Uncle Sam Goes 2.0
As mentioned by Lieutenant Colonel (ret.) Grossman, violent video games are having more and more practical applications. For example, realistic violent video games set in a warlike environment are being used to treat veterans who have post-traumatic stress disorder. Video game-like applications of digital technology are also an integral part of military operation. P.W. Singer, author of Wired for War, raises some considerations:
Technology is wrapped up in the story of war. You look at all the things that surround us, everything from the Internet to jet engines; these are all things where the military has been a driver for technology. And technology opens new frontiers, new directions we can go in, but it also creates new dilemmas, new questions you need to answer . . . Going to war meant that you were going to a place where there was such a danger that you might never come home again, you might never see your family again. Now compare that experience to that of a Predator drone pilot. You're sitting behind a computer screen, you're shooting missiles at enemy targets, you're killing enemy combatants. And then at the end of the day, you get back in your car, and 20 minutes later, you're at the dinner table talking to your kids about their homework.91
Singer alludes to important questions. How will identifying with a violent avatar, or removing oneself from direct violent action that's actually happening in the real world, affect the way we view each other and affect our real-life behavior? Could video games desensitize players not only to others' feelings but also to their own?
Rye Barcott, author of It Happened on the Way to War, told us that in the Marine battalion in Iraq in 2005, during heavy firefight periods, young Marines returning to barracks would rush to play violent video games all night, going back into battle the next day like “exhausted zombies,” and that was a common pattern among many of them.92
“Video games are never going to replicate the real thing,” says Lieutenant Colonel Larry F. Dillard Jr, of the US Army.93 But you never know.
In the popular children's science-fiction novel Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card, Ender gets enrolled into Battle School, eventually reaching the school's top rank through his intelligence and cunning. Ender's practice sessions, in which he commands spaceships in a 3-D battle simulator with his fellow students, gradually escalate into battle after battle against an enemy alien race called the Formics, also known as Buggers. Ender is on the brink of exhaustion and is having horrible nightmares that haunt him during his waking hours. In his “final exam,” Ender's crew is outnumbered nearly a thousand to one near a small planet. Ender decides to use a deadly weapon to destroy the planet itself, annihilating all the ships in orbit. He's hoping his ruthless actions will get him kicked out of the school. Instead, he learns that all the battles had taken place with real fleets and his actions effectively ended the war with the aliens.94
The questions foremost in our minds are: Could Ender have killed the Buggers if he knew that it wasn't a game? If being one step removed from action makes for more effective and less endangered soldiers, why wouldn't the military be moving in this direction?
Not to mention how obsessed young people, especially young men, are with gaming. Noah Shachtman, contributing editor of Wired, said that the military understands it must embrace today's digital-obsessed youth in order to recruit the kind of soldiers, airmen and Marines that will be needed in the next century.95 But will the youth of today understand the impact of their actions as they use indirect technology to execute their orders?
Soldiers using this technology today may have actually had firsthand experience in real combat situations, and they come to work wearing their uniforms as a constant reminder that a button they press in one location could have real-life consequences at another location on the other side of the planet. Yet we should be wary of the fact that kids are growing up immersed in realistic digital entertainment depicting violent scenes, which they are physically removed from but feel they are participating in. These kids, who have spent too much time in the “trees,” likely will not have the same capacity to empathize with other people and thus may make less humane decisions; especially as drone technology presents itself as a deadly real-world extension of gaming technology.
‡ Gamification is a term that describes a system that is designed to motivate people and evoke their competitive drives by using rewards, feedback loops, and publicized status indicators (i.e., leader boards, progress graphs, ability to “level up,” friend counts).
§ Bushnell's Theorem or Nolan's Law is an aphorism by game designer and Atari founder Nolan Bushnell about video game design: “All the best games are easy to learn and difficult to master. They should reward the first quarter and the hundredth.”
TWELVE
Sour Grapes
Entitlement versus Reality
A hungry fox saw some fine bunches of grapes hanging from a vine that was trained along a high trellis and did his best to reach them by jumping as high as he could into the air. But it was all in vain, for they were just out of reach. So he gave up trying and walked away with an air of dignity and unconcern, remarking, “I thought those grapes were ripe, but I see now they are quite sour.”
—Aesop, “The Fox and the Grapes”
In stressful situations, many of us adjust our understanding of what's going on to preserve our sense of self. The core message of “The Fox and the Grapes” tale is not in the fox's failure to get the grapes but in his reaction to that failure. He maintains his pride with a wee bit of self-deception. “And therein lies the appeal,” says D.L. Ashliman, professor emeritus of the University of Pittsburgh. “Each individual reader can respond to the fox's self-deception according to his or her own expectations and needs. We can criticize the fox for his dishonesty and inconsistency, or we can congratulate him for his pragmatism and positive self-image.”1 The fox's response preserved the integrity of his self-image to himself.
Stanford University social psychologist Claude Steele was the first to describe the theory of self-affirmation, in 1988. His students, psychologists David Sherman and Geoffrey Cohen, described its powerful role in their own research, nearly two decades later:
[The theory] asserts that the overall goal of the self-system is to protect an image of its self-integrity, of its moral and adaptive adequacy. When this image of self-integrity is threatened, people respond in such a way as to restore self-worth . . . One way that this is accomplished is through defensive responses that directly reduce the threat. But another way is through the affirmation of alternative sources of self-integrity. Such “self affirmations,” by fulfilling the need to protect self-integrity in the face of threat, can enable people to deal with threatening events and information without resorting to defensive biases.2
In a sense they are saying that people can respond negatively to such threats by going on the defensive, or that a better way is to go on the offensive to bolster one's self-integrity.
Young men's attitudes are similar to the fox's. The ego reigns king in Western society today, and our delusional self-perceptions have dissociated us from mundane reality. Most people confuse comfort with happiness, preferring familiarity to truth. Our politically correct culture has become stifling for any form of critical analysis. Although stigmatizing people with labels (i.e., “she's suffering from X,” “he's got Y disorder”) can be damaging, such labels also allow people to externalize their problems and avoid taking personal responsibility to improve themselves. The avoidance of reality has pervaded our language and even the way we understand what's happening around us, as the late comedian George Carlin pointed out. People have invented a “soft language” to insulate themselves from the truth—he said, “toilet paper became bathroom tissue . . . The [garbage] dump became a landfill . . . Partly cloudy became partly sunny.”3
Western culture is presenting a confusing and unfulfilling reality full of distorted ideals. In the US, for example, the average high school student's performance has not improved over the last thirty years, yet their grades have u
ndergone excessive inflation. In 1976 only 18 percent of students had an A- average or better, but in 2006 33 percent said they did—that is an 83 percent increase! At the same time, 20 percent fewer students did fifteen or more hours of homework per week than in 1976.4 In other words, the illusion of success is supported. They got rewarded for doing less.
Young men are told they can be anything they want to be, but it doesn't feel that way. With modern pressures to constantly perform flawlessly in all areas of life—school, career, socially, sexually—we can't blame them for seeking validation and approval in other environments like porn and video games or even gangs, or for being relieved when their anxiety or depression is diagnosed and given a label that other young men also share, such as ADHD. This estrangement creates a different set of rules and perception of self for young men that does not translate into the real world, however.
Developmental psychologist Erik Erikson saw identity as a combination of the ego's dealing with the outside world and the unconscious mind. He believed a stable sense of self could be achieved when there was a successful balance between the two. Adolescence, Erikson said, was the most important time for this development,5 which makes us wonder how stable adolescents' identities are when they are searching for them though imitations of life rather than in the real world's daily trials and tribulations. The assumption that high self-esteem automatically translates into real-world success is deeply untrue, and as much as a young man can seek refuge in his parallel world and spend the majority of his time behind a screen/gang/label—which can essentially act as a buffer or mask separating him from the social majority—he will eventually come up against the unavoidable demands and responsibilities of reality, which could very well trigger a severe identity crisis.
Poet and philosopher Robert Bly and psychoanalyst Marion Woodman call this confrontation “The Great Disappointment.” Leonard Sax says our culture does a terrible job of preparing kids for the moment when they realize they're not going to be the next big thing:
The spiritual condition of the child before the onset of puberty [is] characterized by the feeling that “something marvelous is going to happen.” Then sometime after the onset of puberty, navigating through adolescence, the teenager is hit with the awareness that something marvelous is not going to happen. That's the moment of The Great Disappointment. In our culture, that moment is often postponed until young adulthood, when the 20-something finally realizes that she isn't ever going to compete in the Olympics or be the next American Idol or a movie star.6
Adolescence, Sax says, is the period when children should be learning about their own abilities and limits. In a world with such a massive population as ours, the vast majority of us are going to have to come to terms with the fact that we are no more special than anyone else. Being a mature adult means recognizing that you're not going to be famous or on the cover of popular magazines. This subpar job of preparing young people for this realization leads to a rocky transition into full adulthood. Playing video games regularly can make the gamer the master of that universe, and for many young men that is all the satisfaction they need.
The young men who game to excess often avoid anything that undercuts their means of achieving validation because it is so woven into their identities. Therefore it is doubly threatening when their activities are being questioned because they themselves are being critiqued at the same time. Virtual actions and ego become interchangeable. Distraction and immersion into their preferred virtual space serves as a shield around them, pushing any ego-puncturing inconsistencies out of sight.
Truthfully, most of us have started doing this to some degree—pretty much all of us have some kind of online persona that we get validation from. As the pace of life picks up, the new immediately becomes the familiar, and soon it is old and then obsolete. More and more, Western culture takes technology for granted and we feel entitled to distraction and instant gratification. As the comedian Louis C.K. lamented on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, “Everything is amazing right now, and nobody's happy.”7
These days, it literally is all about “me.” In an analysis of over 750,000 books published between 1960 and 2008, Jean Twenge and her colleagues found that the use of first person plural pronouns (i.e., we, us) decreased 10 percent, while during this same time frame, the use of first person singular pronouns (i.e., I, me) increased 42 percent, and second person pronouns (i.e., you, your) quadrupled.8 It is easy to get turned off and become dismissive of anything that isn't serving our individual needs or beliefs, or serving them fast enough. But there's something else, an uncomfortable gnawing feeling that accompanies any moment when we don't have our face buried in some external device. It's not exactly loneliness. It's more like an itch we can't scratch. We know we could just stop and sit with ourselves if we really wanted to, or fix whatever problem has come up, but we couldn't be bothered to figure it out or put the effort in to apply the solution. So we complain or dismiss whatever is causing the gnawing feeling. This is what is commonly referred to as “first world problems.”
One reason why young men may feel entitled to things these days is because very few of them actually participate in the process of building or maintaining the things they take for granted. It used to be only wealthy gentlemen who didn't know what was under the hoods of their cars, now hardly any young men do. They just take their vehicle to an auto mechanic where it can be diagnosed electronically and fixed with specialized tools. The process of creation and upkeep is out of sight. Most young men who have cars do not even to know where the battery is, until their car stalls and they realize they are missing the cables to jump-start it.
Just as it is necessary to humanize a person to have empathy for them, in order to fully appreciate any given “thing” there needs to be a sense of the efforts and resources that went in to making it. When a young man gets handed things constantly during his early years without any conditions around use or bailed out of trouble during his adolescence, he doesn't learn to appreciate things or take pride in cultivating stuff, only in owning stuff. What he learns is to expect everything and to manipulate others to get stuff he believes he needs. Nowadays, many young men have no sense of awe. They have become disconnected from the physical reality around them. At the same time, they develop a belief that any sort of blue-collar job is beneath them, whether it is skilled or unskilled, or even pays more than many of the jobs in white-collar industries, as in plumbing or being an electrician.
In 1969, the Rolling Stones sang the song “You Can't Always Get What You Want,” but, they assured listeners, if enough effort was put in, a person could get what they needed. The song was a hit. Today a song like that would never get made. Hard work appears to be for someone who doesn't know how to work the system—a sucker—and young men no longer have the patience or desire to learn how to build the foundations for success, nor are they inclined to expose themselves to what they perceive as ridicule if they were to fail along the way.
In the 2013 CIRP Freshman Survey, a survey of incoming college freshmen from around the US that is conducted annually by the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA), the researchers noted that while freshmen perceive themselves as cooperative and tolerant of those with different beliefs, they rated themselves poorly when it came to being open to having their own beliefs challenged.9
Similarly, in a Josephson Institute of Ethics survey on the moral attitudes of young people, 45 percent of boys (versus 28 percent of girls) “agreed” or “strongly agreed” with the statement, “a person has to lie or cheat sometimes in order to succeed,” and twice as many boys as girls agreed or strongly agreed that “it's not cheating if everyone is doing it.”10 Stop for a moment and repeat that phrase to yourself. Any consensual activity can become acceptable even if it is immoral or unethical. That attitude becomes a stepping-stone for good people to justify doing worse things, if others are doing so.
Why Buy the Cow When You Can Have the Milk Free?
Mara Hvinstendahl, author of Unnatural
Selection, says that it is a myth that there are fewer men than women in the world. Women tend to outlive men, but at birth, the natural sex ratio is 105 males being born for every 100 females.11 Why does the world start off with more men but end up with more women?
Roy Baumeister, social psychologist and author of Is There Anything Good About Men?, offers a provocative explanation. Throughout history, he says, the probability that an individual woman will reproduce has been reasonably high. This has been because there was always a good chance, provided a woman played it safe and went along with the crowd (which most women did), that a man would enter the scene at some point and offer sex. Women didn't need to sail into uncharted waters or explore new lands—where the likelihood of certain death was quite high—to find mates with whom to reproduce. Our female ancestors played it safe, in other words.
Men, however, had to take a vastly different approach in order to secure a mate. Most men who lived in the distant past do not have descendants alive today, and the chances of a man who played it safe and followed the crowd having living descendants is especially low. If men wanted to continue their lines they needed to be resourceful, creative, take risks, and explore new options. Baumeister says:
What seems to have worked best for cultures is to play off the men against each other, competing for respect and other rewards that end up distributed very unequally. Men have to prove themselves by producing things the society values. They have to prevail over rivals and enemies in cultural competitions, which is probably why they aren't as lovable as women.
Man, Interrupted Page 16