Comments on: A Profoundly Traumatic Experience

By: Alrenous

Alrenous — Sun, 28 Dec 2014 00:25:12 +0000

Humans have an innate resistance to killing in a fair fight, exactly because they’re just as likely to kill you if you try. Ambushes and murder are different.

Also, as per the Christmas Armistice, European hobbits see other European hobbits as being part of the same group.

By: Toddy Cat

Toddy Cat — Sat, 27 Dec 2014 23:25:14 +0000

I’ve never been in a situation where I had to kill, so I really can’t say, but I can’t help but believe that if humans really did have an innate resistance to killing, history wouldn’t be nearly as bloody as it is. And since Milgram’s experiment has pretty much been revealed to be tendentious crap, I wouldn’t put a whole lot of stock in anything that references his results.

By: Handle

Handle — Sat, 27 Dec 2014 14:03:23 +0000

Nah. This is just overreaching and playing to his intellectual audience. I think this ‘hesitation to fire’ trope is a myth.

The traumas of the battlefield is mostly related to a variety of stressors, but not from the act of killing other people.

Organized groups of men have been gleefully killing each other, mostly their closest-related near-neighbors, in hand-to-hand combat since the dawn of time, as have individual homicidal criminals. We see this in recorded history, without much sign of guilt, trauma, or remorse, and in pre-recorded history, through archaeological and genetic evidence.

Men resist killing people they associate as belonging to the same group, and that’s about it.