The American Way of War

I've got a short series of posts from awhile back on the American way of war. I decided to add to it with this short conversation with Claude.

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American wars since the collapse of the USSR

Give me a chronological list of the wars that America has been involved in since the collapse of the USSR.

The project knowledge touches on this theme thematically but doesn't provide a factual list. Here's a straightforward chronological account from general knowledge, using 1991 (the USSR's formal dissolution) as the starting point:

Gulf War (1991) — Already underway when the USSR collapsed in December; the US-led coalition expelled Iraq from Kuwait. A short, decisive conventional war.

Somalia (1993) — Humanitarian intervention that escalated into urban combat, culminating in the Battle of Mogadishu ("Black Hawk Down").

Haiti (1994) — Military intervention to restore the elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Bosnia (1995) — NATO air campaign (Operation Deliberate Force) in which the US played the lead role, ending the Bosnian War.

Kosovo (1999) — NATO air war against Yugoslavia to halt ethnic cleansing; again US-led.

Afghanistan (2001–2021) — Invasion following 9/11, ousting the Taliban; the longest war in American history.

Iraq (2003–2011, then resumed 2014–) — Invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, followed by a prolonged insurgency. US forces returned in 2014 to fight ISIS and remain in smaller numbers today.

Libya (2011) — US participated in NATO air operations that led to Gaddafi's fall.

Syria / ISIS (2014–present) — Air campaign and special operations forces deployed against the Islamic State across Syria and Iraq.

Iran (2020) — The drone strike killing General Qasem Soleimani; a targeted killing rather than a sustained war, but a direct military act against a state actor.

Yemen (ongoing, indirect)** — The US has provided intelligence, refueling, and arms to the Saudi-led coalition, with direct drone strikes against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Iran (2025) — You noted in your War Series writing (with a 2026 addendum) that a Trump-era attack on Iran occurred, which fits this list as the most recent major escalation.

A few observations relevant to your own analytical framework: this list illustrates the pattern you describe in your War Series — the post-Cold War redirection of American aggression outward, particularly toward the Arab/Muslim world as the new "Other" following the loss of the Soviet scapegoat. Nearly every conflict after 1993 takes place in the Islamic world, which tracks your 2014 addendum about the "well-crafted Orientalist mythology of the exotic and crazy Arab Other."

Talcott Parsons 1947

At the heart of that War Series is a 1947 essay by Talcott Parsons, “Certain Primary Sources of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World.” I read that early in my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins. I regard it as speculative, plausible but speculative. How would one gather empirical evidence on it? It’s not like any nation ever announces, “We’re going to war to let off some steam and ease tensions at home?”

That's exactly the right epistemological challenge — the mechanism Parsons proposes operates at the level of collective unconscious motivation, which is precisely what makes it both compelling and resistant to direct verification. But there are several indirect empirical strategies that could build a cumulative case.

Quantitative correlational approaches

The most tractable starting point is looking for statistical relationships between domestic stress indicators and the initiation of military action. You'd want to examine whether wars or significant military escalations cluster after periods of elevated internal tension — economic downturns, spikes in domestic unrest, rising inequality, political polarization indices. The null hypothesis would be that war timing is random with respect to domestic conditions; a systematic pattern would be suggestive. Turchin's work on political stress cycles (his "cliodynamics" project) is actually well-suited to this — he's already built quantitative indices of internal instability across centuries, and one could ask whether war-initiation correlates with his stress peaks.

The "rally around the flag" literature

There's actually a substantial body of political science research on this, though it approaches the question from a slightly different angle. The "rally" effect — the well-documented spike in presidential approval following military action — shows that war does relieve domestic political pressure in measurable ways. John Mueller's work on war and presidential popularity is foundational here. The harder inferential step is from "war relieves pressure" to "anticipated relief motivates war-making," but the effect at least confirms the direction of the mechanism.

Elite communication analysis

Parsons' theory doesn't require that anyone consciously decides to go to war for psychodynamic reasons — the motivation can be largely unconscious and rationalized afterward. This actually makes elite rhetoric more useful as evidence, not less. You'd look for patterns in how war is framed domestically — whether war rhetoric systematically spikes domestic us-versus-them language, whether it correlates with reduced internal scapegoating (your Klinkner & Smith thesis about civil rights gains during wartime), and whether the timing of hawkish escalation by elites tracks with rising domestic discontent. Content analysis of congressional debates, newspaper editorials, and presidential speeches across the full arc of conflicts could reveal structural patterns invisible to any individual case.

The comparative/historical method

Parsons' thesis should predict that nations with other mechanisms for handling internal aggression — stronger corporatist institutions, more robust social contracts, functioning scapegoats already in place — should be less prone to foreign military adventurism. Scandinavian nations, for instance, would be a useful comparison class. You could also look at cases where domestic conditions that should predict war didn't produce it, and ask what was different. The comparative method won't confirm the mechanism, but systematic cross-national patterns would be hard to explain otherwise.

The Klinkner-Smith natural experiment

The civil rights thesis is actually the most testable piece, and as you note in your writing, they've already done substantial work on it. Their finding — that Black Americans' civil rights gains cluster tightly around periods of external military threat — is exactly the kind of pattern that's hard to explain without something like Parsons' mechanism. It's not proof of the psychodynamics, but it's consistent evidence that war functions to redirect internal aggression in measurable ways.

The fundamental limitation

None of this gets you to the causal mechanism Parsons actually proposes — that repressed aggression generated by Western child-rearing practices flows through nationalist scapegoating and finds periodic release in war. That specific chain is probably permanently beyond empirical reach, because the mediating variable (unconscious aggressive impulse at civilizational scale) isn't directly observable. What you can do is show that the functional relationship holds — that war operates as if it were serving this purpose — and that alternative explanations (pure rational calculation of national interest, for instance) leave systematic residuals.

Which is, frankly, roughly where Freudian-influenced social theory in general sits: plausible, structurally coherent, supported by functional evidence, but not falsifiable in any clean Popperian sense. The honest assessment is that Parsons is probably tracking something real but operating at a level of abstraction that empirical social science can approach but not fully close.

Civil War Among Chimpanzees

Carl Zimmer, These Chimps Began the Bloodiest ‘War’ on Record. No One Knows Why. NYTimes, Apr. 9, 2026.

Near the end:

And the researchers are still trying to figure out what set off the conflict in the first place. “All of a sudden, yesterday’s friend becomes today’s foe,” said Dr. Mitani.

Within any group of chimpanzees, violence will flare from time to time — when apes converge on a tree full of fruit, for example, or when lower-ranked males vie to replace an old alpha male.

But this aggression can be dampened by the friendships that form over years. Some chimpanzees are especially social, jumping between many cliques. “They’re these important social bridges,” Dr. Sandel said.

In 2014, five adult males died, perhaps because of disease. Dr. Sandel speculated that these deaths ripped away some of the bridges that previously held the Ngogo groups together. Low-level conflicts blew up into something akin to civil war.

The Ngogo conflict could offer a glimpse at the kind of violence that might have flared up in our ancient forebears, given that chimpanzees and humans descend from common ancestors that lived about six million years ago.

“These findings tell us indeed that these civil-war-like types of conflicts were possible in the course of human evolution,” said Sylvain Lemoine, a primatologist at the University of Cambridge who was not involved in the study.

The Ngogo chimpanzees show how our ancestors could have gotten dragged into years of lethal fighting without ideology or cultural identity — let alone the language to talk about them.

Instead, shifting social bonds might have been enough to light the fire.

There's more at the link.

Hip-hop & violence, misogeny, etc.– From shared knowledge to common knowledge

I'm copying this from Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen), which quotes a Roland Fryer piece in the Wall Street Journal:

In a TED Talk released on Monday, I describe a decadelong effort to measure hip hop’s impact. My research team and I assembled a data set tracking the genre’s diffusion from the late 1980s onward. We compiled exposure measures from virtually every U.S. radio station between 1985 and 2002 and from the Billboard Hot 100 from 2000 through 2024, then digitized station playlists using custom AI tools. The result is a detailed record of what different parts of the country heard in a given year. Using modern text analysis, we examined hundreds of thousands of songs and every word they contained.

We classify hip hop into four broad categories: street, conscious, mainstream and experimental…

Radio data also let us look inside the music. Over the past 40 years, hip-hop lyrics have grown substantially more explicit: profanity, violence and misogynistic language each increased roughly fivefold in our text-based measures, while references to drugs rose by approximately half as much. That growth in lyrical intensity helps explain why hip hop continues to provoke anxiety. But it also sharpens the question that matters most, at least to an economist: Does exposure to these lyrics have measurable effects on people’s lives?

To answer that, we looked at locations with varied hip-hop exposure—some places where it arrived early, others where it arrived later. Hip hop initially reached mass audiences through a subset of black radio stations, often those formatted as “urban contemporary.” Some cities gained early access through those stations. Others didn’t for reasons as mundane as geography, signal reach and local radio history.

That uneven rollout created natural variation in exposure.

Using radio data and decades of census records, we estimated how much hip hop was played on the radio in each county in the U.S. over time. We then tested whether increases in hip-hop penetration were linked to changes in crime—and whether people exposed to more hip hop in their formative years experienced worse outcomes in education, employment, earnings, teen births and single parenthood.

The answer was striking. In our estimates, the effects hovered around zero, sometimes even slightly positive. Places with heavier rap exposure didn’t experience higher crime, lower educational attainment or weaker labor-market outcomes relative to trends elsewhere.

Here's a link to the Ted Talk.

And here's a comment I made over there:

Interesting. Here's a post I wrote back in February. It's about the depiction of sex in novels from Pride and Prejudice through Fifty Shades of Grey. I speculate that what's going on there is the conversion of shared knowledge about sex to common knowledge. I wonder if something similar is going on in hip-hop: "Over the past 40 years, hip-hop lyrics have grown substantially more explicit: profanity, violence and misogynistic language each increased roughly fivefold in our text-based measures, while references to drugs rose by approximately half as much."

The 19th Century Anglophone novel

Fryer mentions using "modern text analysis" to determine the content of hip-hop lyrics. That phrase covers a number of techniques, including topic modeling. In his 2013 book, Macroanalysis, Matthew Jockers applied topic modeling to a corpus of roughly 3000 19th century Anglophone novels. One of the topics he identified as WIVES AND MARRIAGE. Thus cluster map shows the words in that topic:

Explaining Buddhist Violence in Asia

Nilay Saiya, Stuti Manchanda, Monks Behaving Badly: Explaining Buddhist Violence in Asia, International Security (2025) 49 (4): 119–159. https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00510

Abstract: The dramatic rise in religious violence across the globe since the end of the Cold War has motivated scholars to try to explain violent religion-related extremism. Much of the attention to religious violence in the modern world focuses on Islam. Of the world's major faith traditions, Buddhism is most commonly and widely associated with peace, tolerance, and compassion. Yet Buddhism, like every other great religion, has a violent side. While scholars acknowledge violence within Buddhism, few have explored why Buddhism becomes violent in some places but not others. We develop a structural explanation for Buddhist violence. Our central claim is that Buddhist violence tends to occur in countries where Buddhism and the state are closely intertwined. We test this theory using both a statistical analysis of Buddhist violence in Buddhist-majority and Buddhist-plural countries and case studies of Buddhist violence (or lack thereof) in Myanmar, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. Our findings show that religion-state integration emboldens Buddhist vigilantes to attack religious minorities. Our analysis suggests that states can take specific actions to mitigate the risk of violent religious extremism.

H/t Tyler Cowen

A drop in zero-sum thinking, America and beyond

Damien Cave, Welcome to the Zero Sum Era. Now How Do We Get Out? NYTimes, March 1, 2025. The lede: “Zero-sum thinking has spread like a mind virus, from geopolitics to pop culture.” Zero-sum thinking: “...the belief that life is a battle over finite rewards where gains for one mean losses for another.”

Later:

But nowhere is the rise of our zero-sum era more pronounced than on the world stage, where President Trump has been demolishing decades of collaborative foreign policy with threats of protectionist tariffs and demands for Greenland, Gaza, the Panama Canal and mineral rights in Ukraine. Since taking office, he has often channeled the age he most admires — the imperial 19th century.

And in his own past, zero-sum thinking was deeply ingrained. His biographers tell us he learned from his father that you were either a winner or loser in life, and that there was nothing worse than being a sucker. In Trumpworld, it’s kill or be killed; he who is not a hammer must be an anvil.

Mr. Trump may not be alone in this. Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China have also displayed a zero-sum view of a world in which bigger powers get to do what they want while weaker ones suffer. All three leaders, no matter what they say, often behave as if power and prosperity were in short supply, leading inexorably to competition and confrontation..

Until recently, the international order largely was built on a different idea — that interdependence and rules boost opportunities for all. It was aspirational, producing fourfold economic growth since the 1980s, and even nuclear disarmament treaties from superpowers. It was also filled with gassy promises — from places like Davos or the G20 — that rarely improved day-to-day lives.

Deep history:

Zero-sum thinking probably seemed to make a lot of sense for our evolutionary ancestors, who were forced to compete for food to survive. But the mind-set has lingered and researchers have become more interested in mapping its impact.

The most recent work in the social sciences builds on the findings of George M. Foster, an anthropologist from the University of California, Berkeley. He did his field work in Mexico’s rural communities where he was the first researcher to show that some societies hold “an image of limited good.”

In 1965, he wrote that the people he studied in the hills of Michoacán view their entire universe “as one in which all of the desired things in life such as land, wealth, health, friendship and love, manliness and honor, respect and status, power and influence, security and safety, exist in finite quantity and are always in short supply.”

From the recent past:

The last time zero-sum thinking guided the world, Europe’s colonial powers of the 16th to 19th centuries saw wealth as finite, measured in gold, silver and land. Gains for one translated to losses for another and empires levied high tariffs to protect themselves from competitors.

Mr. Trump has romanticized the era’s tail end. “We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913,” he told reporters last month. “That’s when we were a tariff country.”

In fact, the United States is far richer now in household income and economic output. But of greater concern may be Mr. Trump’s refusal to acknowledge the historical context. Economists say the mercantilism and great-power rivalries of that imperial age hindered wealth creation, advanced inequality and often led to the most complete zero-sum game of all: war.

Possible causes of zero-sum thinking:

Economic inequality fosters such a belief about success. But zero-sum Americans may not really be squabbling over taxes, college, jobs or wealth.

Jer Clifton, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who oversees extensive surveys of primal world beliefs, told me the current backlash may be rooted in a zero-sum conviction about something deeper: importance.

Many Americans seem to fear that if some other group matters more, they matter less. “In 21st-century America, the more common, driving fear is not food or resource scarcity, but not enough meaning,” Dr. Clifton said. “We are a people desperate to matter.”

On the bright side, “studies have found that people can be taught to see situations as nonzero sum with deliberation and guidance.”

There's more at the link.

Back in 1999 Robert Wright published Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, which covers the evolution of human society from human origins to the present. He now has a substack of that title, Nonzero. I discuss Wright’s ideas in a number blog posts, and Nonzero specifically in: Cultural Evolution and Human Progress, from 2010, and A quick guide to cultural evolution for humanists [#DH digital humanities], from 2019.

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Bonus, from the article: “Mr. Smithson said he often told students in his classes to see him as their opponent so they would collaborate with one another, not compete.”

How many unnecessary deaths will be laid at the feet of DOGE? [The destruction of USAID.]

Ari Daniel, Why Dean Karlan, chief economist of USAID, resigned on Tuesday, NPR, February 26, 2025. From the article:

We're watching psychological warfare against a workforce that has been committed to furthering the lives of other people. This was a career choice they made to help others even if they disagreed about how to improve USAID.

If you want to reform foreign aid, this isn't the way to do it. This approach is going to radically increase the cost of all future foreign aid. That's because if you want to work with anybody in the future and you tell them, "No, no, no, this time we're here. We're not going to fold on you," how are you going to convince them of that? When you can't trust someone, it makes you reluctant to make agreements with them. And that means doing less good with more money to have the same positive impact as we were having before.

There's a lot of good that USAID has done across the board in terms of health, education, helping farmers, and helping people in crisis.

Now, there are people who are going to be radically worse off and sick and not educated in the same way because of what's happened. Literally taking people who are in hospitals and stopping treatments because the money is not there.

And not just that — people are going to die. A lot of people.

So we now have a million million tragedies that could have been avoided.

There's more at the link.

H/t Tyler Cowen. 

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On the carnage at USAID, Zach MontagueMichael Crowley and Adam Liptak, Chief Justice Allows U.S. to Continue Freeze on Foreign Aid Payments, NYTimes, Feb. 27, 2025. From the article:

In another aggressive move on Wednesday to carry out the president’s directive, lawyers for the Trump administration said that it was ending nearly 10,000 U.S. Agency for International Development and State Department contracts and grants.

The pair of administration actions stunned diplomats and aid workers already reeling from mass firings at U.S.A.I.D., which funds food, health, development and democracy programs abroad, and which the Trump administration has systematically dismantled. A former senior U.S.A.I.D. official said the cuts account for about 90 percent of the agency’s work and tens of billions of dollars in spending.

The cuts deal “a catastrophic blow to USAID’s implementing partners and the populations they serve, likely bankrupting many, and shuttering lifesaving and important programs forever,” a group of agency workers and partners said in a fact sheet distributed Wednesday night.

That's one passage from a much longer article.

America the Cruel: First the immigrants, then their neighbors, then your neighbors. When will it be your turn?

This video of deportation is from the OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE account on X:

ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight 🔊 pic.twitter.com/O6L1iYt9b4

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 18, 2025

Andrew Egger, Sadism for Its Own Sake, The Bulerk, Feb. 19, 2025.

The White House is spotlighting the leering cruelty with which they carry out the deportations that are happening. Deporting former designees of temporary protected status back to countries where they face prosecution: check. Deporting migrants to countries they’ve never even visited: check. Holding detainees at Guantanamo Bay: check.

And yesterday, releasing the single most viscerally disturbing piece of deportation propaganda to date: A short video, posted to the official White House X account, titled “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.”

ASMR videos, which became popular on YouTube in the 2010s, use specific audio cues to stimulate feelings of relaxation and euphoria in the viewer. The White House video perversely mimics the style: lovingly lingering on the revving engine of an airplane waiting to take off; the jingling of chains as they are laid out in rows on the ground, then used to shackle deportees’ arms behind their backs; the shuffling of chained feet up into the plane. No faces are ever seen. The idea is not just that viewers should approve of the footage. It invites them to take sensual pleasure from it.

Plenty of Trump’s people were happy to oblige. The tweet quickly induced hooting replies—memes of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman blissfully vibing on his headphones in a MAGA hat, exhortations to “let the clanging bar sounds of Guantanamo Bay whisk you away to your happy place,” speculation about when “some of our corrupt politicians” would be going the same way.

Trump is degrading the moral fiber of his followers:

...the Trump years have genuinely made so many right-wing people worse. What they have undertaken has been a long, slow, corrosive education in vice: from giving themselves permission to rationalize away Trump’s cruelty, to indulging in it in a quasi-performative way themselves, to realizing—almost to their own surprise—how much they liked the taste.

There's more at the link.

Emergent Permission Structures for Murder in the Digital Age

Killing With Applause: Emergent Permission Structures for Murder in the Digital Age, NCRI: Network Contagion Research Institute, Eaglton Institute of Politics, Rutgers-New Brunswick, Dec. 12, 2024, 32 pp.

Executive Summary:

The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has revealed a dangerous shift in societal norms. Using social media data, AI, and social psychology survey methods, we find an evolving online “permission structure,” a framework that justifies previously unacceptable beliefs or actions with a mutually reinforcing dynamic: Social media platforms provide amplification, while psychologically susceptible individuals provide justification. Together they form an emergent system that normalizes violence.

Our data suggest that this is not simply about extremist fringe groups. These narratives are becoming popular on mainstream platforms in ways we have only previously seen on extremist platforms such as Gab or 4chan, creating widespread cultural shifts that lower moral boundaries for targeted violence against political, social, or class enemies. Our survey revealed that the more social media a person consumes, the more likely they are to believe that Mangione’s actions were at least somewhat justified.

Key Observations of a Moral Shift:

• Targeted violence is becoming normalized online and in the real world. Memes, viral content, gamification and the lionization of Luigi Mangione are constructing frameworks that endorse and legitimize violence, encouraging harassment and further acts of violence against corporate figures.

• A real-world copycat culture to attack CEOs is growing: An apparent copycat attack against a corporate leader occurred on December 17, 2024, when Nathan Mahoney, a newly hired employee of Anderson Express Inc. stabbed company president Erik Denslow during a staff meeting leaving him in critical condition. Mahoney appeared smiling in his police photographs.

A real-world copycat culture to target and harass CEOs is growing: Supporters of Luigi Mangione vandalized a former Goldman Sachs executive’s home in NYC, with phrases like "Deny, Defend, Depose" and "Free Luigi." These messages, drawn from Mangione’s rhetoric, illustrate how digital narratives endorsing violence are manifesting in real-world acts of symbolic aggression against perceived corporate elites.

Previously fringe rhetoric has migrated into the mainstream: Once confined to 4chan and Terrorgram subcultures that venerate mass shooters, the mass following of Mangione’s X account and the virality of “Free Luigi” across multiple platforms, shows that the elevation of violent actors now permeates everyday discourse.

Viral memes gamification and humor-driven content have commodified murder: Memecoins, merchandise sales, and in-person gatherings have transformed the assassination into a cultural commodity. The repeated depiction of Mangione as a heroic renegade—spread through montage edits and viral videos—fosters tacit approval for further targeted attacks.

Harassment campaigns escalating to tangible threats: By December 7th, The #EatTheRich hashtag already surged nearly 300% as compared to the previous monthly average and over 500% compared to the prior week, correlating with an increase in explicit targeting of corporate leaders. Circulating “wanted: CEO” posters and executive “hit lists” bridge online rhetoric and physical-world acts of intimidation, illustrating how digital harassment can evolve into orchestrated threat campaigns.

Conspiratorial and anti-establishment rhetoric is further eroding already low institutional trust: Viral numerology theories and allegations of planted evidence feed a conspiratorial environment that undermines institutional trust and encourages resistance to law enforcement. Popular online content now includes claims that Mangione’s arrest was staged and urges jury nullification, legitimizing interference with the justice system.

• Survey data on public opinion confirms widespread adoption of rhetoric seen online. Approximately 44% of Americans surveyed rejected the assertion that the CEO’s murder was “not at all justified”. This reflects the adoption of anti-establishment sentiments and narratives of justification that are proliferating across social media platforms.

• Our analysis confirms social media supports a digital “permission structure” for justifying murder: Authoritarian tendencies, low internal locus of control (lack of personal agency), and social media use are the strongest predictors of justification for the shooting.

• Those who justify the murder are young (78% are18-27), social media users (64% use social media 4+ hours a day) and highly authoritarian (approximately 70% are in the top quartile for this trait).

Platforms matter. Users of Bluesky score highest in justification for the murder with 78% reporting that the CEO’s killing was at least somewhat justified. Only extremist platforms such as Gab or 4chan evidenced similar levels of endorsement for the murder.

The “Battle” of Wounded Knee

Heather Cox Richardson, December 28, 2024, Letters from an American.

On the clear, cold morning of December 29, 1890, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, three U.S. soldiers tried to wrench a valuable Winchester away from a young Lakota man. He refused to give up his hunting weapon. It was the only thing standing between his family and starvation, and he had no faith it would be returned to him as the officer promised: he had watched as soldiers had marked other confiscated valuable weapons for themselves.

As the men struggled, the gun fired into the sky.

Before the echoes died, troops fired a volley that brought down half of the Lakota men and boys the soldiers had captured the night before, as well as a number of soldiers surrounding the Lakotas. The uninjured Lakota men attacked the soldiers with knives, guns they snatched from wounded soldiers, and their fists.

As the men fought hand to hand, the Lakota women who had been hitching their horses to wagons for the day’s travel tried to flee along the nearby road or up a dry ravine behind the camp. Stationed on a slight rise above the camp, soldiers turned rapid-fire mountain guns on them. Then, over the next two hours, troops on horseback hunted down and slaughtered all the Lakotas they could find: about 250 men, women, and children.

Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, and what I learned still keeps me up at night. But it is not December 29 that haunts me.

What haunts me is the night of December 28.

On December 28 there was still time to avert the massacre.

In the early afternoon, the Lakota leader Sitanka had urged his people to surrender to the soldiers looking for them. Sitanka was desperately ill with pneumonia, and the people in his band were hungry, underdressed, and exhausted. They were making their way south across South Dakota from their own reservation in the northern part of the state to the Pine Ridge Reservation. There they planned to take shelter with another famous Lakota chief, Red Cloud. His people had done as Sitanka asked, and the soldiers escorted the Lakotas to a camp on South Dakota's Wounded Knee Creek, inside the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation.

There's more at the link.

More Cobra Kai: Freud, Girard, and History [Media Notes 143b]

I wanted to follow up on my earlier post about Cobra Kai. Here’s my point of departure:

So, what do we have? A conflict between two teenage boys gets reignited in their early middle age where it becomes amplified into a war for dominance of the karate world. On the one hand, it is rather ridiculous, adults using their dojos as vehicles for working out their conflicts. How Freudian! [Indeed. Think about that for a minute, think about it very seriously.] The series is aware of this and indicates that awareness in various ways.

Freud was interested in how our early life influenced, strongly influenced, our behavior as adults. His theory of psychosexual development placed a lot of emphasis on the early years, especially the first six years, but also – but also of course, especially of course – dealt with the emergence of sexuality in puberty.

Cobra Kai centers on Johnny Lawrence and Daniel LaRusso, but their story originates in their middle-to-late adolescence in The Karate Kid and its sequels. That’s a bit late for the really deep Freudian stuff to kick in, but the causal dynamic is nonetheless clear and Freudian in kind. The attitudes, feelings, and actions of these middle-age adult men follow patterns set in place in their adolescence. Not only are we told about this past, but we see scenes from the early films.

But the Freudian dynamic goes deeper than that. For it also explores the earlier life of the men who taught Lawrence and LaRusso, John Kreese and Mr. Miyagi respectively. We see scenes from Kreese’s experience during the Vietnam War and before and are led to understand how they have made him the bitter man he is today. LaRusso travels to Okinawa and learns things about Miyagi that he hadn’t known, including something about his early experience with competitive karate the full nature of which has yet to be revealed (we’re two-thirds of the way into the final season). Moreover, when Terry Silver is brought into the film, another bad guy from the past, we learn more about the origins of the Cobra Kai school of karate, strengthening the shows depiction of the pull of the past.

Cobra Kai is also shot through with mimetic desire and sacrifice. The original conflict between LaRusso and Lawrence centers on a mimetic conflict over a woman, Lawrence’s ex-girlfriend who becomes attracted to LaRusso. In the present, LaRusso’s decision to start a dojo is a mimetic answer to Lawrence starting a new Cobra Kai studio – notice that it is that form of karate which gives the series its name. And mimetic dynamics play out in the relationships among the teenagers at the center of the series, LaRusso’s daughter, Samantha, Lawrence’s son, Robby, and his young protégé, Miguel, and a young Cobra Kai student, Tory Nichols.

The sacrifice dynamic is a bit trickier, but the series features a number of karate tournaments and a number of gang battles between the rival dojos. Kenny Payne and “Stingray,” among others, emerge as sacrificial victims in those battles, and then we have the grand melee that ends episode ten on the sixth season. This takes place the Sekai Taikai, an international karate tournament to determine, in effect, the dojo of dojos and anoint the best karate style. The tournament breaks down in a free-for-all battle involving, not only the karate students, but their teachers as well. [Spoiler alert] The battle comes to a dramatic end when one of the student fighters, Kwon, a particularly arrogant fighter, accidentally kills himself with a knife he’d picked up off the floor. The knife had been dropped by Kreese, who’d intended to kill Silver. We’ll have to wait until February to find out what happens next.

Think of the scope covered in the series: from Vietnam, Okinawa, Korea, and America in the mid 20th century through to an international tournament three decades into the middle of the 21sr century. That’s a big chunk of recent history, albeit centered on actions involving only a group of individuals. No nation-states take part in the conflict. This is no War and Peace, but it is, nonetheless history, and it is history displayed in patterns analyzed by Freud and Girard.

Why is Cobra Kai better than one might have expected? [Media Notes 143a]

When Cobra Kai first showed up on Netflix back in 2020 I noticed it – Oh, the karate kid continues, that’s nice – but had no interest in watching it. But then I read something, perhaps this piece in The New York Times, indicating that it was actually rather good. So I decided to give it a try.

I liked it, I actually liked it. It’s a martial arts movie, and I’ve got a minor interest in such movies. But it’s got more going for it.

You may remember that back in 1984 there was a film called The Karate Kid, which was about a teenaged boy who is mentored by a middle-aged Japanese handyman and karate sensei. The film did fairly well and was followed by a couple of sequels. I have a vague recollection of having watched, I don’t know, that last half of the original film on TV at some time. But that was the extent of my involvement.

Cobra Kai is a sequel to those films, but with a twist. Rather than pick up where the original series left off, it starts when the teenaged protagonist of the original film have reached early middle age. Here’s how the Wikipedia entry explains the premise:

Thirty-four years after being defeated by Daniel LaRusso in the 1984 All-Valley Karate Tournament at the end of The Karate Kid (1984), Johnny Lawrence suffers from alcoholism and depression. He works as a part-time handyman and lives in an apartment in Reseda, Los Angeles, having fallen far from his wealthy lifestyle in Encino. He has an estranged son named Robby, from a previous relationship, whom he has abandoned. In contrast, Daniel is now the owner of a successful car dealership and is married to co-owner Amanda with whom he has two children: Sam and Anthony. However, Daniel often struggles to meaningfully connect with his children especially after his friend and mentor Mr. Miyagi passed away prior to the series’ beginning.

After using karate to defend his teenage neighbor Miguel Diaz from a group of bullies, Johnny agrees to teach Miguel the way of the fist and re-opens Cobra Kai. The revived dojo attracts a group of bullied social outcasts who find camaraderie and self-confidence under Johnny’s tutelage. The reopening of Cobra Kai reignites Johnny’s rivalry with Daniel, who responds by opening the Miyagi-do dojo, whose students include Sam and Robby, leading to a rivalry between the respective dojos.

Whereas The Karate Kid had Johnny Lawrence as the bad guy (“villain” doesn’t seem quite the word) and Daniel LaRusso as the good guy, Cobra Kai is not so polarized. Both men get to be jerks and both get to be decent and sympathetic. But they maintain their antagonism and work it out through their respective dojos, Cobra Kai and Miyagi-do.

So we’ve got action on two strata, among the adults and among the teenagers. The teens are motived by their own romances and beefs and join one dojo or another in the process of working things through. But Johnny and Daniel pick up the conflict from their youth and use their dojos as a vehicle for working it out. That conflict is cloaked in different martial arts styles. Cobra Kai blunt, aggressive, and brutal while Miyago-do strives for ‘balance’ and is more ‘spiritual.’ The stylistic difference is obvious in the fights ¬– of which there are many – and is the occasion for much conversation throughout the series. There’s even an attempt to blend the two styles in opposition to yet a third dojo which shows up in the middle of the series.

Which is to say, things get complicated. More actors, more complex interactions, kids moving from one dojo to another as their relationships between one another and with their elders shift. By the second or third season the two dojos are fighting of karate dominance in San Fernando Valley. By the sixth season – in process, 10 episodes are online, the last five will come next year – we’re talking about dominance of world-wide (teen) karate. Somewhere in this process we see genuine evil, with people getting seriously injured and even killed.

So, what do we have? A conflict between two teenage boys gets reignited in their early middle age where it becomes amplified into a war for dominance of the karate world. On the one hand, it’s rather ridiculous, adults using their dojos as vehicles for working out their conflicts. How Freudian! [Indeed. Think about that for a minute, think about it very seriously.] The series is aware of this and indicates that awareness in various ways. 

It’s brutal, but also lighthearted and funny. And there’s plenty of fighting, well-choreographed, and well filmed. It’ll be interesting to see how things end.

* * * * *

And exercise for the reader: Like so many things these days, this series just begs for a Girardian interpretation. On the one hand we’ve got mimetic desire operating on individual relationships. But we’ve also got larger scale sacrificial rhythms revealing themselves in the various gang battles and organized tournaments. Who are the scapegoats?

One study shows that male bonobos engage in violence more often, though less intensely, than male chimpanzees

Phie Jacobs, Bonobos, the ‘hippie chimps,’ might not be so mellow after all, Science, April, 12, 2024.

Chimps (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) are the closest surviving relatives of modern humans. That makes them interesting subjects for scientists studying how aggression evolved in our own species. But the two apes are very different in their behavior. Chimps are patriarchal, forming all-male coalitions that patrol their territory; they react violently when they happen upon an outsider or neighboring clan. “Chimpanzee intergroup encounters are not possible,” Mouginot explains. “They will kill each other.”

Bonobos—which some have called “hippie chimps”—are far more peaceful, says Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke who wasn’t involved in the new research. Their societies are dominated by females, and amicable interactions between communities are commonplace—and frequently marked by displays of enthusiastic sexual activity. And although bonobos are no strangers to conflict, scientists who study the apes have never witnessed a lethal encounter. As far as we know, Hare says, “no bonobo has ever murdered another bonobo.” [...]

Field researchers tracked 12 male bonobos from three communities—from the moment they woke until they settled down for the night—at the Kokolopori reserve, located deep within the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They did the same with 14 male chimps from two communities at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. Every time an ape attacked or charged an adversary, or was on the receiving end of such aggression, a researcher was there to document it.

The results, Mouginot says, “really came as a surprise.” Overall, male bonobos turned out to be about three times as likely as chimps to engage in aggressive behavior. Although none of the encounters were lethal—and the team didn’t track the severity of injuries—bonobos weren’t afraid to push, hit, and bite their foes. Their aggression didn’t appear to be a turn-off for female bonobos, who actually preferred to mate with aggressive males. [...]

But whereas male chimpanzees frequently ganged up to or defeat rivals or bully females, bonobo males mainly participated in one-on-one fights and rarely attacked members of the opposite sex. In fact, males were far more likely to be on the receiving end of violence from groups of aggressive, dominant females.

There's much more at the link.

H/t Tyler Cowen. 

More –

• about the bonobos in the NYTimes. 
• The original research: Differences in expression of male aggression between wild bonobos and chimpanzees.

John Wick 1, 2, 3 [Media Notes 116]

Out of curiosity, and because Netflix kept telling me the films were about to leave the site, I watched the first three (of four) John Wick films. That leaves me with two questions: 1) what’s the point of all the action, violence, and fights, and 2) what, specifically, is going on with it in these films?

The first question extends beyond the John Wick films. Action and violence occur in many, perhaps most (even all?) films. But some films are built around them. Why? More specifically, what’s the point of films in which minutes can go by, five, then, or perhaps more in a single continuous sequence, when nothing happens to advance the plot. We just have a continuous stream of violence. Even when the violence is over, for the moment, the plot may not have been advanced in an appreciable way. The protagonist has overcome another obstacle, which is something, but not much.

I suppose – and I’ve just realized this, though this question has been bugging me for a while – makes some presupposition about the proper time-lapse between (major) plot points in any film, not just action/adventure films. Thus, for example, we also have scenes where people may eat a meal, or a couple have sex, with nothing happening in the plot during the course of the scene, which make well take a couple of minutes. Still, in films like the John Wick films, the scenes of violence can be quite extended. The same is true of martial arts films.

True Lies is an interesting example. There are extended action/violence sequences. There’s the opening sequence, which accomplishes nothing to advance the plot since it transpires before the main plot begins. Most/all of the James Bond films open with such a sequence (& True Lies parodies them). The film ends with an extensive violence sequence. For the most part it simply demonstrates the ability of the good guys to finally defeat the bad guys. That’s one plot point, albeit a major one. I suppose the rescue of the daughter is another plot point. So we’ve got two plot points for that one extended bit of violence.

How would that work out for all of these films, that is, the ill-defined class of action/violence films? What about the Indiana Jones films, or the Jurassic Park series, the Rocky films, Die Hard, or Godzilla? And then we have all those film types I’ve never watched, the car films (Fast and Furious), the Transformer films. What’s the ratio of plot points per action/violence sequence? And then there’s the more general question about how much time elapses for each plot point. That will of course involve tricky questions of figuring out what the plot points are in the first place, and dividing them into major and minor, etc. In the end, it’s about the pace of a film, no?

But I asked specifically about action sequences, and specifically about fights. In the John Wick films we have fights that last several minutes, perhaps even ten minutes, in the course of which Wick deals with 10s of opponents, injuring and killing many of them, before the sequence ends. In how many such sequences does nothing change beyond the cumulative body count? I don’t know, and the Wick films certainly aren’t the only such films, but they’re the ones I’ve recently watched.

Obviously the mayhem itself is the point. It’s thrilling. What’s that appealing to? The aggression, mayhem, and death, why do we watch it? What need does it satisfy? I’m not sure. Nor are such films appealing to all people. They’re of no more than moderate interest to me, but they ARE that.

There’s also the artistry and craftsmanship involved. This operates on three levels. There’s the skill of fighters, and there’s the skill of the overall fight choreography, and there’s the skill with which it is all staged, filmed, and presented. Those skills vary considerably across films. And there’s our ability to follow the action, to keep up with it – here I’m thinking of a post a I wrote several weeks ago about play-by-play sports commentary. That’s pleasurable for the viewer. That is, on the one hand we have pleasure in our ability to keep up with the action and, on the other hand, our appreciation for the skill required to produce the action. These particular pleasures cannot happen in prose – though at the moment I’m thinking of Hemingway’s skill in writing about a bullfight – and only in a somewhat more limited way on stage.

And then we the overall mise-en-scène of the John Wick films. There’s the whole noir aesthetic, but what I have in mind are the features of the particular criminal underworld in which Wick exists. There’s the mysterious 12-member Table that presides over it all, with all the rules and rituals and paraphernalia, which gets developed over the course of the series.

In the first film – which apparently had not been conceived with sequels in mind – reveals the existence of the Table. We’ve also got the coin-like markers containing the thumb-prints in blood, and the Continental hotel, where denizens of this underworld can take rooms but cannot “conduct business” on the premises. This gets elaborated in subsequent films. In the second film we see the 1930s Art Deco administrative apparatus with the type-writer keyboards and the message tubes. Now Wick is tasked with killing a member of the ruling Table. In the third film Wick finds himself fighting the table, and meeting the mysterious Elder out in the middle of the desert. This Elder seems to have some authority over the Table. How’s that managed from the middle of the desert?

This mythology is developed through various specific objects, persons, places, rules and rituals, which are floating in an ever-expanding sea of mystery. What holds this world together? One can of course ask that of any imagined world, not to mention the real world in which we live, but the Wick films seem to bring this issue starkly to our attention in the contrast between all the specifics of the mind-numbing violence and the utter pointlessness and endlessness of it all.

Very clever.

3 Manifestations of America’s vulture of violence, a speculation

We’ve just witnessed another horrible mass shooting and we’re in Memorial Day weekend. I’m thinking about America’s pact with violence, something I’ve been thinking about a long time. As I’ve said in various posts, early in my undergraduate career I read an essay that Talcott Parsons published in 1947, “Certain Primary Sources of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World” (reprinted in Essays in Sociological Theory), which has influenced me a great deal. Parsons argued that Western child-rearing practices generate a great deal of insecurity and anxiety at the core of personality structure. This creates an adult who has a great deal of trouble dealing with aggression and is prone to scapegoating. Inevitably, there are lots of aggressive impulses which cannot be followed out. They must be repressed. Ethnic scapegoating is one way to relieve the pressure of this repressed aggression. That, Parsons argued, is why the Western world is flush with nationalistic and ethnic antipathy.

Thus I offer one manifestation of America’s culture of violence:

A bloated defense establishment and senseless wars: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and others.

That violence is socially sanctioned. This second manifestation is not:

Domestic gun violence, including mass shootings.

There is the gun violence, on the one hand, which runs up against attempts to control the availability of guns, on the other. Both of these, I would argue (but not here and now) are manifestations of America’s pact with violence.

My third example is quite different from the first two, and is the one that prompted this post:

Fear of rogue AI among the digital intellectual elite.

In this case there is no actual violence. Rather, there is the feat that, at some time in the future, artificially intelligent machines will turn against us. As far as I know, this is a specifically American fear.

Yes, there is widespread fear that robots and artificial intelligence will take jobs from people. But that’s quite different from believing that super-intelligent machines will turn on us, as Skynet did in the Terminator series. I have pointed out, in a post about Astro Boy, that the Japanese have different ideas about robots than we do, and do not fear them. When I asked folks at Astral Codex Ten whether or not anyone knew if the Japanese feared rogue AIs, the answer was that, no, they don’t, nor it seems, does anyone else.

Now, that’s hardly proof of anything, but it is indicative. If it turns out that fear of rogue AI is concentrated in America – and in Nick Bostrom’s orbit in the UK – then that is something that needs to be explained. I’m suggesting that the explanation will take us to the same psycho-cultural mechanisms have led us into senseless foreign wars, and have led a small number of people to senseless gun violence and mass murder.

More later.

John Dollard on "free-floating" aggression and racism

 [Note: I'm posting in this, in part, to keep John Dollard's name in my mind.]

Why do people need racism? John Dollard addressed this question in his classic 1937 study, Caste and Class in a Southern Town, which “redirected the study of southern race relations in general and lynching in particular.” The question implies that mistaken beliefs about others are symptoms of racism, not its cause. Racism has some useful function in the individual or collective lives of racists. What function could that be? Dollard’s answer was, in effect: to keep the peace.

Dollard observed that social life is often frustrating, generating aggressive impulses which cannot be always be satisfied. In Dollard’s view this leads to

a generalized or “free-floating” aggression . . . [that] can be thought of as a tendency to kick, hit, scorn or derogate someone or something if one could only find out what. A second necessity is that of a permissive social pattern. This must exist in order to lift the in-group taboos on hostility. The permissive pattern isolates a group within the society which may be disliked. Usually it is a defenseless group. . . The third essential in race prejudice is that the object must be uniformly identifiable. [pp. 445-446]

In other words, white racists are using blacks as scapegoats for the accumulated frustrations they experience in daily life. Aggressive impulses are being displaced from their real objects, which are appropriate targets, to substitute objects, toward whom one can act aggressively.

The idea has certain attractions. It is fairly simply and straightforward and seems applicable in other cases as well. Racism and ethnic scapegoating are certainly not uniquely American. Between the Japanese and the Koreans, the Hindus and Muslims of India, the English and the Irish, the Gypsies and half the world, the Jews and half the world, ethnic scapegoating is common. It almost seems that wherever you have three people, two will get together and blame their troubles on the third. With groups that think of themselves as a people, whether the Serbs or the Hutus or the Germans, it is easy to find other groups to blame and to hate. 

 

Thus in his study of nineteenth century European aggression, The Cultivation of Hatred, Peter Gay notes that “Ethnic pride and ethnic anxiety were, in many, indistinguishable” and suggests that ethnic scapegoating was the obverse side of the coin of nationalism. The identity a people creates for itself is, in part, the fact that we are most emphatically not them, who are primitive and inferior. He suggests that World War I was a tremendous release for a frustrated and repressed Europe for “the war released aggressive impulses of which people had been unconscious in calmer times.”

 

* * * * * 

 

I elaborate on this in a post that dates back to 2014, Blacks, Blues, and Soul Sickness: Lynching and Racism in the USofA.

Here's a post that discusses the Amazon series, The Underground Railroad, and then lists several posts about racial violence. I particularly recommend Empaths & Gangstas: On the psycho-sociology of race in America [Media notes, Star Trek S3 E12].

The normalization of violence in commercial kitchens via food media

Meiser ET, Pantumsinchai P. The Normalization of Violence in Commercial Kitchens Through Food Media. Journal of Interpersonal Violence. April 2021. doi:10.1177/08862605211005138

Abstract: The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there are 2.53 million cooks and chefs in the United States. Of those, one in four reports experiencing physical violence in the workplace—roughly 632,500 victims. While shocking, this figure fails to account for the psychological and sexual violence that also plagues commercial kitchens. Workplace harassment and bullying is not limited to the United States and has been documented in Scottish, English, Scandinavian, French, Malaysian, Korean, and Australian kitchens. Why is violence so prevalent in kitchens, and how has it become a behavioral norm? Using data from 50 in-depth interviews with kitchen workers and analysis of food media, this article shows that while kitchen workplace violence can be attributed to typical causes, such as occupational stress, there is an overlooked source: the normalization of violence through food media. By exploring television shows, like “Hell’s Kitchen,” and chef memoirs, like Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, readers will see how bullying and harassment are romanticized in these mediums, glorified as a product of kitchen subculture, and consequently normalized in the kitchen.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Does violent media trigger real aggression? [seems not, but more study needed]

Two long-term studies designed to prove that media-inspired aggression spreads through people's networks like a contagious disease found not a hint of it. https://t.co/HTO8MjHIj4 pic.twitter.com/3vIm5VMzgL

— Rolf Degen (@DegenRolf) March 31, 2021

Death, Terror Management, and Nationalism [#pandemic]

In Beethoven’s Anvil I cited Kierkegard, Ernst Becker and Franz Borkeneau in asserting (p. 90): “Our intelligence allows us to know that we will die, and the rituals though which we mark death are among the most important and intense we perform. I suggest that without such rituals, death threatens to become a psychological trap for the living. Periodic participation in ritual musicking reduces one’s sense of isolation and attaches one to the group, as Freeman has suggested, making one’s individual fate a matter of less concern.“

There is a body of theory more or less devoted to arguing that culture is primarily a device for dealing with our fear of death, Terror Management Theory. Here’s the opening of the Wikipedia entry:

In social psychology, terror management theory (TMT) proposes a basic psychological conflict that results from having a desire to live but realizing that death is inevitable. This conflict produces terror, and is believed to be unique to human beings. Moreover, the solution to the conflict is also generally unique to humans: culture. According to TMT, cultures are symbolic systems that act to provide life with meaning and value. Cultural values therefore serve to manage the terror of death by providing life with meaning.

At roughly the same time I came across an article with a very long title: Philip T. Hoffman, Why was it that Europeans conquered the rest of the world? The politics and economics of Europe’s comparative advantage in violence (PDF). The article argues that while it is not clear, in general, just when “Western Europe first forged ahead of other parts of the world,” it is clear that in one area, the ability to wage war, Europe had “an undeniable comparative advantage well before 1800...” While the whole argument is interesting, I’m interested in one sentence, from page 11: “In an era before nationalism motivated troops, armies had to be centralized, for if soldiers (many of whom were mercenaries) were scattered across a country, desertions would soar.”

There it is, our old friend death. Nationalism made a difference in how states could motivate their troops. Nationalism is one of those cultural inventions that distances us from death.

Do trained murderers working of a Mexican drug cartel have a code of conduct?

From Azam Ahmed and Paulina Villegas, He Was One of Mexico’s Deadliest Assassins. Then He Turned on His Cartel. The NYTimes, 14 Dec 2019:

Murder was rarely for sport, the sicario said. He studied his victims at length, investigating the complaints against them. Once confirmed, he warned them to stop, mostly to keep them from drawing too much attention from the authorities. If they didn’t, he planned the killings meticulously, carrying them out only with approval from above.

“For me to kill someone, I had to have permission,” he explained. “Why do I want to kill that person? Not because I just don’t like them. That’s not how it works.”

He followed a code, he said. He didn’t recruit children, and wouldn’t harm women or working people, if he could avoid it. But the workings of organized crime were rarely orderly. He did kill women and innocent civilians. For all the talk of honoring a code, it was often just that: talk. Business always came first.

The New York Times confirmed many of his homicides with the authorities and attempted to speak with the victims’ families in several cases. All refused. Having lost their daughters, sons and fathers to the cartel, they were fearful of reprisals.

Of all the people the sicario killed in his five-year run, only a few haunted him, he said. One in particular.

It was during a routine operation, he recalled, when his bosses sent him to eliminate a group of local kidnappers. After he arrived, he said, he found a college student with them. The sicario said he knew instantly the student was innocent: the look of terror on his face, his body language, even his clothes. They were all wrong.

Following protocol, the sicario tied everyone up and called his boss. He wanted to let the young man go. He was unaffiliated. There was no need to kill him. But the boss said no. Any witness was a liability.

As the boy begged for his life, the sicario said he looked away and told him he was sorry before slitting his throat.

“That student still haunts me,” he said, weeping. “I see his face, that kid begging me for his life. I will never forget his eyes. He was the only one who ever looked at me that way.”

A sinner confesses:

For five years, the sicario lived as two different people: the son who dropped off groceries for his mother and had a baby of his own with his girlfriend; and the “monster,” as he called himself, who killed for a few hundred dollars a week.

After his arrest, the wall between them began to crack. He suffered what seemed like psychotic episodes, he said, sleepless nights of strange voices and shadows collapsing on him. He knew he deserved no pity, that he alone was to blame. He took some comfort in that.

“I was at the point of going crazy,” he said. “I would spend two or three days crying.”

Eventually, a pastor — an uneducated, reformed convict himself — came to see him. At first, the sicario worried the man was a spy sent by his enemies. Eventually, he began to speak to him and, before long, could hardly stop.

The pastor was caught off guard by the torrent of confessions as the sicario gave himself over to the Bible with a fervor he once held for violence, a conversion so common it is almost a cliché in the world of gangs and cartels.

“That other person is dead,” the sicario said as if, with repetition, it might become true.

He found new purpose in confinement, helping solve cold cases, testifying against cartel players and paving the way for some two dozen convictions. The police said they saw a real transformation in him, though they had their own reasons to believe it, too.

The 'Nordic paradox'–Gender equality seems correlated with a high incidence of intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW)

Gracia E, Martín-Fernández M, Lila M, Merlo J, Ivert A-K (2019) Prevalence of intimate partner violence against women in Sweden and Spain: A psychometric study of the ‘Nordic paradox’. PLoS ONE 14(5): e0217015. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217015

Abstract

The high prevalence of intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW) in countries with high levels of gender equality has been defined as the “Nordic paradox”. In this study we compared physical and sexual IPVAW prevalence data in two countries exemplifying the Nordic paradox: Sweden (N = 1483) and Spain (N = 1447). Data was drawn from the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights Survey on violence against women. To ascertain whether differences between these two countries reflect true differences in IPVAW prevalence, and to rule out the possibility of measurement bias, we conducted a set of analyses to ensure measurement equivalence, a precondition for appropriate and valid cross-cultural comparisons. Results showed that in both countries items were measuring two separate constructs, physical and sexual IPVAW, and that these factors had high internal consistency and adequate validity. Measurement equivalence analyses (i.e., differential item functioning, and multigroup confirmatory factor analysis) supported the comparability of data across countries. Latent means comparisons between the Spanish and the Swedish samples showed that scores on both the physical and sexual IPVAW factors were significantly higher in Sweden than in Spain. The effect sizes of these differences were large: 89.1% of the Swedish sample had higher values in the physical IPVAW factor than the Spanish average, and this percentage was 99.4% for the sexual IPVAW factor as compared to the Spanish average. In terms of probability of superiority, there was an 80.7% and 96.1% probability that a Swedish woman would score higher than a Spanish woman in the physical and the sexual IPVAW factors, respectively. Our results showed that the higher prevalence of physical and sexual IPVAW in Sweden than in Spain reflects actual differences and are not the result of measurement bias, supporting the idea of the Nordic paradox.

Introduction

Intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW) remains a pervasive social and public health problem in western societies [1–8]. Increasing gender equality is at the core of the prevention efforts of this type of violence, as gender inequality is considered a main factor explaining IPVAW. Accordingly, rates of IPVAW are expected to drop as country-level gender equality increases [9–12] (see [13] for a review). However, in western countries, high country levels of gender equality are not always linked with low prevalence of IPVAW.

The high prevalence of IPVAW in countries with high levels of gender equality was defined by Gracia and Merlo as the “Nordic paradox” [14]. Nordic countries are, according to different international indicators (e.g., Global Inequality Index; Global Gender Gap Index; European Index of Gender Equality), the most gender equal countries in the world [15–17]. However, despite these high levels of gender equality, Nordic countries have high prevalence rates of IPVAW. The high prevalence of IPVAW in Nordic countries is illustrated by a European Union (EU) survey on violence against women conducted by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) [18]. In this survey the average lifetime prevalence of physical and/or sexual violence by intimate partners in the 28 EU member states was 23%, with a range between 13% and 32%. However, Nordic countries in the EU were among the countries with higher lifetime prevalence of IPVAW, with rates of 32% (Denmark, the highest IPV prevalence in the EU), 30% (Finland), and 28% (Sweden). The high prevalence of IPVAW in Nordic countries is also supported by other studies and national surveys [19–25]. However, despite survey and research data pointing to a disproportionally high level of IPVAW in countries with the highest levels of gender equality like the Nordic ones, interestingly, this puzzling research question is rarely asked and, so far, remains unanswered.

The reasons explaining these high levels of IPVAW prevalence in Nordic countries, despite their high levels of gender equality, are not yet understood as almost no research has addressed specifically this paradox [22]. Gracia and Merlo [14], proposed a number of theoretical and methodological lines of inquiry towards understanding the Nordic paradox. However, as these authors noted [14], a first step to ascertain whether the Nordic paradox reflects true differences in IPVAW prevalence is to rule out the possibility that measurement bias is causing prevalence differences between Nordic and other countries. To eliminate this possibility, a key question is to ensure the comparability of IPVAW prevalence data across countries. In other words, comparisons of IPVAW data across countries should not be made without first ensuring measurement invariance.

IPVAW can be a culturally sensitive issue, and the way this type of violence is perceived or reported may vary across countries. Therefore, ensuring cross-cultural measurement invariance is critically important for appropriate and valid cross-cultural comparisons of self-reported IPVAW scores between respondents from different countries [26–32]. As Jang et al. noted [29], different perceptions of items or different interpretations of response scales can lead to measurement non-invariance (i.e., non-equivalence of measures). If this is the case, it cannot be assumed that the construct of interest, in our case IPVAW, is interpreted in the same way across countries because the same score in one country may have a different meaning or reflect different levels of IPVAW in another. Without ensuring measurement invariance, score comparisons across samples from different countries can be unreliable and inadequate, and the validity of comparing women’s IPVAW experiences across countries becomes questionable [28,29,32,33].