Has modern culture lost touch with the warrior ideal?

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The family man espouses a hunter ethic. It is the James bond/modern hero type that promulgates the way of the warrior.

A hunter is one who provides. A warrior takes what is not his by force.

You are either mixed up or you are nostalgic for the wrong thing.

Yupa wrote:
Has it?
It seems that historically, among ancient and medieval European and Asian cultures and a number of Native American cultures it was seen as respectable and honorable to stand up for and defend what you believed in, not by marching around holding up signs and shouting bland slogans, but by breaking enemy ranks and slaying foes, even as recently as World War II.
However, it seems like post-Vietnam modern culture seems to have lost touch with the idea of the honorable warrior, and with that archetype blatantly trampled and spat upon by self-professed peace activists, who want us to deny and hate our history, an important archetype is missing from our collective cultural consciousness, and that seems to bespeak a tragic lack in the stories and concepts that inspire us as human beings.

Yupa is, after all, a 19 year old kid who has been captivated by the romantic nonsense of the glories of the hero overcoming evils and righting all wrongs. This is not to deny that 19 year olds can think clearly. He stands in stark contrast to Orwell who may have some problems in my view but in general he has a wonderful grasp of realities.
But to ignore the events and consequences of the US experience in Viet Nam is a frightful lack of comprehension. Millions of Vietnamese and tens of thousands of young Americans were brutally murdered in a conflict for no cause other than the delusions of the leaders of the USA and the West about theoretical politics.

There is no justification for this mindless savage butchery under any circumstances and certainly none under the romantic delusions of naive worship of the status of a warrior. The rout of US forces at the end of the conflict has not resulted in any severe danger to the USA and the more or less reasonable current relations of the USA and Viet Nam testify to the total uselessness of the idiotic conflict. A warrior as such is an instrument of its culture to be used wisely or badly just as any weapon can be so utilized. In general the eagerness to indulge in savage butchery does no credit to cultures throughout history and soldiers have probably been more used for ineffective or destructive ends than beneficial ones. Individual soldiers are not encouraged to decide whether their actions are wise or evil. The training of soldiers in general is to deprive them of the normal cultural conditioning towards compassion and reason and that is not a beneficial use of the potentials of any human being.

Thus spake an ex soldier.

Yupa, you understand that Sand knows what hes talking about, because he actually trained and served in world war II?

I would like to claim validity on that basis but I never was put into combat and cannot make that claim. But there is enough general evidence for that throughout all the factual material written by the many men who have had that experience and have suffered physically and mentally for the rest of their lives for what they found necessary to do to survive and to help their companions survive. This is no secret. War is total misery for all involved and only a rather stupid homicidal maniac could feel inspired by it.

It is my understanding(as a noncombatant) that the basic training process fosters comradeship with ones unit, a reflex action to danger and a skill set to fall back upon.

This certainly wouldnt be combat experience, but it is the beginning of the conditioning process, is it not?

I was also told that the idea behind the drill Sargent being a complete a-hole was so that your fury and hatred would be focused on him instead of team mates, at least until you entered the combat theatre, where the enemy would serve that role.

You once said you dislike guns. Was this true before your enlistment, or something that developed later?

The basic conditioning process is deeper than emplacement of a "them against us" mindset. It involves an automatic compliance to follow any order given by superiors. It destroys any individual capability to think about what has to be done irrelevant as to how it might conflict with logic or personal emotional reaction. Any army cannot function properly without this automatism since no individual soldier can be aware of the circumstances for which that order was given. And this psychological mechanism is heavily enforced because many lives and the success of any mission depends upon it. This is basic and it is basically inhuman and permits the most outrageous violations of common humanity. But that is the nature of war.

The basic love of weapons arises out of a sense of personal insecurity. A gun bestows the power of death upon the holder and all my life I have hated the death of anything alive since I am fully aware of the intricate beauty and structural wonder of anything alive from the most primitive cell to the full wonder of the huge and varied creatures that inhabit the oceans and the delightful efficient animals that skim through the skies or the fascinating creatures like ourselves that can mentally encompass galaxies and atomic particles. There is simple beauty in many weapons but an inherent horror in their function to destroy the complexity of life, frequently out of fear and stupidity and ignorance.

Compassion should extend only to one's people/tribe and those one's people/tribe take under their wing or are taken under the wing of. Any sense of compassion beyond that is unreasonable and foolish and weakens the soul and mind. Over-extensive compassion causes the spirit to become lazy and unfit to continue to survive without some kind of crutch for support.
How one can't be inspired by tales of battle is something I fail to understand: ancient sagas that tell of sweeping, stirring wars, of men against men, and men against gods and spirits, of gods against giants and demons, and all of these tales lend a valuable cultural archetype, of those who defend and those who rebel and those who undertake the honorable task of, as has been said, "taking by force what is not theirs," which is something that takes a lot of courage. Most are too cowardly to take what isn't theirs, yet the Norsemen of old had the courage to take the treasure and property and women and of the English and Irish by force, and would risk their lives and shed gallons of red to do so. That's something you have to admire. Yet the tales of warriors, both true and false, are now treated the same way a backwoods midwestern farmer with no indoor plumbing would have treated the latest issue of the Sears-Roebuck catalogue: as toilet paper. Just imagine how different the world would be if the United States had not been under the leadership of a man who was willing to help the other Allied powers defeat Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini, or what would have happened if the south had been allowed to secede from the Union and continue the practice of keeping and abusing slaves.

I'd say those applications of brutality have done more honor to humanity than can possibly even be imagined.

You could say the same thing about a hunter. A hunter takes deer, boar, and various other animals that "aren't his." I don't see how that's any different from killing a human being.

The structural complexity of life is exactly why it's important to destroy it, in addition to the fact that life is almost overly common on Earth. Life, especially human life, is like gold or oil or money or any other resource: its value goes down the more of it there is. With 6 billion people on earth, I don't see what's wrong with a few dying.

The code of the warrior is alive and well. Those who stand up with signs that protest the wrongs in society, often giving up their freedom (being jailed) for the good of the whole. A warriors duty is not to kill, but to protect... and to protect those who are unable to protect themselves. To stand for justice. Rights will never die as long as someone is willing to stand up for them.

Those who kill for money and fame are not warriors, they are nothing but common thugs. Maybe AS has my buying into this whole honor thing... but when the chips are down I would rather have a Marine than a Blackwater Employee at my side.

Whatever glory humanity can demonstrate to any future intelligence that may emerge it will not come from its ability to destroy its members in bloodshed and torture and cruelty and ignorance. It will come from being able to understand mutual problems and provide peaceful and sensible solutions. Violence engenders violence and the horrors of any war leave behind bitter memories that last for centuries and engender future meaningless violence. There is no glory in battles, only the nasty business of cleaning up vicious stupidities much as a garbage collector cleans up a disgusting mess and the stench of any necessary brutality pollutes the cultural air almost unendingly.

Glorious battle is the idiotic dream of an immature unthinking mind that has never experienced it. There is nothing worthy in murder whether it is sponsored by individual psychosis or that of a nation.

Umm... ok? The issue is that today we end up having a lot of instances where other people not in one's nation or who speak one's language are still valuable because they are current or future trade partners, or because excessive aggression would be believed to cause more problems. Additionally, I am not sure how you figure out what is "unreasonable compassion", as in order to do so, one must make emotions purposive. The problem is that emotions don't necessarily all submit to one overriding purpose and it isn't too wrong for them to not. Additionally, "unfit to survive" is also questionable because I can imagine a lot of people who could survive and thrive today and who will have compassion for enemies.


Tales of battle are irrelevant to the modern age to a great extent, and instead, the greater desire is to reduce violence and end these kinds of noble struggles to replace them with a more scientific violence.

The issue is that "taking by force what is not theirs" just leads to zero-sum games. Modern wealth is built upon the possibility of on-going growth, and this cannot take place if all of our resources are diverted to zero-sum games. For that reason, it makes sense for us to ignore the value of zero-sum games for growth games.

Why do you have to admire the thievery of unproductive brutes over the prudence of productive workers? We are ideological descendants of the latter, not the former. So, why honor the defeated, and barbaric enemies of our people over the successful strategies of our own tribe?

Here's the thing though: in both wars, we had highly productive nations with a limited military ethic defeat nations with much more exalted military focus. In WW2 militarism was a characteristic of the fascist nations, and the US was actually considered a soft nation for it's democracy, liberality, and capitalistic nature. In the Civil War, the North was just a land of industrialists, while the south had most of the great generals and skilled soldiers of the time. In both wars though, numbers and productivity (and in the case of Japan, technological superiority) won over military spirit. So why exalt the warrior spirit, when the trader's ethic and the producer's efforts are our basis of strength?


Maybe, but other people apparently disagree.

We can't communicate with animals, we can't trade with animals, we can't mate with animals, we can't induct animals into our tribe, and animals cannot create things like we can.

Temple Grandin begs to differ. Actually, anyone who owns a pet or works in a zoo would beg to differ.


Oh, really?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoophilia


Explain household pets, seeing eye dogs, k-9 units, and service animals


Explain wasps' nests and beaver dams

Let me put it in these terms: animals cannot use the internet, written language, spoken language, or anything like that. We can find ways to convey certain bits of information to them, but we cannot really have a full dialog with any animal, or debate, or exchange of ideas, or give complicated instructions with any ease, or anything like that.


Sex and mating are different. I can masturbate, but I cannot mate with myself.


They are toys and tools. They do not have the rights that people have in our society.


Nothing to explain. They cannot create things like we can. Beavers have yet to build an industrial plant, and wasps have yet to mine for silver. Saying "animals cannot create things like we can" does not mean "animals cannot create". It means that they cannot do so to the same degree as we can. The better examples are really the tools that apes develop, but the issue there is still that we easily outstrip their capabilities.

It would be a great educational experience for Yupa to spend an extended time in the most dangerous areas of Iraq or Afghanistan where random death is now extant under the current conditions of modern warfare, where no one is ever sure the ground may release death merely by stepping on it, where companions are daily blasted to bloody fragments for no obvious reason, where soldiers are placed in terrible danger for no obvious reason or gain to the nation, where hatred for all sorts of real and imagined reasons runs rampant. It is a hellish experience and a place where idiots can learn a great deal about warrior ideals.

But then, as I have learned at his site, there are some individuals who do not have the capacity to observe, think and learn. Hopefully they will indulge in their apparent predisposition to mate with other species and thereby eliminate their genes from human lines.