We indoctrinate society with war and violence, and then wonder when society gets violent...

[galileoreloaded]

when as a society we glorify dehumanization and violence on one hand, and then act all aghast when the geography changes and it manifest closer to home.

We reap what we sow, and both ideologies are complicit. See Iraq, Af/Pak, and the the continued doctrine therein.

[ixion]

1. violence is ubiquitous in the universe, however, we do glorify violence, collectively speaking

and that is one of our fatal flaws, literally; and the product of a species that doesn't use the one decent muscle it has: its brain.

[LibDemAlways]

2. True. No one could look at what we're spending on Iraq and Afghanistan

and argue otherwise. When I think of the term "civilized country," I'm not thinking of the U.S.

[jotsy]

3. I believe there are other components in play that muddy matters even more.

There are layers of conditioning generations of this public. I've no doubt the PTB views us by and large as Pavlovian, but that didn't happen in quite a natural fashion.

A Yale professor named Stanley Milgrim conducted an experiment back in the 60's about authoritarianism that yielded very surprising results. Psychologists of the day had contended that no more than one in twenty would comply with orders to administer increasingly strong volts to another, yet a significantly higher portion complied with given directives to continue.

How likely is it that all the wrong people have been working the hell out of those results ever since?

When advertising works, at its root, what it is successful in creating is envy, which I would be apt to contend is a first cousin to insecurity. It is that Achilles heel that has been exposed, enhanced and then exploited.

[Romulox]

4. We've been in one war or another constantly since I was born.

It seems to me that we've lost most of the ones I can think of... :shrug:

[jaksavage]

5. Half of our GDP

Half!