人間の本性は悪なのか？ #477

The strange data on soldiers who wouldn't shoot

Of the 27,575 muskets recovered from the Gettysburg battlefield, 90% were still loaded — meaning they had never been fired. Similar reports exist from the Napoleonic Wars, where soldiers deliberately missed their targets: given the firing rates of the era, units should theoretically have been able to kill 100 people, but in practice only 1-2 people were killed per minute. Even in World War II, the firing rate among American riflemen was only 15-20%. The soldiers who didn't fire weren't fleeing — they willingly took on tasks more dangerous than shooting, such as rescuing the wounded or carrying ammunition. Fukai (Fukai) introduced this data, arguing that, contrary to the common belief that "human nature is violent," it actually reveals a strong psychological resistance to killing one's own kind.

How distance creates the inability to kill

According to the book, the closer the distance to the person being killed, the greater the psychological burden; the farther away, the smaller the burden. One theory holds that spears remained in use longer than swords or blades through the Middle Ages not simply because of their length advantage, but because they created enough distance for a soldier to tell himself he was "sweeping," not "stabbing." The long spears (sarissas) of Macedonian heavy infantry can be interpreted the same way. With mid-range weapons like rifles, the enemy's facial expressions and voice no longer reach the shooter, and with long-range weapons like missiles and aerial bombing, psychological trauma becomes even less likely. Data was also introduced showing that sailors, compared to ground troops who kill by their own hand directly, are less prone to mental illness.

The Vietnam War and the conditioning-driven surge in firing rates

The reason the firing rate among American soldiers jumped to over 90% during the Vietnam War was Pavlovian conditioning training. Training shifted from leisurely shooting at round targets to human-shaped pop-up targets that appeared and fell in an instant, with immediate rewards for hits and punishment for misses, building the ability to fire reflexively before conscious thought. As a result, while it took an average of 50,000 rounds of ammunition to kill a single enemy soldier in Vietnam overall, snipers who had undergone this conditioning training killed with an average of just 1.39 rounds. But a war with a thin sense of just cause, anti-war sentiment upon returning home, and experiences of guerrilla warfare that involved civilians combined to leave many returning veterans suffering from PTSD.

The shared structure of drone strikes and social media harassment

Modern remote weapons like drones share the same structure. According to The Philosophy of Drones (Drone no Tetsugaku), drone operators live in cities, and after work they go out for a drink and spend time with their families like anyone else. Fukai likened this to social media harassment. As photography critic Ken Oyama (Oyama Ken) has pointed out, abuse that would be exhausting to deliver face-to-face can be hurled one-sidedly through a smartphone screen, where the other person's face is invisible. Horimoto (Horimoto) cited examples of people who don't change their attitude in person even toward those they've criticized — such as the episode where he directly told QuizKnock graduate Ko-chan (Kochan) about criticism of him in person, and the story of Kominehizumi, a critic of "as-if humanism," who showed up alone at a Loft event.