Why Young Men Go to War

Of course its not that simple, but we, I suppose especially us techie boys (us because I am one), think that an M1 Abrams tank, a F-15 airplane or a Sig Sauer rifle are, well, cool. We also think uniforms look good. And we dream of being heroes, especially when we are young.

It is, of course, nonsense. All these machines, while technologically interesting, are basically just ugly tools to end lives of other humans. I suppose the glamour and pride only work as long as you believe it does. And so forth.

Of course we need some weapons to defend ourselves, (one might argue our nuclear weapons are more than enough already), because who knows may come and attack, sure. But, yea, I think I just want to say, stop glorifying all this stuff.

It gives me hope that one of the most popular computer games ever, Minecraft, is not a war game. :)

I went to war because I was in the army and wondered what was the point of being in the army if you don't go to war. After doing my training, deploying in Afghanistan was the logical follow up. Why train so hard just to stay home.

After the mission, I left the army. Partly because life back into garrison was boring as hell, partly because I felt I had lived all that was to live in the army and it was time for the next phase in my life.

At least my original goal is sort of achieved. The army and all the things I lived at that time have equipped me with a confidence that has since helped me achieve milestones toward my life goals. In retrospect, the three decisions I enumerated were sound and being my young self again, I would do the same.

I was performing an autopsy yesterday when the med student, the photographer, and the assistant started talking about guns. Their gusto was impressive. I felt no need to partake, but I think that was attributable, at least in part, to the fact that I have far more experience with weapons than any of them. But I acquired those experiences by satisfying the same desire they, to some extent, haven't. How do you break that chicken-egg problem?

Alternate rites of passage, I would think. We need more of those. Is there a way to facilitate young men helping on start-ups earlier in their careers? Maybe before college?

In most cultures and societies males start life on the female side along their mothers. They are special, they are beloved, they are cared for – but they are also objects. When entering adolescence and adulthood, males are essentially losing their identity. They are no more special or unique, they are disposable (as in "women and children first") — and they have to accept this insult. They have to redefine themselves. Moreover, there are some preconditions in most cultures to becoming eligible as a subject. Some of these are related to inheritance, but it really goes a bit deeper than that. So, if they are not born rich or not the eldest son, they are asked to prove they were eligible for being a valued member of society. One way to do so is founding and supporting a family, but there are also preconditions here. To most, the final proof is showing their willingness and to prove being able to "burn themselves" (sometimes literally as in the trenches of war) for societies sake, to accept disposability. (Staying up late coding is yet another way of burning yourself, while not that drastic.) — This may be underpinned by an institution known in some cultures, the institutions of "sworn virgins", where women would enter the male side on the precondition of never returning the realms of female definitions. Ever thereafter they are part of the male side and accepted as males, but they also have to adhere to the socials contracts related to this definition. — Following to this, war is a major means of regaining identity and uniqueness – and becoming an eligible member of society. Small wonder that this often connected with pride.

In my humble opinion, these patterns are also to be observed in the discussion of gender diversity in IT and other male dominated environments. Most of the objections and/or insults against females are rather pretexts or symptoms for a basic mistrust against members who do not adhere to the laws of disposability. (Problems often evaporate as the gender-definitions are crossed by "sworn virgin coders". But this isn't a solution to the problem at all.) In this context, the presence and acceptance of "real females" is a real threat to the construction of these environments. This isn't just a show. It's more about accepting that these are not protected realms of males joined in their attempt to become eligible to the honors of society, accepting that these environments are rather part of society themselves. (So, is coding war? Swallow your pride. Nobody should be forced to burn. Does this align with the structures of business as we know it? No. – Hint: Businesses are not only burning money.)

These two statements:

1. “War is so compelling that you can even get a room full of pacifists to pay money to be entertained by it.”"

2. "“My sister is a complete and utter feminist and pacifist,” he explains. “She doesn’t see the irony. She’s participating in this wonderful festival … that’s reenacting a battle. Nobody reenacts the Treaty of Ghent. [It] just isn’t that compelling.”"

I find particularly profound.

Any attempt to "window dress" our base nature, is just that - "Window dressing".

This actually plays out in a lot of areas... fraternities, urban gangs, Github, etc. The dynamic of dividing humanity into "insiders" and "outsiders" follows closely as well. That dynamic is used to dehumanize all "outsiders" so that the goals of the group can be placed above morality and ethics.

I believe these things are true because I'm a slow learner and have been suckered into this dynamic more than once... I tried a college fraternity for a short while (after being accepted, rejected it and dropped out of college), fell in with the wrong crowd and did drugs until my eyes rolled so far back into my head that I swear I was able to see my brain (stopped altogether after somewhat harrowing experiences) and joined the US Army to shoot artillery after 9/11 (went to Afghanistan and after I got back became a conscientious objector before being put out administratively with an "honorable" discharge).

In the US, mass media is the fertilizer for mass murder... we teach young men that their number 1 goal is to be manly... and that women are just holes to fuck... and that you need to fuck as many holes as possible to be manly... and that explosions are cool... and that you need to create and survive explosions to be manly... and that streetfighting is cool... and that you need to be in a bunch of streetfights to be manly... I could keep going but I think you all get the point.

If the culture changes men will stop going to war unless they are forced to... while the biological urges described above can be exploited to manipulate peoples' actions, those urges could be channeled to positive actions instead, and they are certainly not a free pass to commit the atrocities that most people just pretend don't exist. This is the area where I disagree with the author if the article... it actually does start and stop with those who pull the trigger

That's not confined to the military of course. It seems almost rude to admit you do your job to get a pay check in many occupations.

Junger is saying that war is really emergent behavior: young men are violent, so they are not just willing to go to war, but want to. It's certainly a new perspective to me. I suppose it makes some sense, though it feels to me that wars today are "not what they used to be". Take WWI and WWII. There was mass draft and the country was generally behind these. I am sure there was a great number of people who were unhappy to be drafted, but it seems that here people actually believed in the existential threat to the US.

Then take the Vietnam war. Hugely unpopular. Look at this widely circulated picture of a lighter supposedly carried by a US soldier in Vietnam: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/07/10/article-2171404-14....

Now, today our military is volunteer-based and tiny compared to, say, what it was during WWII. Only a small percentage of the population serves, and are pre-selected. Is it then fair to say that all or even most young men want to go to war? It seems to me the answer is no.

So the remaining question is whether war happens because of this emergent behavior or for other reasons. Basically, if we gave that small percentage of young men something better than war, would war stop? Or would we continue to wage war anyways?

One way to counteract that could be actively practicing nullifying one's ego. Everyday, do one thing you really dislike, and stop doing one thing you really like and can do. People need to get over this ridiculous idea that all their desires must be sated.

However it seems especially absurd to say he has no political agenda in his films, and in the next breath criticize two common political narratives.

This for me was an unbelievable experience as a German, where if the army would be involved with any kind of school it would be a major scandal. But while in high school in america it was normal to be propagandaed on during your lunch hour.

Just because some closely related primates display something we can interpret as war doesn't mean you can then assume there is some related, unavoidable instinct in homo sapiens. This is a poor argument that highlights the author's own bastardized interpretation of evolution. It's 2015 and those are chimps, in 2015. We are not chimps. This line of argument is very weak.

Overall, his self-consciousness is barely containable and I'm having trouble being objective based on this. It sounds like intelligent people tell him he's wrong, but he's got the facts and the platform, so he's right. He can't strongly defend his ideas. He just likes to say everyone on the right and left is crazy, absurd, and/or wrong - obviously. But there's no follow-through. He knows. He was there, and he's telling you. He's read something about chimps and has an opinion about innate differences and their implications for society. This echoes personalities I've known who self-affirm from exactly the lack of external affirmation they seek. He seeks to define the boundaries of the discussion to suit his conclusion, then accuses others of not being able to have an honest discussion if they wouldn't agree to it since they argue that it is no space for an insightful discussion. Catch-a 22.

Why is there no mention of the incentives for the 14%+ of women in the US military? That's a big enough number to do a study to see how many of them are trying to find "manhood" and compare it to the boys.

They should have a question in the discharge process: "Did you find manhood during your service?"

As an aside, I'd be interested to see an Ask HN: "How many people have you killed on the field of battle?"

http://www.loonwatch.com/2011/12/we-re-at-war-and-we-have-be...

> "It's a left-wing version of the Christian right rejecting the theory of evolution," he says. "I mean the far left is also now rejecting the theory of evolution, which is just insane."

The left wing, whatever it's worth, is certainly not rejecting the theory of evolution. Just because men are evolutionarily predisposed to go to war doesn't mean that not wanting them to go to war is rejecting the theory of evolution. Evolution only shows us what is. (In the case of evo-psych, it's usually more like what may have been.) Meanwhile, it's our job to figure out what ought to be, and to defer to evolution on that point is nothing but intellectual laziness.

Just because men choose to go to war doesn't mean that they are not also victims of a social order that glorifies war and gives them a warped idea of what it means to be male. These can both be true. Politics always takes advantage of pre-existing psychological propensities, but it also reinforces them and reshapes them to its advantage over many generations. In fact, most questions in the form of "did X cause Y or vice versa?" in politics and sociology can be answered as "duh, it's a feedback loop."

Humans are subject to evolutionary pressures like any other life form. But one of the major differences between us and other animals is that we can recognize when our biology predisposes us to participate in evil, and counter it with our intelligence and strength of will.

If evolution is taking us places where we don't want to go, we have the intelligence and technology to give the middle finger to evolution and shape our own destinies. That includes telling young men that they no longer need to kill other men in order to be acknowledged as upstanding members of our society.

EDIT: An earlier version of this comment included the following rant, which was meant as an aside. But too many people seemed to think that it was my main point, so I'm moving it to the end.

> "I don’t put any political agenda into my work. I think the right wing tends to idolize soldiers—you can't talk about them critically in any way. The left wing went from vilifying them in Vietnam to seeing them as victims of a military-industrial complex." He laughs over the phone. "Both views of soldiers are just absurd."

It's funny how every time I hear someone say they have no political agenda, or that they are neutral, they almost always go on to devote the vast majority of their effort to criticizing the left wing. Maybe they secretly endorse the right wing, or maybe they think the right wing is not even worth criticizing. In either case, I find this fascinating.

Young men might have an excuse, but we, older men, should know better. Even when we didn't live through a war, we should be smart enough to understand its realities, its destructive power, its cruelty. We must stop wars before they start. None of it is worth a young man's life.

We should teach our children how ugly weapons are and how valuable life is.

I disagree with the author when he states the West doesn't really have an answer - sure, the answer isn't in the back of a textbook. One might even reasonably conclude there exists a multitude of answers - some of which probably conflict.

Here are some examples -

Pedestrian - acquire a skill, get a real job, marry, have kids. Clearly serving the profit motives of others - cultivate expensive tastes. Macho - pursue dangerous hobbies, enter a risky profession - which for some reason excludes cab drivers and convenience store clerks.

If I had to offer a guess, I might say, "Assume responsibility for yourself."

The article is about young men choosing to go to war, in our all-volunteer military, but there wouldn't be a war to choose to enter if the mostly old, mostly white, mostly men in Congress didn't choose to have one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_%28miniseries%29 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DShDaJXK5qo

The episode covers what goes into training young people who enter the marine core. It features candid interviews with drill sergeants and the recruits themselves about their motivations. Well worth a watch.

One of the main points the episode makes is that the job of being a soldier is ultimately about killing and dying, something that doesn’t come naturally to most people. The method for turning young men into soldiers is basic training.

According to Dyer the secret of basic training is that its not really about teaching people, its about changing people. He claims that if you want to change people quickly and radically, you put them in a place where the only right way to think and behave is the way you want them to. You isolate them and then apply enormous physical and mental pressure. i.e basic training. Essentially he claims that basic training is all about brain washing.

In the linked interview Sebastian Junger talks a lot about what it means to be a man. In particular:

“In that kind of environment,” Junger continues. “If you dare talk about what it means to be a man, what you’re saying is men are different from women.”

and

“We aren’t asking, ‘What does it mean to be a human being?’” he says. “‘What’s it mean to be a man?’ Once you have that conversation you offend a lot of academics.”

and

“Men are clearly wired for [war],” he continues. “The male response to war is an evolutionary adaptation that clearly works for our species.”

He doesn't quite claim that young mens desire to go to war has its roots purely in biology but he comes close. Personally I don't buy it.

I think the concept of going to war as a rite of passage, particularly in the USA, is a social construct that’s largely the result of pervasive propaganda. The US military has an impressive marketing budget and aggressively recruits in schools right across the country. In the US, joining the military is not seen as a weird or embarrassing thing to do. In contrast, in my country (Ireland), joining the military is seen as a somewhat odd choice.

What’s interesting about Dyer’s documentary is that it interviews recruits before they go through basic training. Many of them are poor with few job prospects and no sense of direction. The military gives them a sense of purpose and is socially acceptable thing to do.

First, while gender may be "a social construct" it tends to recur in similar patterns across most societies. That's not to say that gender roles don't exaggerate the (actually very slight, in biological terms) differences and aren't a source of much injustice. However, there's a recurrent ranking that societies create: high-status men > high-status women > low-status women > low-status men. This is why conversations about gender and "patriarchy" fall flat, it's why feminists and MRAs both have a point, and it's not how things necessarily should be, but it's how things are in at least 90% of the societies that humans create.

High-status men have harems of 10+ wives, in pre-monogamous societies, which means that some men will have zero. Since women have a rate-limiting reproductive resource (i.e. a womb) they have a good chance of getting at least some action. Low-status men don't, because they're the lowest of the low. No one likes them. And in a non-monogamous society, they're recognized as an actual danger. Of course, most young men will start out low in status. When's the last time, in popular culture, you saw a teenage male portrayed in a positive light? Most of the world fears and hates (most) teenage males.

Eventually, the high-status men recognize the threat. They see men who are sex-starved and poor and deprived of opportunities for improvement, but young and fit while they are fading. So they encourage them to raid other tribes, escalate petty conflicts into moral causes, and even glorify the whole thing because it brings the male population down and makes a pre-monogamous society (which would otherwise be unstable and violent) stable for a while.

This pattern is so ingrained in us that we've mythologized it and glorified something that is actually pretty awful. It's also where we get the need to "become a man". Because the gap between high-status (or, at least, realized and mature) men and low-status ones is so severe, we've had to create narratives around it. We've also had to elevate quixotry to a virtue.

You see this not just in war but when the stakes are smaller. Take startups. What do we call those (oddly nostalgic, even if things were awful at the time) narratives about low-status men working 90-hour weeks, debugging others' awful written-to-deadline code, as 0.02%-owners of a startup whose benefits would accrue to high-status men (founders and investors)? "War stories."

As a species, we've had to create this narrative to explain something that we do to each other for Darwinian, reproductive reasons. It continues even in a mostly monogamous and mostly peaceful society.