Since the institution of the all-volunteer military in 1973, young American men have been under far less pressure to be prepared for military service than they had ever been before. Whereas before, the state needed manpower to be militarily ready, after, it ceased to become important within its own view.
At the same time, with the left gaining more effective authority, ‘aggression’ — particularly male aggression — became seen to be a sort of pathology, except among racial minorities, in which it is seen as an unfortunate result of History. Whereas before, men were seen as domestic, local, national, and international arbiters of morality, capable of dispensing justice within their own realm (or otherwise acting criminally to promote disorder), under the new culture, the expectation became that all men ought to be pacifists in their own life except when specially authorized.
Laws against domestic violence made the traditional law-giving role of fathers in the household become criminal. Instead, specially-empowered social workers, teachers, psychologists, and psychiatrists would be charged with maintaining domestic order through special rhetorical techniques and by prescribing chemical potions designed to inhibit aggression and limit the impacts of undesirable emotions.
The institution of the AVF was necessary for also creating the new masculinity. When you expect to have to ship off your entire young male population to another continent every 30 years or so to kill or be killed, ensuring that boys are strong, aggressive, and obedient is one of those vaunted national security priorities. When it doesn’t matter, as far as the Defense Department is concerned, most of the country’s men can be dope-smoking bronies, and it won’t impact their ability to do their jobs, as long as they pay their taxes on time.
If we look at it from the biological point of view, civilization has been a long process of breeding men who are more apt to cooperate in ever-more sophisticated ways than they are to fight. Owing to technology, a greater capacity to cooperate also leads to a greater capacity to fight. The ‘Highway of Death’ in Gulf War I demonstrated to the planet what conventional air superiority could do. Saddam Hussein showed up with tanks and other armored vehicles and was completely obliterated by airplanes, helicopters, and artillery — all of which rest on a superiority of applied intelligence rather than numbers and brute force.
That this attack was itself a limited show of force — the Americans could have just used neutron bombs instead, although it would’ve run against international law — served to amplify its propaganda impact.
When the state’s mechanisms for inhibiting disordered violence fail, in most situations, the story is ignored or blamed on a ghost of history. When one Chicago gang member guns down several people, it rarely makes the national news, because it’s normal. When a white or Asian young man kills several people, it makes the national news, in part because the state’s apparatuses for inhibiting their aggression has usually failed in an embarrassing manner. When this failure happens, countless experts go on TV to argue for a new set of legislation to justify an expansion in their powers and capabilities, not necessarily because their actions will actually prevent more disordered aggression, but because it fulfills their bureaucratic imperatives.
The goals of these expansions are often unrealistic: the Connecticut gun seizures provoked after a shooting by a young man in psychiatric treatment proved to be unworkable due to widespread noncompliance among gun owners in that state.
When boys were expected to go to the Army, when one boy shot a popgun at his brother, it was not a concern, and his parents would laugh and even encourage the roughhousing. Now that it is no longer expected (in a highly unusual way for a government dedicated to democracy, which is almost always girded by conscription), even a drawing of a rifle is enough to solicit a prescription for a boy, if not an expulsion from school and permanent impacts on his record.
What we may be seeing are the limits to feeding the ‘better angels of our nature.’ An over-cooperative population has a difficult time handling covert aggression, infiltration, and outside attack. The Goldilocks level of civilization is probably not attainable by design, but is instead selected by global human competition.
To put it bluntly, boys who aren’t allowed to even draw a gun with crayon are unlikely to draw a gun on a foreigner sawing the head off of a pedestrian in public. To boot, the boys who have been promoted by virtue of their docility and deference to feminine authority are quite likely not to recognize that said foreigners with a predisposition towards dramatic decapitation are even much of a threat once they are older and writing columns for the Guardian or Gawker.
Showing a disposition for aggression has become bad manners, by design. ‘Aggression’ has even become a bad word: psychologists tend to encourage ‘assertion’ instead, although one wonders what assertions are ultimately backed by.
At the international level, we’re seeing the consequences of the culture of pacifism and leadership acceptable to feminine value systems: it has a lot of trouble handling, gaining the advantage in, and winning conflicts.
the Americans could have just used neutron bombs instead, although it would’ve run against international law – See more at: http://www.socialmatter.net/2014/06/12/inhibiting-violence/#sthash.ydjuXmnm.dpuf
Actually, the USA breaks its own laws and international laws all the time.
They didn’t use the neutron bomb because a bunch of brass hats decided they liked depleted uranium better. Laws had nothing to do with it. It was a government of men, not laws.
And then the depleted-uranium babies were born, opening up a new age of human deformities, mutations, and inoperable cancers.
We use depleted urainium because it’s very dense and has armor penetrating properties greater than it’s predecessor tungsten. The health concerns [which affect us as well] were unknown prior to them appearing.
As to International Law: The United States is International Law. We are International Law.
I find nothing to disagree with in the above article, you are correct on all points.
At the present time although this wasn’t addressed we’re better indeed much better with an all volunteer force especially as it’s becoming generational as police work, firefighting and indeed many safer trades. We don’t have a problem winning any battle tactically, we do have continious strategic stalemate or defeat since Korea but those are due to non-military political considerations. To wit we are consistently betrayed. The cost of actually doing anything to solve that problem is prohibitively high, it may not always be so.
What shocks me is the speed with which “zero-tolerance” has rendered the schools uninhabitable.
As a third grader in the 1980’s, I brought a DEWAT pineapple grenade to show and tell. I thought it was the coolest thing. After a classmate of mine (against my reproach) pulled the pin, I was sent to the principal’s office. She told me “not to bring hand grenades to school.” That was it. No detention, no suspension, nothing. Had that occurred today, I’d have likely been expelled and/or shipped to GITMO.