Semi-random thought

[unixronin]

There's nothing wrong with a nation being ashamed of its soldiers' behavior when their behavior falls short of reasonable expectations.  But a nation that is ashamed of its soldiers simply because they are soldiers is doomed.

Comments

[house-pundit.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but there have always been those who eat the meat gladly but despise the butcher.

To be a combat soldier, you have to be an in-betweener on conscience. You have to be able to get past killing the person right in front of you for the sake of something larger. That is, you have to be psychologically capable of head overruling heart, and living with yourself comfortably and well afterwards. You should feel no pangs of conscience and sleep like a baby--conscience-wise, not necessarily wrt other traumas.

This is the functional, healthy state of a human being. No? This is the "normal" state humanity has lived in, per Darwin, for the two million or so years there have been humans. We in-betweeners are the normal, healthy ones.

There are two extreme kinds of failures in the pro-survival conscience attribute of humanity. There are the sociopaths, who have none. Then there are the people for whom personal conscience is not a choice, but a compulsive, emotional straight-jacket.

A healthy conscience can be turned off based on being over-ruled by conscious, logical evaluation as to the appropriate thing to do. A healthy conscience may not completely fail to bite you if you do something that you know in your head is the right thing but feel in your heart was wrong, but you can use your mind to, over time, talk some sense into your heart, and you can live with yourself.

All societies have nature plus nurture failures of the healthy conscience attribute.

Societies with a lot of conditions favorable to one version of failure do the Darwin thing and get more of it.

Unfortunately, in our society and much of the world, most of the people who decide who's psychologically healthy and who's psychologically ill have the conscience failure of being bound in a compulsive straight-jacket. Or, if not completely bound there, so far to that side that they can't see that the kind of psyche we evolved in over two million years is not rightly described as ill or dysfunctional.

They also can't see that it is not a good idea for them to play God and decide that what's "functional" in human society has changed when they really don't know what the fuck they're doing--and they don't. It's my field, I'm not a PhD, but I know enough to know we've barely scraped the surface in those areas, and trying to make a prescriptive decisions to change the species based on our paucity of information is another one of those Big Mistakes that the field of psychology has regularly made that have really fucked up real human beings.

Now to something psychology does know, and that's that people over-rely on anecdotal evidence. The more we hear about it, the more we believe it happens, and that's frequently not the case at all.

This is one of those.

For one thing, people who appear to be pathologically conscience-bound tend to turn into in-betweeners under appropriate stressors. Sleeping tiger. If the stressors aren't big enough, the tiger rolls over and goes back to sleep. If the stressors are big enough, the tiger stays a tiger--but that says nothing about his kids.

WWII generation versus us--difference is the relevant stressors to reforge people who are in-betweeners by nature, pathologically conscience-bound by nurture. Add Darwinianly appropriate "nurture" and they revert to normal human "type."

As the movie "Stripes" said (and I can't believe I'm quoting it), "Our ancestors were kicked out of every decent country in the world."

We're mutts. Mutts have fewer genetic problems. We have a decent historical track record of people becoming psychologically healthy wrt conscience when enough of a war kick in the pants is applied.

In-betweeners don't despise soldiers. They (we) understand why soldiers are necessary, and it's in their nature, where they're capable of it, to sign up. Where not capable of signing up, it's in our nature to support the soldiers' efforts in any way we can. It takes a hell of a lot to fuck up two million years of evolution overnight.

This nature/nurture issue wrt healthy vs. pathological conscience is also, I believe, the cause of the "Tommy Atkins" phenomenon.

[house-pundit.livejournal.com]

Oh, and another thing. Mother Nature/Darwin have ways of encouraging pro-survival behaviors. Built in reward mechanisms. Reward for pro-survival behavior is well understood.

Killing off threats to your people is one of the ultimate survival necessities.

It is not only psychologically healthy to kill threats to your people without remorse; it's psychologically healthy to enjoy it.

It's the field of psychology that's broken, not the soldiers.

[house-pundit.livejournal.com]

Anticipating the argument of pro "civilization" folks about other evolved in behaviors that need to go out of style, let's take rape:

Rape is not pro-survival, or, to be more accurate, it has limited survival utility and is only pro-survival for losers. Stopping it is pro-survival for winners.

Human offspring require a lot of nurturing from their mothers or they die. Women don't feel all cozy about babies from rape, generally. Sure, sometimes, but they're a lot more likely to kill the infant. The woman's regular mate is highly likely to kill the infant. If she doesn't have a regular mate to help with resources, she's less likely to be able to raise the infant.

A man with good genes is going to be favored by the woman or her kin. He's not going to have a problem getting a mate, generally speaking. Sure, he might increase his odds of more offspring by rape, but by reducing the breeding opportunities of other good-gene males, he loses allies, and still has little way to guarantee that his rape-made offspring don't get killed instead of raised. Large cost, little reward. Some reward, but there are major constraints on it. Generally, one way or another, his resources have to support the kids or they won't get raised. If he has resources to support the extra kids, and his genes are good, he has better odds of them getting better care if the kids' mother likes him and likes them, and he's going to have no shortage of willing chicks.

Generally speaking, rape is the strategy of losers.

Others arranging marriages versus people choosing their own mates is something for another day.

Point is, yes what you hear in the news and from "experts" is really fucked up, but I wouldn't really worry about them being able to pull off major changes in the gene pool that quickly--especially when people with healthy genes can easily masquerade as pathologically conscience bound--even from themselves.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

You'll hear no argument from me on any of that.

[cipherpunk.livejournal.com]

If you haven't yet read Victor Davis Hanson's (no relation to me: I'm a Hansen) book Carnage and Culture, do so now. Seriously. It's a magnificent tome which takes the same argument you're making and develops it into the realm of an actual theory of history.

According to VDH, the Western virtues of patriotism, political liberty, individualism, free association, economic liberty and self-criticism are not in themselves things we have cultivated. But war is the ultimate Darwinian environment for cultures and civilizations, and cultural values that make nations martially ineffective tend to lead to military ruin.

For instance, Napoleon lost 99% of his troops in his attack on Russia... why? Because France wasn't willing to shake its fist at Napoleon and say "you moron, you're fucking up our conquest, now learn from your mistakes and stop killing off your entire Goddamned army!" Had Napoleon lived in fear of his populace, he likely would have conquered a lot more of Europe.

Anyway, VDH looks at Salamis, Lepanto, Charles Martel's repulsion of the Moors, the Spanish discovery and conquest of Mexico, Cannae, Rorke's Drift, Midway and Vietnam, using each as a lens by which to discover what cultural traits on the winning side most influenced the victory, and showing that the overwhelmingly peaceful Western way of life is really the result of the perfection of war.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a very interesting book. I'll have to see if I can get my hands on a copy.

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

there's a decent amount of evidence that many of the psychological traits that our society finds uncomfortable were really damn useful during human evolution.

's why i like jungian psychology a little better- it recognizes that the darknesses are a part of us and needed to be wholly human. i know somebody who repeatedly gets treated as a sociopath by your run of the mill psychologist because they were put in a situation where they needed to defend thmeselves to survive, and the very wilingness to kill another for survival makes a person somehow broken in the eyes of your standard brain professional. which seems a perspective disturbingly divorced from reality...

civilization is such a thin veneer, really.


...anyway. the only way i can imagine someone ashamed of soldiers as soldiers is someone who doesn't recognize the need to back up words with action (force) from time to time. i thought we'd moved past that sort of naivete. at least, i don't hear it much. at all.

[ossuarian.livejournal.com]

I've been meaning to write an article about how dangerous the U.S. idealization of its soldiers is. If I understand you right, it's the opposite of the point you're making.

If by "a nation" you mean this one, I don't think we're ashamed of our soldiers. I think we come halfway in between idealizing them and fetishizing them. In terms of foreign policy, the national dialogue is coming dangerously close to saying we need to be constantly aggressive to give "the soldiers" something to do.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

In terms of foreign policy, the national dialogue is coming dangerously close to saying we need to be constantly aggressive to give "the soldiers" something to do.

That is, indeed, the opposite extreme, and like all extremes, is just as bad a problem. It's exactly this kind of thing that the Founding Fathers had in mind when they said that the maintenance of a standing army was dangerous to liberty, as it encouraged foreign military adventures (by implication, unnecessary foreign military adventures).

That said, I didn't have a particular nation in mind. Granted, I was remembering the hate and vitriol many vets returned from Vietnam to find, but the US is far from the first — and surely won't be the last — country many of whose citizens regard its military with contempt and disdain, until the day the shit hits the fan and they suddenly realize it's blowing their way.

For it's Tommy this an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"
But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot.

[cipherpunk.livejournal.com]

The problem is not the U.S. trust, confidence, and pride in its armed forces. Speaking broadly, that's a very good thing. An army that is scorned by its population will find itself unable to draw in the sort of people it needs to be a professional army -- with the moral dimension that goes along with it -- and will instead have to settle for an army of people who weren't smart enough to get into college and have no problem obeying authority no matter how ridiculous or corrupt.

Look at the difference in professionalism between Vietnam-era draftees and modern-day volunteers. It's night and day.

The problem specifically we face is that the President's approval rating hovers around 20%, Congress's approval rating hovers around 10%, and the military's approval rating is over 95%. That, to me, sounds like a recipe for either a very powerful and professional military being entrusted to incompetent civilian hands (a recipe for destruction), or perhaps a recipe for a military coup in this country (another recipe for destruction).

But the problem is not the approval of the military -- it is the total, utter, absolute leadership collapse of the Executive and Legislative branches.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The problem specifically we face is that the President's approval rating hovers around 20%, Congress's approval rating hovers around 10%, and the military's approval rating is over 95%. That, to me, sounds like a recipe for either a very powerful and professional military being entrusted to incompetent civilian hands (a recipe for destruction), or perhaps a recipe for a military coup in this country (another recipe for destruction).

But the problem is not the approval of the military -- it is the total, utter, absolute leadership collapse of the Executive and Legislative branches.

Can't argue with that. Although sometimes, I wonder whether when government gets bad enough and corrupt enough, a good clean military coup by competent and honest generals might not be such a bad thing after all — particularly if they take power only for long enough to clean the crooks out of the pigsty and put an honest government back in power.

[luxobscura.livejournal.com]

I thought about that during the Katrina clusterfuck on the federal level. Then, all of a sudden, Lt. Gen. Russel Honore steps off a helo, starts barking orders, tells his boys to keep their rifles "at rest", and shit suddenly started getting done.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

I don't know any nations like that. Perhaps unfortunately.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

The US got into that in the Vietnam era. (BTDT as a draftee...)

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

Elf reports that there is great support from about half the population when she travels. In Kalifornia, the local constabulary actively works to get soldiers in trouble, the local citizenry is, at best, neutral towards them. There are element in the gang space that hold it as a matter of pride to beat up soldiers and get their ID cards. In short, the environment outside the base is hostile.

In the USA, I think getting rid of the draft was a huge mistake. The general military now draws from a much narrower demographic, allowing the use of the military in ways that the consequences can be ignored, politically. Over use of the reserves is totally screwing up the lives of a lot of the reservists. (As an example.)

I tend to agree with house_pundit in that the public keepers of our culture are incompetent. I suspect that most members of our culture know better.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I tend to agree with house_pundit in that the public keepers of our culture are incompetent.

Sometimes I find it very difficult to credit them with mere innocent incompetence.

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

The 13th Amendment forbids involuntary servitude.

And America hasn't "gotten rid of" the draft. Every American male is still required to register at the age of 18. They just haven't used it in a while because it nearly destroyed the military.