What causes the GUNG HO attitude in young men?

[Philosoraptor]

You know, Gung Ho-ism, what is it? Testosterone in overdrive? Having something to prove? Releasing natural male agression?

What makes young men and women get this gung ho attitude? Some lose it after battle, some keep it till the day they die.

what is Gung Ho?
--------------------------

Pronunciation: 'g&-'hO
Function: adjective
Etymology: Gung ho!, motto (interpreted as meaning "work together") adopted by certain United States marines, from Chinese (Beijing) gOnghé, short for ZhOngguó GOngyè Hézuò Shè Chinese Industrial Cooperative Society
: extremely or overly zealous or enthusiastic

[Lasher]

1. My wife gets like that sometimes.

She calls it PMS.

[malaise]

6. LOL

Tell her to avoid the extra dose of sweet stuff that our bodies demand at that time such as pastry & chocolates and replace with fruit then watch PMS disappear forever. Exercise also helps. Been there, done that.

[itzamirakul]

18. No, no, malaise! Nothing is worth giving up pastry and chocolate...

Make your family suffer if you must, but EAT THAT DOGGONE BROWNIE! :)

[malaise]

22. LOL

I merely postponed the pastry and chocolates until after potential PMS days.:D

[BOSSHOG]

2. I'm reminded of an amusing anecdote

relative to your post.

An old bull and a young bull are standing on a hillside looking down at a field of heifers. The young bull says lets run down there and fuck one of them heifers. The old bull says lets mosy down and fuck em all. I know that doesn't answer your question only intensifies it. Another great "old" saying - "youth is wasted on the young."

Testosterone and Alcohol, one helluva gungho combination.

[malaise]

8. On the other hand

the only way old men get young girls is to send the young ones off to war.

[itzamirakul]

19. Right! Because even though they may be too old to cut the mustard...

they can still lick the lid!:evilgrin:

[malaise]

23. You forgot their new bible

Viagra :D

[itzamirakul]

33. Yeah, Viagra and some of these new "extenders" are helping

these old dudes sit around and lick their own eyebrows....:crazy:

[havocmom]

13. Always wondered if there was an evolutionary element to it.

Them young bulls tend ta wanna jump fences and get to other bull's cows now and then. Seems some fightin also ensues...

Seriously, I have wondered if part of the urge for battle in younger males is programmed into the human. Get the young, virile males to travel a bit. Sort of a way to mix the genes up more and ensure survival of the species through more combinations.

Then, there is the advantage the OLD bulls have at home if they can encourage the young ones into heading for other pastures. ;)

[sgxnk]

14. lol

joke referenced in the movie "colors" btw.

told by michael duvall to sean penn


GREAT movie

with a small role by "rico suave" gerardo i might add

[Totally Committed]

3. Testosterone.

Hate Radio.

And, more testosterone.

TC

[skooooo]

5. ditto

[Bluebear]

25. You said it.

[PaDem]

4. George W. Bush............

a man's man.

[Arugula Latte]

30. Yes ... Pay no attention to the fact he's afraid of horsies and

went AWOL and he can't walk, ride a bike, or sit on a couch without falling to the ground occasionally ...

(shhhhhh)

;)

[PaDem]

32. hey, it'd be fun to have a beer with him, right?

plus he talks like you and me......or something like that.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

7. MTV.

video games

[HarukaTheTrophyWife]

27. There were plenty of "gung ho" young men before MTV & video games.

Isn't that what fundies like to blame stuff on?

[asthmaticeog]

9. Hormones, selected in over millenia.

Remember that for most of our evolution, life expectancy was around 30 years, and humans lived in a very unforgiving nature-state. Males who didn't have that quality would tend to lose in fights over food and mates to males who did have it. So it was really amped-up males that would most often survive and breed. While we often deplore that now, we may often forget that it was essential to our being here now. While those of us in Western nations don't really *need* that to survive, it's still very much a part of us. Evolution takes longer than ideas need to take hold; human bodies haven't had time to catch up to our noblest ideals.

[Armstead]

10. There's good Gungh Ho and bad Gung Ho

The reasons for Gung Ho are pretty much what you stated in young people.

But I see Gung Ho as something that's basically a neutral power. There's bad Gung Ho and there's good Gung Ho.

We all see the terrible results of bad Gung Ho.

But it can also be positive. Howard Dean has managed to keep a good Gung Ho going into middle age, for exmmple. In fact, the famous Dean Scream was actually just ol' Howard getting carried away with his Gung Ho.

I think the trick is to redirect Gung Hoism to positive ends, instead of associating it with riught wing craziness.

[LUHiWY]

11. ???

a kind of competition? Were you in Raq?

a type of repressed homosexuality?

[lonestarnot]

12. Testosterone and direction or lack thereof in upbringing.

The inculcation of group think is a family thing. Follow the leader is a drill.

[Metta]

15. Undirected testosterone, ignorance, needing a scapegoat.

Especially in battle or in business.

[itzamirakul]

16. For some, it is probably the thrill and excitement of battle..

(gung ho in relation to the current wars). If they (some of them) weren't fighting "over there" they would probably be fighting each other gung ho on American street corners, playgrounds and outside of bars.

It allows some of them to bring video gung ho-style games into physical realities.

It allows some of them to release the gung ho racial hatreds that they have grown up absorbing.

Some of them are gung ho mentally unstable, as we have seen.

Some are blindly patriotic and believe totally in what they are doing and that gung ho killing of people will somehow bring peace. Good luck to them 20 years from now.

Some didn't expect to have to go into battle, but once there have developed gung ho just to look "normal" among their fellow soldiers.

Some feel the gung ho need to prove that they are not "mama's boys."

Some fell for the recruiters' gung ho hype.

Some are just gung ho about BEING gung ho. They are willing to join and follow the gung ho crowd.

Some have a secret gung ho death wish and love the opportunity of defeating and disappointing death.

For some, gung ho activities substitute for or allow the release of sexual energy.

[Captain Hilts]

17. It's people in groups. Women have fewer such opportunities. nt

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

20. Ironically, the term originated with the Commusts 8th Route Army.

Even more ironically, I learned about it's origins when I was in the marines and the "Red Chinese" were still considered a major enemy. My outfit was even deployed to Taiwan during one of the "tense" periods.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gung-ho

Gung-ho is a phrase borrowed from Chinese, frequently used in English as an adjective meaning enthusiastic. The original Mandarin Chinese phrase is Gōnghé (工合), a standard abbreviation for gōngyè hézuòshè (工業合作社), meaning industrial worker's cooperative. (It is true that gōng means work and hé means together, but gōnghé by itself is not a standard Chinese term and serves only as an abbreviation for gōngyè hézuòshè: an English-language analogy of a not-fully-comprehensible abbreviated phrase would be "IndCoop".)

The phrase entered the American vernacular when it was picked up by then-Major Evans F. Carlson, USMC. According to Carlson, it was used as a slogan by the WW2-era Communist Party of China's 8th Route Army, led by Zhu De.

The phrase was originally coined by Rewi Alley, a New Zealander who went to China in the 1920s and whose contribution to the country was later recognised when he became modern China's first honorary citizen. The industrial workers co-operatives that were formed as part of the Gung-ho movement stemmed from Helen Foster (Peg) Snow, wife of American journalist Edgar Snow. Peg Snow suggested to Rewi Alley that China needed widespread industry through the establishment of a movement (Alley, 1987).

Carlson traveled with the 8th and with Rewi Alley. Later he used gung ho during his (unconventional) command of the 2nd Marine Raider Battalion. From there it spread throughout the Marine Corps (hence the association between the two) and into American society as a whole. It is now often used in the ironic sense of excessively enthusiastic, overzealous.

[zalinda]

21. Stupidity

Teenagers, especially boys, think nothing bad will ever happen to them. They think they can live forever. They take amazing risks. There is a time when you are under your parents rule, and when you hit the teen years, you rebel and all hell breaks loose. Normally sane kids do insane things, like rrr's daughter. Consequences are not considered for their actions, they just do it. Biology, evolution, or just pulling away from your parents, who really knows why they do it.

zalinda

[Nashyra]

24. Just Joining the military

does not mean that some young people are "gungho" Some join because they think they can actually make a difference. They think they have the potential to be better leaders. How do you explain college graduates joining the military? There are some of them out there and the ones I know are not all about killing, they are about knowing leadership from the ground up in more than one aspect.

[HarukaTheTrophyWife]

28. My friend (on his 2nd extended tour in Iraq) joined because after college

he couldn't find a job that paid enough to live on and he had tons of student loans. The military offered to pay back all his loans and gave him a big signing bonus. He felt it was an offer he couldn't refuse, plus he also felt that the military needs more liberals in it.

[TygrBright]

26. I am beginning to examine the possibility...

...that Western social institutions formed over the last 200 years no longer serve our species well in terms of raising healthy, functional (in the larger social sense) males. In non-Western cultures there are many mechanisms for directing the 'gung ho' energy of young boys and teaching and enforcing cultural and social norms and standards.

Even historically, you can see vestiges of this in Western cultures in the institutions of apprenticeship, military service, cultural traditions of 'chivalry,' etc. Of course, these things all worked well because they were (essentially) created by and for males in a male-dominant cultural matrix. The loss of the absolute male-dominant culture devalues those institutions and they have not yet been superceded by anything coherent and positive. You can see the 'gang culture' groping in that direction, but of course it's not a positive force and does nothing to integrate boys and young men into the larger community and cultural norms.

We need to find positive ways to value the differences in how males generally develop and learn, how they apply energy and focus, and channel that into new institutions that will give them important roles in a more egalitarian, leisure-available, industrialized world.

Caveat: Boys and young men AS INDIVIDUALS vary widely and cannot be held to a stereotype, model, etc. However, boys GENERALLY do show many developmental characteristics that are different than girls. While culture affects and reinforces gender expectations, the differences do appear to go beyond what can be explained by culture. If I speak generally in the following paragraphs, it's on this basis, I am not making blanket assumptions that "all males" are such-and-such, or that differences don't exist and matter, etc. /caveat

Starting with pre-school and elementary education, it is clear that our system needs adjustment to better serve ALL of our children, boys AND girls. Early education needs to mix gender-segregated learning contexts with gender-mixed contexts to better serve both. Male-group bonding needs to start early with positive adult male role models, and needs to focus on developing confidence and social competence among peers and introduction to social values.

Males tend to function better in heirarchies and respond better to competition. Females tend to function better in egalitarian groups and respond better to cooperation. Each needs time to learn and grow strong in these inherent modes and also needs structured encouragement to develop confidence in each others' modes. (i.e., Boys need to learn the skills to function well in a more egalitarian, cooperative society, and girls need to learn the skills to function well in heirarchies with competitive norms.)

The modern institution of the family no longer offers a consistent matrix for certain types of developmental learning. Family structure is too heterogenous for society to rely on family alone to consistently perform some developmental tasks to assist. One danger we are seeing today is the success of efforts by those who would destroy the secular nature of our society to build a socializing network for young people in the context of church-based groups that promote horrendously anti-social values. These replace an older, more positive system of church-based groups that functioned well as an adjunct to family- and school-based socialization for a broader cross-section of youth.

One reason the authoritarian, reactionary, anti-secular right wing has mounted such a sustained, powerful attack on public education is that it is the single most important tool our society has for forming social and cultural norms. They have (correctly, in my opinion) focused on detaching young people from the larger social context and structuring their development around outdated male-dominant norms, with enormous power and effectiveness. They are harnessing 'boy power' and suppressing 'girl power' through early education and development, and in consequence are creating a tough, resilient anti-social subculture that is far better equipped to achieve its goals than the larger society.

We can't deal effectively with this until we re-orient our social institutions to harness 'boy power' AND 'girl power' to educate and nurture strong, positive young people focused on the goals so critical to our species' survival right now.

That means a massive makeover of the public education system that will infuriate all of the stakeholders, and a massive investment in a service program that will merge military service with a Peace Corps/CCC-type model and give all young people the experience of working cooperatively for the benefit of the community for a year or two.

It will take a couple of generations, at least.

dubiously,
Bright

[formercia]

29. Warrior Nation

We are a product of our environment. From a young age we are all trained to be warriors.

[warrens]

31. Incomplete personality development nt