So, what is this Warrior Ethos? Pressfield believes it derives from the values developed to allow small tribes of hunter-gatherers to survive, values that are still seen in tribal cultures in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The Warrior Ethos, according to Pressfield, consists of:

• Courage.

• Selflessness.

• Love of and loyalty to one’s comrades.

• Patience.

• Self-command.

• The will to endure adversity.

These attributes, mastered and turned inward, are believed to help a person control or eliminate envy and greed, laziness, selfishness, the capacity to lie and cheat and do harm to our brothers.

Drilled into a person and turned outward, they are also supposed to help us overcome fear and the instinctive will to survive, and put ourselves into situations where killing or being killed are our sole options.

How is this done? How, in the span of a few formative months or years is several million years of evolutionary program overwritten with a new code? The tools that society uses, according to Pressfield, are shame, honor, and love.

Pressfield soon runs into a problem; his thesis is based on glorifying a set of principles that was generated in a historical epoch that he himself admits was “High Barbarism” and that lives on today principally in tribal groups and criminal organizations.

How to separate out the “good” Warriors from the “bad” ones, if they all embrace the same code, the very code he is advocating?

Pressfield ponders this point as follows:

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 Mafia and criminal gangs live by rigorous and sophisticated codes of loyalty, discipline and honor. So do terrorist organizations. Does that make them warriors? Do these groups practice the Warrior Ethos? When is “honor” not honor?

It’s an excellent question, and the answers are simple; yes, they’re warriors, yes, they practice the Warrior Ethos, and honor is always honor, but only in the eyes of the beholder.

These answers should certainly give us pause — but Pressfield pushes forward, undeterred, and tries to differentiate the good Warriors from the bad Warriors by enumerating the similarities and differences between the two.

Incidentally, the fact that we’re already making in-groups and out-groups and subjective value judgments about good and bad, right and wrong on page 16 is also a worrying sign of what’s to come.

But let’s hear Pressfield out on the nature of tribes — their social, cultural and political characteristics, because here he’s really done a good job of summarizing these types of organizations.

First, tribes are hostile to all outsiders. This has been true, anthropologists tell us, of virtually all tribes in all parts of the globe and in all eras of history. Tribes are perpetually at war with other tribes.

Tribes practice the primacy of honor. Tribes are governed not by the rule of law but by a code of honor (nang, in Pashto).

Tribal codes mandate the obligation of revenge (badal). Any insult to honor must be avenged.

Tribes prize loyalty and cohesion. Tribes revere elders and the gods. Tribes resist change. Tribes suppress women. Tribes value the capacity to endure hardship.

Tribes are patient. Time means nothing in the tribal scheme. Tribes will wait out an invading enemy till he tires and goes home. “You’ve got the watches,” say the Taliban, “but we’ve got the time.”

Tribes are tied to the land and draw strength from the land. Tribes fight at their best in defense of home soil.

Tribes are adaptable; they will take on any shape or coloration temporarily, if it will help them survive in the long run. Tribes will ally with enemy tribes to repel the greater threat of an invader, then go back to killing one another once the invader has been driven out.

So far, so good. Pressfield and I are in complete agreement, but then he makes this jaw-dropping assertion.

There is much to admire in these qualities. In fact, a strong case could be made that what the U.S. military attempts to do in training its young men and women is to turn them into a tribe.

In fact, there is very little to admire in these qualities, especially for the modern, professional military.

We don’t want Marines behaving in a hostile manner towards “outsiders”, regardless of whether those outsiders are U.S. civilians, foreign nationals, or members of other U.S. or Coalition armed forces.

We don’t want a Marine Corps governed, as in days of old, by concepts of honor that historically resulted in everything from fist-fights to duels to the death.

We don’t want Marines seeking to revenge themselves or their friends, which leads directly to atrocities such as Haditha. We want the rule of law, not of eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth.

We don’t want to resist change, we want to lead it, and we don’t want to suppress women, we want more of them serving alongside their brothers and sisters in arms. We don’t care what Gods our Marines worship, and we’re an expeditionary force — we’re not tied to the soil of our homeland.

Adaptability, patience, loyalty, the capacity to endure hardship, and a degree of respect for one’s elders — those are about all the useful characteristics that can be extracted from the anthropology of tribalism.

Reposted from Steven Pressfield’s “The Warrior Ethos”: One Marine Officer’s Critique and Counterpoint, by Edward H. Carpenter. Copyright (c) 2014 by Edward H. Carpenter. Used by permission of Umbrella Books. All rights reserved.