Pandaemoni
Valued Senior Member
As for duels I was talking about private dueling. If I challenge you o a duel, and you feel that your life is too important to accept the challenge, you say no, which would be entirely rational. In practice though, society looked down so severely on anyone who refused a duel, that you could not continue to be a professional or tradesman, because everyone who knew about the duel would avoid you (lest they be linked with your unmanliness). So, in practice, even people who opposed the concept of dueling, accepted offers to duel while others started duels for no reason at all (other than the social accolades they won for being a great duelist).
Dueling was voluntary in that you were allowed to say no to a challenge, but social pressures were such that that was usually not an economically viable option.
As for "idiots" we are all products of social conditioning. The reason why Islamic fundamentalists saw the heads off of innocent victims and others can't even bring themselves to watch the videotapes of them doing it without vomiting is largely that the two groups were socialized differently
The reason why:
- viking raiders killed men women and children on raids or
- Old Testament Jews (supposedly on the orders of God Himself) killed men, women children and even animals in their attacks to conquer the Holy Land, or
- those involved in the Sand Creek Massacre of the elderly, woman and children or
- the German people could turn a blind eye to Hitler and the plight of the Jews or
- Aztecs cut the beating hearts out of sacrificial victims every single day or
- the Anasazi, Fore and many others turned to cannibalism as a part of every or
- many Americans in the 19th century and earlier thought slavery was the natural condition of non-whites or
- etc.
To take a more mundane issue, why do so many people raised in Saudi Arabia become Muslims or people in Rome become Catholics? Not only that, why do they fervently believe in the truth of it so much, that on average they they remain in that faith their whole lives, even if they are aware of the tenets of other religions or denominations? Why do Americans, in general, believe so strongly in the right of gun ownership and the death penalty, and the average person in most other westernized democracies think those things are crazy and should be gotten rid of? The answer is that culture influences them to preferentially accept one set of religious tenets over another and one set of values common to the society as a whole. Again, none of these people are idiots, but social conditioning (which includes influences both from parents and from the culture around them) is a very powerful thing.
Finally, and decidedly more controversially, why is it that more images we see of permissive sexuality we see in the culture, the more we seem to get in the future? Because there are self reinforcing aspects to such things. As the images and stories start to pervade the media and daily life, the stories they tell become increasingly normalized. In the case of violence it's clear that there are "idiots" out there who will be disproportionately affected, but the effects do not necessarily stop at the idiots. Even if the effects did stop there, I'm not sure why the conclusion would be that that's okay, since the people those "idiots" would be brutalizing would at least on occasion be non-idiots. Why should any rational person support a cultural shift the outcome of which will be "to make idiots more violent" let alone if there is a possibility that the outcome will be "to make the entire culture more violent on average"?
If the gains of the shift outweigh those costs, then it makes sense, but I am highly skeptical that the minor entertainment benefits from gladiatorial-reality-TV will be enough to offset the damage caused.
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