PureIrony said:
Kids beat the shit out of each other because we are living in an age which glorifies violence to an almost masturbatory extent. That, and the fact that everyone in this generation seems to have no sense of self-control, and that should go double for children.
This is because we live in an age where both parents work and are too busy to raise their children so they stick them in front of the TV or buy them a Game Boy. This means that the newest generations are increasingly being raised by media rather than their parents. This doesn't bode well for humanity considering the media is capitalistic and profits by instilling consumerism in its viewership. The more impulsive people are the more profits there are to be made. This is not to say that capitalism is a bad thing. Capitalism is merely an economic system, and a generally efficient one at that. Consumerism, on the other hand, is a hollow and destructive value system.
OT: Violence is a perfectly natural part of human nature. It's true that it is destructive most of the time, but that doesn't mean that we should shy away from depictions of violence and pretend that we're something that we're not. You know what's bad? Fantasizing violence. People used to live in small communities where they would see violence and death on a regular basis, kids watched their fathers hunt, their mothers slaughter livestock, and their elderly and sick die. This lent gravitas and concreteness to the concepts of death and violence. In contemporary society we hide real death away in hospitals and slaughterhouses. We're only exposed to death and violence through the distortion of the media. Everyone thinks war is like Rambo or Call of Duty. There are very few accurate depictions of war in the media,
Saving Private Ryan might be considered one, but it still isn't the same as being there.
Another thing you have to remember about war is that it has changed radically over the past few centuries. War used to be a lot more personal, back when people fought with swords you used to look your enemy in the face when you killed him. That was no doubt a powerful experience, but it might actually have been LESS traumatic than modern war. The reason I say this is because modern war is random. You generally don't even see where the bullets come from, and the impression is that you'll be struck down by random chance and that you have little power over your own survival. Old warrior cultures used to praise war and warriors because they had a strong sense of agency in war. Your skill, bravery and physical strength were often what led to your survival, so it makes sense to instill value systems that promote these attributes. This leads not only to the success of individuals but also societies (yes, like it or not, war-like societies are generally more successful than their peaceful counterparts, largely because they tend to conquer their peaceful counterparts).
The contemporary mindset regarding warfare is best expressed in the principle of "sacrificing yourself for your country". That's why the media celebrates soldiers who die trying to save their comrades, rather than soldiers who kill a copious amount of enemy combatants. This is necessary because it is the only real way to deal with the horror and randomness of modern warfare. But video games express pretty much the polar opposite of this value system. They're just plain unrealistic. This is fine as long as people don't mistake video games for reality. The problem is that children need their parents to explain this distinction to them.
The sad fact of the matter is that, yes, the parents
are to blame. The parents are pretty much always to blame because at the end of the day it's up to them to talk to their child and make sure they are developing properly. If the media is distorting their child's perception of reality then they need to deprive the child of the media. If a parent doesn't have the time to do this then they shouldn't be a parent. No one has a
right to have children because children are human beings, not property. By bringing a child into the world a parent has taken upon him or herself a duty to provide that human being with the best care possible. If we start passing laws that are intended to make up for the failings of parents we are essentially admitting to the destruction and cultural irrelevance of the human family. Sad, but this is probably the way society will inevitably become. George Orwell and others were right to be skeptical of socialist movements that sublimated the role of the parents to that of the state in a child's upbringing. What they were tragically unaware of was the capacity for this same type of sublimation to occur naturally in capitalist societies where children are largely left to be raised by TV and other forms of digital media while their parents go off to work and then come home to vegetate in front of those same types of media.
