Isegoria

This video of the Woolwich terrorist is surreal, as the youth casually apologizes to a camera crew — that our women had to see this — while still covered in blood and holding bloody knives:

“You people will never be safe. Remove your governments. They don’t care about you.”

I can’t imagine things going down quite this way in, say, Texas.

China has gone through periods of anarchy and state-control, so good farmer qualities — working hard, being thrifty, and planning for the long term — led to success only some of the time:

There was thus a parallel model of selection that favored “big man” qualities: charisma, verbal bombast, physical strength, ability to intimidate, talent for mobilizing gangs of young men…

This point is discussed by Feichtinger et al. (1996) who see Chinese history as a shifting equilibrium between farmers, bandits, and the State: “Farmers who produce a good, bandits who steal this good, and rulers fighting against banditry and taxing farmers.” When the State weakened, as it often did, farmers had to placate bandits as best they could. Banditry may have then surpassed farming as the best way to accumulate wealth, prestige, access to women and, ultimately, reproductive success.

As Bianco (1991) notes:

About ten years ago, a Chinese scholar, invited to spend his holidays in Haute-Provence, was worried: “There aren’t too many bandits there?” As an emigrant settled in France since the revolution, he continued — and to this day continues — to associate the countryside with banditry as a matter of course. For a rich family like his own (otherwise he would not have become a scholar), the obsessive fear of a bandit raid, of being taken away or of extortion was constant. The landowners maintained private militias who could at least stand up to the small gangs, and their sons avoided venturing too far away for fear of being kidnapped. The oldest son especially was the most valued prey because the family would have to rush to pay a high ransom to ensure the continuity of their lineage and appease the spirits of their ancestors.

[…]

On some rail lines of southern China, the train almost never reached its destination without being attacked at least once [by bandits]. In the province of Yunnan, highwaymen controlled most of the roads, stopped and ransomed travelers, and those merchants who persisted in pursuing their occupation, since commercial traffic ended up being choked off or became more selective.

We forget, especially the libertarians among us, how awful things were before the State pacified social relations. It was this pacification that made free and open societies possible. It especially made the market economy possible. Ironically, when the Communists wiped out banditry — something no previous regime had managed to do — they also laid the basis for their country’s future economic takeoff.

Peter Frost looks at what drives people to violence:

I first went to elementary school in a largely English Canadian neighborhood of Scarborough. Schoolyard fights were only occasional, and there was almost always a good reason. My family then moved to a largely Scotch-Irish town in central Ontario. There, the schoolyard fights were a daily occurrence, and they seemed to happen for no reason at all. I eventually found out the reason… something to do with “respect” or rather the lack of it.

We like to think that people everywhere respond to situations more or less as we do. If the response is anger — red boiling anger that can kill — we assume there must be a very good reason. Otherwise, the person wouldn’t be so angry.

Hence the puzzlement over the Boston bombers. What drove them to such an act?

“Normal” is a relative term, and in other societies, such as Algeria, people do kill for apparently trifling reasons, as Frantz Fanon discusses in Les damnés de la Terre:

Very often the magistrates and police officers are stunned by the motives for the murder: a gesture, an allusion, an ambiguous remark, a quarrel over the ownership of an olive tree or an animal that has strayed a few feet. The search for the cause, which is expected to justify and pin down the murder, in some cases a double or triple murder, turns up a hopelessly trivial motive. Hence the frequent impression that the community is hiding the real motives.

Boys in such a society are expected to get in fights, come home with bruises, and play “manly” games that build courage and endurance:

This pattern of behavioral development doesn’t differ completely from my [Peter Frost's] own. The difference is largely one of degree. But there’s also a difference in kind: the violent male as an independent actor who fights for himself and his immediate family. For “normal” boys in Western society, male violence is legitimate only when done under orders for much larger entities: the home team, the police, the country, NATO… Everywhere else, it is evil, criminal, and pathological.

[...]

Male violence has long been viewed differently in different societies. In our own, it is stigmatized, except when done “under orders” by soldiers or the police. Some societies, however, had no police or army until recent times. Every adult male was expected to use violence to defend himself and his family. Yes, you could go to a law court to settle your differences with someone. But even if the court ruled in your favor, the sentence still had to be enforced by you, your brothers, and other male family members. That’s the way things were done. For millennia and millennia.

[...]

Initially, all adult males everywhere had to defend themselves and their families, not by paying taxes but by getting their hands bloody. This situation changed with the rise of the State. In other words, some powerful men became so powerful that they could impose a monopoly on the use of violence. Only they or their underlings could use it. Male violence had been “nationalized” and could be used only if ordered by the State or in narrowly defined situations of self-defense.

In this new pacified environment, the violent male went from hero to zero. He became a criminal and was treated accordingly. Society now favored the peace-loving man who got ahead through work or trade. This process has been described for England and other parts of Western Europe by several academics, like Gregory Clark. With the establishment of strong States toward the end of the Dark Ages, and a subsequent pacification of social relations, the incidence of violence declined steadily. Violent predispositions were steadily removed from the population, either through the actual execution of violent individuals or through their marginalization and lower reproductive success. The meek thus inherited the earth (see previous post).

Or rather a portion of it. In some parts of the earth, particularly remote mountainous areas, State control came very late. These are societies in the earliest stages of pacification. Male violence is a daily reality, which the State can only contain at best. Such is life in Chechnya … and elsewhere.

(Hat tip to Konkvistador.)