[WS:] I do not think it is as much death as power. American males seem to be obsessed with power and control in everyday life, much more so than Europeans in my view. I recall a research by Dane Archer of UCSC who compared reactions of British and US adolescents to vignettes portraying conflicting social situations. The US-ers seem far more likely than the Brits to react in a way that involved projection of power (attacking, killing etc.) than personal interaction (arguing, negotiating, etc.)
I am not sure why this is the case. One possibility is that this is an outcome of a contradiction between individualist ethos espoused in the American culture and the sheer amount of formal rules restrictions and regulations that permeate the everyday life in this country. The reverence for power and aggression is aspirational rather than factual . To get his yayas out, a British adolescent goes to a pub and gets into a fist fight, but that venue is closed for most Americans because it is verbotten by public drinking laws, rules, policies, and liability concerns - so they escape into fantasizing about projecting power. They buy an SUV, get into a flame war on the internet, and glorify visible manifestation of power (such as the military and its toys) among other things.
Wojtek
On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 10:20 AM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
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> On Oct 6, 2011, at 10:02 AM, Fernando Cassia wrote:
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>> they did it as scientific research. Science is open and peer reviewed.
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> With gobs of public money. Yeah, in the U.S., public investment is ok if it's part of the death machine. But there would be no internet as we know it without the Pentagon. Or computers, for that matter. I think even the mouse and the GUI are traceable to DARPA.
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> Doug
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