Chapter 1

The Socialization of Aggression

by Hugh M. Lewis

Just as with any other species of animal the human must perform certain biological functions to ensure survival. Instead of distinguishing him as a higher, nobler form of life, the human shares certain affinities with other animals which tend to obscure any such distinctions. Of these different biological functions, aggression in its purely natural form is one. All of these functions lumped together have as their source the mist basic forms--the life instinct. The origin of aggression is the essence of life itself, that of the life instinct. Nature is random and entropic. Entropy guarantees all things disintegrate eventually from a state of integrated order into a state of random disorder. Living entities die. Life struggles for survival against this natural entropy. It procreates its species to forestall extinction. This struggle is the origin of the force of life and the essence of aggression. The human shares aggression with all other life. It is a necessary and natural life instinct.

At first glance nature might resemble a symbolic peaceable kingdom, a paradise of passively cooperative tranquillity. Plants seem to exhibit no form of aggression, remaining rooted to a single place until they die. Relative to the human condition lower animals seem content in their natural habitat. They are not usually seen to kill members of their own species not to kill other animals except for food or self defense, yet taken from the scientific perspective of evolution, even with plant life a dynamic cooperative and competitive struggle occurs for existence. All life forms must adapt to a continuously changing environment or else they must perish. Life continues because organisms must be able through whatever biological mechanism to anticipate and control change. For plants this ability is very basic and is attained genetically. For animals this adaptive ability is more complex and takes the form of inherited instinctual behavior. For the human this ability to predict and control is rooted in a complex learning process occurring primarily during his early socio-educational development. The human in part is a product of his environment but at the same time he represents the apex of the hierarchy of life in his ability to adapt, predict and control his environment. The measure of this ability distinguishes inanimate objects and life and lower forms of life from higher forms. But this hierarchy of the ability to adapt, predict and control is paralleled by a corresponding hierarchy of the complexity aggression takes.

It is the complexity of the human ability to predict and control of his intelligence, which distinguishes him from all other life forms. The entropy of death creates fear and uncertainty. The ways in which the human learns to deal with these fears and uncertainties is a complicated process and complicates the forms of aggression. The human must learn during his early development to deal with entropy. Unlike a bird that inherits an instinct to fly and to survive a human must be taught his means of prediction and control. As with other animals he must go through a process of sexual intercourse to propagate his species. This fundamental need to propagate makes the human a social animal. Man's more complex intelligence makes for more complexity in his social relations than with any other animal social organization.

Birds tend to make colorful displays of feathers and intricate dances during mating process. This forms a basis for a pecking order for natural selection. It is not unusual that the human performs similar activities in his mating process, putting such great store in appearance and beauty, in cosmetics and jewelry, attending dances as a primary means of meeting the opposite sex. Here we can see a human yearning for aesthetics, for music and other art forms which bring pleasure. Unlike birds, human intelligence makes for a more complex form of natural selection, a pecking order which is wrapped up in social standing, display of wealth and power. The complication of these basic aggressive drives takes the form of needs for social achievement, recognition and control over others and in the need to be artistically creative and in the need for individual fulfillment.

In learning to deal with his social environment the human undergoes during his early personality development a socialization process of learned behavior modification, it is based on the individual's ability to predict the consequences of failure to abide by the rules and to control the consequences of doing what he wants in a manner acceptable to his society. His natural forms of behavior are thus modified to match the established norms and unconscious prejudices of his society. Meeting this norms brings rewards in the form of social acceptance and recognition. Failure to meet these norms brings punishment. Through this process of behavior modification an individual acquires appetites and aversions, standards for social acceptance and learns the unspoken morality of his society. This morality takes the form of individual value systems to reflect the symbolism of good and bad, of gilt and repression, of natural urges, the creation of stereotypes and the foundations for instilling prejudices and a closed social mind.

Just as the individual is involved for survival in a naturally entropic environment, the society of which the individual is a member is involved in a similar struggle for survival in a similarly naturally entropic environment. Just as with the individual, the society as a whole seeks to propagate its culture. The individual makes a social contract with his society in which he sacrifices his individual freedom in personality development for group security while the society gains from his subordination and conformist coordination enhancement in its ability to propagate its culture. The society does this by controlling and channeling the individual's natural aggressiveness and desires into more abstracted forms of aggression. Thus aggression--already of a complex nature in the individual's existence--becomes evolved into a more complex indirect form of social aggression. The society which outlaws murder and theft within its boundaries condones a more altered form of this same aggression against designated elements of the externalized environment.

The social contract contains two general types of controls--rewards and punishments--both of which have two targets of human behavior, thinking and moral behavior, and the individual's lifestyle and physical behavior. Entropy guarantees that it is always easier to destroy than to create. This fact makes for the undesirable consequence that in the social contract there is usually a greater predominance to punish than to reward, and a slanting of the socialization process and social control programs more toward punishing for maladaptive behavior than for the rewarding of positive behavior. The comparative easiness with which to incorporate a punitive system than a reward system has made the punitive system the more prevalent one in most cultures. The desirability to have individuals control their own behavior rather than being physically forced to control these actions makes for the role of instilled morality in the early development of social character, of superstition, religion, prejudice and ignorance. It is easier to prevent an event from occurring at its source than to cure its malevolent effects once the event has occurred. It is always easier to threaten punishment than to insure the credibility of the punitive system. If the threat is not reinforced, credibility is lost and the social cohesion disintegrates. If continually consistent reinforcement does not occur the social cohesion disintegrates. If punishment does not follow acts of transgression social order crumbles. Social punishment is not omnipresent, thus acts of transgression tends to breed further acts of transgression. Rewards are easier to promise but harder to keep. If rewards that are promised are not soon realized, disillusionment and disenchantment with the social system soon follows. The primitive system must be maintained, the reward system can often be foregone. Individuals are motivated not to do certain acts of transgression, but are less often motivated to perform extraordinary acts of progressive behavior. Over reliance on punitive control systems to the neglect of positive reward systems results in social stagnation. The society is assured survival but is less adaptive to a changing environment.

No social system is completely punitive, nor can any be completely based on positive reward. Reward and punishment must necessarily coexist in any social system. Most social systems create a certain personality type, termed the authoritarian personality. The authoritarian represents the embodiment of the stereotyped ideals of his culture. The authoritarian stresses conformity to social standards. This personality type tends to have obsessions with anal characteristics, a predisposition with conformity, cleanliness, order, detail and time. He tends to have a closed unimaginative mind, lacking much introspection, creativity, individuality, is strongly prejudice towards out groups, is deficiency motivated more by fear for failure than by desire for reward, cannot function rationally in stress situations in a consistent manner, hides mistakes and often fails to correct them, is dogmatic and stubborn beyond reason, finds scapegoats, prone to inaction, is overly sensitive to criticism, has a leaning towards fanaticism in both religious and political beliefs, being easily subordinated both mentally and physically to a "higher" social order, a truly selfless believer and finally has an attraction and a tendency to lead a typically military way of life.

The authoritarian is socially dependent. He has externalized the bulk of his valuations, both negative and positive on quantitative materialism and on social distinctions. He needs to change his external environment--being obsessively deficiency motivated, by externally reinforcing his valuations on other people. His behavior and the underlying personality structure is one of doing less with more, a process of natural self disintegration. He is fear motivated and lacks courage to confront his own dilemma and to initiate the changes that would lead to positive fulfillment. Just as no social system is completely authoritarian, no personality is completely authoritarian. The authoritarian personality is the product of society. Everyone has these tendencies to some extent, some more than others. The authoritarian and his society share in a mutual symbiotic relationship, insuring the security of both and the propagation of the maladaptive patterning of each.

The social group as a whole is no better than the sum of its individual members. In a punitive system the threat is always more preferable to actual punishment. With a threat a victim has the motivation to keep from losing what is threatened but when the punishment is actualized all substance for the victim's growth motivation has been removed. Then a positive reward system must be implemented from scratch. A punitive system controls maladaptive behavior, a reward system provides direction for model behavior, supplying motivation instead of removing it. A reward system builds morale, and is much more effective than punitive measures in behavior modification. An adequate reward system negates the need for punitive system. A reward works toward maximizing the sum of the social group by maximizing the value of the individual constituents. A punitive system minimizes the sum of the social group by requiring minimum performance of the individual members. Only to the extent that the authoritarian personality type predominates the individual's personality matrix will a positive reward system be hindered in the extent of its values. Only to the extent which a social system has a firm grip on the minds of the individual constituents will a reward system fail to be implemented and need to be negatively reinforced by punitive system.

The prevalence of a punitive system is undesirable because what is dealt with is not a quantifiable substance but a qualitative value system. These are not hard and fast laws of nature, but only traits and characteristics of universal human personality matrix and of the resultant universal social organization which manifest themselves only as imperfectly defined tendencies which more or less infect every individual and society. Destruction, pain or punishment have no inherent physical value except in human qualitative value. It is the human element that is dealt with. It is the human who assigns qualitative value. This is the basis for the assumption that aggression becomes a moral issue. It is at this point in the socialization of aggression that the rationality of aggression becomes questionable. Aggression is altered from its rational natural form into an irrational and unnatural one.

A social system with a predominantly punitive control system and a minimal reward system, in which the human element becomes subservient to the externalized standards of the system, forms an authoritarian based power structure. Such a society is a closed system which stresses a maximum valuation on conformity to authority and a minimum valuation on individual fulfillment. A social system such as this tends to maximize incorporation of aggression and such aggression tends to take the form of militarism, scape-goating, and strongly prejudicial ideology. The authoritarian power structure insulates the social body from the external environment. Aggression finds an outlet against outcast within the social system or out groups external to the social system. Nazi ideology using the Jew as a scapegoat is a prime example in our time of an extremely authoritarian social system but many other more current examples exist. Such aggressive social behavior is fundamentally irrational. Social systems, the few existing which tend to be relatively open and to maximize social control through the reward system tend to be egalitarian and democratically organized societies without a high degree of racial or cultural insulation, stressing a minimum on conformity and a maximum on individuality. These social systems tend to be non-aggressive and more liberal. All in all the need to control others and the failure to gain individual self fulfillment are the strongest deficiency motivations for the prevalence of militarism.

Society is a reflection of the individual constituents. A social subconscious is a unique entity of a group of individuals subconscious behavior patterns. Every individual constituent is unique and every society is unique, relative to a single time and place. Every individual and every society is subject to a wide variation of social influences yet every one shares a common character which is the reflection of the common character of universal human nature.

The military is a subsystem of a larger social system. Militarism is one defect and symptom of a larger social disease. Militarism is not only a social problem by itself, but is also a part of a much more prevalent but less recognizable phenomenon. The social pathology of militarism manifested so prevalently today throughout international relationships of human society is yet a symptom of a more generalized social pathology which affects almost every sphere of human social activity. Understanding the nature of militarism leads to an understanding of the underlying phenomenon of a wider social disease. To solve the problem of militarism directly is to cure it, to deal with only one symptom of the whole disease. This would be a most difficult solution. To solve the more general pathology is to prevent the cause of militarism at its origin.

The more general underlying disease is a social pathology causing the social inhibition of the normative development of the individual's creativity. It is pathological in being alien to natural human growth, as such, it is fear based, deficiency motivated, mutually disintegrative and self destructive. This generalized pathology is unnatural and unhealthy to the common human personality matrix and it is therefore also pathological to and a derivative of that matrix. It is a fear founded deficiency motivated pathology which is inhibitive of natural normative growth of the growth maturation of the human personality. It becomes inertial deadweight to the progressive development of technological civilization. It is a mutually disintegrative, destructive, death oriented process of development which disrupts and displaces the human individual's integrative, decision making process and creative and normative growth. It is the heart of the individual immaturity and the source of neurotic social developments such as drug abuse, criminal behavior and prejudice, ignorance and social immobility. It is the source of much social injustice. Militarism is the clearest and best empirically discernible symptom of this subtle social pathology. It is not only inertial to the overall realization of social commonwealth, but it is the most malevolent manifestation causing the actual regression of civilization through the destructive nature of war, to which it has consistently in the past and must inevitably in the future lead.

Relative to militarism this general social pathology has several important influences on strategic thinking and on the economic health of society. In the first instance the disease of militarism creates a psychology of authoritarianism: non-dynamic, uncreative, unviable, dehumanizing the naturally human normative functioning. It leads to over centralization of social power into an authoritarian power structure, into the hands of a few, and becomes institutionalized into a continuing dogmatic character in which tradition has precedence to rational activity. The system becomes bureaucratized under the banner of officialdom with the resultant increase in inertial deadweight in a gradual almost imperceptible snowball growth and in eventual stagnation of human potential arising from the subsequent over specialization of each human's functionary role.

In the second instance it gives rise to the most prevalent doctrine of nationalism, resisting further political integration and justifying the crime of conscription which has tainted modern warfare with a peculiar tendency towards escalation, totality and brutality. Nationalism resists further social progress toward world peace. Underlying nationalism is a less understood elemental grand strategy of terrorism. This strategy relies almost exclusively on the threat and use of brute and destructive force to cause fear and manipulate human valuation. As the nuclear dilemma clearly demonstrates it is essentially an irrational, unproductive dead end to the future of human civilization. It tends to obscure more rational alternatives.

Militarism inflicts every society and culture, no group of humanity is completely immune from the common underlying normative pathology. It leads to nationalism and political and religious fanaticism. It infects democratic societies as well as dictatorial entities. Yet despite the variations its nature follows several distinctive patterns and increases dependence on force rather than the power of human valuation. It causes a net loss of actual egalitarian political functioning of a social group. It leads to an increased incidence of violation of human rights, increased inertia of social modernization and a decline of economic growth. It leads to eventual cultural stagnation. Its obsessive influences on the ongoing character of a human, of a social subsystem and of the whole of humanity, once fully developed, is almost impossible to eradicate completely.

The disintegrative effects of militarism to humanity and civilization not only influences the logistical, tactical and strategic functioning of a healthy society in the event of conflict, but also subtly and less directly, in terms of potential opportunity cost, infects the peace time interim periods of economic growth. It infects the peace time strategic orientation. It infects and hinders economic growth of all nations and the overall economic development of the world.

One well described and special instance of the malevolent, disintegrative and regressive effects of this general social pathological condition and of militarism in particular as one specific symptom are the effects on the logistical process of sustained peace time proliferation of a military economy and the overall economic influence this has on a nation's economy as a whole. It is the central cause of economic stagnation of the United States and has many indirect social side effects such as increased incompetence, inflation and economic stagnation, drug abuse, decline in educational proficiency and in technical vocational competence. The whole process of economic decay is well covered in the book "The Permanent War Economy" by Seymour Welman, which is here reviewed.

"The decline of the United States as an economic and industrial system is now well underway. This is a consequence of the normal operation of a thirty year military economy fashioned under government control at the side of civilian capitalism. The new state controlled economy, whose unique feature include maximization of cost and of government subsidies has been made into the dominant economic form in American capitalism.

Traditional economic competence of every sort is being eroded by the state capitalist directorate that elevates inefficiency into a national purpose, that disables the market system, that destroys the value of the currency and that diminishes the decision power of al institutions other than its own. Industrial productivity, the foundation of every nation's economic growth is eroded by the relentlessly predatory effects of the military economy.

All this began in the circumstance of World War 11 that made a war economy look like a boon to economy and society, apparently solving the economic problems of the Great Depression. But the self assured operators of the military economy that burgeoned from 1950 on never reckoned with the possibility that a permanent war economy would function as a parasite weakening the larger host economy that feeds it. The very perception of such developments had been made difficult by an ideological consensus about war economy that classifies this a source of economic health. Such ideology, by filtering what we look at, prevents us from seeing both the quality and the depth of the deterioration of American productive competence. The unintended effects of war economy have made is a prime cause of the stagnation it was invoked to solve.

Since the source of the negative effects of war economy is the sustained nonproductive use of capitol and labor, this process is not unique in the United States. It is shared by all states that try to sustain permanent war economies."

"…the ideological consensus that evolved from World War 11 transformed the justification for military spending from time limited economic effort to achieve a political goal (winning World War 11) to a sustaining means for government control of the economy. It is a central thesis of this book that this consensus of the economic benefits of military spending has played a vital role in marshaling the commitment of the American people to a permanent war economy.

There was hardly any interregnum between the end of World War 11 and the start of the political, economic land military confrontations that soon were defined as the Cold War. From the outset, methods of military containment, nuclear and non-nuclear were given high priority by American planners. The concept of a "permanent war economy" formulated in 1944 was soon made a reality. Once the Soviets exploded an atomic bomb in 1949 and the Korean War was fought (1950-1953) a regular annual portion of the American national product (7-10%) was spent on the military. Military industry was enlarged and mobilized to win an arms race that has no foreseeable end at this writing."

"…in sum, the belief that war brings prosperity has served as a powerful organizing idea for generating and cementing a cross society political consensus for active or tacit support of big military spending as a sustaining feature of American public life.

However, an outward appearance of economic health can belie an underlying reality of economic decay. In the experience of many people during the thirty years after World War 11, especially in the upper middle class and in the technical and administrative occupations, the expectation that war spending brings prosperity was borne out. What went unrecognized was that war economy produces other unforeseen effects, with long term destructive consequences. These include the formation of a new state managed economy, deterioration of the productive competence of many industries and finally the destruction of the dollar as a reliable store of value. These results were not visible to intellectuals and almost all others in the educational occupations. They assumed that increased money income (whatever the source) necessarily reflected more available wealth in the society. In fact, the $1,500 billion spent on the military since World War 11 produced no economically useful products for the society…

From the economic standpoint the main characteristic of war economy is that its products do nor yield ordinary economic use value, usefulness for the level of living (consumer goods and services) or usefulness for further production (as in machinery or tools being used to make other articles).

"…Furthermore, full American participation in World War 11 lasted only four years. The major heavy capital goods of American society could endure even under high capacity use. That meant that the railroads, the power plants, the roads, the dwelling, the principal factories all could be used through four years of wartime economy without basic replacement, but that is no model for a thirty year long war economy. During the extended period of war economy not only war major replacement required for things like power plants, communication systems, railroads, and the like, it was also necessary to make substantial improvements in the technical quality of machinery and facilities to produce new and more productive technology was required.

During the long period of the Cold War more than half of the research and development technical manpower of American society was drawn away from civilian industry and into work that was military supporting, directly or indirectly. The concentration of labor, especially skilled labor, and capitol over a long period to the nonproductive economic growth induced a set of deteriorations in American technology, economy and society that were not intended or anticipated by the prophets of prosperity through war production. An early analysis of the resultant industrial depletion was given in my book "Our Depleted Society" (1965).

A further consequence of the Cold War was a major transformation in the activity of the federal government, embodied in a new kind of institution that was set up to develop and manage America's expanding military systems. At first the military system was simply of a continuing "war economy" which may be said to exist as military spending becomes a continuing, significant and legitimate end purpose of economic activity. As the activity continued through the 1950's it took the shape of "military industrial complex" and was then transformed under Kennedy-McNamara into a full fledged centrally managed industrial system. In "Pentagon Capitalism" (1970) I outlined the main features of the new top management control organization that was set up in the Pentagon from 1961 on to regulate the managers of about 20,000 principal firms that serve the Department of Defense (apart from about 100,000 sub-contractors). This new organization represents a concentration of power hitherto unknown in American experience--industrially or politically. Only Soviet type societies have had comparable centralization of top economic, political and military authority. In form the new state management is comparable to the central offices used manage very large multi-division firms. "Pentagon Capitalism", while diagnosing various features of war economy, focused on the corporatization of the federal government. It was particularly concerned with the dynamic factors underlying the functioning of the new corporate type management institution in the Pentagon.

This book is directed to a broader problem, the nature of a new economic system, state capitalism, that operates a war economy. The new economy, erected at the side of and intertwined with the older business system, has firms that are a new economic breed. The textbooks and the literature of economies are based upon the interactions of model firms that minimize cost and maximize profit, doing that under more or less competitive conditions in the market places where the action is centered. A new kind of enterprise has become characteristic of military industry. This firm maximizes cost and maximizes subsidies from the state management. In this universe, patterns of managerial decision making rather than impersonal market interactions dominate the company scene."

"The history of arms production includes a record of substantial profit taking that continued into the arms race of the nuclear era. Once the Department of Defense decided to rely primarily on business enterprise rather than on government arsenals for research, development and production of weapons, the managers of such firms, old and new, lost no time in taking advantage of the opportunities for growth and profits that were afforded by escalating military budgets.

Even the development of elaborate rules, procedures and Pentagon staffs for negotiating and monitoring military contracts did not abort the opportunity for attractive business gains on government expense. Instead the government business relationship developed into a loosely structured collaborative form called the military industrial complex.

When Robert McNamara was installed as Secretary of Defense in 1961 all of this bilking of the public treasury by the military industrial complex was supposed to change. Cadres of men trained in the techniques of statistical analysis and managerial control were recruited for top positions at the Pentagon for the purpose of designing and operating the largest industrial central office in the world. The new Pentagon chiefs formalized control methods that were appropriate to the task of regulating more than twenty thousand sub-firms. The emphasized the introduction of analytical methods and standardized computer routines. In combination, these control techniques were supposed to yield "cost effectiveness" in the military industrial system.

From a statistical point of view, behavior is "under control" when it varies within predictable and acceptable magnitudes. In this sense, the price of a new military product is "under control" when it appears to be within range of known prices of similar or comparable products. In the world of military economy, however, "under control" has meant control around a rising average trend where the rising costs are incorporated as an inherent part of the price process. By accepting the record as a given condition, the Pentagon management perpetuated rising costs without determining whether the rising cost "history" is necessary--or why there is rising cost at all, especially since many technological improvement options have tended to reduce costs. However, following their "control" reasoning, McNamara's staff developed techniques for calculating the trend of military product prices through time and for predicting in that way the likely and apparently reasonable price of future products…

This "control" practice preferred by the Pentagon was swiftly accepted and incorporated into the procedures of the military industrial firms. They could present the cost and price record of a class of products as an acceptable baseline for formulating price bids on new products. However, these techniques of historical costing and pricing, while satisfying formal requirements of statistical control, do not necessarily afford a basis for cost efficiency or cost minimization. In fact the historical coasting techniques became centrally involved in pervasive cost and price increases in the military industry system.

With respect to cost, price and profit, the conditions of business success are significantly different for the managers of military serving as against civilian product firms. For a businessman intent on increasing his profits one of the available options is to raise the price of what he sells. Even if the rate of profit is constant, a higher price enables the businessman to earn a larger amount of profit. However the manager of civilian product firms are restricted in the use of this strategy. First, if competing firms choose not to raise their prices business can be lost to them. Second, customers may decide not to buy a product altogether , or to replace it with a substitute. That is why the managers of civilian industry firms, striving for maximum profit, have given close attention to a second strategy, minimizing their costs, mainly costs of production. The businessman can enlarge his profit margin by reducing costs, or by offsetting increases in the cost of, say, labor or raw materials, through improvements in his internal efficiency. In fact, this mode of operation has been a continuing feature of private capitalism from which gains were made by the society as a whole through the continued enlargement of the average productivity of the labor force.

In the economy of military industry, these conventional business rules have been revised. Big contracts especially are arranged by negotiation with one selected supplier, so there is no competitor selling to the single buyer, the Pentagon. And the Pentagon, having ordered a product, usually wants it. Thus even if the price turns out to be as much as three or four times the originally negotiated amount, the Pentagon finds the money to pay for it. Under such conditions, the managers of military industry firms are under no external pressures to do all of the demanding work of problem solving that is involved in trying to minimize costs through internal efficiencies. Why bother? If costs go up, so too can prices, and thereby profits. This in a nutshell, is the logic of cost maximization. Regardless of the formal technical diversity of Pentagon industrial contracts, this regular effect gives them the general characteristics of cost plus arrangements.

On the Pentagon side, rising prices have ordinarily been paid by asking for and getting more money in the annual budgets appropriated by Congress. Again the added money paid to the military serving enterprises is justified as being good for the economy as a whole making jobs and putting money into circulation. That is the logic of subsidy maximization, the readiness of government to pay more than the conceivable cost of given work if it were to be done under other than cost maximizing conditions.

These, then are the economic forces that made maximization of cost and maximization of subsidy into operating features of both the military industrial firm and the state management at the Pentagon that controls them. By "firm" I mean both the separately identified enterprise and the military serving divisions of larger civilian firms. There are no general instructions to these firms that read: Thou shalt maximize cost: Thou shalt maximize subsidy. These features are both legally prescribed and otherwise accepted as the way of life in military industry…"

"The Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline" by

Seymour Welman

Military Dimensions