The Warrior Ethos by Steven Pressfield

• The Warrior Ethos embodies certain virtues--courage, honor, loyalty, integrity, selflessness and others--that most warrior societies believe must be inculcated from birth.
• Every warrior virtue proceeds from this--courage, selflessness, love of and loyalty to one’s comrades, patience, self-command, the will to endure adversity. It all comes from the hunting band’s need to survive.
• In the ear before gunpowder, all killing was of necessity done from hand to hand.
• Some say that self-preservation is the strongest instinct of all, not only in humans but in all animal life.
• The Warrior Ethos evolved to counter the instinct of self-preservation.
• Against this natural impulse to flee from danger (specifically from an armed and organized human enemy), the Warrior Ethos enlists three other equally innate and powerful human impulses:
• Shame
• Honor
• And love
• Courage--in particular, stalwartness in the face of death--must be considered the foremost warrior virtue.
• No one is born with the Warrior Ethos, though many of its tenets appear naturally in young men and women of all cultures.
• The Warrior Ethos is taught.
• Courage is modeled for the youth by fathers and older brothers, by mentors and elders. It is inculcated, in almost all cultures, by a regimen of training and discipline. This discipline frequently culminates in an ordeal of initiation.
• 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.
• Tribes are tied to the land and draw strength from the land. Tribes fight at their best in defense of home soil.
• Sociologists tell us that there are two types of cultures: guilt-based and shame-based.
• Individuals in a guilt-based culture internalize their society's conceptions of right and wrong. The sinner feels his crime in his guts. He doesn’t need anyone to convict him and sentence him; he convicts and sentences himself.
• A shame-based culture is the opposite. IN a shame-based culture, “face” is everything. All that matters is what the community believes of us.
• Warrior cultures (and warrior leaders) enlist shame, not only as a counter to fear but as a goad to honor.
• The interesting thing about peoples and cultures from rugged environments is that they almost never choose to leave them.
• Better to live in a rugged land and rule than to cultivate rich plains and be a slave.
• The greatest counterpoise to fear, the ancients believed is love--the love of the individual warrior for his brothers in arms.
• Ordeals of initiation are undergone not as individuals but as teams, as units.
• Courage is inseparable from love and leads to what may arguably be the noblest of all warrior virtues: selflessness.
• The group comes before the individual. This tenet is central to the Warrior Ethos.
• Selflessness produces courage because it binds men together and proves to each individual that he is not alone. The act of open handedness evokes desire in the recipient to give back.
• Among all elite U.S. forces, the Marine Corps is unique in that its standards for strength, athleticism and physical hardiness are not exceptional. What separates Marines, instead, is their capacity to endure adversity. Marines take a perverse pride in having colder chow, crappier equipment and higher casualty rates than any other service.
• This is another key element of the Warrior Ethos: the willing and eager embracing of adversity.
• In warrior cultures--from the Sioux and the Comanche to the ulu and the mountain Pashtun--honor is a man’s most prized possession.
• Warrior cultures employ honor, along with shame, to produce courage and resolve in the hearts of their young men.
• Honor is the psychological salary of any elite unit. Pride is the possession of honor.
• The warrior sense of humor is terse, dry--and dark. Its purpose is to deflect fear and to reinforce unity and cohesion.
• For the warrior, all choices have consequences. His decisions have meaning; every act he takes is significant. What he says and does can save (or cost) his own life or the lives of his brothers.
• The American military is a warrior culture embedded within a civilian society.
• The greatness of American society, like its Athenian progenitor, is that it is a civilian society. Freedom and equality are the engines that produce wealth, power, culture and art and unleash the greatness of the human spirit.
• The returning warrior may not realize it, but he has acquired an MBA in enduring adversity and a Ph.D. in resourcefulness, tenacity and the capacity for hard work.
• The returning warrior possesses the Warrior Ethos, and this is a mighty ally in all spheres of endeavor.
• But the Warrior Ethos commands that brute aggression be tempered by self-restraint and guided by moral principle.
• When an action is unject, the warrior must not take it.
• The capacity for empathy and self-restrain will serve us powerfully, not only in our external wars but in the conflicts within our own hearts.
• Human history, anthropologists say, can be divided into three stages--savagery, barbarism, and civilization.
• The collective unconscious, Jung said, contains the stored wisdom of the human race, accumulated over thousands of generations.
• The collective unconscious is the software we’re born with. It’s our package of instincts and preverbal knowledge. Within this package, Jung discovered what he called the archetypes.
• Archetypes are the larger-than-life, mythic-scale personification of the stages that we pass through as we mature.
• Archetypes serve the purpose of guiding us as we grow. A new archetype kicks in at each stage. It makes the new phase “feel right” and “seem natural”.
• One of the primary archetypes is the Warrior. The warrior archetypes exists across all eras and nations and is virtually identical in every culture.
• The hardest thing in the world is to be ourselves.