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The article "Is There Anything Good About Men?" by Roy Baumeister [1] takes some interesting angles on the reasons and motivations for men choosing war, and gen
by halfcat 12y ago
The article "Is There Anything Good About Men?" by Roy Baumeister [1] takes some interesting angles on the reasons and motivations for men choosing war, and generalizes why the worlds most powerful people, as well as the overwhelming majority of most prison populations, are men.
In some ways, the reasons look to clearly stem from culture and society's influence, as discussed in the Baumeister article.
On the other hand, there is definitely a some element of the innate [2] "us vs. them" at play, allowed to run unbridled in the suspenseful environment of war. I imagine this would result in an experience not easily replicated in the real world.
No where else offers this:
1. You might get to kill "bad people"
2. You won't get in trouble for it
3. You don't have time to think or process it. It just happens, split second, you die or they die, you panic, resort to your training, you live. Instead of being punished, you are a hero.
4. You might die. Hearing a bullet whiz by your head and surviving, followed by the subsequent huge adrenaline rush.
5. If you don't die, you see yourself as an invincible super hero that gets to save the world.
There are ways to replicate a lot of this, like joining a street gang or getting involved in organized crime, but instead of becoming a hero, you get 20-to-life. Not quite the same risk-reward.
Something about it seems very juvenile, in the sense of getting to do "bad things" with very little risk of negative consequence, and there's some element of "playing super hero" here. It makes me think of going off to college and partying your ass off for a semester, with unlimited access to alcohol and sex, fully funded by the parents, with very little negative consequence. I'm sure many people do look back on that with fond memories. To some people, war is probably like that, on steroids.
[1] http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm
[2] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/babies-help-unlock-the-origins-of-morality/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/babies-help-unlock-the-origins-o...
- stolio 12y agoI started reading that Baumeister article to complain about the current political climate. Even though it turns out I'm sympathetic to his views there were a few interesting angles, as you put it. One that had never occurred to me: > The first big, basic difference has to do with what I consider to be the most underappreciated fact about gender. Consider this question: What percent of our ancestors were women? It’s not a trick question, and it’s not 50%....Recent research using DNA analysis answered this question about two years ago. Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men.
- tormeh 12y agoThat may be because most men never get any offspring. It's evolutionarily convenient to only have the genetically best men get women pregnant. A common theory is that the reason we have marriage/monogamy is that the men who get left out of sex don't much like this arrangement and would prefer equal allocation of women.
- meric 12y agoIronic this kind of equality is destroyed as modern society in dismantles traditional marriages in the name of equality.
- stolio 12y agoI might as well argue that women started polygamy so more of them could be with the top males. If you lack all of the things it might take to attract female partners (health, money, power, social status, charisma, intelligence, humor, etc.) to the extent that you're getting left out of sex, you don't have the clout to design and implement new institutions.
- tormeh 12y agoThere's kinda this thing about numbers, though. 50% of all men is a lot of guys dissatisfied with the status quo. And you don't have to implement new institutions within the existing power structure, you just have to get a group of fellow guys together, run off with some kidnapped girls few will miss and start your own society. Then you invent a religion to justify it, and voila, soon your tribe has reason to go and pillage, burn, rape and convert.
- stolio 12y agoSounds like the plot from Revenge Of The Nerds. Very unlikely because of the same problem as before: the ability to attract females correlates with the skills needed to start a successful new tribe that can compete with the old. The only way I see to save the argument is to say that the "losers" who left, or were more likely pushed out, stumbled upon some favorable ecology, maybe they stumbled into modern day Europe. But then you're back to geographical determinism and so many things changed in society as agriculture developed that singling out male envy as the cause of monogamy requires more evidence than I think you have.