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September 10 - October 14, 2019
When people become angry, or frightened, they stop thinking with their forebrain (the mind of a human being) and start thinking with their midbrain (which is indistinguishable from the mind of an animal). They are literally “scared out of their wits.” The only thing that has any hope of influencing the midbrain is also the only thing that influences a dog: classical and operant conditioning.
In this case, poverty, drugs, gangs, discrimination, and the availability of firearms all predispose more blacks than whites toward violence.
Bronson James, a black Texas-based radio commentator whose show I was on, observed that this is identical to the genocidal process in which for centuries the white man used alcohol in a systematic policy to destroy the culture of the American Indian. For a variety of cultural and genetic reasons, the Indians were predisposed toward alcoholism, and we dumped it into them as a crucial part of the process that ultimately destroyed their civilization. The pumping of media violence into the ghettos today is equally genocidal.
“To neglect it is to indulge it.”
How the American soldier in Vietnam was first psychologically enabled to kill to a far greater degree than any other soldier in
previous history, then denied the psychologically essential purification ritual that exists in every warrior society, and finally condemned and accused by his own society to a degree that is unprecedented in Western history.
Bruno Bettelheim, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, argues that the root of our failure to deal with violence lies in our refusal to face up to it. We deny our fascination with the “dark beauty of violence,” and we condemn aggression and repress it rather than look at it squarely and try to understand and control it.
It is therefore reasonable to believe that the average and healthy individual—the man who can endure the mental and physical stresses of combat—still has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance towards killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility…. At the vital point he becomes a conscientious objector. —S. L. A. Marshall Men Against Fire
Robert Heinlein once wrote that fulfillment in
life involved “loving a good woman and killing a bad man.”
only 15 to 20 percent of the American riflemen in combat during World War II would fire at the enemy.
That missing factor is the simple and demonstrable fact that there is within most men an intense resistance
to killing their fellow man. A resistance so strong that, in many circumstances, soldiers on the battlefield will die before they can overcome it.
With the proper conditioning and the proper circumstances, it appears that almost anyone can and will kill.
A threatened baboon or rooster who elects to stand its ground does not respond to aggression from one of his own kind by leaping instantly to the enemy’s throat. Instead, both creatures instinctively go through a series of posturing actions that, while intimidating, are almost always harmless.
When the posturer has failed to dissuade an intraspecies opponent, the options then become fight, flight, or submission.
Submission is a surprisingly common response, usually taking the form of fawning and exposing some vulnerable portion of the anatomy to the victor, in the instinctive knowledge that the opponent will not kill
or further harm one of its own kind once it has surrendered. The posturing, mock battle, and submission process is vital to the survival of the species.
There is a clear distinction between actual violence and posturing. Oxford social psychologist Peter Marsh notes that this is true in New York street gangs, it is true in “so-called primitive tribesmen and warriors,” and it is true in almost any culture in the world. All have the same “patterns of aggression” and all have “very orchestrated, highly ritualized”
in the mind of an animal it is the one who makes the loudest noise or puffs himself up the largest who will win.
Posturing can be seen in the plumed helmets of the ancient Greeks and Romans, which allowed the bearer to appear taller and therefore fiercer to his foe, while the brilliantly shined armor made him seem broader and brighter.
For centuries the war cries of soldiers have made their opponents’ blood run cold.
BANG!” with a musket. Firing a musket or rifle clearly fills the deep-seated need to posture,
The simple fact is that when faced with a living, breathing opponent instead of a target, a significant majority of the soldiers revert to a posturing mode in which they fire over their enemy’s heads.
And the trend can be found in the firefights of Vietnam, when more than fifty thousand bullets were fired for every enemy soldier killed.[2]
after the Battle of Gettysburg, 27,574 muskets were recovered from the battlefield. Of these, nearly 90 percent (twenty-four thousand) were loaded. Twelve thousand of these loaded muskets were found to be loaded more than once, and six thousand of the multiply loaded weapons had from three to ten rounds loaded in the barrel.
If most soldiers were desperately attempting to kill as quickly and efficiently as they could, then 95 percent should have been shot with an empty weapon in their hand, and any loaded, cocked, and primed weapon dropped on the battlefield would have been snatched up from wounded or dead comrades and fired.
The amazing thing about these soldiers who failed to fire is that they did so in direct opposition to the mind-numbingly repetitive drills of that era.
The fact that these Civil War soldiers overcame their powerful conditioning to fire through drill clearly demonstrates the impact of powerful instinctive forces and supreme acts of moral will.
Peter Watson, in War on the Mind, points out that “deviant behavior by members of our own group is perceived as more disturbing and produces stronger retaliation than that of others with whom we are less involved.”
Much has been made of the obvious existence and manifestation of Thanatos in war, but what if there is within most men a stronger drive than Thanatos? What if there is within each person a force that understands at some gut level that all humanity is inextricably interdependent and that to harm any part is to harm the whole?
“Every individual dispensation,” wrote Marcus Aurelius, almost two millennia ago, “is one of the causes of the prosperity, success, and even survival of That which administers the universe. To break off any particle, no matter how small, from the continuous concatenation—whether of causes or of any other elements—is to injure the whole.”
“in killing the grunts of North Vietnam, the grunts of America had killed a part of themselves.”
Perhaps to truly understand the magnitude of the resistance to killing is also to understand the magnitude of man’s inhumanity to man. Glenn Gray, driven by his own personal guilt and anguish resulting from his World War II experiences, cries out with the pain of every self-aware soldier who has thought this matter through: “I, too, belong to this species. I am ashamed not only of my own deeds, not only of my nation’s deeds, but of human deeds as well. I am ashamed to be a man.
Richard Gabriel tells us that “in every war in which American soldiers have fought in [the twentieth century], the chances of becoming a psychiatric casualty—of being debilitated for some period of time as a consequence of the stresses of military life—were greater than the chances of being killed by enemy fire.”
after sixty days of continuous combat, 98 percent of all surviving soldiers will have become psychiatric casualties
the 2 percent who are able to endure sustained combat: a predisposition toward “aggressive psychopathic personalities.”
it was only in the twentieth century that our physical and logistical capability to sustain combat outstripped our psychological capacity
to endure it.
Increasingly unsociable and overly irritable, the soldier loses interest in all activities with comrades and seeks to avoid any responsibility or activity involving physical or mental effort. He becomes prone to crying fits or fits of extreme anxiety or terror.
Unable to deal with his environment, he has mentally removed himself from it. Symptoms include delirium, psychotic dissociation, and manic-depressive mood swings.
Ganzer
syndrome, in which the soldier will begin to make jokes, act silly, and otherwise try to ward off the horror...
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Conversion hysteria can manifest itself as an inability to know where one is or to function at all, often accompanied by aimless wandering
Upon occasion the soldier becomes amnesiatic, blocking out large parts of his memory. Often, hysteria degenerates into convulsive attacks in which the soldier rolls into the fetal position and begins to shake violently.
total weariness and tenseness that cannot be relieved by sleep or rest, degenerating into an inability to concentrate.
Ultimately the soldier becomes obsessed with death and the fear that he will fail
emotional hypertension,
paranoid trends accompanied by irascibility, depression, and anxiety,
What has happened to the soldier is an altering of his fundamental personality.
