Episode Eight: The Warrior Archetype

I joined the Marine Corps (the Marine Corps Reserves actually) during the Vietnam era. I was dodging the draft. When I arrived at boot camp at Parris Island, my mindset was 100% to resist the brainwashing. I just wanted to do my time and get it over with. But here’s the crazy thing …

I couldn’t resist it.

There were four or five other guys in my platoon who went in with the same mindset. We were civilians in our hearts and we wanted to stay that way!

Those guys succumbed too.

They “got with the program.”

By graduation day, when the band played the Marine Corps hymn and we, who had only been called “maggots” so far, were finally addressed as Marines, we all had a lump in our throat.

Why?

The Warrior Archetype.

It kicked in.

Despite everything my brain told me, my blood overruled it. My Collective Unconscious overruled it.

The Warrior Archetype is real. It exerts a powerful, even irresistible pull at the time of life when its tide is high.

There’s a good side and a bad side to this.

An honorable training regimen, seeking to produce soldiers and Marines who are governed by the laws of war and are capable of self-restraint, self-command, and even self-leadership doesn’t aim to activate EVERY impulse or capacity of the Warrior Archetype. Because no few of those impulses, let’s call it what it is, are brutish and craven and evil.

An honorable training regimen seeks to inculcate the warrior VIRTUES and to eradicate, or at least to bring under control, the potential excesses inherent in the warrior soul of man.

What are those virtues?

Thinking of the Spartan agoge, what virtues did the training seek to impart?

I wrote a book about Alexander the Great called The Virtues of War. Here are the virtues I enumerated: (remember I was seeking to identify them not as I would, but as Alexander might) …

The will to fight.
Love of glory.
Self-command.
Shame at failure.
Contempt for death.
Patience.
Selflessness.
An instinct for the kill.
Love for one’s comrades.
Love for one’s enemy.

We could easily name others: humility, endurance, a sense of humor, aggressiveness, imagination, self-restraint, perseverance, the willing embracing of adversity.

Each of these has a dark side as well.

Aggressiveness can become brutality, love of glory can become megalomania, imagination can take us into dark, dark places.

On the other (positive) side, the virtues cited above have applications in countless fields unrelated to conflict or war.

A mother needs these virtues.
A teacher.
A nurse.
A paramedic.

Artists and entrepreneurs of all kinds need such virtues as imagination, self-command, patience, selflessness, even an instinct for the kill. Have you ever tried to quit drinking? Or to finish a novel when it’s 99.9% done.

Which brings us to a deeper way of looking at the Warrior Archetype—as a template and a persona for fighting the INNER WAR.

We’ll begin examining that in the next episode.