ershel “Woody” Williams, the last surviving Medal of Honor
awardee from WWII, died last week. According to the newspaper, while he
was at the battle of Iwo Jima, all his comrades were killed by the
Japanese, so Williams picked up eight flame throwers and used them to
incinerate six pillboxes.
The amount of courage, rage, and adrenaline represented by this seemingly superhuman act is all but unimaginable today. Very few men, and even fewer women, no matter how physically fit, are capable of channeling such extraordinary amounts of adrenaline and performing such acts of person-to-person violence in defense of others. Yet throughout our history there have been times when guys like this would have made the difference between surviving and prospering or being on the shortlist for extermination.
Contrary to the belief among some feminists that if men disappeared everyone would sit around peacefully eating fruits and vegetables in some Garden of Eden, male aggression is essential. The presence of an intimidating male automatically creates a reaction in the primate brain. Those blue state politicians who tried to defund the police and those Europeans who convinced themselves that “soft power” would ensure tranquility are slowly relearning this truth: that without a fair and unapologetic system of defending the state, other groups automatically emerge and fight each other in an attempt to fill the empty slot in our ecological niche.
That is the purpose of a police force: not to protect people, but to ensure that the citizens believe the state will fulfill its obligation to administer justice. The citizens benefit by being allowed to do other things besides defending their property, and the state benefits by preventing vigilante and anarchist groups from arising to challenge its authority.
The same is true of the military. Those veterans who are still around today—many permanently crippled by wounds or living in constant torment from PTSD—intuitively knew that the reason humans have war is to maintain the existence of the state. We libertarians join conservatives in criticizing the state for growing too big, but we also admit that the nation-state is one of mankind's most successful inventions as well as one of the most dangerous.
In its absence, and in the absence of courageous men to defend it, we may experience peace and serenity for a short time, but we would also be surrendering real power for soft power. Soft power is little more than the power to complain. The inevitable consequence, as the Europeans are now discovering, is that some other group will inevitably surface and takes your resources and your land, kills your people, destroys what is left of your culture, and drives the survivors into feudalistic slavery.
Our leaders, lacking in courage themselves, describe our military as courageous and brave, but it is an irony of nature that the capacity for bloody and lethal violence is the only way to ensure the humans' survival. That is why we celebrate the Fourth of July in such a stylized way: not with H-bombs but with beautiful fireworks; not with military maneuvers but with parades to demonstrate self-discipline. People prefer the illusion, but we should never imagine that we can ever extract ourselves entirely from the brutality of nature.
If we someday find a way to eliminate aggression from our nature, we might be able to eliminate manspreading and mansplaining. We might even be able to clench our teeth and pretend to care while we ask each other which pronouns we prefer. Feminists might be happy for a while, but our extinction would be assured.
jul 04 2022, 5:43 am
