I was talking with NBS and SB for an upcoming episode of Ascending the Tower and one thing that came up was Vietnam, which got me thinking. A couple weeks ago Vox posted on “the killers”, those who are capable of instinctively waging war “without restraint and without regard to their personal safety”. He talks about Christianity’s killers. The article notes that there are a very small percentage of men who are killers and that these killers tend to take higher casualties for rather self-evident reasons.
Just under 27 million American men were eligible for military service between 1964 and 1973. Of that number 8.4 million served in active duty. Another 2 million served in the National Guard or military reserves… 2.1 million actually saw service in Vietnam… 58,152 were killed; 153,303 were seriously wounded. Only about a third of those in Vietnam were drafted.
About a third of eligible American men were a part of the military during the war. Of those, One out of every 10 Americans who served in Vietnam was a casualty. 58,148 were killed and 304,000 wounded out of 2.7 million who served, about 2% died.
The people dying in this war generally chose to serve, and were likely disproportionately killers. If we add on top of this the 441915 who died in the WW2 and the Korean War, then in two generation we have about 500,000 Americans who have been selected out of the population. The men selected out would generally be the killers. The previous generation had about 116,000 selected out in WW1 and two generations before that about 600,000 men were selected out by the Civil War.
These modern industrial wars tended to, at least for Americans, kill out the fighting population, particularly the ‘killers’, while leaving the non-fighting population in peace.I can’t help but wonder if this may have have had a selection effect on the genetics of the population. I’m sure that the ‘killer’ spirit has at least some genetic basis. Has America been slowly selecting out its warrior spirit by sending those with killer instincts off to die on the other side of the world? Could this, at least partially, explain the liberalization and feminization of America?
Also thinking along these lines, Western Europe, especially in WW1 and on the Western Front in WW2, had a much more intense selection effect. Maybe this could, partially, explain why Western Europe glommed to socialism and feminization more heartily than America. Of course, Sweden and Denmark would be very obvious counterpoints to this hypothesis.
All of this is nothing but idle speculation but I can’t help but wonder what kind of selection effects modern industrial war, particularly the avoidance of civilian casualties in America and western European countries, has been having?
I appreciate this article very much. I’ve thought the same thing for some time but have been unable to articulate it nearly as well.
I suspect that this is even worse in Europe where from 1914 to 1946 and a bit later, more than 30 million fighting age men were killed and who knows how many were taken out of the reproductive pool by injury or disease, That leaves society built by the old, the infirm and women, not ideal for a martial society. Also tens of millions of people with PTSD is going to leave a sour taste for war. Now PTSD was known in the past but less people went to war and personal violence among people accustomed to some amount of death is far less traumatic than the random death that makes up most modern warfare
I also think that a lack of exposure to any kind of martial virtue for most of them may have had a strong component as well .
I’m not however entirely sure this is a bad thing, with the threat of hydrogen bomb warfare still looming we can’t afford another internecine European bloodbath.
Russia alone within a few years or less adjust its arsenal of nuclear weapons to render the Earth permanently uninhabitable as could we. China and the other powers including with effort Israel and France could destroy civilization as we know it.
Even if nukes weren’t used, genetic engineering and germ warfare could be nearly as nasty.
Also even without those another threat, precision guided weapons. We’ve never faced an opponent who can at will target every significant piece of static infrastructure and not miss. The same tech that allows nukes also allows ballistic missiles to say hit every power plant in the US. Its theoretically possible to put anti-missile batteries in place but the way modern economies work, by waging war on wages means there isn’t significant money to do this . Its not possible to keep taxes to the point where there won’t be mass evasion or political consequences. We can’t make ends meet and have hugely expensive missile defense that have to constantly adapt to new methods of attack . Offense is vastly more powerful than defense.
Thus as a society we cannot use large scale war as a social outlet and we have to maintain domestic stability at all costs. If it weren’t for Cultural Marxism this would be much easier but CM is just Communism 2.0 and that ideology never went away and probably won’t if only for economic reasons. Automation means no work, no work means a push for Communism just as Marx predicted. You have to have work for enough people to avoid communism and of course the Cultural Marxists who are just along for the ride.
Now as to the population issue, may hobby horse which is odd enough related. Emasculated men have less children but ironically are acting with more wisdom. One should not have children on the dole or until one has the resources. What we are getting, slow population decline is only natural given the economy. In Europe around 50% of young people can’t afford a family and decent people won’t raise people in poverty if they can avoid it . The only way around this is to have work and or income for people. Counting on a religious revival to get people to fundamentally work against their own interests or to have babies on the dole is just not going to happen. People wisely take umbrage and regard this as corrupt.
Eliminating Cultural Marxism and immigration would slow the rot and help prevent replacement with a population willing to accept a much lower standard of living since they have lower IQ and high time preference but won’t fix anything and its won’t stop it entirely. If all non Whites in say the UK vanished , the population might grow but it would be mainly Chavs which aren’t much better.
Basically too many good people are basically superfluous and if you want them to have kids, you have to pay for it,
As such them being emasculated is not much an issue to the elite , porn and cheap entertainment syngerize well with this and a police state to sustain stability and you only need a few enforcers against the weak .
Long term this ends the society but since when do any of the globalists care about they are they are born and raised?
Now it would be possible to eliminate the welfare state as we know it, burn the village to save it and provoke mass K selection. Ignoring the immorality of such an act and the risks, the net result would be drastically smaller population through famine, plague and civil war .
No one church,state, corporation other than crazy Deep Greens want this.
Hoping say the 40 million starving people who were dropped from EBT in the US alone don’t shack with some group that makes Boko Haram look like the Libertarians is a bad bet. Get Him! He Can Read !is a future we all want to avoid .
Another option is socialism and nationalism but WW2 kind of soured that for everybody.
As it is I have no idea how to undo any of the messes only to slow the rot.
I doubt it. That kind of selection would take many generations of constant selection on the entire population to achieve. Our current bovine passivity is entirely due to conditioning.
We just need a war where our large urban centers are carpet-bombed.
Dirtnap, we’ve had centuries of industrial war starting well before Napoleon and centuries more of deliberate conditioning since the Catholic Church worked to destroy more traditional kinship arrangements such as Frith in favor or a more easily controlled nuclear or extended family/village arrangement for their ideal Christendom.
Also by the 18th century or so, if Pinker et all are correct, casual violence had already started to decline quickly my guess though they’d disagree was from guns being a good equalizer combined with previous efforts at pacification and later a bigger state with better policing
Modern warfare was a break in this with large standing armies basically exposing large numbers of men and women to total warfare. This created psychological damage across populations that were rarely exposed .
Raiding and looting were bad and known in the last but they weren’t everyday brutal modern warfare and having ones village looted by armies sucked and caused problems, the were not on par with the damaged caused by say firebombing Dresden or the Napoleonic war.
The real kicker I’d guess is much more effective use of artillery and bombs since its largely unstoppable random death for you and your mates, there is a reason they started talking about shell shock .
PTSD has always been there and there are stories in Celtic myth that are pretty much tales that match up with PTSD but now there is more of it and a lot more civilians with it.
Combine this with a strong state to eliminate most violent individuals Cultural Marxism and the current prosperity you have a recipe for a much more passive society . No need for violence, no benefit for it and less genetic appetite for it basically.
and the Eloi frolicked along until the sirens went off.
Such a selection effect would have to exist. Just has to. It’s obvious. So how then, have peoples always warred, and usually been well prepared for it? Two ways: 1)people of high birth were expected to fight (even if not necessarily be cannon fodder); and 2)people of modest (even low) birth got an “artificial” status boost from having participated in the war. Both of these were turned on their head in WW2 and that upturning is showing no signs of abating. We “rewarded” WW2 vets with some giveaways like the GI bill and a big booming economy. No status. And it is no accident that we haven’t actually won a real war since then. Not that there aren’t plenty of other reasons for that as well. There are many. But adverse selection and inappropriate reward::risk incentives cannot have helped.
Come to think of it, Grerp said a similar thing about Russia when she was on the show.
I’ve often thought this same thing & that the timing of WWI & II seemed especially effective at wiping out two successive generations of aggressive fighting men.
Btw, the Nordics haven’t always been such a docile lot. Sweden, in particular, fought a lot of wars with all their neighbors & became a great power in the late 1600s.
They even pulled the classic European overreach move of invading Russia in the early 1700’s & paid the usual price of a crushing defeat in Russia & an invasion at home.
They pretty much gave up military aggression after that, which validates your thesis.
Not everyone who died was a natural killer, not all survivors were genetic milquetoast. War doesn’t eliminate killers from the gene pool, it eliminates the pressures which build up to revolution. We still have police forces today for good reasons… to keep the killers honest and revolutionaries in check.
It depends whether ‘killer’ is synonymous with psychopath. If not, since psychopaths display the same traits in that they like to kill, kill more, and get killed more often in the modern battlefield (due to a lack of inhibitory functions) then no. Because there are more American psychopaths now than ever. But if this ‘killer’ trait doesn’t align with the dark triad (and I think it does) then I would be very, very curious to see the results of killing them all off.
I wanted to kill people so I joined up and for five years I got yanked around and kept back. After that, I said fuck it. You can only jerk your killers around for so long until they get tired of it. Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Iraq I, Afghanistan, Iraq II, and in all these wars the United States Gov dicked around and military men came home to hostile civilians. Why fight?
The Shadowed Knight
Yea the math sounds good expect I have been there and done that and we still have our killers. Thing is most of us get out because they want to fight and the leadership doesn’t.
As long as we have Ulster Scotts we’ll have that section of the gene pool. I would say the lack.of effective fighting has more to do with college grads running the show then a lack of talent.
So far.Vox has been wrong at the user level on every .military post he has written
AB is dead on about work and children.
It’s all part of what’s been happening to our species since civilization, domestication. Domestication has a number of common traits that are observed across different species in contrast to their “wild” counterparts. Anthropologists have confirmed that the same exact pattern is shared between modern humans and our ancestors who built the first civilizations. It’s a tricky balancing act, the killer instinct and domestic socialization. For individuals, the ones capable of adapting to both develop a switch, military mode and civilian mode. I wonder how much this has to do with the decay of empires. The Romans were excellent warriors but during their collapse they depended on foreign born fighters. The Spartan system was unsustainable, they couldn’t produce new warriors fast enough to replace the ones that died. New civilizations spring out of the barbarian peoples on the frontiers of the old civilization, the blood of the old civilization’s people dilutes with the barbarians leaving behind the mark of domestication, a linear trend in the cyclical nature of civilizations.