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The Warrior Ethos

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The Warrior Ethos

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Highlights & Notes

The Spartans do not ask how many are the enemy but where are they. —Plutarch

The Warrior Ethos is not, at bottom, a manifestation only of male aggression or of the masculine will to dominance. Its foundation is society-wide. It rests on the will and resolve of mothers and wives and daughters—and, in no few instances, of female warriors as well—to defend their children, their home soil and the values of their culture.

Every warrior virtue proceeds from this—courage, selflessness, love of and loyalty to one’s comrades, patience, self-command, the will to endure adversity.

At a deeper level, the Warrior Ethos recognizes that each of us, as well, has enemies inside himself. Vices and weaknesses like envy and greed, laziness, selfishness, the capacity to lie and cheat and do harm to our brothers. The tenets of the Warrior Ethos, directed inward, inspire us to contend against and defeat those enemies within our own hearts.

The Warrior Ethos evolved to counter the instinct of self-preservation.

Shame. Honor. And love.

The concepts of shame, honor and love imply moral judgment. Right and wrong. Virtues and vices.

Ethos is derived from the same Greek root as ethics. The Warrior Ethos is a code of conduct—a conception of right and wrong, of virtues and of vices.

Every honorable convention has its shadow version, a pseudo or evil-twin manifestation in which noble principles are practiced—but in a “dark side” system that turns means and ends on their heads.

The Warrior Ethos, on the contrary, mandates respect for the enemy. The foe is granted full honor as a fighting man and defender of his home soil and values.

Individuals in a guilt-based culture internalize their society’s conceptions of right and wrong. The sinner feels his crime in his guts. He doesn’t need anyone to convict him and sentence him; he convicts and sentences himself.

Warrior cultures (and warrior leaders) enlist shame, not only as a counter to fear but as a goad to honor. The warrior advancing into battle (or simply resolving to keep up the fight) is more afraid of disgrace in the eyes of his brothers than he is of the spears and lances of the enemy.

“soft lands make soft people.” His answer became famous throughout the world: Better to live in a rugged land and rule than to cultivate rich plains and be a slave.

Courage is inseparable from love and leads to what may arguably be the noblest of all warrior virtues: selflessness.

Selflessness produces courage because it binds men together and proves to each individual that he is not alone. The act of openhandedness evokes desire in the recipient to give back.

Selflessness. The group comes before the individual.

This is another key element of the Warrior Ethos: the willing and eager embracing of adversity.

The payoff for a life of adversity is freedom.

If shame is the negative, honor is the positive.

Honor, under tribal codes, is a collective imperative. If a man receives an insult to his honor, the offense is felt by all the males in his family. All are mutually bound to avenge the affront.

Honor is the psychological salary of any elite unit. Pride is the possession of honor.

The will to fight, the passion to be great, is an indispensable element of the Warrior Ethos. It is also a primary quality of leadership, because it inspires men and fires their hearts with ambition and the passion to go beyond their own limits.

Several aspects of this quip—and Leonidas’s remark about “sharing dinner in hell”—are worth noting. First, they’re not jokes. They’re dead-on, but they’re not delivered for laughs. Second, they don’t solve the problem. Neither remark offers hope or promises a happy ending. They’re not inspirational. The deliverers of these quips don’t point to glory or triumph—or seek to allay their comrades’ anxiety by holding out the prospect of some rosy outcome. The remarks confront reality. They say, “Some heavy shit is coming down, brothers, and we’re going to go through it.” Lastly, these remarks are inclusive. They’re about “us.” Whatever ordeal is coming, the company will undergo it together. Leonidas’s and Dienekes’ quips draw the individual out of his private terror and yoke him to the group.

The language of the Warrior Ethos is private. It speaks warrior to warrior and doesn’t care if outsiders get it or not.

Why? Is it easier to be a soldier than to be a civilian? For the warrior, all choices have consequences. His decisions have meaning; every act he takes is significant. What he says and does can save (or cost) his own life or the lives of his brothers. The nineteen-year-old squad leader and the twenty-three-year-old lieutenant often exercise more power (and in spheres of greater and more instant consequence) than their fathers, who are fifty and have been working honorably and diligently their entire lives. Is adrenaline addictive? Is the fight? Are these tours of combat, hellish as they may feel in the moment, the best years of our lives?

Civilian society prizes individual freedom. Each man and woman is at liberty to choose his or her own path, rise or fall, do whatever he or she wants, so long as it doesn’t impinge on the liberty of others. The warrior culture, on the other hand, values cohesion and obedience. The soldier or sailor is not free to do whatever he wants. He serves; he is bound to perform his duty.

Civilian society rewards wealth and celebrity. Military culture prizes honor. Aggression is valued in a warrior culture. In civilian life, you can go to jail for it. A warrior culture trains for adversity. Luxury and ease are the goals advertised to the civilian world. Sacrifice, particularly shared sacrifice, is considered an opportunity for honor in a warrior culture. A civilian politician doesn’t dare utter the word. Selflessness is a virtue in a warrior culture. Civilian society gives lip service to this, while frequently acting as selfishly as it possibly can.

The civilian sometimes misconstrues the warrior code; he takes it to be one of simple brutality. Overpower the enemy, show no mercy, win at all costs. But the Warrior Ethos commands that brute aggression be tempered by self-restraint and guided by moral principle.

Let us conduct ourselves so that all men wish to be our friends and all fear to be our enemies.

The capacity for empathy and self-restraint will serve us powerfully, not only in our external wars but in the conflicts within our own hearts.

Human history, anthropologists say, can be divided into three stages—savagery, barbarism and civilization.

Fix your mind upon its object. Hold to this, unswerving, Disowning fear and hope, Advance only upon this goal.

We want action. We seek to test ourselves. We want friends—real friends, who will put themselves on the line for us—and we want to do the same for them. We’re seeking some force that will hurl us out of our going-nowhere lives and into the real world, into genuine hazard and risk. We want to be part of something greater than ourselves, something we can be proud of. And we want to come out of the process as different (and better) people than we were when we went in. We want to be men, not boys. We want to be women, not girls.

We want a rite of passage. We want to grow up.

Let us be, then, warriors of the heart, and enlist in our inner cause the virtues we have acquired through blood and sweat in the sphere of conflict—courage, patience, selflessness, loyalty, fidelity, self-command, respect for elders, love of our comrades (and of the enemy), perseverance, cheerfulness in adversity and a sense of humor, however terse or dark.

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