“The Warrior Ethos”: What Psychology and Society Can Learn from the Military
For over a decade psychotherapists have circulated as advice something that I consider to be a culturally damaging cliché. You hear it from the mouths of psychology professors, clinicians, teleshrinks, self-help gurus, and even people just chewing the fat at your local lunch counter. With such confidence has this cliché been promoted in our society’s echo chamber that by now it is taken for irrefutable universal fact.
What am I talking about? If you have heard it once you have heard it a dozen times. No—that’s not the cliché I’m talking about. You know how when you’re on an airplane, the flight attendant tells you to put the oxygen mask on your own face first and then on any children or companions that may need help? That’s the cliché I’m talking about—and it’s delivered pretty much like that by people who are not flight attendants, in situations that have nothing to do with flying, as if it sprang from some germ of wisdom that held global application to every situation that might arise. It doesn’t.
Some have taken this so far as to believe that if everyone just looks after their own self-interest all will be right with the world. It won’t. Individuals have even entered elected public service thinking that what’s good for them is good for the country. It’s not. Most people who enter elected public service these days are highly privileged. Most of the people they are elected to serve are not. Their needs and their access are different—or soon will be. Supposedly that is why the privileged have felt called to serve others—not themselves.
People also have wildly different interpretations of what it means to take care of their own needs first. I think it is important to assess this—whether you are the person in question or the person advising. I know people for whom the word “mask” includes make-up, and you better not interrupt them for help with your metaphorical oxygen mask while they’re putting on their waterproof mascara. After all, cameras will probably be present at the emergency landing, and what’s the point in surviving if the pictures don’t look good.
Now, I’ve never had a horrible flight nor met a flight attendant I didn’t like; and I’m not going to tell you to argue against their admonition. The FAA has prescribed instructions that can be disseminated to a large group of people of disparate skill and uniformly followed in a moment of crisis with little if any negative consequence. Their instructions are situation and population specific. There may be situations in which taking care of your own needs first is best. The problem arises when this is over-generalized.
I do not want to think that all the people I interact with over a range of situations consistently put themselves first. The DSM-IV-TR (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revised) may not categorize consistently putting oneself first as narcissism, but in my book it’s not health. Maybe the fact that consistently putting oneself first is not listed as a narcissistic trait in the DSM-IV-TR is further evidence of just how narcissistic our culture has become. Psychologists are even now considering dropping narcissism as a diagnosis all together. Understandably, it may be difficult for some psychology professionals to see as a symptom or an illness that which they routinely prescribe as a cure.
What on earth has caused so many of our nation’s psychologists to take their pearls of wisdom from an industry that at times has taken it’s own advice too broadly and thought little of leaving passengers on the tarmac for half-a-day with no food, insufficient toilet facilities, and poor air quality because it was perhaps easier and cheaper for them to do so? Do we really want to teach people to be so self-serving they must be legislated into common courtesy? Do we want a culture in which people bow to expedience or chase after profits? Do we want a society modeled after an industry that would attempt to seduce us with low rates, and then nickel and dime us to death? This, in my view, would be the death of civilization. We are gasping for breath.
When Medal of Honor recipient Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta and the other members of Company 2d, of the, 503d of the173d Airborne Brigade accepted a mission that Helen Cooper in the New York Times (2010, November 16) described as “a campaign to provide food, winter clothing, and medical care to Afghans in remote villages,” they were not putting the oxygen masks on their own faces first. There are more expedient ways to make more money in greater comfort with far greater personal safety—and often more accolades.
Some of the First Platoon survived that mission. Sgt. Joshua C. Brennan, and the platoon medic, Hugo V. Mendoza, did not. Reportedly, the Taliban ambushed the platoon and as some went down others threw grenades—charging into the gunfire to rescue the wounded. In his account posted on the White House website, President Obama describes how Giunta, “crested a hill alone, with no cover but the dust kicked up by the storm of bullets still biting into the ground.” There, it is stated, Giunta saw the mortally wounded Brennan being dragged off by enemy combatants. According to the President, “Sal never broke stride. He leapt forward. He took aim.” To Giunta he said, “You charged forward through extreme enemy fire, embodying the warrior ethos that says, ‘I will never leave a fallen comrade.’ ”
When Giunta was awarded the Medal of Honor for retrieving the mortally wounded body of Brennan, he responded, “ ‘Every single person I was with would have done what I did, possibly even better, but they were doing other things,’ ” (Retrieved November 30, 2010 from http://www.newsworld22.com.) According to the President, in that moment of action, Giunta was guided by the advice of his team leader, “ ‘You just try—you just got to try to do everything you can when it’s your time to do it.’ ”
I’m not crazy about war. I think most wars come about because civilians—Presidents, State Departments, diplomats, regulators etc.—weren’t doing everything they needed to do when it was their time to do it. As a consequence our military is called in to clean up the mess left from the faulty policy and poor performance of others. When such a high price is paid, as is often the case, it’s not easy to reconcile that emotionally.
Geiko Insurance has a comedic commercial caricaturing a drill sergeant as an unsympathetic psychotherapist. I wonder, though, what our culture would look like if more of us, at the moment of decision, rather than applying to our situation the advice of the flight attendant to put the mask on our own face first, instead applied the advice of Giunta’s team leader and tried to do everything [to the last breath] that was needed to be done when it was our time to do it.
** Nothing connected with this blog or this website should be considered counseling or treatment. **
