"NIGGAZ GET KILT OVER BITCHEZ" - Lil C.S. Lewis
-
Her point that monogamy strengthens status of women, reduces male violence.
James Thompson
The
difference in reproductive strategies between males and females - with
males varying greatly in the number of offspring they produce and
females varying not much at all - holds the key to patterns of violence.
In a nutshell, males must compete for access to females either through
song, coloration, or display or by engaging in direct battle with their
competitors, and thus evolution has strongly favored aggression over
timidity. Cross-culturally, aggressiveness is widely - and all too
correctly - seen as manly, and its opposite, timidity, is seen as
womanly. (A statement by President Lyndon Johnson provides a memorable
example of this. When told that a high-ranking member of his
administration had become a dove on Vietnam, Johnson snarled, "Hell, he
has to squat to take a piss.")
Levels
of aggressiveness correlate nicely with mating strategies. Among
monogamous nonhuman species, such as geese, eagles, foxes, gibbons, and
most songbirds, males and females produce nearly equal numbers of
offspring and also are nearly equal in physical size and aggressiveness.
Among polygynous species, however, the bigger and nastier a male is,
the more likely he will be to fend off his competitors successfully and
win the mating game. Accordingly, it is the James Bonds and the Rambos,
not their more pacific brothers, whose genes are projected into the
future, thus giving rise to succeeding generations that are likely to
be, if anything, more violent.
When
does this arms race stop? Only when the overall disadvantages of such
behavior exceed its evolutionary benefits. At some point, highly
aggressive individuals either run too great a risk of injury or death or
lose out in other ways. For example, among some birds, males
occasionally spend so much time singing, posturing, threatening, and
fighting with their male neighbors that they neglect their own
offspring. Overall, however, natural selection smiles on behavior - any
behavior - that contributes to reproductive success. For males, that
smile has been especially broad and toothsome when it comes to
aggressiveness.
...
Primatologist
Franz de Waal of Emory University describes "aggressive politicking"
among male chimpanzees, which form potentially violent coalitions
according to shifting rivalries and incentives of threat and reward.
Male rivals often meet an untimely death at the hand of such coalitions.
In contrast, coalitions of female chimpanzees are oriented toward
supportive family relationships rather than murderous competition.
Why
has evolution favored such a distinct gender gap? Simply put, males
succeed reproductively at the expense of fellow males, whereas a
female's reproductive success is unlikely to be enhanced by knocking
fellow females out of the way. If anything, females with a penchant for
ferocity are more likely to suffer injury with little or no reproductive
gain to show for their efforts.
...After
reviewing murder records over a wide historical range and from around
the world, psychology professors Martin Daly and Margo Wilson of
McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, concluded "There is no known
human society in which the level of lethal violence among women even
begins to approach that among men." More specifically, they found that a
man is about twenty times more likely to be killed by another man than a
woman is by another woman. This finding holds true for societies as
different from one another as modern-day urban America (Philadelphia,
Detroit, and Chicago), rural Brazil, and traditional villages in India,
Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), and Uganda. This is not to
say that murder rates are equivalent in these places. In modern
Iceland, for example, 0.5 homicides occur per 1 million people per year,
whereas in most of Europe the figure rises to 10 murders per million
per year, and in the United States it soars to more than 100. In all
cases, however, male-male homicide exceeds its female-female counterpart
by a whopping margin. The fact that the pattern of violence remains
remarkably consistent from place to place and parallels male-male
competition seen in other species argues forcefully for its biological
underpinnings.
During
1995 in the United States, for example, 3,329 men were convicted of
murder, compared with 226 women. What's more, the victims were
predominantly men: 3,051 men versus 508 women, numbers that clearly show
men's tendency to kill other men. Moreover, around the world and
throughout history, the age of most male murderers (that is to say, most
murderers) has remained remarkably constant, in the early twenties. Put
another way, those most likely to kill are men at their physical peak
who are trying to establish themselves socially and reproductively.
Today's proliferation of guns has changed these statistics, but not
dramatically. In the United States, for example, the age group with the
highest arrest rate for murder is currently those from eighteen to
twenty-two.
Judith
is familiar with the case of "Big X." By age nineteen, Big X had been
arrested twice for drug possession and - by his own admission - had been
involved in two armed robberies and a rape. When asked about his life
on the streets, Big X replied, "It's pretty good bein' bad." When asked
to elaborate, he explained: "The biggest, baddest dudes get the best
stuff. You know: respect, clothes, whatever junk you want, and the best
chicks." Asked about the chicks, he said, "There ain't a lot of chicks
in the gang, but you know, they sure ain't goin' down for the guys at
the bottom." ("They Not Goin' Foe ME. That's Foe Sure!" - Peter Dagampat Ph.D.)
"Would You B On Me If I Was Po, Broke, And Hone Grey [Hungry]; Always Bi My Lonely And Nobody Know ME?...Hell Nah!" - Lil B A Stoner
After
Big X worked his way to the top of his gang, he was confronted by
"Rutter," an imposing kid who moved into the neighborhood and asked to
join. Eventually Rutter was allowed to "jump in" (join the gang), but
only after getting beat up as a test of his toughness. From the start,
Big X didn't like this rival male and warned him, "You touch my chick,
I'll bust your dick." As it turned out, Rutter never touched Big X's
girlfriend, but he did look at her and make a provocative comment about
her breasts. In response, Big X calmly pulled out a 9-mm pistol and shot
Rutter twice - in the groin. Rutter survived, and Big X is now serving a
thirty-year term for reckless endangerment and assault with intent to
kill.
"Access to female mates may be predominantly determined by intimidating, competing with and winning against male rivals, rather than by being perceived as attractive and chosen by females." https://psyarxiv.com/edw4f/
OTHER SOCIETIES, SIMILAR PATTERN
Among
traditional peoples, men who compete successfully with other men mate
more often and have more children than do their lesser rivals. An early
study by Northwestern University anthropologist William Irons showed
that among the Yomut Turkmen of Iran, cultural success was rewarded by
biological success: wealthier men had substantially more offspring than
those who were poorer. Similar correlations have been found virtually
everywhere they have been sought.
Indeed,
when psychologist Laura Betzig of the University of Michigan looked at
historical cross sections of 104 human societies, she found that "in
almost every case, power predicts the size of a man's harem." Minor
kings would typically have a harem of about 100; kings of greater
substance, perhaps 1,000; and emperors, 5,000 or more. Betzig also
found, significantly, that dominance is a powerful predictor of harem
size.
At
the same time, it is fairly obvious that rich and successful people
today do not necessarily have more children. This fact isn't altogether
surprising: in modern society, means and ends of reproductive success
have become disconnected. Yet evolutionary echoes linger on. In a study
of French Canadian men, for example, no connection was found between
socioeconomic status and reproductive success. However, when the
researchers probed deeper and considered number of copulations as well
as number of sexual partners, it was possible for him to estimate
"number of potential conceptions" had birth control not been used. The
results showed that without contraception (the situation throughout most
of human history), today's wealthier, more successful men would in fact
be producing many more children than would poorer men.
Some
of the most pathbreaking and rigorous studies of violence among
small-scale, traditional cultures have been conducted by anthropologist
Napoleon Chagnon of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Since
the late 1960s, Chagnon has periodically lived with the Yanomamo
Indians of Brazil and Venezuela. Inhabitants of the rain forest, they
call themselves the "fierce people," and for good reason. Within their
own villages, Yanomamo men are very pugnacious, regularly engaging in
social interactions that involve a lot of bluff and bluster and no small
amount of violence as well. Most disputes (which break out frequently)
take place over women and are settled by chest pounding duels or club
fights in which the contestants take turns smashing each other on the
head. Men strut about seeking to establish their reputations as
warriors. Realizing the odds, they memorize defiant speeches to be
uttered if they are mortally wounded. According to Chagnon, 44 percent
of all Yanomamo men aged twenty-five years or more have killed someone,
and fully 30 percent of all adult male deaths result from such violence.
In addition to fighting among themselves, men in a typical Yanomamo
village devote considerable time and energy to making war on their
neighbors. Once such disputes are started, there is an unending cycle of
retribution, with a victim's relatives retaliating against the killers
or at least against the killer's village or kin. A failure to retaliate
would label them as weak, easy marks, and thus vulnerable to further
attacks. Not surprisingly, nearly 70 percent of all Yanomamo adults have
lost a close relative to violence.
Chagnon
concludes that there is a clear evolutionary payoff to this
male-generated violence: men who have killed have more wives and more
children than do men who have not. One renowned fellow named Shinbone
had 11 wives, 43 children, 231 grandchildren, and - at last count, in
the early 1980s - 480 great-grandchildren. We don't know how many men
Shinbone killed, but we are confident that he wasn't meek and mild
mannered.
When
Chagnon commented to his Yanomamo friends that some anthropologists
believe the Yanomamo fought over food - especially animal protein - they
laughed and responded, "Even though we enjoy eating meat, we like women
a whole lot more!"
VIOLENCE AT THE BOTTOM
Male-male
competition doesn't always afflict the winners. Men can be as ferocious
when trying to avoid the bottom of the sociosexual hierarchy as when
trying to rise to the top. In fact, battles at the lower end of the
competitive ladder are often more vicious than those among the elite.
This is probably because men at the bottom have little to lose and thus
are drawn to no-holds-barred fighting, a last ditch bravado involving
risky and deadly tactics.
Data
gathered in the United States confirm this notion of violence at the
bottom. Across the board, killers are more likely to be unmarried,
unemployed, less educated, and of lower socioeconomic status than
nonkillers. In addition, young men, especially those from disadvantaged
social and ethnic groups, are overrepresented when it comes to drug
addiction, violent crime, absentee fatherhood, and the like. The
proliferation of violent gangs speaks to the desperation of the
have-nots. A young man must prove he is tough enough to fight his rivals
and willing to defend his gang at all times. Thus, gang members engage
in an endless series of offensive attacks and retaliation, battling
those who wrong them or get in their way. It is not unusual in some
inner-city neighborhoods to see guns brandished from car windows as gang
members careen through the streets displaying their bravado and
willingness to fight.
Maybe if we put the guns down and talked about it... we wouldn’t have to make so many Rest In Peace Shirts!!!
You guys Cry when a Loved one is killed but You still Condone Gang Violence!! 
I don’t get it.. Cry one day.. bury them the next.. And go back to regular ghetto programming. IT WONT STOP UNTIL WE MAKE A CHANGE!!
I don’t get it.. Cry one day.. bury them the next.. And go back to regular ghetto programming. IT WONT STOP UNTIL WE MAKE A CHANGE!!
Guns don't shoot African-American men, African-American men shoot African-American men. #debatenight
The Writing Directed To The Po-Lease On The Red Sign That The Black Boy Is Holding Should Read, "You're Worse Than The Young Blacc Niggas That We're Related To Who Patrol Our Communities Killing One Another And Innocent Blacc Bystanders Like Myself!" BANG!
One
teenager arrested recently for attempted murder said that his victim
looked at him the wrong way. When this offense took place, he and his
attacker were separated by a busy street, so nothing happened. But they
met the next day when the attacked happened to be cruising by in a car.
He pulled over, jumped out, and pumped five bullets into his victim. His
explanation for such cold-bloodedness? "I'm the toughest guy on the
block." (MY FATHER, DICK DAGAMPAT, TOLD ME THIS AFTER I'D GOTTEN MY NOSE BROKEN IN 6TH GRADE. HE LOOKED AT ME WITH DISAPPOINTMENT AND SHAME AND SAID "I WAS THE TOUGHEST GUY IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD AND I NEVER HAD MY NOSE BROKEN...I NEVER LET THAT HAPPEN TO ME.")
As
with Yanomamo, retreating from or avoiding violent confrontation brands
one a sissy, a loser. Naturalist and explorer Peter Matthiessen notes
that among the Dani people of the New Guinea highlands,
A man without valor is kepu - a worthless man, a man-who-has-not-killed. The kepu men go to the war field with the rest, but they remain well to the rear...Unless they have strong friends or family, any wives or pigs they may obtain will be taken from them by other men, in the confidence that they will not resist; few kepu men have more than a single wife, and many of them have none.
Manuel Sanchez, a thirty-two-year-old man from Mexico City, sums up the situation nicely:
Mexicans, and I think everyone in the world, admire the person "with balls," as we say. The character who throws punches and kicks, without stopping to think, is the one who comes out on top. The one who has guts enough to stand up against an older, stronger guy is more respected. If someone shouts, you've got to shout louder. If any so-and-so comes to me and says, "Fuck your mother," I'll answer, "Fuck your mother a thousand times." And if he gives one step forward and I take one step back, I lose prestige. But if I go forward too, and pile on and make a fool out of him, then the others will treat me with respect. In a fight, I would never give up or say, "Enough," even though the other was killing me. I would try to go to my death, smiling. That is what we mean by being macho, by being manly.
The
pattern begins early in life. "Boys will be boys" is the indulgent
observation of many, especially those from an older generation, when a
boy behaves aggressively. Famed evolutionary biologist and Harvard
University professor Edward O. Wilson reflects on his own childhood:
My worst difficulties came from the fist fights. They were merciless and brutal...One boy, usually the local bully or the "champion" of a group, challenged another boy, usually the newcomer...It was unmanly to refuse a fight...My face was sometimes a bloody mess; I still carry old lip and brow split scars, like a used-up club fighter. Even my father, proud that I was acting "like a little man," seemed taken aback.
Another
aspect of male violence is the ease with which it is triggered. After
interviewing convicted killers in Philadelphia, sociologist Marvin
Wolfgang identified twelve categories of motive. Far and away the
largest, accounting for fully 37 percent of all murders, was what he
designated "altercation of relatively trivial origin; insult, curse,
jostling, etc." In such cases people got into an argument over something
as unimportant as a sports game, who paid for a drink, an offhand
remark, or a casual insult. A friend of ours who is a public defender
tells the story of a murder that took place in St. Paul, Minnesota. In
this instance, a nineteen-year-old boy, who was known to have a quick
temper, shot and killed his fifteen-year-old brother. After the two had
argued over who should play Nintendo first, the elder brother went into
his bedroom, loaded his gun, came back, and shot the younger brother.
To
die over something so inconsequential as a casual comment or a dispute
about some distant event or ill-chosen word seems the height of irony
and caprice. But in a sense, disputes of this sort are not trivial, for
they reflect our evolutionary past, when person altercations were the
stuff on which prestige and social success (and ultimately biological
success) were based. In this context, it is very upsetting to be
"dissed." Thus, it is not surprising that young men today fight and die
over who said what to whom, whose prestige has been challenged, or whose
clothing is offensive.(Making Sense of Sex: how genes gender influence our relationships)
And now we come to the part of the story you probably don't know. When Hamilton's father received news of the catastrophe, he raced to his son's bedside. The father - Alexander Hamilton, the man whose handsome face still graces the ten-dollar bill - climbed carefully into bed with his doomed son Philip and gave vent to his grief. One of Philip's friends was looking on and said that Alexander's sorrow "beggard all description." The nineteen-year-old Philip was Alexander's eldest and favorite child, the one he'd doted on as a baby and later called "the brightest, as well as the ablest, hope of my family." When Philip was buried, Alexander had trouble walking to the graveside; as one observer wrote, he had to be half carried to "the grave of his hopes."
And yet, less than three years later, still mourning Philip and knowing he was in the wrong, Alexander had himself rowed away from Manhattan to the Jersey banks of the Hudson, directly across the river from Forty-second Street. There, at Weehawken, on a lovely summer morning, he was greeted by the vice president of the United States, Aaron Burr. When the two men fired, Hamilton fell, perhaps cut down by the very same pistol that had killed Philip. (Hamilton and Burr certainly used the same set of pistols.) Gut shot like his son, Hamilton's death throes lasted thirty-eight hours. His agony was, according to his surgeon, "almost intolerable" and not much deadened by opium.
"48% of men and 45% of women indicated status/reputation concerns as the reason for their last act of direct aggression...status-related competition appeared to be an important motive for aggression”
https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1164523627418660864
https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1164523627418660864
HONOR
"Present!"
said one of the seconds, commanding the duelist to raise their weapons
and fire. But neither man did. They just stared at each other across the
stillness of the clearing, their breath clouding the morning air. They
stared at each other for a long time, perhaps hoping that someone might
call this madness off and they could embrace and part as friends. After a
full minute had passed, Hamilton raised his weapon. The clearing
erupted with two near-simultaneous explosions. The two lead balls passed
each other in flight, one sizzling wide into the trees, and the other
steering around Hamilton's gun arm to bite into the soft flesh beneath
his ribs. The ball punched a fist-sized hole through his innards before
exiting through his left side and lodging in his opposite arm. Hamilton
fell face-first to the earth. Once back in Manhattan, he lay in bed for
more than twenty-four hours, writhing in agony and trying to die
bravely.And now we come to the part of the story you probably don't know. When Hamilton's father received news of the catastrophe, he raced to his son's bedside. The father - Alexander Hamilton, the man whose handsome face still graces the ten-dollar bill - climbed carefully into bed with his doomed son Philip and gave vent to his grief. One of Philip's friends was looking on and said that Alexander's sorrow "beggard all description." The nineteen-year-old Philip was Alexander's eldest and favorite child, the one he'd doted on as a baby and later called "the brightest, as well as the ablest, hope of my family." When Philip was buried, Alexander had trouble walking to the graveside; as one observer wrote, he had to be half carried to "the grave of his hopes."
And yet, less than three years later, still mourning Philip and knowing he was in the wrong, Alexander had himself rowed away from Manhattan to the Jersey banks of the Hudson, directly across the river from Forty-second Street. There, at Weehawken, on a lovely summer morning, he was greeted by the vice president of the United States, Aaron Burr. When the two men fired, Hamilton fell, perhaps cut down by the very same pistol that had killed Philip. (Hamilton and Burr certainly used the same set of pistols.) Gut shot like his son, Hamilton's death throes lasted thirty-eight hours. His agony was, according to his surgeon, "almost intolerable" and not much deadened by opium.
"In the 3 decades leading up to the Civil War, there were more than 70 violent incidents between congressmen...a representative insulted the Speaker during debate, the Speaker responded by murdering him with a bowie knife right there on the House floor."
Philip Hamilton was killed by one of his father's many political adversaries, a twenty-seven-year-old lawyer named George Eacker. One night at the theater, young Philip, possibly drunk, stormed Eacker's private box with a friend and abused the lawyer for criticizing his father in a speech. Afterward Philip wouldn't apologize for his insults. He was too enraged over the way Eacker had insulted him in reply, calling him a "damned rascal." These were, quite literally, fighting words. A man called someone a rascal - or a puppy, a jackanapes, a coxcomb, or a liar - only if he specifically wished to provoke a duel.
Aaron Burr called out Alexander Hamilton for more serious affronts. Hamilton was outwardly friendly to Burr when they met on the street or socialized in each other's Wall Street homes. In later years Burr would sometimes speak of "my friend Hamilton - whom I shot." But Hamilton deeply distrusted Burr's politics and character and said that he felt "a religious duty to oppose his career." Rather than confront Burr openly, however, Hamilton opted, in the parlance of the day, to slit Burr's throat with whispers. Hamilton may have had a hand in newspaper accounts that accused Burr of, among other depravities, treason, being named as the best customer of no fewer than twenty whores, and twirling buxom girls at a "nigger ball." Burr believed that Hamilton was smearing him, and his suspicions were confirmed when Hamilton was quoted in a newspaper calling Burr a "profligate" and a "voluptuary in the extreme," with implications that he had said far worse.
On the eve of his duel, Hamilton tried to put his affairs in order. He updated his will and wrote a letter to his wife, Elizabeth, whom he addressed as "best of wives, best of women." The letter explained that he was fighting Burr with the greatest reluctance and only after exhausting all other options. This was true. Burr and Hamilton had traded endless letters back and forth through their seconds, with Hamilton working lawyerly dodges and splitting verbal hairs, trying to weasel out of the mess on a technicality. He was reluctant to fight because he didn't hate Burr and he felt that dueling was radically at odds with good Christian behavior. Moreover, Hamilton knew that if he died, his family would struggle to pay their debts.
So why, when they had so
much to live for, did the Hamiltons, father and son, recklessly risk
their lives over such paltry stuff? Alexander Hamilton was a co-author
of The Federalist Papers and the architect of the American financial system. Couldn't he do the cost-benefit math?
P. D. Mangan
How
strange the change from dueling, when your reputation was worth dying
and killing for, to being encouraged not to care what others think
Maybe it has to with more atomization: your personal reputation among those who know you isn't as important now.
"If You Kill Me And Go To Jail Yo Bitch Still Gon' Fuck (Love)!" - Lil C.S. Lewis
It's easy to see why men fight over precious and necessary things such as food, wealth, or the love of a woman. But duelists so often killed, and were killed, over trifles - loose words, rumors, impertinent looks. Duelists imperiled their lives for something they couldn't touch, see, or even precisely define: their personal honor. This is the riddle of the duel: how could intelligent men risk so much over what seems like so little?
Killing a man in cold blood because he has called you a voluptuary or ruined your night at the theater seems deranged. But that's because most of us today don't fully grasp the historical importance of honor. In the Hamilton's time, honor represented the entirety of a man's social wealth. Honor wasn't some trivial thing; it was precious coin that brought the best things in life. And if this coin was devalued, a man's prospects - and the prospects of his entire family - were devalued as well.
Muscular cultures of honor still exist today, and where they do, it's easy to see honor's value. Take prison. If a mad scientist wanted to run an experiment that plunged deep down to the roots of masculine aggression, he could do no better than to take many hundreds of frustrated young men, isolate them from the softening influence of women and children, see that they are armed with all kinds of ingeniously improvised weapons, and cage them together for years on end in circumstances that give them little hope of ever prospering outside the walls. Prisons are the most extreme honor cultures currently in existence. The harder the prison, the harder the culture of honor. And what emerges from such cultures is a lot of violence. In prison, inmates fight over tangible things such as control of a black-market economy in drugs, booze, and other contraband. But as frequently they fight over honor, although they usually don't call it that. They call it respect. But honor and respect are different words for the same thing. They represent a group's estimation of a man's ability to inflict harm and confer benefits - of his power, in other words.
"IT AIN'T WHETHER YOU WIN OR LOSE IT'S THE RESPECT THAT COUNTS...BEHIND BARS (WHERE THAT NIGGER BELONGS)" - KURUPT YOUNG GOTTI (M00LIE)
It may seem odd to think of a prison as an honor culture, because for us honor has noble connotations. But a culture of honor can tolerate extremely ignoble behavior - from Alexander Hamilton's profane gossip to the rapes and murders in modern American jails. A culture of honor is really nothing more than a culture of reciprocation. A man of honor builds a reputation for payback. In a tit-for-tat fashion he returns favors and retaliates against slights. Consider the case of Jimmy Lerner, a corporate number cruncher who got locked up for killing a friend in a fight and afterward wrote a prison memoir called You Got Nothing Coming. Early in his sentence a massive inmate called Big Hungry approached Lerner in the crowded lunchroom, lifted a banana from Lerner's tray, and sauntered away as he peeled it. On a second occasion Big Hungry wordlessly cut in front of Lerner in the phone line. On both occasions Lerner was more chagrined than annoyed, and he let the slights pass with a shrug.
Lerner was lucky in having a formidable cell mate named Kansas, who was still a young man but old in the ways of prison. After the phone incident Kansas told Lerner that he had no choice but to kill Big Hungry. "Kansas, that seems a little extreme, don't you think? Stabbing a guy over a phone call?" Kansas replied, "It ain't about the phone call, O.G. It's about Respect." Lerner explains: "Ask any convict who has been down a few days for his definition of a 'man' and the concept of 'disrespect' will surface quicker than stank on shit...'A man,' Kansas might say, 'is someone who tolerates no disrespect!' A real man, a stand-up man, seeks out disrespect and destroys it!"
A different convict, a thirty-five-year-old armed robber named Peter, explains why. "You can tell the rabbits...They bring this guy in and he is doing time for some punk-ass white-collar rip-off, and right away I figure this guy's got no heart." So Peter gives the new guy a "heart check" by harassing him on little things - stealing his books in the same way Big Hungry stole Lerner's banana. By failing to retaliate, the new guy fails the heart test, just as Lerner did. Peter says, "I mean, c'mon, a righteous motherfucker would have stuck me, 'cause he's gonna know that if he lets me take his law books, I'm coming back for his ass next. I'm no fool. A few days later, I go up to this dude and tell 'im we are forming a partnership. He's gonna do my laundry for me and buy me whatever I want from the commissary and that's just how it's gonna be...You see, that's how it is with rabbits. You ever wonder what they are good for, or why God made them? They're food."
In a tough prison, you can either be a "righteous motherfucker" - a missile programmed to seek and destroy disrespect - or you can give your ass up, often literally but figuratively, too. If you fail the heart test, the other inmates will take your food, exploit your commissary privileges, extort your relatives, and make you a slave. The prison equation is ruthlessly simple: yielding on the smallest thing (a banana, a book) is equivalent to yielding on the biggest. Not fighting over a banana or a book is the same as declaring I am a rabbit. I am food.
In prison men defend honor because honor is necessary to life. The most respected prisoners have the best lives, while the least respected have no lives at all. Prison culture provides an exaggerated - and thus clarifying - insight into why men like the Hamiltons were willing to risk so much over honor. In the Upper strata of European and American society, not dueling in defense of honor was a form of suicide. Men risked death or injury (throughout history, most duelists managed to walk or limp away afterward) to avoid the certainty of social annihilation. Some historians have speculated, lamely, that Hamilton fought Burr because he was suicidally depressed over Philip's death, a daughter's mental illness, political setbacks, and constant money problems. But this is wrong. Hamilton desperately sought a face-saving way out of the duel and fought Burr not because he wanted to kill or die, but because he so much wanted to live.
To dodge the fight Hamilton would have had to apologize to Burr and effectively admit to a history of low and dirty lies. If Hamilton simply refused to fight, Burr would have instantly "posted him," literally printing the news that Hamilton was a coward. To be seen as a duel dodger was, in many ways, a fate worse than death. Backing down would have jeopardized Hamilton's political ambitions, his position of social eminence, and his business as a lawyer. Hamilton's family would have been tainted as well - his wife unable to show her face in society, his children's prospects diminished professionally and romantically. Hamilton fought not because he was brave, but because he was scared of what it would cost him not to fight. As one of Hamilton's friends wrote after his death, "If we were truly brave, we should not accept a challenge; but we are all cowards."
The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch. Gottschall, p. 12-18.
MOORE TO CUM
4:44
(COMPLETE LACK OF RESPECT! UTTER LACK OF RESPECT! THE NIGGER NOT ONLY TOOK THE OTHER NIGGER'S MONEY, BUT TOLD THE OTHER NIGGER HOW HIS FORMER "BITCH" SUCKED AND FUCKED HIM! THEN AXED THE OTHER NIGGER (THE NIGGER THAT LOST HIS MONEY) HOW HIS DICK TASTED SINCE THE OTHER NIGGER WAS KISSING THE LIPS THAT SUCK HIS DICK (THE DICK OF THE NIGGER WHO WAS WINNING THE MONEY!) NOW, HOW'S THAT FOR DISRESPECT!)
"WHAT MY DICK TASTE LIKE, LIGHT, WHITE/NIGGA!" - DARK NIGGA (THAT'S WHAT HE ESSENTIALLY AXED HIM!)
If you're born poor in a gang invested neighborhood in a 3rd world country with a corrupt government & no-growth economy it is very unlikely you would succeed. Yes some have made it so it's doable. But it's much harder than those born in fortunate circumstances. Some compassion!
Analyzing
Randy's brain made us reflect upon an important distinction in violence
research - between "proactive" and "reactive" aggression. This
distinction has been around for a long time in the work of Ken Dodge, at
Duke, and Reid Meloy, in San Diego. The basic idea is that some
predatory people - the proactives - use violence to get what they want
in life.
Randy
Kraft was proactively aggressive. He carefully planned his actions,
drugging his victims, having sex with them, and then impassionately
dispatching them. Like a good computer specialist, he was methodical,
logical, calculating, and an able trouble-shooter of problems.
Proactively aggressive kids will bully others to get their money, games,
and candy. There's a means to an end. Proactives plan ahead. They are
regulated, controlled, and driven by rewards that are either external
and material or internal and psychological. They are also cold-blooded
dispassionate. They'll carefully plan the heist they have been thinking
through, and they'll not think twice about killing if need be. Quite a
lot of serial killers fit this bill - like Harold Shipman, in England,
who killed an estimated 284, most of them elderly women; Ted Kaczynski,
the Unabomber, whose terror campaign was conducted with mail bombs;
Peter Sutcliffe, who bumped off thirteen women in the north of England;
and Ted Bundy, who carefully killed about thirty-five young women, many
of them college students.
Flip
the aggression coin and the other side to the Randy Krafts of the world
are "reactive" aggressives. These more hot-blooded individuals lash
out emotionally in the face of a proactive stimulus. Someone has
insulted them and called them names. They've lent money and it has not
been returned. They've been verbally threatened. So they hit back in
anger.
Take
Ron and Reggie Kray, two identical twins who grew up in east London and
operated in the swinging '60s, the same time that Randy Kraft was
operating in Southern California. Reggie Kray's killing of Jack "the
Hat" McVitie was an example of reactive aggression. It went like this.
McVitie
had said mean things about Reggie's schizophrenic twin brother, Ron.
True, Ron Kray was fond of his food, and yes, he enjoyed exploring the
boundaries of his sexuality. But there are more subtle ways of
expressing these facts than to call him "a fat poof'" as Jack "the Hat"
did. Jack also owed the Kray twins a hundred pounds, which did not help
things. Adding injury to insult, one night walking out of a Chinese
restaurant, Reggie bumped into McVitie, who said, "I'll kill you, Kray, if it's the last fucking thing I do." Now, that's not nice.
Reggie
decided that that was going to be Jack McVitie's last supper. Later
that night Reggie pushed a knife into McVitie's face and stabbed him to
death in an explosive fit of pent-up anger. Reggie would have blown
Jack's head off, but his .32 automatic jammed twice, so he had to use a
knife instead. Reactive aggression is much more emotional and
unregulated. So in this context, although they were both murderers,
Kraft and Kray were more like apples and oranges.
Given
this proactive-reactive subdivision, I decided to categorize our
forty-one murderers into proactive, predatory killers and reactive,
emotional killers...
The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime. Adrian "Makes It Rain, Let It Drip" Raine, p. 76-77.
