Motivation in War

**TheCurmudgeon** · 07-21-2013

If you were to look at the limited demographic data for hunter-gatherers you would find that about 95% of same sex murders are male against male and it is either over a women or in revenge for stealing a women. Gat covers this in his book as well as the fact that most warriors are males. You were on the right track - although the idea of being on a long cross country journey thinking about sex makes me wonder where you stopped along the way ...

**jcustis** · 07-21-2013

I had the four female members of my clan along, all as part of a relocation to Florida. Finding myself stuck in containment with them for those six days, I spent a lot of time wondering why humans of the opposite sex put up with each other.

**Bill Moore** · 07-22-2013

Originally Posted by TheCurmudgeon

If you were to look at the limited demographic data for hunter-gatherers you would find that about 95% of same sex murders are male against male and it is either over a women or in revenge for stealing a women. Gat covers this in his book as well as the fact that most warriors are males. You were on the right track - although the idea of being on a long cross country journey thinking about sex makes me wonder where you stopped along the way ...

I can't buy this Freudian psycho babble, but if there is any truth to it then future wars can be prevented with technology and capitalism. Excellent way to test your hypothesis. If young men can be sexually satisfied with sex robots, that may eliminate the will to fight, but I suspect not, some of the most violent societies are the most over sexed. I don't think it will work, at the end of the day a lot of young men will still give us their girl friends and families to pursue adventures and test their manhood.

http://news.discovery.com/tech/robot...tes-120423.htm

Robot Prostitutes, the Future of Sex Tourism

**jcustis** · 07-22-2013

Yeah Bill, but I think young men do that due to an innate compulsion to have better sex. It is subconscious to a great degree, and I didn't mean to say that we fight to have sex. I should have been more thoughtful in the post, but I only ever meant it as a drive-by.

We fight to acquire power and prestige, wealth, influence, control, knowledge, and on and on. We fight as individuals who compromise states, so it is an individual component of a larger dynamic, and although most can control the impulse to sow their oats beyond their betrothed, look at thr number of general officers who can't control the impulse despite having everything they could ever want. For goodness sake just look at Petraeus. If he isn't the poster boy for what I'm talking about then I don't know who is. This stuff goes back to Helen of Troy. What does power and prestige get for the man who holds it? What does money get for the likes of the Trumps and the Welches?

We scratch our heads and ask, why can't these guys keep their wee wees in their pants, but we already know the answer why--they simply can't help themselves and control the impulse. That, or they don't think they will be caught. I know few might offer an opinion on this in polite company, but I think if you sampled 1,000 men if they would have sex outside of their marriage with some dream, perfect female, because they knew they could never be caught, 900+ would probably say they'd do it.

Over-sexed societies were still violent because there was probably this subconscious thing ticking in the heads of the ruling elite that drove them to pursue increasingly outlandish forms of sex. We'd call some of it depraved today, but the only reason why we came to consider it as off-kilter was because it fomented conflict. We suppressed sex and indecency because we wanted to stop conflict. We still liked the sex, as any scandal to befall a priest, minister, or legislator proves, but we tried to keep the conflict down.

When we look at large-scale conflicts, or the reasons behind how dictators and leaders who become aggressors on the world stage are able to come to power, I think you have it right TC. That aggressive, power-grabbing behavior (often explained away as defense of the father/mother-land) is looked at as acceptable because in the subconscious of the men, it's just a state/ruler/industrialist behaving the same way they wish they could on an individual level.

I can't quite put my finger on what drove eunichs of royal courts to behave as they did, but yeah, I did a lot of thinking on this through Utah, Kansas, and Tennessee.