evilthecat said:
Well, it's not "war" which turns people into bodies, it's other people. Therefore, "war" (or rather, certain elements of military service) are designed to turn people into people who can turn other people into bodies. That's something which most people have an intensely socialized aversion to doing.
We are not actually that socialized to be adverse to killing members of "other tribes." We are more socially and even evolutionarily geared toward being peaceful within our own tribe, and being quite deadly against opposing tribes. Your point that it isn't "war" that turns people into bodies is, I think, mostly semantic. War is the institution of major military conflict, to say it doesn't kill people seems like a stretch. Contrary to what some think, the military doesn't have to break you down, steal your personality and empathy and turn you into a killing machine. As it turns out, humans aren't all that adverse to killing, though I am, obviously, speaking in the broadest of scopes here.
I don't think Bob's use of the word "psychopath" was meant to be taken literally. Very few of the people who staffed the death camps were actual psychopaths, they were ordinary people who had friends and family but who still went to work every day and just did their job as part of an institution which turned millions of people into bodies because that's what they'd been trained to do.
I won't presume one interpretation of his meaning over another, but there seems to be two ways to take what he said. Either war does actually turn people into psychopaths, or else war and its institutions cause regular, sane people to act like psychopaths. Either way you slice it, he's dead wrong. There is nothing inherently psychopathic about fighting in a war. Now that does not mean it's all sunshine and roses or that atrocities aren't committed by people who either break down mentally or really are psychopathic, but again, we're speaking in broad tones here. Again, I didn't take Bob's words as some literal condemnation of soldiers or a suggestion that we're all raving lunatics, I just didn't like what he said because it was horse manure.
This is a horrible truth which people have been trying to wrap their heads around ever since. People don't need to be psychopaths to act like psychopaths. The vast majority of the most horrific atrocities of recent times were carried out by people like you and me, people who had good, functional relationships with other people, who had feelings, compassion for others and at least the capacity for remorse. Those people had to be trained to shut those things off.
Does war turn people into psychopaths? No. Does war make it more likely that people will act like psychopaths? Well, I guess it depends how you see it, but if you take the ability to override that deeply ingrained socialized revulsion towards killing people as one symptom of psychopathy, then war probably brings people closer.
If you think one just "shuts off" things like remorse, compassion or empathy, I'd say you're wrong if you're speaking about most people. At no point did I ever shut off any of that stuff. There was nothing psychopathic about calling in a mortar attack on a machine gun nest, or an air strike on a sniper position, or firing down range at targets more than willing to shoot back at me. It was simply a matter of doing what had to be done, even if it was messy business. We knew we were killing people and we weren't happy about it either, but we also knew that if we didn't kill them, they'd try to kill us. Our willingness to do what we did was not only not psychopathic, it was so normal as to be practically mundane.
