Young homo sapiens males have a natural instinct for war, which can be expressed or not depending on circumstances. Going to war is the historical high risk + h

Young homo sapiens males have a natural instinct for war, which can be expressed or not depending on circumstances. Going to war is the historical high risk + high reward option: you might be killed, but if you survive, you have a good shot at becoming richer, more powerful, and having offspring (both by becoming a desirable husband/son-in-law, and through the pervasive rapes in which victors indulged after a won battle). Founding a startup is a modern incarnation of that instinct, appealing mostly to the same young males demographic, albeit skewed toward those with very favored socio-economical backgrounds. So, the less hope people have to thrive the "regular" safe way, e.g. because of durable economical crisis and loss of upward social mobility, the more likely they are to respond well to jingoism. As a side-note, polygyny and jingoism are strongly correlated. Indeed for each man with several spouses, there are unwilling bachelors. They're willing to take the high-risk road and fight battles to become patriarchs; as a bonus, war casualties increase the female/male ratio. I recommend reading The Red Queen if you're interested by all aspects of mating strategies and risk acceptance, not limited to human beings nor even whole organisms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Queen:_Sex_and_the_Evolution_of_Human_Nature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Queen:_Sex_and_the_Evol...).