The Warrior Pathology

But unlike so many in his demographic, Jeff also believes he has a moral obligation to help others whenever he can. Loyalty and generosity are baked into his daily life; he’ll help any friend (or friend of a friend of a friend) who needs it, often to his own detriment. His objection to high taxes and social safety nets is that they allow a less-than-trustworthy government to decide when and how his money is put back into the community. He feels he’d make better choices. I’ll admit I don’t have a good counter for this – at least not as it relates to him and his ethos. But I do get to remind him that most people (Conservatives) do not share his natural interest and generosity. Most people with money and resources won’t spread it around voluntarily. They use their wealth to hire great lawyers and accountants who’ll help them hold onto their money, then soothe whatever guilt they have by dropping $100k at the annual auction for their kids’ private school. Jeff will typically yield on that point, and I think that’s how we’ve survived each other for 30+ years.

There’s one point on which neither of us will yield, however, and that’s guns.

A Strange Game

The movie ‘War Games’ took place in a very different time. In 1983, nuclear war was a legit existential threat in the world, and the two opponents seemed utterly intractable in their views. In the movie, Joshua, a very early AI that was taught to play chess, was stolen and asked to figure out how to win a nuclear war. We spend 3-4 extremely tense minutes of playing with the Pentagon’s war simulator and ratcheting up the REAL DefCon alert levels while it’s is quickly running through thousands of devastating scenarios, Joshua abruptly stops. Sound and chaos and simulated death is replaced by a blinking cursor. When asked, it famously called nuclear war a strange game, because ‘the only winning move is not to play.’

That’s pretty much how I feel about guns. It’s the automatic solution for those who are either unable or unwilling to use their brain to solve problems. And we all end up losing something in the process, whether it’s our property, our lives, or our humanity.

For as genuinely decent as he is, Jeff believes the only way for all of us to be safe is for all of us to carry a gun. ‘No one is going to risk fucking with you if they know you have a weapon,’ he says, entirely convinced that this kind of level playing field will solve everything. But it’s a false ideal. There’s no leveling the field because the very nature of violence is predicated on escalation or martyrdom. Would the gunman have cancelled his Psychosis Murder Ball weekender at Mandalay Bay if everyone at that Vegas concert had been armed? Of course not. He planned on dying, anyway. Would knowing that worshippers were packin’ in the pews have changed the goal of that little white supremacist turd in Charleston? Not likely. First because rational thought isn’t part of his makeup, and also because he believed himself to be superior to them!

How do I show pro-gun people that this might-makes-right thing is actively choosing to devolve? Sure, bonking rival Neanderthals on the head may have gotten us out of the trees, but it can’t be how we move forward. There’s always a bigger rock or better way to throw it. What if my assailant has a semi-automatic Dirty Harry hand canon, and rightly figures I have some nickel-plated slinger-of-insults in my purse that I don’t really want to use?

Here Jeff rolls his eyes at my naivete. “You’ll have a real gun, honey, and I’ll teach you how to use it.” I don’t vex him further with a reminder that I dated a cop. I know how to use a gun; I simply choose not to. There’s also a strange ego to it that I find nauseating. If I have a gun, it means I am better than you. I’m stronger, more worthy of existing. Maybe I was a victim at some point, but now I’m in charge and there’s hell to pay. It means that if you break the rules —or even make me feel uncomfortable for some reason— I can be justified in taking your life.

As soon as I give myself this permission, the moment I make my life more important than yours, I willingly become the Warrior.

I think most of us have at least some aspect of the lower-case warrior in us. We have someone or some situation that we would willingly kill or die for. If a deeply foolish person tried to hurt someone in my family, they’d be signing up for a bad encounter with my warrior. But she’s a limited and unlikely reaction, not a constant state of existence for me. Someone who has fully embraced their Warrior role approaches every situation from a position of power over: The protector, the defender, and – when left unchecked – judge, jury and executioner. It’s important to know that a true Warrior, by definition, can only exist in conflict. Without a battleground they’re irrelevant, and nobody likes that. The result is that they instinctively create violent scenarios to validate themselves. It’s what I call the Warrior Pathology.

As a Warrior, I walk through the world in a different way. Maybe it’s small; my pace or stride, the carriage of my shoulders, a look in my eye. It’s a tendency to diminish the needs and will of anyone outside of my field of protection. I tend to have a shorter fuse and a higher demand for compliance. I carry myself with an attitude that says, ‘my life, my ideals, and the lives of those I protect are more important than yours, and there’s not a thing you can do about it.’ And Warriors from another pack can smell it on me. Their muscles involuntarily knot up, and they’ll enter into any exchange between us in a different way: more alert, assertive, defensive, defiant, quicker to escalate, and more protective of their kingdom, whether it’s a castle in the air or some sticky barstool.

Because if the Warrior doesn’t have a war to win, he’ll inevitably create one.

That’s why the level playing field can’t exist. At the heart of it, having a gun signals to all the world that you have the authority to decide who gets to survive. Nothing ‘level’ about that. Running your life this way puts you in the nose of all the other animals who believe themselves to be the authority, which makes you a threat; a problem that they have to solve.

Once violence becomes your language, it will always come down to who has the biggest gun, most lethal ammunition, or who’s the fastest to mobilize.

So imagine the day when your dream state arrives and we’re all armed. Will there be some magical stalemate or equilibrium acheived? The Warrior needs a war. You can’t get all of them to cede power to a centralized figure. At some point, ideas start getting adopted according to the fire power behind them rather than on merit or providing the greatest good. Someone at some point will end up on the raw end of some deal you’ve made, and they’ll take issue. You get called out. Soon you’ll have to start shooting anyone who doesn’t get in line behind your ideas, because you can’t have disgruntled groups getting together and pooling their resources against you.

On that day, congratulations! You’ve built a Kraterocracy: Full autocratic rule by military might. You’re the new North Korea, Syria, Sudan, Lebanon, Burma, etc. You should enjoy it while it lasts because this form of governing is highly unstable. When every bully wants to be in charge, it inevitably devolves into petty warring factions. There will always be someone more right, more ruthless with bigger guns waiting to blow your shit up and take whatever you were trying to protect.

The Warrior Pathology sets up a cognitive bias for the zero-sum game: A kind of feedback loop where we see anyone else’s gain as our loss, even if it has no measurable impact on us. Someone else getting ahead means I fall behind. For example, a friend of mine has very specific views on same sex marriage: He thoroughly believes that legitimizing gay marriage somehow makes HIS traditional marriage less valuable. Frustrated, I ask (well, shout) “how does this materially impact you in any way?” Rather than seeing it as lifting others up, this lowers the bar for what marriage is, thus reducing the quality of what he has. Nothing is being taken away from him; no benefits or rights are being rolled back in order to redistribute them to ‘The Gays.’ I pointed this out… Sensing defeat, he shut down the discussion with his own nuclear option: ‘It’s a sin.’

The ugly truth is that he simply doesn’t believe the LGBTQ community is entitled to the same kind of life that he has. He doesn’t wish harm on them or have any interest in preventing their relationships (his face says otherwise). He even suggests that ‘some type of separate-but-equal partnership would be fine.’ But believes himself to be morally superior and should be treated as Better Than. No logic or reasoning can fix it.

The level playing field cannot exist as long as any one of us feels morally, spiritually, or ethically superior to another human being. Adding a gun to this superiority matrix turns a zero-sum game from something distasteful into full-on dangerous. With all of us carrying around our own rules, our own hurts and flaws and world views, there’s no way for everyone to have the same opportunity to live their lives.

The Loss of Our Humanity

Jeff and I go through this argument again (and again), and he always saves the heaviest artillery for last: ‘So if someone breaks into your house to take your stuff or take your life, you’ll just let them? With no thought to how the rest of us will feel if you’re dead?’ And every time, I have to take a beat and think for a second. How can I explain it this time in a way that gets through?

If I use a gun on another human being, then the fundamental core of who I am is already dead. Will I be pissed if they take my shit? Yeah. But it’s just stuff, and it can be replaced. It’s not worth my life. Hell, it’s not even worth the thief’s life. Take it. If you pose a threat to my family, you’ll face full-scale mamma bear warfare – all teeth and claws and any cast iron pan within reach. If I go out, I assume that whomever I was protecting is also gone and I wouldn’t want to live without my people anyway.

There’s no life worth living if it requires a gun to keep it. It means that humanity has chosen violence over reason, and I don’t want any part of it.

As the argument goes, I guess this is my nuclear option.