you describe. But I'm inclined to believe that there is some kind of continuum to which both experiences belong. Can you allow for the possibility that the football playing described by the athlete is at least a pale facsimile?
I've had moments with teams where everything is just connected and everything works, every person has latched onto something, we don't talk, the next pass goes perfectly and the next one. It is like being part of something bigger than yourself. Everyone is in the zone and all makes sense.
I've got no idea on the war thing, but it is something truly magical that I will treasure for the times it did happen.
Many of the awkwardly out of place, positive emotional responses of men to war -- the intense engagement, the euphoria, the sense of bonding and belonging -- make a lot of sense when we consider what would happen to those men if they were absent. The same goes for the immorality of it -- indifference to suffering and lack of interest in context or justification.
One of my fav books, that story about him being in Germany with a friend and his son, and watching this young kid scream over the edge of a dropoff really hit something for me. There is something in us with that energy and we shouldn't ignore it.
> 42 American soldiers and many more Afghans were killed in the "Valley of Death" before it was finally abandoned, written off as more trouble than it was worth.
Only 42 to get that nickname? After the World Wars happened? Wow. We've gotten soft in modern times.
The entire butcher's bill from the War on Terror and the Iraq war for the US military, over a decade and a half, would be less than a quiet day during one of the offensives on the Western Front in WW1 or the Eastern in WW2.
This is the single thing that freaked me out the most about our military and made me realize it wasn't the place for me when I joined at 17. Being a high school kid and meeting people who will look you straight in the eye and laugh as they talk about murdering someone, or watching their comrade's head explode. And not hypothetically, but in real, gruesome detail. I guess there's a need for that kind of person to exist to do our dirty work. But they are broken human beings and it is an absolute tragedy.
That feels like a fairly unique experience. I was in the military and I don't recall ever meeting anyone with that sort of attitude towards killing or death. On the contrary, most everyone I knew was rather opposed to fighting and saw what we were signed up for as a necessity that we did out of duty to our country, not because we liked it.
The Marines literally make you say "kill" during combat training.
The phrase for firing a machine gun is "die mother fucker die mother fucker die mother fucker release" (release the trigger to prevent over heating of the barrel)
Every time we went on a platoon run the diddies are about murdering our enemies.
I honestly don't believe you were in the military, or you seem to have forgotten what it was really like. Or maybe you were in the air Force, but definitely not the Marine corps.
Source: I got out after 2 deployments in the Marine corps as a Sergeant.
The U.S. Marines (and to a lesser extent other US infantry forces) are well-known for this sort of thing; for heavy mental preparation and priming to kill. It's standard in many other US forces, and non-US forces, to not experience this in training. As such, it's very possible to be in the US military without being trained to chant about killing people and so forth.
What's more interesting is that this is not always known to people inside the group; that they believe it to be the standard (people from other military occupations are likewise often surprised when they witness a group of people team-chanting about killing people, having believed their own approach to be standard, and in my experience some European military find it a little disturbing, as they tend to be even further removed from this approach). Everyone takes their own experience and generalises it across the board; the US marines are an extremum in the field of mentally preparing (or indoctrinating) people to kill.
Horses for courses; it only becomes a problem in the field when you put people heavily indoctrinated in killing into a deployment where not shooting people is really what's needed, and vice-versa. Unfortunately, that's where it has fallen down over the last decade or so.
Completely serious, thanks. It is totally normal for the Marines to beat it into you, they are trying to make sure that when the shit hits the fan you do what you need to do without hesitation.
Yes, I was in the U.S. military 25 years ago. I will leave it at that and not try to demean your opinions with an unnecessary personal attack. It's just the Internet, after all, and 'winning' an Internet argument ain't worth it ;-).
If the German military can serve as any kind of reference, internal culture can vary a lot between branches and unit types. So you should really ask which unit types you all served in.
On the contrary, most everyone I knew was rather opposed to fighting and saw what we were signed up for as a necessity that we did out of duty to our country, not because we liked it.
I met this fellow musician at a jam session in St. Paul. Somehow the conversation got around to the military, and he proudly said he was the 3rd generation of men in his family who had signed up for the Marines. He bragged that it was the way the men in his family got to kill people. As in, they enjoyed it, and that was the legal and moral way to do it. It's not like the family was poor and had to do it, either. He was a...fellow who could cause consternation. However, he was quite likable in a way as well.
I'm glad that such people exist and manage to lead law abiding, productive lives.
I strongly suspect there are exceptions to this rule. At the very least we know there exist people in prisons today who enjoy murder. Arguably that's very different since (I assume) 'enjoying killing' and 'enjoying getting shot back at' are worlds apart. But, would it surprise you if there was a small minority of drone operators who genuinely enjoyed their work?
Then again I suppose (hope) the modern military system might select against that kind of mindset.
I'm not talking about whether or not people enjoy the act of taking another person's life. Obviously, some people do. I am talking about bragging about it. If you ever hear someone making these kinds of claims loudly at a bar, you can bet your next paycheck they never left the FOB.
I don't mean any offense by this, I'm trying to say it delicately, but I think "anybody who brags about killing in combat is lying" is something of 'white lie', probably earnestly believed by most who repeat it, meant to preserve the reputation of combat veterans as a whole by discrediting any veteran who would be so tactless as to brag about killing. I believe it's basically a way of credibly stating "this person who's making the rest of us look bad by association does not represent us."
This is one of those rules with essentially zero exceptions. Nobody that's telling the truth ever brags about that.
There's another musician I know in that scene (but in a different part of the US) who was in Vietnam. No one could ever get him to talk about his combat experience. There was one time that we succeeded on steering him onto the topic, and we very soon changed the subject and stopped bringing it up. (He was also one of the nicest guys I ever met, unless he was being blunt about music. He also could play Santa Claus without a disguise!)
Do you think Timothy McVeigh ever fabricated enjoying killing? There are accounts from his fellow soldiers that he quite enjoyed shooting at enemies. My estimation, from life experience, is that there are definitely sociopaths and psychopaths out there. 99%+ of people aren't like that, but you will definitely meet them all the same.
We shouldn't simplify reality just to paint pretty pictures for ideological reasons. Life is messy and there is a nasty side to reality. Hopefully, we won't have to deal with it that often.
>"people who will look you straight in the eye and laugh as they talk about murdering someone"
Murdering, or killing? I ask because murder refers to a specific sort of unlawful killing, but it's not clear if you're using the term precisely. Most would probably say there's substantial difference between laughing about killing somebody who was trying to kill you (not murder) and laughing about killing a civilian in cold blood (murder).
Why is it unclear that he uses term badly? His statement was clear. It sounds more like you just don't want to believe that someone would brag to him specifically about murder.
The line "I guess there's a need for that kind of person to exist to do our dirty work." made me suspect he was talking about killing not murdering (I presume he wouldn't say that about murderers.) His response to me seemed to confirm he was using the word murder in a loose sense to include lawful killing.. that's how I read it anyway.
Also, I didn't say he used the term "badly", I wondered if he was using it precisely. Maybe you think linguistic imprecision is bad, but my intent was to suss out his meaning, not criticize how he uses language. I'm more interested in the meaning behind the words.
A calf is no more perfect than the wolf that rips it apart and eats it.
There's no reason to assume other people are like you, and that if someone's not, that they're better or worse, broken or holy.
Right. To assume people are anything like calves, is incredibly delusional.
Valuing human life for it's own sake is an incredibly recent phenomena, and the jury is still out on whether or not it's a good idea, since we make trade-offs everyday, we just pretend otherwise. (Speed limit on vehicles being the most popular example of this, we could decrease the speed limit and save lives, but it'd inconvenience many people, so we don't.)
Guy sounds like an asshole, I'm pretty sure theres plenty Vietnamese during the Vietnam War who didn't love the "war".
War sounds sexy from afar because theres relief to soldiers with guns who can later on just leave that life and rest with their actual kids while Vietnamese civilians wander around trying to survive and not die from bombings, shootings or to be played around by soldiers from any side. One can ask any Syrian refugee about how much they love the Syrian Civil War to understand this.
My consensus is basically if you have some kind of power or can be relieved later on, war is a great experience. If its your actual life, then you dread walking outside to gather supplies and food to survive. War is only fun when you actually have some decent control over it.
I find it ironic that he talks about the power of love after ditching the Vietnamese girl he was going to have a future with "the way all men betrayed the women who helped them through the war".
Read the last 7-8 paragraphs. The talk about "the power of love" cheapens what is otherwise a resonating piece. No where else does love (apart from "loving" war) come into play.
I often wonder if economic competition is not a re-emergence of that need into a non physical manner. Kinda like sport. You try to kill your opponent but symbolically (team or alone).
It absolutely is, and it's at the core of everything else we do -- even if it doesn't seem that way on the surface -- because violence is a core component of what it means to be human. Not only human, but an animal from mother nature. Violence is just nature asserting itself. Anyone that thinks they can beat mother nature is fooling themselves.
It provides the missing counter-piece to human civilization, ever since we started farming.
You can not be intellectually honest with yourself and against war(before the invention of fertilizer and the atomic bomb) if your lifestyle produces x^2 kids every generation. So war always was the other part of the cyclus civilization was ramping up towards.
And this cycle deformed us - the culture as a total down to the individual whose psychological variations and epigenetics are basically barely hidden adaptions to these cycles.
So even the most seemingly peaceful society is one recession away from becoming a emotionally hardened band rallying behind some leader to wage conflict upon whoever is foreign and in reach.
Which is one of the reason why the economic mill must be kept going, no matter what- the alternative is not some settled down hippie life- but a war of all against all.
Respect to whoever coerced the current path (cell-phones with cameras, internet) into being. It seems to be pretty reliable when it comes to instilling self-control and preventing the war mode partially. And of course, thanks goes to Los Alamos, the atomic egg that prevents the best at power-grabbing from sending millions to die like in the iran-iraq war or the WorldWars.
Humans appear to have a separate thought module when it comes to war - my guess is it is probably biological and has undergone a great deal of selection over the millions of years since the first proto-wars were fought successfully by our ancestors against our non-ancestors.
It is quite useful to keep this is mind when trying to organise social unitary to tackle important issues and why calls for a "war on x" fail unless the x is real war target.
This writer circles poignant issues but I don't feel like he has enough insight to shed any real illumination on them.
I'm actually pretty alarmed that he seems to think society no longer glamourises war and in almost the same breath describes how our cultural depictions are transmuted from showing outright psychopathy to evoking glamour (Wagner being played for the US invasion of Granada in 1983, 4 years after Apocalypse Now hit cinemas).
Insight and personal experience are not synonyms: as an example, poor coders may possess a great deal of experience, but little insight.
This author certainly has thought about this a great deal - I love how he intentionally weaves a kind of incoherence into his own writing while showing why attempting to 'telling it straight' could never communicate what it was like on the ground. I absolutely love Tim O'Brien's writing for this.
But deciding 'he fought in Vietnam, therefore his analysis of what War means for Men In General are beyond critique' seems a warped view to have; is this any different from the kind of childish thought-terminating cliches that we see when people defer to the 'Founding Fathers'? the idea that the matter at hand is to be settled by nominating a Person Who Is Always Right?
I think it would more more of an insult to him to declare his experiences immune from criticism than it would be to engage with them and try to figure out what does or doesn't stick.
And for me the incoherence of claiming that the romantic notion of war died with Verdun and Passchendaele and then demonstrating that this is an outright lie with the Grenada story might even amount to a neat trick if it was done deftly. And deftly would mean not later glamourising it himself towards the end of the same article as the great and eternal Crucible of Manhood.
Consider Chris Hedges' "War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning" (2002), which examines the way that War creates (or perhaps comprises) a culture of its own, and acts as a transformative experience that has little if any civilian analogue.
The work is flawed, and I believe one passage had a disputed claim of plagiarism, but this work still explores these issues better than I have seen elsewhere.
I liked reading about the two forces at play here. The ideal self vs the reality of who you really are. Extreme moments such as war can cause you to learn so much more about your darker aspects.
That was fantastic. It is rare for someone to speak so publicly about such feelings. I felt that it was coming from the heart. A real connection.
I immediately checked whether he might have written anything else but was disappointed to find nothing.
For others looking for more I very strongly recommend Dispatches by Michael Herr. That book is probably the most beautiful of the 20th century.
That's a very personal testimony based on the own author experience, not an overall study on all army veterans. I doubt all veterans are "playing by the rules" by saying publicly how horrible the war is but secretly recalling the great moments. If we go that way, are all PTSD victims phonies part of the show? They're all part of making this narrative credible? Be serious one minute... What this guy enjoyed was the brotherhood and exceptional means mobilized for the purpose of the war, not the killing itself.
it is more like why men with tanks love war against people with sticks. if this guy got horribly injured he would still love war? if his city back home was bombed into the ground he would still look back with joy at his shenanigans in vietnamese whorehouses?
In way yes, it is not really about winning it is about being truly at the edge of your abilities mentally and physically though I understand your sentiment there is something innately human about war, about being on your limits, facing death and standing tall surely it is not beautiful and we can argue the ethics and motivations but it is a part of what makes us human.
I'm not saying it's about winning, I'm saying he will find it too painful to remember "being on his limits, facing death, etc." if he was in a real war where his side also suffered losses or he was injured, captured, etc. those painful memories would dominate his view
No need to look for the winners, just go ask the injured. Plenty of vets in the US came to their senses after getting injured chasing some foreign adventure under the guise of defense.
That was a pretty narrow viewpoint. It seemed to lack any consideration of Vietnam as a country or the Vietnamese people affected by his love of war. Do those fighting for their countries and lives share that love?
So I guess my takeaway of his point is: War is some special experience that Western Men have (and not women, Vietnamese, or anyone else), where they get to fulfil some kind of murderous power fantasy over people who don't matter?
Maybe this is the sort of story he has to tell himself to ignore the woman he betrayed, the desecrated bodies he laughed at, the utter disregard he held for everything outside himself and his band of brothers.
War is some special experience that Western Men have ... where they get to fulfil some kind of murderous power fantasy over people who don't matter?
No. Nothing about that is western. That’s just history.
War is the most human you’ll ever be. I don’t know how to explain it to someone who doesn’t want to believe their own potential for malevolence. It’s like eating from the forbidden tree in the garden. You’re eyes become open to the savage visceral reality that we’re nothing more than primates that talk.
True. Nothing about violence is specifically western.
Also true that the reality is that humans have evolved from more primitive animals that are totally driven by survival instincts and thus will usually act that way too (though mostly disguised in more subtle forms than war).
What you're missing though (or perhaps deliberately ignoring) is the potential of humans to rise above being marionettes of their animal instinct. Acting by instinct has its upsides sometimes. It certainly brings raw animal gratification but rationalising that we're "nothing more than primates that talk" is just an excuse to enjoy the animal gratification while ignoring the consequences (which beyond hurting other sentient beings also blocks one's way to real freedom, which is the real tragedy).
As someone who has probed the depths of his own "malevolence" in very anti-social ways (and with nothing to do with socially acceptable state-sanctioned acts) I understand what you are saying. However, "primates that talk" is not what we aspire to being, at least not me.
The enthusiasm that soldiers have for carrying out the policies of their leaders is what bothers me about them. It's really nothing to do with the basic mechanics of killing other than the outright cowardice that technology brings into it all.
It's interesting to read this first hand account after having read some more science focused stuff.
>The power of war, like the power of love, springs from man's heart.
Both actually almost certainly arise from evolution. Love helps reproduce the species, wiping out the adjacent tribe and grabbing their resources helps also and if you are too nice they may wipe you instead. See 'Demonic Males' and the like for how chimps and early man did much the same kind of thing with of the order of a third of males dying in war like activities
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demonic_Males
Now we're getting quite good at not having wars (see Pinkers stuff or https://medium.com/future-crunch/the-decline-of-war-8760f9a5...)
through things like the UN, EU democracy and so on but the warlike instincts remain and come out in football, political battles, video games and the movies. Also I've found things like high altitude mountaineering have some war like aspects - bunch of mostly blokes fighting the mountain with some risk of death - and are quite fun.
Pinkers theory about how we have become more peaceful are apparently not backed by sufficient statistical evidence. I always take NNT’s statements with a grain of salt, but the pure stats/math stuff seems solid.
Taleb seems to be criticising stuff Pinker didn't really say. Pinker's arguments are mostly look at this graph / dataset, haven't the numbers gone down, maybe this is why and he isn't really trying to do sophisticated statistical analysis generally. Taleb then attacks and says he hasn't done sophisticated statistical analysis but that's not really Pinker's point.
But isn't Taleb's core criticism precisely the lack of rigorous statistics backing Pinker's claims? I mean you can't just write a book with claims in it backed by pretty graphs and data and then go "sorry, was never meant to be hard science lol". Because then we're in bullshitting territory, unless I missed your point?
You're dealing with the sweep of human history over centuries and there isn't really a clear data set to do stats on. So given that I think Pinker's approach is about as good as you can do. But none of it is 100% conclusive - it's more a bunch of fuzzy data pointing the same way.
Taleb has an argument that purely doing stats on war deaths we could be in a quiet patch before carnage as usual. The arguments against this are qualitative stuff like the spread of democracy, the internet, cellphones, the global economy etc which Pinker deals with and Taleb kind of ignores.
> But I believe that most men who have been to war would have to admit, if they are honest, that somewhere inside themselves they loved it too, loved it as much as anything that has happened to them before or since.
This sounds conspicuously like the conservative version of the people who say "All men secretly desire to rape women."
I welcome the day when ideas stand or fall on their own and are no longer pre-judged and rejected because they are “conservative”, “liberal”, “religious”, “scientific”, or whatever.
A fun drinking game is to ask them to rigorously define what “Hegelian” is, and every time the explanation becomes pointlessly vague or self-referential, drink. I take no responsibility for the inevitable stomach pumping though.
And that while there is truth, there is no true idea. That what we experience as truth is a segment of dialectic that gives us emotional satisfaction enough to stop. But that this is personal and another person might need a longer chain which includes the antithesis of your ultimate (i.e. chain ending) idea.
I think this was written back before "people" became standard, in the 1980s I think "men" was still in vogue. It says men every few words, but that probably meant less than it does now.
Aside, I think it's insane to argue that men "love war" while at the same time admitting knowledge of Vietnam. Weak men like to feel tough by pretending to like war, as if a politician would exert themselves more or less by calling in a strike.
If this were true PSTD would not actually happen. Wouldn't the cure just be more exposure, if you could get used to it?
>War is a call to power and a purpose.
We're a long time past when the raiding hordes would actually be profiting from their own raiding. Like it or not we live in a country so rich that we have essentially nothing significant to gain by pillaging: the cost for us to conduct warfare is greater than the entire productivity of the nations we invade, even before the bombs start lowering their GDP. As a result it's starting to get close to a century since the last time the US or an allied country fought a war with a purpose stronger than tenuous political chessplaying. Evidence for this: what fraction of our currently deployed armed forces have a lot to say about the political situation where they are fighting? Apparently the answer is almost none, because they're not there to talk about geopolitics. As a result the sense of purpose is isolated in nicely lit rooms while the direct costs are allocated to people who don't focus on the broader goals.
It seems that Futurism is back in vouge, but we'd better remember that the reason it fell out the first time was the fact that an actual war got started. The only two environments where that view can sustain itself are rooms full of warlords who profit and loose in actual war, and rooms full of intellectuals who profit and loose from nothing and who expect to survive in any case.
Now this is something which is misunderstood quite a lot. Almost nobody gets it, though, sometimes not even the doc at the VA. But how could he? He's never been over there. And even if he was over there, he was a desk jockey, a fobbit (you can google that one). Maybe it's best to think of it -- PTSD -- like a switch. And the switch gets turned on when you deploy: The switch that activates the soldier on the battlefield, scanning for threats, vigilant and ready to fight in every situation. Soldier mode -- the mode you love to be in, for all the reasons mentioned in this thread. And then when you get back home, the switch gets turned off: Civilian mode. Once again the civilian slob that goes to the movies and eats a big tub of popcorn. Then when you deploy again, the switch is turned on again: Master of chaos. You come home again, the switch is turned off again: Master of Sunday afternoon naps.
The problem is that at some point, you come home and you realize the switch can't be switched off. It's just a part who you are now. It's now the way you're wired: The first time you go to the movies as a civilian with the switch turned on, you realize you're surrounded by strangers in the darkness for an hour and a half of intense visual and auditory stimulation. Walking down the street to the restaurant, you're actually on patrol, and nothing's more dangerous than a dismounted patrol through the city. You start leaving all the lights on in the house at night, because the things that killed your friends often came out of the darkness. You can't sleep, because of the lights, and because you're hypervigilant and every little noise signals it's time to dispense violence. And if there's one thing that compounds the problem, it's a lack of sleep. This is how you end up in situations where somebody knocks on the door when you're laying on the couch chasing naps that never come, and the mailman smiling at you when you open the door has no idea you're holding a loaded firearm in the hand he can't see. And worse yet, lots of people in this situation drink until they pass out, just to try and get some sleep. But this switch doesn't get turned off when you're drinking at the bar. And on top of that, all the people and all that noise makes things worse, and.......
The problem is that indeed, you've gotten used to it. All of that has been your reality for long enough that you can't turn it off. But our culture has no place for people like this. Our culture is definitely not used to this, and won't get used to this. Relationships cannot handle the strain, so they disintegrate. And employers don't put up with that shit, no matter how cool they are. And lots of people don't try to get help, even in places where the VA normally does a good job and knows how to handle these problems. So in the end, completely alienated by the rest of their communities, some kill themselves. Others end up on the street. Others spend the rest of their lives teetering on the edge of sanity, trying to play a trivial, vapid game with trivial, vapid rules that are always at odds with the life-or-death rules of combat they're wired for. And this is actually why people don't understand unless they've been over there.
Since this was written in the 80s and it’s Esquire, it’s highly possible that the author is a military-industrial complex shill. Or an apologist at best.
The only people who love war are corrupted individuals. They have no morals.
> The only people who love war are corrupted individuals. They have no morals.
Says a person who has never truly faced a grave moral test in his life.
I have known many veterans of horrific combat from Okinawa through Afghanistan. They all will tell you they loved it in some bizarre, insane fashion.
Yet these same people are the most trustworthy, truly moral people I have ever known. They have touched the abyss, and you and I have not. They understand things we never will.
Look, this "abyss" you're talking about can be "reached" by anybody, and I don't have to say how. It's not actually something that we want ourselves or our fellow man to do. It doesn't make you better, if any of it sticks you're worse.
Going on deployment and finding something that improves you is like going to a bar/casino in Las Vegas and finding Mormonism. Sure, it can happen, but it's not what happens.
Saying that you love war is like love massive earthquake in habitated area. That is what people react to - they are aware of massive destruction, hunger (both soldiers and civilians), freezing babies, break of laws, abuse, thousands of families without resources, displaced, soldiers being invalides till rest of their lives. Veterans being unable to live in peace again. War means rise of authoritarian regimes and terrorist groups too.
War is not just action and adrenalin. It is also rape and toddlers dying of hunger. It is ethnic massacres.
There’s a difference between being willing to die for certain ideals (i.e. like the Gauls during Julius Caesar’s campaigns) and loving wanton bloodshed. That’s the point I was trying to make. If you can’t understand the difference between fighting a defensive war and an aggressive war, you need a reality check. Also, I’m not sure why both my replies were flagged - I believe I was acting extremely civil.
But it's neither the willingness to die or the bloodshed itself. Thích Quảng Đức had the willingness and courage to die for a cause, but you'll have a great difficulty recruiting many to do what he did.
When I was a young man, the military appealed to me. I liked its presentation of power. Its structure, order, and clear roles seemed to provide a sense of purpose. Maybe war itself would be bad, but the structures and forces that war brings seem like they wouldn't necessarily be bad for everyone.
Not everyone thinks or feels like you. That doesn't necessarily make them morally corrupt individuals.
All of the things you listed could also be found on an oil rig: clear roles, a sense of purpose, and the sleep deprivation (not listed but it builds character.) It's quite close to the Keynesian "it's good for the government to spend therefore it's good buy fighters" argument: sure, it creates jobs/funds research, but why not spend the same effort (and far fewer lives) on building the next supercollider or something? War can be a laudable sacrifice if it's necessary but it seems that some are trying to abstract the "good" from the condition.
"All men" or "all people" is a trope that should be erased from our vocabulary. Most statements making claims (esp. about the motivation) of "all people" are incorrect. Every person has their own opinion, and you simply can't generalize. Unless it's naïve tautological claims like "all people need food to survive".
Actually, you really can generalise - about large, and especially about large homogeneous - populations.
For example - homosexual men are statistically more likely to belong to larger families. Evolutionary biologists believe that this is due to the presence of childless gay men benefiting the children of their siblings,thus genes that at first blush seem to be "for" non reproduction survive in the pool. (Someone should notify the Boy Scouts that they've got it exactly backwards).
What you can't do is generalise about individuals from their group membership (unless that membership is voluntary, and even that is fraught).
War is to a degree more consensual. BDSM scores very highly in taboo surveys. I don't think the author would say all men love executing POWs or anything like that.
Also, not to support that view, but the amount of sexual violence that has historically accompanied war is startling. There's obviously something to it.
I don't know about consent -- I don't see much consent going on in conflict ... but there is definitely a lot of truth in the link between sexual violence and conflict.
Rape has been used as an instrument of war for all of recorded history - as a demonstration of domination; as a means of punishment and repression - and also - just because the men can.
Combating the use of rape and sexual violence in conflict is something that we are trying very hard to make progress on ... but it is a very difficult (maybe even impossible) task; human nature being what it is.
I feel like this is an incredibly childish and almost insulting reduction of a complicated and important feeling that the author is trying to come to terms with, and one that is likely very common, even if not universal. He spent pages explaining and examining this attitude, and doesn't appear to be using it as a justification at any level, I don't think it is appropriate or helpful to frame it this way at all.
I started because it saves time, urine is sterile when expelled and I am using soap to wash the rest of me which should clean everything after up. Makes sense to do it then, rather than use an extra couple gallons to flush 500ml of liquid to what is ultimately the same place.
Enter on one side, the purists: "sterile means absolutely, positively no germs"
Enter on the other side, the realists: "if I pull open my festering sore, and you piss on it, will I get your illness?"
The purists say, "well maybe, the probability is not zero, you can't say that is sterile"
The realists say, "Run the experiment it 1000 times, and if no one gets infected, what do you call that? What do you call it if 1 out of 1000 gets infected?"
Ok, I'm going to say the following after I issue my caveat that I never expected to see a discussion about peeing in the shower here on HN BUT of all the places on the Internet HN is one of few places mature enough to handle such a discussion. :)
I'd like to offer the counter-point that for those people who enjoy peeing together (as a kink) the shower seems like a great place to pee together.
Fucking dickwads in this thread who can't understand that violence has solved more problems in human history than any other solution.
Its like, "oh, I live in a peaceful society, therefore all other societies in the history of humanity should have known better" when they don't realize that america is very violent, has always been violent, and has more capacity for violence than any other society in the history of the planet. Don't you realize that your "peace" is literally maintained by the us' overwhelming threat of force?
Goddamn it's threads like this that really makes the ignorance of the hacker news community stand out to me in all aspects outside of tech.
Source: been commenting here since 2008 and also deployed twice and got out as a sergeant in the US Marine Corps and have literally made the decision on who lived/died on the battle space.
I think a lot of young folks (many in HN) know history from what they watch/read/hear in daily news, which is a terrible source. So that may be why.
Major nations of modern era (since end of WW2) have not gone to total wars simply because of the availability of nukes. Not because people suddenly became enlightened and refused to fight a war.
US did not use all of its arsenals (including nukes) against Chinese troops in the Korean War, despite serious setbacks.
I think this was due to Russia also having the nukes. Or maybe US govt thought it should never use nukes ever again after seeing the horrible effect after using them in Japan.
Either way, before telecomm network connected populace of different nations as closely as it has, US faced certain instances where some generals requested using nukes but ultimately didn't happen. Most likely because the other side (Soviets) also had them...
Many people don't realize that violence is literally the foundation of our "peaceful" society. The policeman with his taser and handgun directly enforces peace in your neighborhood. The soldier with his rifle and cannons guards your nation's borders, and his violence is the reason you can work in peace in your air-conditioned office and blabber about which js framework to abuse this week.
You are 100% right. Violence (or threat of violence) is the answer to almost all problems.
I don't know what you're trying to say. That violence has been used as a solution to problems? Sure. It has. That violence has, rarely, in some cases, been a sufficient answer for a problem? Sure. You cited a few. But that's not what you started out saying. You said that violence has "solved more problems in human history than any other solution" which is ridiculous.
Oh, and I don't think hunting animals for food is the kind of "violence" we're discussing.
>Oh, and I don't think hunting animals for food is the kind of "violence" we're discussing.
You didn't understand what he was trying to get at.
He was talking about hunting as an outlet for anger, so in that context I suppose he is framing violence through hunting as an outlet and hence a solution to anger.
Not that this isn't an interesting read (albeit mostly a lengthy rationalization of shared trauma) but they really need some better editors over at Esquire — spelling, spacing and grammatical errors everywhere.
Edit: there appears also in the text, frequently, the world "tile" as an adjective. "tile night" "tile blackness" "tile war". Methinks someone needs a better find + replace regex.
What I mean to say is this: Violence is built into every human being. Or as one of my favorite quotes of Captain Picard goes, "The seed of violence is within each of us". When I joined the army, I realized the most dangerous thing that could happen is for regular people to think that they're not capable of the things they read in the news.