There is a clear distinction between actual violence and posturing. Oxford social psychologist Peter Marsh notes that this is true in New York street gangs, it is true in “so-called primitive tribesmen and warriors,” and it is true in almost any culture in the world. All have the same “patterns of aggression” and all have “very orchestrated, highly ritualized” patterns of posturing, mock battle, and submission. These rituals restrain and focus the violence on relatively harmless posturing and display. What is created is a “perfect illusion of violence.” Aggression, yes. Competitiveness, yes. But only a “very tiny, tiny level” of actual violence.
“There is,” concludes Gwynne Dyer, “the occasional psychopath who really wants to slice people open,” but most of the participants are really interested in “status, display, profit, and damage limitation.” Like their peacetime contemporaries, the kids who have fought in close combat throughout history (and it is kids, or adolescent males, whom most societies traditionally send off to do their fighting), killing the enemy was the very least of their intentions. In war, as in gang war, posturing is the name of the game