Human Nature is Not a Trap
Ruth Benedict
FAILURE
OF
NERVE is not the same disease in every civilization.
Some nations stand most firmly and with unexhausted courage
when all is apparently lost, some resign themselves to fate. These
patterns are clear not only in resistance to a foreign enemy but
in internal conflicts; they stand out· most sharply in resistance to
an outside invader. Even primitive tribes and kingdoms, when
they are called upon to face the inexorable spread of White civili–
zatio.n, force on our attention _the importance of knowing what
form collapse will take in any culture. Whole kingdoms, like
the Incas of Peru, or the aboriginal states of Mexico accepted
White domination in the age of the conquistadors with a rapidity
and a painlessness which is one of the curiosities of history. Their
capitulation involved no failure of nerve in the populace. They
merely exchanged one overlord for another, and they naturally
did not see this as involving any question of preserving the in–
tegrity of their existence.
If
eventually they were the more de–
ceived, that was a circumstance they had to bear as they could,
sometimes sullenly, sometimes with resignation. They gave up
the battle almost before it started and they doggedly continued
to operate along their old familiar lines even in catastrophe.
The free tribes of the Americas, whether they were Abipones
in South America or Dakotas in North America, took an exactly
opposite course. They valued their personal autonomy above all
things and saw life as a series of decisions they themselves made.
All
their integrity was called in question by any act of capitula–
tion. They saw nothing of value in the peonage or the wardship
the Whites offered them and they fought and fought and fought
again. Many fought themselves to actual extermination; in South
America some fled to the jungles of the Amazon or the wastes of
the Gran Chaco. Whatever happened, morale meant to them re–
sistance, and capitulation was a proof that they had lost their
nerve.
When they were disarmed and trapped and forced to
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