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The only real way to do something like this in the modern world seems to be mandatory military service, or something like it. Otherwise our lives are just far too devoid of any real suffering, especially the physical kind.
I do think that the Overton window could shift back enough towards responsibility in our lifetime to make mandatory military service a possibility. The best shot we have at getting Westerners back to some semblance of maturity is in my view instituting a sort-of UBI, but requiring 2 years of mandatory military service to obtain it.
With this system, if you're a criminal and poor or something, well you can either go to prison or go to the military. Tough luck if you don't want to.
Of course within that service there would have to be competence tests, physical trials, etc. but there are decent templates like South Korea. A commenter on an open thread in ACX here recently mentioned that in South Korea the TV dramas tend to have quite a common theme of older folks putting youngin's back in their place. We need more of that energy as well - Rob Henderson does a great job here of explaining how utterly ridiculous and backwards it is that adults now seek the validation of children. Even and especially in universities, where professors really should know better.
I don't like mandatory military service when there's always the risk that our troops could get plunged into a non-defensive foreign war and come back with the grievous injuries, PTSD, or worse.
So mandatory military service should HAVE to be paired with some serious skin in the game where if our leaders send out our troops to a conflict (even without a declaration of war) they have something personal on the line as well.
And I think that helps bring back the 'respect your elders' dynamic as well, if your elders have actually seen some shit and are just as tied to the fate of the nation as you are, and thus aren't trying to trick the young 'uns into dying for a worthless cause and pay a price the elders never had to pay or will have to pay.
My personal belief is that if you advocate for a war you should immediately be assigned to fight on the front lines. If you're an old man who can't fight effectively? I don't care - if you think the war is good, you're going to be the one fighting it. Advocating for entering a war without being willing to fight in it yourself should be at the very least deeply shamed, if not criminalised.
That's a bad idea. No, a terrible one.
You'd actively sabotage the military, which I guess you're okay with. God forbid the country actually needs it for a defensive purpose.
More importantly, you're antagonizing the troops without actually addressing the incentives for leaders to pick fights, since they are already in. It'd be like the Roman Senate trying to handicap Caesar by sending him all their dissidents. What do you think happens next?
The point of this is the chilling effect - I don't expect those old men to go and fight, I expect them to shut up and not advocate for other people to go die in order for them to be personally enriched. My belief is that advocating for other people to go die in order that you can profit off their sacrifice is such a moral wrong that the minor disadvantage of having the occasional octogenarian true believer playing a part on the battlefield is worth the cost. But that said, I could definitely agree to a compromise where people who advocate for a war that they cannot meaningfully fight in or support have to instead perform hazardous and dangerous support tasks back at home - what matters is that they have some skin in the game.
I think that's pretty reasonable.
It's the collision of moral wrong with material wrong that makes this so difficult. Skin in the game is a good thing. The problem is that most any policy which enforces it comes at the cost of effectiveness. As in economics, the most efficient solution is rarely the most moral one.
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Well, if we could somehow return to the legal status quo of the national guard not being deployed outside of the homeland, that would wrap things up rather nicely, yes?
In that case mandatory military service could be fulfilled without being sent on far flung imperialist adventures, and would be more like a militia / police force of last resort as was originally intended.
Professional army stays professional, the militia stays home and learns the basics of military affairs and life and kindly fucks off back to their normal civilian lives with a valuable skill set and shared cultural experience for life. Plus then they are actually around if serious shit pops off in the homeland.
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