As far back as anthropologists have peered into human history, they’ve found one disturbingly universal behavior that transcends both society and race... warfare. War is often described in Darwinian terms as the inevitable
consequence of male aggression. But who can blame us? Males have evolved to possess strong appetites for power, because extraordinary power has always gone hand-in-hand with extraordinary reproductive success.
Even today, studies of very primitive societies such as the Yanomamo, a tribe widely scattered across the Amazon, contain examples of these codes of corporal conduct in action. Yanomamo men from competing villages engage in protracted “Hatfield-and-McCoy”-type feuds that go on for years. And these are not just playful demonstrations either... these fights are characterized by
Like many tribal societies, the Yanomamo are polygamous and take
multiple wives. Researchers have noted that the most celebrated warriors among these people have twice as many wives and three times as many children as their lesser fellow non-fighters. Now that’s reproductive success!
But now for the other more interesting half of the story... Historians estimate that while women have accounted for fewer than one percent of the people who have actually fought in wars, they have done their part to facilitate the carnage by favoring warriors as preferred mates, while shunning the cowards and losers. So if men have been brutes historically, women share equal blame for rewarding their combative behaviors. During World War 1 for instance,
women in Britain and the United States were handing out white feathers on street corners to men not wearing a uniform – actually shaming them for avoiding military service! How are we not supposed to want to show off our fighting skills for them with this sort of punitive treatment as the price of failure?
Anyway, as a result of our pan-generational lust for combat and war,
human societies have placed a high value on pain-tolerance in their young males. They understood that men who accepted physical pain could demonstrate
fearsome courage in battle... and that these men were therefore likely to be great protectors of the women and children. Protection has always been one of the principle duties of men throughout the ages. In antiquated times, males submitted themselves to painful experiences such as ritual scarring and penis piercings (ouch!) to announce their bravery and entry into a fighting culture. Today, many organizations from college fraternities to the military still engage in hazing rituals that are little more than watered-down versions of the same
concept.
The idea underlying any sort of ritual training that seeks to expose
someone to incrementally greater levels of fear and pain is to make it routine for them. You have to know fear, you have to know pain, because it is from this knowledge that you learn how to manage it within your own mind. In egghead psychological terms this is called desensitization. Ducking pain and fear produces the opposite sort of guy, one who spends much of his mental energy worrying about how to zig-zag his way through life while experiencing as little of it as possible.
I spent a fair amount of my own youth ducking pain as well, and the day I finally decided to accept some was transformational for me. When I say I ducked pain this doesn’t mean that I hid in my house and refused to ever come out and play. On the contrary, I was active in many different sports and took my share of licks and lumps. If you’ve ever been hit with a hockey puck twice in the same spot within a couple of minutes, then you my friend, know pain! I also nearly broke my foot playing basketball, and I can’t even begin to remember all the sandlot football injuries incurred by playing with no equipment besides the football itself.
The point is, despite all this mayhem there was one kind of pain that I was sure I couldn’t take, and that was a good ass-whipping in a fist fight. For some reason I was deadly scared of it, and because of that irrational fear, I backed down from several encounters with various pricks and bullies that I’d crossed paths with during my teen years. I was a big pussy.
Evading this kind of physical pain began to create a different sort of distress in me that I’d never imagined however... psychological anguish.
Taking the form of what I called “post-pussy-out” rage fantasies.
It worked something like this: after every incident where I ended up fast- talking my ass out of trouble rather than fighting my way out like I should’ve, I would spend hours walking around in circles imagining all the elaborate ways that I would like to kill the bastard with a crowbar, or somehow humiliate the guy or whatever. And these revenge fantasies would go on and on, sometimes for weeks afterwards... popping up at night sometimes when I couldn’t sleep. These rage fantasy’s eventually grew into a genuine burden – stacking up from the very first time I’d backed down from a fight in 6th grade, right up through my
sophomore year in high school... a span of about 5 years. And at this age, five years can be an eternity.
Finally, one day I said fuck it and decided that it would probably be less painful over the long haul to just take a goddamn punch in the face next time and be done with it!
My “chance” came a few weeks later outside the school locker room when this prick who’d crossed my path before started up with his bullshit. Somehow I kept reminding myself that it would just be easier to fight this guy now and take my beating rather than have to go through all that post rage crap again. I got in
his face and told him to fuck off and he was choking me against the wall a second later. I kneed him in the stomach to get him off me and in a blind fury traded a few wild punches with him before a teacher came out of nowhere and broke us up. He shoved us both off in opposite directions and told us to get back to our next class.
It wasn’t until a half hour later that I noticed I had cut my hand somehow – I didn’t realize that when you’re jacked on adrenaline in a fight you don’t even feel small amounts of pain like that. Ha! I had imagined it would be worse, far worse. Shit, playing street hockey was far more painful! The next day I was worried that this guy would jump me with some of his buddies, but that didn’t happen. I
actually saw him about a week later in the hall. We sort of just eyed each other up and said nothing, and that was it. Not only was it a relief, it was downright
amazing that I felt no fear of this guy any longer! It was just... gone, like it never existed. I think I walked around in a daze for the rest of that afternoon, trying to make sense of everything.
And then something else occurred to me – not once since our altercation had I entertained a single rage fantasy about mutilating this guys’ face! My
“chicken-out” SDB episodes normally went: challenge –> flee –> rage fantasies. Now it was more like: challenge –> fight –> peace!