More Roy

A couple of posts ago, I was thinking out loud about Roy Bedard's contention that people's fascination with violence and killing indicated that there was no internal block to killing inside one's own species. I disagree. Not about whether an internal block does or doesn't exist (more on that later) but about whether fantasy is any indication at all of willingness.

It was brain food, and, as usual, everyone responded to the question they heard.
But Lloyd's response got a few days of thinking.

Lloyd said...

Ill just leave this here.

Would you be willing to kill a goat at a slaughterhouse?

Would you be willing to kill a goat on a farm?

Would you be willing to kill a goat in the wild?

Would you be willing to kill someones pet cat/dog?

Would you be willing to kill a person?

The inhibition cant be completely about not killing your own species. Everyone ive ever asked with only one exception wont kill the pet, either.

I put down Lucky two years ago. He was our obsessively loving, epileptic, black cat. Kidney failure. We wanted his last days to be good, loving, with us. And when the pain got bad I put him down. What a euphemism. I continued to pet him and while he purred at the contact and sometimes mewled with pain I put the barrel of a .22 revolver under his throat, angled for the brainstem and killed him. It was over in an instant.

So I've been willing, but not eager.

But never ever once have I fantasized about putting down a pet. And there are people who daydream about hunting, but I don't recall, when living on the farm, ever fantasizing about butchering day. With the possible exception of when we culled chickens, because that was headshots only on moving targets with strict instructions not to shoot hens or the designated roosters... challenge.

And that's a thing, because K brought up fantasy and fairy tales as a kind of visualization, but in actual experience those are very different things in my head. You can daydream about hunting big game, and that's fantasy. When it was time to put down Lucky I rehearsed every step in my head because I didn't want any mistakes. Fully visualized, but not fantasy.

There are a couple of reasons people assume that there is a block against killing within your own species. First of all, Konrad Lorenz. It's been close to thirty years since I read "On Aggression" but it's pretty certain that most 'battles' within a species are ritualized and do minimal damage.  They can look fierce, but generally both bears walk away. But it's not just about not killing, because if a new male lion takes over a pride it will kill the cubs sired by the previous boss.

Then there's "On Killing." Be careful with Grossman's stuff. If you read his sources, they frequently don't say quite what made it into his books. And if you've ever actually fired a musket, there's a much more logical explanation for the multi-loads than reluctance to fire.

But some of the best evidence for the block comes from the people who freeze. If you debrief enough force encounters you will hear time and again, "I knew exactly what I needed to do, but for some reason, I couldn't make myself move." You will hear that from highly trained and motivated people. I have a much smaller number of debriefs for weapons, but sometimes you will get an experienced hand-to-hand fighter who doesn't go for the gun even when it is absolutely necessary.

So, question number one: Is it a block or a freeze? And is there really a difference?

Next part, and this goes to Erik's point about bell curves. There aren't a lot of things in humans where everybody is either one thing or the other. Almost everything exists on a continuum. And some people simply have less internal blocks to hurting or killing humans than others. Nature or nurture? What if it's all three?
Three?
I've heard through the grapevine that there's a guy doing research on a particular group of traits that appear in certain organizations. Evidently, people who gravitate to certain jobs and do well tend to have unusual bone and muscle density; faster healing rates; and respond to an adrenaline dump without a crash afterwards. (I'd like to know about flexibility, ETOH resistance and a few other traits I've noticed but...) That would be a case for a pretty strong genetic component.

Or it could be pure socialization. One of the most chilling things about Rwanda, if Hatzfeld is correct (he reports a prison of 7000 who participated in the genocide with less than a dozen mental health issues in the whole prison) is the lack of PTSD in the killers. Evidently, if you are raised with a strong tribal identity (where no one outside your tribe is a 'real' person) you can kill with all the emotional; baggage of a farmer slaughtering lambs.
Reverse that, and it means that people can be socialized so deeply that they can't make themselves do a 'wrong' thing even when they desperately need to do so to survive. And by wrong thing, I'm not necessarily talking something as extreme as killing, but people facing victimization who refuse to be rude. To slam a door in a strangers face or yell for help and make a scene.
And there's a subtle socialization, too. As much as everyone says how important it is to stand up for people and not let others be bullied and... I can tell you from personal experience that every time I have done so, I've been punished. Someone I cared about would make a point that doing so was stupid, or look at you differently. It was usually a boss. Like the bus driver fired for intervening in a domestic violence situation. That doesn't mean don't stop doing it, but you have to be very robust against peer pressure to keep standing up.

The third way, of course, is that somewhere in this is a mix. Some people are more resistant to peer pressure and socialization. Some respond to reward better than punishment and vise-versa. But I believe you could take one of those genetically predisposed to be comfortable with violence and raise them in an environment where it simple never worked and they would adapt. And I think a certain percentage of even the most dependent 'pleaser personality' genes raised in a dog-eat-dog environment would rise to the challenge. Because, above all, humans adapt. It's what we do.

To sum up, is there a block? For most normally socialized people, I think it's a good bet. How the definition of people is internalized, though, is a social process. And that changes those lines. And some people have more control over their internal states (not just emotion, but actual thought process) and they will tend to adapt faster, including breaking rules. And some people have never internalized society's rules but just follow them out of either convenience or courtesy.

But I still have no idea what to do with Roy's point about excessive fantasy.