Reluctance to Kill vs. Trained Killing — The Psychological Paradox
- Reluctance to Kill (75-80% baseline refusal across combat contexts) - vs.
- Reluctance to Kill (75-80% baseline refusal across combat contexts) - vs. Gender Destruction: Warrior-Making (systematic suppression of the empathy/doubt/vulnerability that creates reluctance)
Keen documents that the overwhelming majority of soldiers do not kill even when ordered, permitted, and threatened with court-martial. Yet warriors are systematically trained to kill, and military systems demonstrably produce killing on command. These are incompatible unless the reluctance is either:
1. Routable — the machinery works not by eliminating reluctance but by circumnavigating it (distance weapons, moral delegation to authority, obedience structures, fragmentation of decision-making responsibility) 2. Reducible — a small percentage of humans lack reluctance naturally; institutional effort selects for them or creates them through sufficient trauma/conditioning 3. Context-Dependent — reluctance is strong in conscious, proximal killing but erodes under specific conditions (dehumanization, authority permission, group pressure, fatigue, threat to self)
The warrior-making machinery is not overcoming reluctance (which would be theoretically impossible given its universal baseline) but rather bypassing it through architectural separation of decision, action, and consequence.
Testing this requires examining: Do soldiers who maintain conscious connection to the reluctance-machinery (who see the target as human, acknowledge the dehumanization happening, feel the moral weight) reliably refuse to kill regardless of training? Or does the reluctance erode even with consciousness?
- Reluctance-to-kill must be a psychological mechanism, not just an emotional preference
- The machinery must work through specific bypass routes, not through destroying the mechanism
- Sufficient consciousness/reconnection to the mechanism should restore refusal capacity even in trained soldiers
- Institutional emphasis on preventing consciousness (degradation of target humanity, obedience without understanding, rapid decision-making) suggests the institution believes consciousness and reluctance are linked