Last week Dr. Bliss offered some speculations about what might interfere with a people's ability to defend themselves:
Better Red than Dead, Revisited, with Moslems
... I can never stop wondering that it is that causes people to become passive in the face of a threat to one's way of life - assuming it is meaningful. This is surely abnormal, because our species could never have survived with a "roll over and give up" instinct.
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Is it a psychological issue (eg masochism, which implies a sexual excitement in being dominated - or an enacted suicidal impulse), is it plain cowardice, is it a kind of hatred for one's own culture or nation? Or is it really just a unicorn and rainbow dreaminess about life (which I tend to view as a psychological defence based in denial of the hard and often cruel reality that people pursue their interests)? I have seem much of the latter, especially in women and in young men who haven't really worked yet.
Dr. Sanity has addressed some of the issues related to the place of aggression in our lives, especially the need for a balance between aggression and passivity. In Part I of FIGHT, FLIGHT AND THE PERSISTENCE OF EVIL, she considered the "fight or flight" paradigm familiar to most people and explained some of the physiological and evolutionary reasons for such a response. In Part II she lucidly concentrated on the outcome of flight (or appeasement, which is essentially the same thing, ie to avoid a fight at all costs) when there is no place to hide and an enemy that is not satisfied with surrender:
While the pacifist ('turning the other cheek' is another variant of running away, or Flight) may be considered saintly and their principles admired and emulated, if such a reaction to dealing with existential threats were biologically programmed into a species, that species would not survive for very long. Even in those species where the preferred response to danger is to almost always run away(because of their size or other limitations), they are still able to fight--quite viciously--if necessary. Take, for example, a typical rat whose usual behavior is to run away from any threat. When cornered, even this small animal will fight to the death if their survival is at stake.
All this is not to say that Flight strategies can not be extremely useful in many dangerous situations. They are. But, consider this very modern reality: there is nowhere to run to avoid WMD. And an important corollary to that is that there is no appeasing someone who is dedicated to an ideology that requires them to kill you.
Under such circumstances, there is no land that can be given up for peace--they will demand more and more and still come after you. There is no appeasement that will prevent them from 'wiping' you off the map. In other words, there is no way to coexist with the kind of evil that exists today.
This essentially means that the 50% of our population whose instinct, when confronted with the repugnant and unbelievable evil of Islamic fundamentalism and its direct and unambiguous threat to Western Civilization, is to run away, appease or convert; are incorrect in thinking that their peaceful response will be effective in preserving their own and their loved one's lives for any significant amount of time. On the contrary, it is more likely that it guarantees their eventual extinction--either physically or psychologically. The only option for them in the end--whether they like it or not-- is to turn and fight (like the cornered rat) or die. Interestingly, and unlike the survival instinct of the rat; many modern humans when faced with the evil that confronts us in the 21st century, have found comfort in psychological denial and in magical thinking about the threat.
Dr. Sanity expands upon this in her post and discusses the role that Postmodernism has had in undermining our ability to mobilize aggression to defend ourselves. The perverse demonization of all aggression, with no appreciation of the moral and necessary uses of aggression, is hobbling the West. Her discussion is well worth your time to read in full.
It appears increasingly that the world's great cultures are falling further and further out of balance when it comes to aggression. Just as the West is placing more and more strictures on the exercise of appropriate aggression, the Islamic World and the Communist (and former Communist) World are idealizing aggression. Much of the Islamic World celebrates Death as the greatest aspiration for its people while our European and Canadian friends and relatives are being told that even the most minimal expression of anger or fortitude can become grounds for legal action in the service of appeasing the easily offended. Once a culture and its mirror have begun the pas de deux of aggression/appeasement, their embrace must spiral until the aggressor finally oversteps an unknowable threshold and provokes a response or the appeaser finally and fully submits. Our current aggression/appeasement cycle is not static, it cannot be static, and while we may be in a relative interregnum at the moment, the testing and probing, the attacks and feints, can only continue and eventually escalate.
There is another aspect of this that I have touched upon in the first posts in this series and is worth expanding upon. First, an illustrative example:
In the early days of my training, I had the oportunity to treat a bright and talented young man, a professional, who was superficially quite appealing. He had friends, was well thought of at work, and was never short of dates. Yet he also had an effete quality, shied away from competition of all sorts, and entered therapy because he worried about his inability to "close the deal." It took awhile to learn all the ramifications of what he meant by "closing the deal" but it became clear early on that this young man was quite passive, frightened of his own aggressive feelings, and determined to avoid knowing too much about his own anger. After some time it became clear that one area in which he was unable to "close the deal" was in a sexual relationship. He was unable to maintain an erection for long with a woman. I will not here go into the details of his treatment, however, he had no physiological reason for his relative impotence and prematurity. Once his anger and especially his defenses against becoming aware of his anger became central foci of his treatment, he began to engage more fully in competition, at work and in play (sports.) As he became more comfortable with his aggression, he was able to partially relax his tenacious hold on his passive position. Finally, he was able to maintain an erection and have successful intercourse with his girlfriend. During a Monday morning session, as he described how powerful he had felt in bed with his girlfriend, he was seized by a burst of passion and pleasure and exclaimed, with tremendous relief, "I can fuck!"
This young man succinctly lived out the aphorism that "if you can't kill, you can't fuck."
Obviously, we do not expect men to prove their masculinity by killing an opponent. There is a certain hyperbole to the aphorism in our modern times, yet on a cultural level, there is a great deal of truth to it. A quote attributed to George Orwell, courtesy of Dr. Sanity, captures the cultural imperative:
"Good people sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
A culture that surrenders it ability to use force and violence to support its members' right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is a culture that has surrendered.
The Demographic decline of the West is inextricably bound up with our cultural surrender. The is intimately related to our loss of faith and meaning, in the broadest senses of the words. Just as Russia is failing because, among other reasons, they have no reason to believe in anything anymore (though there may be evidence of a religious revival) a significant part of the West has lost hope in the future and live lives without meaning.
It may well be that Demographic collapse is an unexpected, but retrospectively predictable, outgrowth of Modernity. This argument gains support from an unexpected direction and that will be the topic for my next post.
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