# Killology, Disaster Solidarity, and the Agriculture of War What if the capacity for violence is not our baseline — but the exception we have been carefully trained into? #### The Study of Killing In 1995, the psychologist and retired Army Ranger Lt. Col. Dave Grossman published On Killing, coining the term killology — the scholarly study of the physiological and psychological effects of killing and combat on the human mind. It is an uncomfortable field of inquiry, which is probably why it matters. Grossman’s foundational and most provocative claim is this: most human beings have a deep, innate resistance to killing their own kind. Not a moral objection, exactly — something more primitive and more stubborn than that. A biological recoil. The historical evidence he marshals is striking: studies of battlefield behaviour suggest that even trained soldiers in combat have frequently fired to miss, or not fired at all, rather than deliberately kill another human being. If this is true — and it remains contested — it carries an enormous implication. The capacity for organised, efficient killing is not our natural state. It is something that has to be manufactured. Trained into the body through conditioning until the resistance is overridden and lethal action becomes automatic. This is what modern military and law enforcement training sets out to do. And Grossman’s killology research group — now rebranded as Grossman On Truth — has been widely used to develop those training programmes, preparing soldiers and police to act under extreme stress without the hesitation that natural resistance would otherwise produce. #### The Cost of Overriding the Resistance Killology does not only study how to condition people to kill. It studies what that conditioning does to them afterwards. Grossman argues that being forced to kill — particularly in circumstances where the killing feels morally ambiguous or unjustified — is one of the primary drivers of PTSD. The resistance that was overridden in training does not simply disappear in the aftermath. It reasserts itself, often catastrophically, in the form of guilt, dissociation, nightmares, and moral injury. The conditioned soldier or officer is left carrying a psychological debt that the institution which trained them rarely helps them repay. Killology also extends its analysis into civilian life — arguing that violent media and video games function as a form of low-grade desensitisation, gradually eroding the natural resistance in young people who have never been near a battlefield. This claim is significantly more contested, and critics — including military scholars — have argued that Grossman’s broader framework overstates the case for innate resistance and does not always hold up against the full weight of historical and anthropological evidence. The controversy is real and worth holding. But the core insight — that killing is traumatic, that the trauma is structural rather than incidental, and that institutions bear responsibility for what they condition people to do — remains powerful regardless of where the edges of the argument blur. Enter Rebecca Solnit: What Disasters Actually Reveal Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell (2009) arrives at killology’s central question from a completely different direction — and its answer is quietly devastating to the assumption that violence is our default. Solnit examined what actually happens when disasters strike — earthquakes, floods, explosions, the immediate aftermath of catastrophe. The conventional assumption, reinforced by films, governments, and military planners alike, is that when the structures of order collapse, human beings revert to savagery. Panic. Looting. Violence. The thin veneer of civilisation stripped away to reveal the beast beneath. What Solnit found, across disaster after disaster, was almost precisely the opposite. In the immediate aftermath of catastrophe, most ordinary people become extraordinarily cooperative, generous, and capable. Strangers feed each other. Communities organise themselves with remarkable speed and effectiveness. A kind of joyful purposefulness emerges — what she describes as an experience of genuine solidarity that many survivors later describe as among the most meaningful of their lives. The violence and the looting tend to come later, and they tend to come from institutions — from authorities panicking about the loss of control, from elite groups protecting property, from the reimposition of hierarchy onto communities that had briefly and beautifully managed without it. Read alongside killology, Solnit’s evidence sharpens into something remarkable. If Grossman is right that killing requires conditioning to overcome natural resistance, and Solnit is right that cooperation and solidarity emerge spontaneously when structures collapse — then perhaps the question is not why human beings are capable of such violence. The question is what systems, what training, what conditioning, what sustained institutional effort is required to get them there. Tim Morton and the Agriculture of Violence The ecological philosopher Tim Morton offers a third angle through the concept of agrilogistics — his term for the operating system installed by the agricultural revolution approximately twelve thousand years ago, which he argues has been running beneath human civilisation ever since. Agrilogistics is not simply farming. It is a logic — a set of deeply embedded assumptions about the relationship between humans and the rest of the living world. Its core moves are: establish a boundary between the human and the nonhuman, treat everything outside that boundary as resource or threat, and organise society around the project of securing and expanding the perimeter. Morton argues that this logic is not merely ecological in its consequences — though those consequences are now existential. It is also a logic of violence. The same boundary-drawing that separates the human from nature also separates us from them, the civilised from the barbaric, the person from the enemy. Agrilogistics, in Morton’s reading, is the deep structure beneath colonialism, racism, nationalism, and war — the operating system that makes large-scale organised killing not just possible but, within its own terms, rational. This is where the three threads pull taut together. Killology identifies the training required to overcome natural resistance to killing. Solnit identifies the solidarity that emerges when that training and the institutions enforcing it temporarily lose their grip. Morton identifies the twelve-thousand-year-old logic that made the training necessary in the first place — the agricultural, boundary-drawing, resource-securing worldview that sorted the world into the killable and the protected long before any army existed. What This Means If Morton is right, the violence that killology trains people into is not a deviation from civilisation. It is one of civilisation’s most consistent products — the logical endpoint of a way of organising the world that has always depended on the drawing of lines and the defence of what lies inside them. If Solnit is right, the solidarity that disasters reveal is not a deviation from human nature. It is human nature — or at least a significant part of it — temporarily freed from the agrilogistical logic that otherwise suppresses it. And if Grossman is right, the fact that killing requires such elaborate conditioning to overcome natural resistance is itself a kind of testimony — evidence, written in the bodies and minds of soldiers, that something in us knows better. The paradise Solnit finds in hell is not a utopian fantasy. It is an empirical observation. And it is perhaps the most unsettling challenge available to the assumption that violence is simply what we are. [!note] A thread worth pulling All three thinkers — Grossman, Solnit, Morton — converge on a single uncomfortable question: what if the systems we have built to protect us are also the systems that make large-scale violence possible, necessary, and psychologically survivable? And what might we build instead if we took seriously the evidence that our deepest instincts run in a different direction entirely? Related reading: Dave Grossman, On Killing (1995) · Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell (2009) · Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (2016) · Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) · Joost Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind (1956) Related notes: [[Agrilogistics — Tim Morton]] · [[Ecological Philosophy]] · [[Democratic Theory]] · [[The Rape of the Mind — Joost Meerloo]] · [[Disaster Solidarity]] · [[Human Nature and Violence]] #killology #ecology #philosophy #violence #Sociology #agrilogistics #humannature #war #trauma