It’s neither, you two. It’s just refraction due to the atmosphere. The majority of the wavelengths of light that reach your eye and all…
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Not where I am! I’m trying to get some planetary exposure in, so I’m currently on a temperate planet taking some time off.
Did you catch this statement earlier?
Yeah, so… that’s exactly the conversation I’m referencing. I told you then that I was worried about how little it worried me at the time… and after I left, I spent a lot of time thinking about that, and about the things you said. When you’re actually right, Miz, I do at least try to listen. You’re just not right as often as you think you are (but then, none of us are. If we didn’t think we were right, we’d change our opinion).
So, yeah. The verbal bitchslapping had an effect. Maybe more of one than you’ll believe.
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I’ll give that some consideration if actions ever actually follows the words. I have a suspicion they won’t.
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Ruthless tactics take a willingness to disregard ones empathy to inflict, even if inflicting them is necessary to prevent future suffering. Being sociopathic (or at least, closer to that than the baseline) helps greatly in that, and makes one a more effective soldier. There’s certainly something to be said for having love for your comrades and being willing to die for them as a way empathy can be powerful, however.
The only real example I can point to here is the Sansha’s Nation, who worked near locked to the orders of Kuvekei, who seems to lack a great deal of empathy. Whilst I’ll admit ignorance to the play of many of the major battles (it was so long ago that doctrine, hulls and command structures used then are near-irrelevant, so I declined to study them intently), but the fact that it took all four empires to break its back says to me something about the power of co-ordinated sociopathy as a military doctrine. Especially considering that they still exist.
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And generals (or admirals, or “Fleet Commanders”) are there to ensure that they do not throw away those lives without good cause. Letting people die, losing the resources spent to train, clothe, feed and pay another trained member of your army for no reason is not sociopathy or a lack of empathy, it is stupidity.
What you speak of with regards to people thinking it is “just them” is certainly a real phenomenon, one I’ve observed even in my own forces, who are ostensibly one of the more sane capsuleer empires. But, honestly, I see no reason to dissuade them at this point. From my perspective it seems almost like a psychological defence mechanism, a decision to absolve them of the fact that they are constantly having to deal with people under their command dying. I’ve always thought it bizzare that capsuleers seem to have a vastly lower rate of psychological attrition compared to any other soldier from any other branch or theatre of history, and perhaps this sort of abillity to willfully emotionally disengage is why. That said, I am no combat psychologist, so I’ll leave that for others to investigate.
You might wish to tell the empires that, as it seems a great many of them are proclaimed war heroes.
And those heroes did exactly what they thought necessary to victory. Tell me Arrendis, do you truly mourn every kill you’ve ever participated in, be it directly or otherwise? Or does it fade with time, does it get easier? Did you ever kill someone and think that they deserved it? Do you think about the famillies of the crew members on the vessel as you train your artillery on them? I’m sure you’ve hesitated once or twice. I think that’s only natural. Has that hesitation ever cost you anything? Have you seen people on your side die, because you, emotionally, could not do what had to be done? Did that weigh on you as heavily?
I feel combat is not a time for those who must justify every decision before taking it, or at-least cannot train themselves not to. Not for moral reasons, but for the simple fact that it is you or them in the majority of cases. I’m not talking about firebombing orphanages from orbit, or whatever cartoon villain atrocity one might commit, but in terms of efficiency I feel it is a benefit for one to be willing to do whatever is necessary to achieve victory, and be willing to do so every step of the way.
Of course, I wouldn’t argue that that would make it the ‘ethical’ way to structure ones army, but if you were designing a new breed of soldier, and had control over how their brains worked on a microscopic level… Well, it would be tempting to take that advantage, wouldn’t it?
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That doesn’t make it right. It’s lovely to be able to rationalize and justify monstrous actions. They’re still monstrous, and those who can do them without conscience, monsters.
This presumes those war heroes never felt the weight of those actions, that they never mourned the losses or raged against the terrible necessity they felt they had to answer. Have you been in their heads? Do you know they had no regrets?
I won’t lie: it started to. It started getting easier, watching fleets die on both sides. During the deployment to Hakonen, I started to really get desensitized to it all. I think I hit my lowest point on August 8th. That’s a day or two after the Typhoon fleet Miz was talking about. You can tell I wasn’t quite… me… then, too:
The ship has guns on it. Which, I think, also speaks to this:
That Ashimmu? That’s not me. Other than the occasional instance of hunting Blood Raiders in Delve (which, given their proclivities, is a necessity) that’s not something I do. Look at the rest of my losses, Jin’taan, right up to my most recent. That’s who I am, or at least—these days—who I’m trying to get back to being.
So, to answer this: I don’t train my artillery on people. And yes, I’ve had moments of hesitation… not the kind you’re talking about, but yes, moments where it’s all too much and my brain stutters through the next few seconds. And every time I do, people on my side die.
Every time someone on ‘my side’ dies, Jin’taan, it’s because I couldn’t do what needed to be done. That might mean I hesitated. That might mean I didn’t talk Asher out of being a fecking idiot again. It might mean I haven’t gotten enough people properly trained through RepSwarm to make sure that we can field 70 Logistics cruisers in each and every fleet.
If those people die, that’s on me. And… yeah, for a while, I got numb. I got cold. I said things I wish I’d never said, but at the same time… saying them… let Miz call me out on it. And even if I was too worked up and angry in that moment to appreciate it, she probably saved my sanity. She put ideas in my head that refused to go away, and that forced me to stop and take a long hard look at who I was becoming.
Pulling back from that… getting back to being the person who had nightmares for years about the impotence of being sub-capital Logistics in the middle of B-R… it’s a slow, clawing process. I’m not sure I’m there yet. I don’t know if I’ll ever be sure. But I can be damned sure that going the other way… isn’t a path I’d wish on my worst enemy.
I completely agree. But combat’s not the only time there is. In combat, you’re answering the necessity of the moment. Once you’re in a fight, you play your part so the people on your ship, in your fleet, get home safe. That’s what you committed to do.
But why’d you commit to that? Why’d you go out on that fleet? Why’d you decide that was an objective worth people dying over? Sometimes, we don’t have that choice. Sometimes, we’re answering the necessity: we act, or those who are coming to harm us will do worse harm to more people. That doesn’t make the decision lighter, and it doesn’t make the decision easier to live with later, if things go bad. It just makes it necessary.
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You just make sure the people who can do so without a conscience, can.
You recognised that your strong moral and empathetic compass would make it difficult for you to act in a way that would be effective in warfare, so you decided to leave that to someone else. I can very much respect that, but it only goes to further my previous point, that sociopaths make the best soldiers.
I was asking you those questions simply to prove the point. I do not doubt that you are someone who is emotionally and empathetically alert. Believe it or not I’ve read enough of your writing to know that much, at least, I was merely attempting to lay out that because of that you are a worse soldier because of your lack of sociopathic tendencies, which you illustrated quite nicely as actively preventing you from being capable of a role which is inherently necessary to warfare, and whilst I’m sure you perform admirably as a Logistics pilot, it removes your tactical flexibility as a veteran soldier to your commander.
That’s a good question, and I do not know. Most of the ones that come to mind did not live beyond their heroism, so we will never know. But I hear very little protest over them being memorialised and deified by the general public. And - in my opinion - for good reason. A government is correct to wish its military leaders to act in such a manner as it ensures their security, through the implicit threat of it being done again. That’s not being callous, that’s being pragmatic.
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No, I make sure people who do answer the call of what they’re told is necessity get to come home again. Or at least, I try to—after all, I’m not always successful. Are there sociopaths among the line capsuleers? Yeah, there are. I’m not stupid or naive enough to think there aren’t. They’re the people shooting random crap on gates even when we’ve told them not to.
More, though, I try to do things like the aforementioned ‘talk Asher out of being an idiot again’. Most of the Directorate aren’t sociopaths, even if I know damned well most of you won’t believe that. Maybe some of them have me fooled. It’s certainly possible. I don’t claim omniscience. But working with them every day for years now doesn’t give me that impression of my fellow directors.
Well, there’s Aryth… but he’s finance, not part of the military command structure.
But the rest… no, not even Mittens. Which brings us to the other part…
Of course the ones who live and are lionized don’t protest it. More would probably be lionized if they hadn’t privately expressed their reservations about such treatment. And those who don’t, who go along with that public spectacle, do it for the same reason they committed the initial acts: because in the interests of the state, of the organization… it’s necessary.
It’s why, even though the CEWPA wars are utterly meaningless, they still go on. All that loss of life… in a terrible way, it’s necessary as a pressure-valve, as a way of channeling the most dangerous and destructive elements of society into an avenue where they aren’t so dangerous. That may well be why CONCORD allows us to continue our nonsense out here in nullsec: it keeps us “contained”. It is, as you say, pragmatic.
But none of that means sociopaths make the best soldiers, Jin’taan. Sociopaths are the ones most likely to not bother following orders not to shoot someone on a whim. They’re the ones who’ll conduct an orbital bombardment or attack a non-threatening tower just because it’s there, who don’t give a rat’s ass about the defensive timer you’re trying to get the fleet to on time, they’re gonna get that aggression timer anyway because that Kestrel over there isn’t warping away fast enough and they wanna kill it.
Because they don’t care about your orders. They care about their wants. They’re sociopaths, not soldiers.
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Having met some of your leaders, I’ll concur on this. They’re pragmatic, callous maybe, but very rarely (if ever) are they evil.
Still, my point is simply that you take the role where you perform best whilst accepting you’re helping others kill people. Let’s hypothetically suggest the new doctrine fit made you add a Remote Tracking Computer to your Legion and had you put it on someone arbitrarily selected, so you have no way of knowing if they’re up to your moral expectations. Would you activate it, and indirectly allow the killing of others? If not, what makes that different from your current actions in a fight, other than you not being able to stomach getting one step closer to something you consider morally repugnant?
That’s not sociopathy, that’s a lack of discipline.
Yes, now we’re getting into that awesome ‘No True Scotsman’ argument space where you suggest an action that’s non-conducive to victory and suggest it as something a sociopath is more likely to do (which I can’t dispute) and I say that that is either the result of a bad commander, or a bad soldier not following orders, but troops not following orders has nothing to do with their lack of empathy.
A lack of empathy does not make one incapable of anything except empathy, and empathy is not a valuable battlefield asset when taken as a whole. If you can find an aspect in modern warfare where it is, I would be interested in attempting to understand that area in more detail.
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Well, setting aside the whole ‘I wouldn’t design a doctrine that required that’ (because you walked into that one, man), I’ve never claimed I wasn’t an enabler of monsters. In fact, I’ve specifically said on my occasions that I am. My point is that that isn’t why I do what I do. Are there side-effects that aren’t amazing and wonderful? Of course. I’m pretty sure that’s true of everything. Even ice cream.
Man, I could go for some ice cream.
As for your hypothetical: I’d do what I need to do, in accordance with my commitments.
See, where you’re getting tripped up is in your assertion that ‘sociopaths make the best soldiers’. See, you’re trying to say that the best soldiers are the ones who won’t hesitate, who won’t suffer a twinge of conscience when faced with the necessity of the moment, and those are two very different things. The men and women you’re talking about, who’ll be ok with what they have to do, even if they’re normally well-adjusted folks with a full allotment of human empathy… dig a little deeper. If you do that, you’ll find they’re ok with it because it was necessary. They’ll often hate that it was necessary, feel that necessity to have been a terrible thing, that society should find ways to make that moment never be necessary… but they’ll still tell you that in the moment, they did what they did because it needed to be done. And they trust their CO to be telling them the truth about what needs to be done.
The people who can throw lives away because, like Ms. Ember’s friend, they don’t think of their crew as human… that’s not them.
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… oh spirits below, I just realized why Jin’boo here is into the subject. This is fallout from that eeniemoo war or whatever it was, isn’t it? He has come for his people, the poorly animated wey-foos or something.
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I’ll note that it is a completely illogical decision given the current state of technology with regards to the module and ship in question, as much as my ego now demands I find some reason to put RTCs on a Legion.
Still, the point here was that, at some point, you would find it goes against your conscience to do what was necessary, and at that point you become useless as a tool via which to wage war. I understand that referring to you as a ‘tool’ is a fairly terrible thing to do, but war is after all, a job, and every job has its tools.
That - I think - is where the two of us are being caught up. Non-sociopathic soldiers are capable of not hesitating and doing what has to be done a large percentage of the time. But not all of the time. You yourself are a great example of that. You have a great reputation, are a veteran of hundreds of battles, but there are some things you now willingly admit you do not wish to do as you feel you will be unable to emotionally cope with them.
Given a situation where actions you find yourself unable to complete the task as you would not be able to live with yourself, you would fail the task. I can’t think of any particular thing that would have any actual millitary value, but for the sake of argument, what if someone were to warp industrial ships with ECM bursts or some simillar E-war, and fill them with slaves, or civillians. They present no direct threat to anyone (much as you do not) however their presence allows the deaths of your allies. Would you (if for some reason in a position to do so) fire upon them?
I think enough of your character that I don’t think you would.
Then I should not be making the commitment to do what is necessary by voluntarily joining the fleet.
If they impair the function of my fleet, they provide a direct threat to my fleet’s survival.
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I’ve lurked here for a while. I posted a few months ago in the opening thread around the Kyonoke matter before we realised quite what was going on. This topic specifically piqued my interest and I seem to have found a rather exceptional verbal sparring partner here. Nothing quite like challenging one’s perspectives on a topic after all.
EDIT: I’ll note that I remained involved in the proceedings of the Kyonoke event but chose to do so in private, as a member of the CSM, given that I felt discretion necessary.
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So you’re willing to temporarily become a sociopath in order to achieve a goal? That’s an interesting way of looking at things that I can certainly see working. But it doesn’t stop you from considering leaving your millitary unit as you said earlier, as a result of the emotional stress that it causes you.
I still fundamentally challenge the necessity of empathy on the battlefield as an effective part of military doctrine that would prevent someone from potentially wishing to limit it in capsuleers. There are definitely ethical concerns, and those you’ve raised perfectly well, but ethical concerns are ethical concerns. They’re relative to time, culture and person. As someone else pointed here, there’s no golden ethical guidelines that everyone sticks to.
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No. That’s kind of the key point here: someone who trusts their leadership to not be asking them to engage in needless slaughter, or who trusts that their actions are necessary in the moment, even while hating the necessity, is a far cry from someone who’d fire their crew for reminding them that those crew members are even human in the first place.
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So, in your estimation there is no combat difference between you and a sociopath, and the only differences are the latter’s propensity for indiscretions and lack of feeling what you consider a necessary weight of conscience after the fact?
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I think a key difference between me and a sociopath is that one of us exhibits the following symptoms:
- Disregard for society’s laws
- Violation of the physical or emotional rights of others
- Lack of stability in job and home life
- Irritability and aggressiveness
- Lack of remorse
- Consistent irresponsibility
- Recklessness, impulsivity
- Deceitfulness
to a degree that can be “characterized as something severely wrong with one’s conscience”. Because, you know those are the symptoms of Anti-social Personality Disorder (aka sociopathy).
Now, let’s look at things like ‘lack of stability in job and home life’, ‘consistent irresponsibility’, and ‘recklessness, impulsivity’. Do those sound like someone bowing to the necessity of the moment? Do they sound like the behaviors of a particularly good soldier?
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No, and I will accept that. A sociopath which is pronounced enough in that particular medical condition would not make an effective soldier in the long term. Though it does seem to match the lives of the few spooks I know, which makes me chuckle a little.
My terminology here has been rather considerably vague, which I attempted to narrow down by asking you to state a position from which empathy would be a valuable thing to have as a soldier. You then consistently presented arguments stating that, for the purposes of combat you were able to displace your empathy.
If you were crafting a race of transhuman soldiers, would turning down their ‘Empathy’ slider be something that would help them be effective soldiers for their creators?
I am sorry to have moved the goalposts somewhat here, given that this did initially start with a snide remark on my part, but this is a topic I find intensely interesting to debate with another person with strong ties to a largely capsuleer military, as you know as well as I how many can - at times - seem like they have little regard for the human beings under their command.
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