The Costs of War

War is an environment that will psychologically debilitate 98 percent of all who participate in it for any length of time. And the 2 percent who are not driven insane by war appear to have already been insane--aggressive psychopaths--before coming to the battlefield.

-Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Killing, p. 50 


I've just started reading this book, and so far it's pretty chilling, as exhibited by the quote above. According to Grossman, there is something innate in humans (and all animals, for that matter) that resists the killing of its own species. War, killing, and violence have a much greater impact on us than I think we've realized before. And governments have to compensate for that by conditioning soldiers to conquer that resistance. And cultures condition their children with violent video games and movies that glorify the act of killing, making it seem easy.


When we have to be conditioned to not resist killing our own brothers and sisters, something has gone wrong. We were not made for violence.