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Continued:
My chain of command have been shitting on me and occasionally acting as though they were trying to get me killed but they were also on my side. How can that be you ask? It comes down to the "functional" in there being two key elements to a functional hierarchy. So long as the fire keeps climbs up the hill, the needs of an isolated individual can mobilize the might of a nation. At the most fundamental level, the answer to what it means to be on "a side" is the same as what makes a tribe or a nation. Your side is not your culture your ethnicity or your religion. Your side, your tribe, and your nation, is who's back you have in a crisis and who has yours.
Tyrone Woods had many friends. Friends in the military and veterans' communities, friends in the EMS community, friends in the So-Cal surfing community, friends amongst the surfers musicians bikers and drunks who inhabited the dive bars of San Diego. Many people who would have had his back, flown a plane to get him out, or taken up arms beside him if granted the opportunity. Unfortunately he didn't have any friends where it really counted, The White House or the State Department. Simply put Hillary got her 3:00 am call and let it go to voicemail. And as all these well meaning very intelligent people who said they loved America and wanted my help to put a Republican in the white house, also told me I was over reacting, being silly, that we shouldn't allow a mere four deaths (how many die in car accidents again?) influence national policy. ...and in that moment I understood, these people were not going to be on my side.
It is often interesting reading your perspective, thanks for writing this up. I look back at my best themotte posts that gets QQ contributions and its often something involving my own perspective. It is truly the hardest thing to get a sense of, and to communicate to others.
I find it interesting hearing this, because I was just having a talk with one of my good friends a while back. His daughter was a teenager in highschool and they were arguing about some of the complexities of modern gender issues. He eventually asked her "how do you define a man?" She didn't have a response. But my friend and I (who have never been in the military) immediately thought to define a man as a singular entity that is often at odds with the world around them. Its not a great definition, but I found it odd that we both had such similar definitions. Our backgrounds are highly different, I grew up in Charlottesville Virginia, easily upper middle class, white, atheist, and soft as hell. He grew up in Compton in the 80's, barely lower middle class, black, part of a group he described as a Christian cult, and hard as nails.
What we did have in common was almost a decade of working in the corporate world and for private companies. You have to be kind of dense working at a corporate gig for so long and not realize that shit rolls down hill, and so does fire. But the trick is that you don't have to take it. The companies are mercenary, but so are the smart employees. There are suckers and naive ones that don't get it. But they either learn or burn out. My friend and I both knew these things. We saw the world as cruel and mercenary. It would not support you, it would not save you. You have to save yourself. You have to look out for yourself. At least you do in the corporate world.
When I see politicians being mercenary, ruthless, and not protecting the people they have downhill I feel totally unsurprised. It happens all the time in the corporate world. Why would they behave any differently? It is only when I have the sinking realization that I will always be downhill from them that the real horror sets in. In the military it sounds like you have an expectation of 'in it together'. In the corporate world I could always leave and escape. In US politics we get neither.
Regarding your latter two paragraphs, I feel like this ties into a lot of the stuff I wrote for SSC and /r/theMotte about Hobbes vs Rousseau and fundamental differences in mindset.
What you and your friend both "got" was Hobbes' thesis about the the default state of man is "bellum omni contra omnes", that is everyone vs everyone, or as you put it "cruel and mercenary".
I hesitate to say that there was an expectation of being "in it together" because there often wasn't. The expectation was that the world, society, national policy etc... would be cruel and mercenary and that's precisely why it's important to look out for your own. No one else will. At the same time I feel like this is where the specification of a functional hierarchy is most important because I feel like a lot of people genuinely don't grasp the distinction and thus don't understand that they are playing with fire.
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