Lessons from the ex-US Special Forces combatant who turned on his country

Who do we become when we lose everything?

How can we control who we become when everything we want to be is completely lost? This question has haunted me over the past years, and I recently came across a story with insights toward a resolution. Spoiler alert: You probably already knew the answer.

This is the story of Stewart Rhodes, a man who let pain and anger rule his life after a loss. It starts with an all too familiar statement by Stewart Rhodes' wife.

“He was going to achieve something amazing. He didn’t know what it was, but he was going to achieve something incredible and earth-shattering.”

Stewart Rhodes joined the army straight out of high school and served in the United States military's elite paratroopers division. He took pride in his work, which was all he knew, considering he enlisted just after high school before experiencing anything else.

For interest's sake, paratroopers are deadly and efficient. They are among the most trained wings in any modern army. These dudes are thrown from a plane via parachute, straight into the heart of war, behind enemy lines. Their skillset ranges from stealth sabotage to quiet elimination of critical points. The most successful use of paratroopers recorded in history was Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967. Most of their missions are classified, and governments rarely admit to deploying them.

Unfortunately, Rhodes's military career was cut short in 1986 after breaking his back in a parachuting accident. He was later honourably discharged from service. This was a loss he couldn't move on from despite the good life ahead of him.

Rhodes seemed destined for a fruitful career after the military initially. He worked as a clerk at the Supreme Court and reportedly pursued a law degree at YALE, but his anger, resentment, and failure got to him.

He would later leave all this behind to start a fight against the government, claiming that its 2001 Patriot Act threatened to take away people's liberty. He alienated everyone around him and formed The Oathkeepers in 2009: an armed organisation which reportedly had numerous armed standoffs with the federal government.

In 2021, The Oathkeepers intended to stop President Biden's takeover from Trump in a series of events called The Capitol Riots. As expected, this didn't end well; Rhodes is now in jail facing 20 years. Under the seditious conspiracy charge.

I believe there is nothing exceptional in Stewart Rhodes' story, but it is a valuable example of how loss can blind to potential in life.

When handled poorly, the emotional pain resulting from loss and failure primes us for a bitter life of anger and negativity. This pain turns us into people constantly looking for an excuse to start a fight and vent our anger into the world. The flip side is that such people are easily manipulated to do someone else's angry bidding — just as Trump used the Oath Keepers after he lost the elections.

Learn to adapt to failure and loss

"The greater part of human suffering is unnecessary. It is self-created...The pain that you create now is always some form of non-acceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On a level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity."

Eckhart Tolle - The Power of Now: Consciousness: The way out of Pain.

Picking yourself up after a loss is always tricky: especially after you realise that you won't make the impact, you hoped to make in the world. While some people easily overcome this, the bulk of us don't. We all carry some form of pain somehow.

Eckhart Tolle called this the Pain-body. He argues that if we carry pain and hurt, we wander on the road to nowhere, sadly attracting other people in pain too. These people you attract eventually turn on you once they realise you are only human and you can't heal their pain or satisfy their delusions: you become a hindrance to their ideal world. This is precisely why all violent revolutions eventually destroy their children and pioneers.

When Rhodes lost his military career, after all the sacrifices he made, he failed to move on. The crippling pain from his injury translated to an inability to see value in the career and life ahead of him. He had other reasonable means to achieve his goals against the Patriot Act, but he chose the violent path because it defined his resentful internal mindset.

Perhaps that's the most terrific take-off point here: The options we take to reflect on the emotions which define our lives.

I lost my mom a decade ago, and I went through a similar phase as a militant atheist. All I wanted to do was burn religion down: to write and speak about the evils of religion. Yet the more I spoke, the more people turned away, but there were a few outliers whom I almost started a cult with. Thankfully, that's all past me now.

During this phase, I never actually wrote anything down!! Isn't that hilarious? Someone with so many ideas and so much to say who claims they can fix what's wrong in society but can't write a meaningful article to contribute their thoughts to the world constructively?

I realised later that pain, anger, and resentment are the darkness that can't exist with creativity.

Why Pain and Creativity can't coexist

A person on fire can't coherently focus on anything other than the heat.

Although healing can help unleash creativity, it is virtually impossible to create anything valuable in your life if you use the pain from loss as an energy source. Creativity is an outlet to facilitate healing, not a partner to hurt.

But, if you don't let the hurt in your life go, you won't see the good things right in front of you. Consequently, you will have a sterile mind. Most people call this perfectionism, but I think it's just a barren mind. You can f*ck around a lot but will produce nothing in the end.

A mind in pain: the perfectionist, like Rhodes, will find it easier to criticise their work and others than to breathe life into a new body of work. It will always look for flaws instead of potential. And its solution will be to destroy it so it can be accommodated.

Stewart Rhodes could have leveraged his position in the supreme court, military experience, and law degree to support civil liberty, but he didn't. Now we know why. The same applies to perfectionists who don't create anything, pushing it for tomorrow.

Letting Go & The Way Out

"Our greatest joy is not in ever falling, but in rising every time we fall." — Confucius

You won't find a perfect person who has successfully let all the messy sh*t in life go. But some events matter more than others. The pain created by these events can potentially define us. It can make us the worst version of ourselves and prime us for manipulation.

The best you can do is to continuously check yourself and guard against the voice which says that being different means you should be antagonistic.

The world quickly becomes cold, dark, and lonely when the ideas you once used to alienate others start alienating you the moment your natural imperfections surface.

Stay guarded. Stay woke. Keep hope and be more.