The Soldiers' Philosopher (2014)
philosophyforlife.org
philosophyforlife.org
Respect.
Well, giving up is taboo in the military. As is fragging etc.
I think there is a big correlation between being defeated and thinking you are.
The quote seems to imply a one way causality. Like as if the realization causes the defeat.
e. g. US thought it defeated Taliban by the end of 2001, Taliban certainly didn't think so. Similar thing with Palestinians vs. Israel.
Exactly. The (British) soldier who answered this was channelling Sun Tzu
> ...such is man, that most individuals will stop fighting at some point short of extinction; that point is reached when one of two things happens:
> Either, the defeated people may lose their sense of organization, fail to decide on leaders and methods, and give up because they can no longer fight as a group. This happened to the American Southerners in April, 1865. The President and Cabinet of the Confederate States of America got on the train at Richmond; the men who got off farther down the line were "refugees." Something happened to them and to the people about them, so that Mr. Davis no longer thought of himself as President Davis, and other people no longer accepted his commands. This almost happened in Germany in 1945 except for Admiral Doenitz.
> Or, the defeated people can retain their sense of organization, and can use their political organization for the purpose of getting in touch with the enemy, arranging the end of the war, and preparing, through organized means, to comply with the wishes of the conquerors. That happened when Britain acknowledged American independence; when the Boers recognized British sovereignty; when Finland signed what Russia had dictated; and when Japan gave up.
Note that Linebarger claims the high point of his PsyWar career to have been figuring out a formula by which outgunned chinese during the Korean War* could stop fighting, in a way that seemed to them not cowardly but honourable.
* a conflict which has yet to reach either of the endings above
The quote was about the 'enemy'. Many civilian governments will end a war, before the military would have.
I'm sure there are a lot of examples in both directions, they should have just walked away sooner, or they should have stuck it out and all died gloriously.
Example: The German Military didn't want to end WW1, wasn't it the civilian government. But, weren't they actually really beat?
Or Vietnam. Did we lose? Or were we convinced we had lost.
It is possible to be 'defeated' but just not accept it. The never give up attitude leads to extra deaths.
What if Japan had this attitude, and we just kept dropping atomic bombs until the country was gone.
Guess goes back to some other quote I can't cite. War is easier to start than to end.
Not true. Following the breaking of the Hindenberg line on 1918-09-29 Ludendorff realised that further resistance would likely lead to communist revolution in Germany. On 1918-10-01 he explained this to the heads of department of his General Staff and said he had therefore asked the Kaiser and Chancellor to ask Woodrow Wilson for an armistice based on his Fourteen Points. It took six more weeks for the armistice to be agreed partly because Ludendorff was trying to ensure that someone else could be blamed the defeat.
Its all in "On a Knife Edge - How Germany lost the First World War" by Holger Aflerbach, 2022.
Maybe Vietnam is better example. One could argue that after the Tet Offensive, that the North was out of resources and the US could have won. But the Tet Offensive had convinced the US that there was no winning, so by 'believing' they had lost, they lost.
"Q: when is the enemy defeated? A: when he thinks he is"
I was just commenting on the original quote, that there is large part of psychology to winning/losing. If you can make the enemy 'think they lost' then you have won, even if it doesn't look like it on paper by the number of units, position, etc...
No. It is only taboo at basic training. Mission-focused delegation of authority in modern militaries specifically adresses this. Leaders are encouraged to take initiative, which often means abandoning a failing plan. The ability to quickly recognize failure, "give up" and reattack a problem is what separates western forces from the drills-based approach of the post-soviet block.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission-type_tactics
(Even at basic training, giving up is a thing. The only true failure at basic is getting oneself or others injured.)
Or when they do not think they are defeated, but their goals now align with your own.
> But Miles had seen it complete in Metzov's eyes sixty seconds earlier. It reminded him of that definition of his father's. A weapon is a device for making your enemy change his mind. The mind was the first and final battleground, the stuff in between was just noise.
-- The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold
Interesting:
The Stoics were giving salvation for tough times. It’s a great philosophy for tough times, I’m not sure it’s a great philosophy for everyday living. It’s always good to feel more in control, but it’s not good to think that luck and the vicissitudes of the world can’t touch you or that you can’t show moral outrage, love, grief, and so on.
The preceding paragraphs are terse and add further insight about the limits of Stoicism (or perhaps the little-s version that one might commonly adopt if under stress) and its effects on curtailing emotions.
Stoicism is about not allowing your emotions to govern you.
Subtle but profound difference.
But I never let them run my life, and I remove them from any bigger decisions. Cold hard facts don't change, and so doesn't your perspective and decisions based on them. Any new fact just adds to the mix with at most mild alteration of the result.
Yet many folks I know have fucked up something bad in their life, by giving up to emotions in crucial moments. Lifelong regrets often afterwards, either hiding the fact in shame or living with consequences, in both cases visibly permanently less happy (not just cheating to be clear although that's of course one of main ones).
One imperfect, but applicable analogy: "emotions are a fuel, and reasoning should be the steering system"
I think it would be useful to emphasize that not letting the emotions govern applies to regret as well: Yeah, I did what I shouldn't have (or missed an opportunity), but now it's done and staying miserable helps noone, just makes me feel bad. Let's take it seriously and make the best of it (at least using it as a very important lesson), focusing on improving the future, not crying about the past.
Past girlfriends are a prime example - since they are past, there was always a not-nice breakup for those long trelationships, but every time I learned very valuable lessons about psychology and personalities and also myself and areas to work on, that led me to my current, non-perfect but pretty amazing wife.
Of course then focus of not repeating those mistakes, this is going back to rationality.
And past is a great source of lessons, but that's about it - focus on now and future, time spent pondering about 'what if' is wasting precious little time we still have in this reality, and it will go fast.
Anyway I don’t see the connection between the vicissitudes of life and travelling half-way across the world and then getting blown up by an IDE^W IED. What part of that fits into the Reinhold Nieburh quote?
> God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.
Or, as soldiers (and some others) put it: "Pick your battles"
Hard to believe, but it is possible.
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-are-in-the-us-...
I just think that’s a bigger conversation than “this one disorder is normal if you’re in traumatic environments”; it needs to be something more like “people aren’t responsible for their mental failings”. Obviously, that’s still a controversial one in and out of the military.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpVtJNv4ZNM
We're doing abnormal things (technologically-intensified war), the effects of those things are "normal" in the sense that we should expect trauma from experiencing traumatic events. What we put our soldiers through is hell. "Hardness" is scar tissue.
Come on, this is a shill interview if I have ever saw one. Fuck all this, the US Army personnel, past and present, deserves way better than this psy-op-ed crap. All soldiers, former and present, deserve that.
And back to the, let's say essence, of the article, you could tell that it was written in 2014, back when Stoicism just had had a strong revival, hence why this lady is mentioning it ad-nauseam. I'd say that by 2016-2018 it was already gone, either way, large parts of the US/Western establishment sure as hell left Stoicism apart when confronted with Trump, for example.
You’re in a lethality and violence-soaked environment, increasingly in population-centric environments. There’s a lot of grey area - who’s the enemy, are they a voluntary or involuntary human-shield, and so on.
Russia: Other countries do bad things too!™
Your comment reads like “whatever, shut tf up” and nothing else. What you expect from that?
1. This other empire/country invades countries (BAD). It would be weird for them to philosophize about “a philosophy for hard times”—that’s like a cold-blooded murderer trying to find a philosophy for the mental anguish that killing causes him, for those “hard times” (okay we’re two similes/metaphors down here maybe time to stop)
2. Likewise people shouldn’t be surprised and react with negativity[1] when someone points out that this empire/country does it (America)
Instead they seem to have interpreted in this backwards, roundabout way:
1. We’re talking about America and the military
2. The main topic is not even how the military kills people, btw (that’s just the backdrop)
3. Russia enters out of left-field: Hey America invades countries so therefore it’s okay that Russia did it!
Quite bizzare.
[1] When I replied that reply was downvoted and at the bottom of the thread
I’ll take the explanation though.
A good writer predicts and suppresses associations in advance, but it’s not always feasible. The main issue itt is that skewed associations are its own topic.
But in this case it’s also the literal meaning. You can’t say (or imply) that A is just as bad as B without also saying that B is no worse than A. Call it the anti-symmetric property of partial orderings if that helps.
Wrong on two counts.
1. These kinds of comparisons hone in on the thing the two things have in common. Invading places. This goes back to my “salient commonality” point. Which you rejected. But now you’re back to claiming that a comparison makes things equal. They don’t. They show that two things have two specific things in common.
2. “You’re saying both those things”, referring to my second thing “it’s okay that Russia did it!” (the wrong interpretation). Somehow you’ve gone from “these two things are just as bad” (covered by (1)) to “therefore Russia doing it is okay”. I still can’t make sense of that.
> Call it the anti-symmetric property of partial orderings if that helps.
Dressing it up in fancy language doesn’t make it true.
I can’t coax your interpretation into the correct lane. Even when they are so obviously wrong.
Have you stopped beating your wife? I don’t care if you’re a wifebeater, no judgement. I’m just randomly curious.
Saying that someone is both a Russian and pro-Invasion (by your faulty interpretation) has a well-deserved stigma.
And other people think this is a bad way to think.
I wonder if one approach is better than the other. I suppose it depends on one's goals, and perhaps on some other things.
That’s what is at the heart of it.
> People will bring up Russia out of nowhere just to point out that it’s not any worse than the US.
Like most people who yell “whataboutism” as if it is an argument you don’t make the effort to parse the salient commonality between these two countries: they both invade places.
Being worse or better in some greater picture has got nothing to do with it.
The reason they need to keep doing that is because it seems necessary to counter/deflate the relentless "hypocrisy, hypocrisy, hyprocrisy" tide of thinking that tends to dominate what passes for discussion on the topic (backed by a lot of broken or distorted narratives about what actually did happen).
And also, because in fact there are substantial differences between the current aggression in Ukraine and what the US has done in most of it recent adventures (the Iraq invasion the one notable exception). So while there are commonalities between what these countries do, by and large they really aren't that "salient". To suggest that they are is, well, whataboutism.
I understand if you think it’s tedious to bring up America’s war efforts on tangentially related topics. There’s a time and place for everything. I used a more subtle hint in my first comment on this submission[1] while also addressing Stoicism (or stoicism). But I didn’t like when someone was downvoted for simply saying that going into self-made conflicts on the other side of the world might make someone question if the team they were fighting for had righteous reasons to fight.
> They don't "yell" whataboutism, they kindly point it out in context.
:)
Since you refer to them and not you I can say that this point (non-argument) is brought up to shut down the conversation since whataboutism is (in their minds) basically a fallacy.
It’s not “kind” but so are non of the conversation points on such a topic. So that’s whatever.
> And they already know that the US invades places, and have fully "parsed the salient commonality" that you seem to think is so elusive to them.
No one would presume that people have been living under a rock for half a century or so. That would be daft. Everyone knows that the US invades places. And plenty of people think that’s either good or that it’s bad but it was done with good intentions, so therefore no one is to blame.
> The reason they need to keep doing that is because it seems necessary to counter/deflate the relentless "hypocrisy, hypocrisy, hyprocrisy" tide of thinking that tends to dominate what passes for discussion on the topic
Counter it with what?
Your “deflate” is quite on point. Why have an argument when you can do a whataboutism-deflate? Then you don’t need to provide any arguments.
But then the other thread participants need to be on board with the thinking that it’s a slam-dunk. Which wasn’t the case this time.
> (backed by a lot of broken or distorted narratives about what actually did happen).
With that? It’s actually different?
> And also, because in fact there are substantial differences between the current aggression in Ukraine and what the US has done in most of it recent adventures (the Iraq invasion the one notable exception). So while there are commonalities between what these countries do, by and large they really aren't that "salient". To suggest that they are is, well, whataboutism.
See the original comment:[2]
> > What scientists call the “are we the baddies?-syndrome”
It’s never quite the same when the aggressor is “us” (the US or whatever else). Then any such comparison is obviously wrong and not nuanced.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41724980
[2]: Which is from a skit, probably not a researched symptom. Right?
I think not. And in particular, I find the the position that "hypocrisy, or rather weakly supported insinuations of hypocrisy, in regard to a certain evil is a vastly more vital and pressing topic than the actual evil happening on the ground itself" (to sum up these discussions in a nutshell) to be especially non-worthy of protracted discussion and "nuanced" debate.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, such as debates and counter-debates about whataboutism on HN.
I can’t keep up with your trains of interpretation.
Whatever the actual evil happening on the ground is, it can’t be about the submission since that’s just about lounging in a lecture hall and talking about philosophy. So I’m at a loss as regards the thing we’re being distracted from.
> God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, such as debates and counter-debates about whataboutism on HN.
God, grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, such as people responding to me on a topic that I myself started.
Doesn’t sound as reasonable in that formulation.
Right, not the original submission but the reference to the Russo-Ukraine war, mid-thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41748747 - and in reference to which, pointless/vacuous accusations of hypocrisy tend to emerge with depressing regularity. Judging by the volume and tenacity of their output, a lot of people do seem to feel that the topic of Western hypocrisy is vastly more important and interesting than that of the genocide/invasion itself, basically.
If it were just about people lounging in a lecture hall, I wouldn't have chimed in at all.