Wood’s World

Why should you join the army? There are a number of reasons people have for joining the military; patriotism, fun, adventure, money, a career, a secure future. Are these good reasons? Do they out way the costs?

Patriotism

My particular pet hate is patriotism. You want to join the military because you are loyal to your country, your government.

If you were born in an opposing country, or you moved to that country when you were very young, you would feel the exact same way about that country and you would be fighting against the people who would probably be your mates if you happened to be born closer or live closer to them.

You’ve been conditioned to beleive that your country are the ‘goodies’ and the opposing ones are the ‘baddies’, Whether that is the case or not. The government might tell you that the supposedly threatening countries have nuclear weapons, they might tell you they had something to do with an attack on your country. If you are in the military, it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, you have to do what they tell you to do. You might help kill thousands of people, then find out later that the country in question didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction and didn’t have anything to do with an attack on your country, the reason you were actually there is very different. Patriotism? I think not.

Patriotism doesn’t have to be a bad thing. If you are truly patriotic and it means a lot to you, instead of joining an institution that deals in killing and is all to often used as a tool for economic expansion covered up by lies about an immediate threat on your homes and way of life. Join the fire brigade, become a doctor, a nurse or a paramedic, become a scientist to progress technology. That way you will be contributing much more to your society, your country and the people around you. You will be helping people, saving lives and increasing standards of living without having to hurt people in the process. Most importantly, you won’t be killing people for potentially false reasons.

It looks fun on the Ads

I admit it, it looks great. Running around playing war games, building bridges, climbing mountains, devising tactics.

But the “adventure” they profess in the adverts is merely code for war, the “discipline” code for violence. The military trains you to kill, to be a drone, a cog in the machine. Recruiters and advertisements unsurprisingly avoid addressing the dehumanizing process undertaken to achieve this. They conveniently forget the psychological costs of killing, or the horrors of war. The ads lie because the product is mentally harmful, and lethal to you and/or others.

When the careers adviser came to my high school, I was around 15 or 16, I told him my interests and my best subjects etc. He ‘listened’ and his conclusion was that I should join the R.A.F. Of course, I didn’t give the idea a moments consideration. Later I realised that he had suggested that half of my class should join the R.A.F. I’ve often wondered why that guy was telling us all to join the R.A.F. Was it just a cop out to make his job easier, or was he trying to recruit us? Either way I didn’t like it.

Read what the recruiter never told you about joining the military.

Money, Career, Training. A Good Base For Your Future.

“The reason to have a military is to be prepared to fight and win wars…it’s not a jobs program.” - Dick Cheney former U.S Secretary of Defence.

25% of the homeless population in America are veterans. There are 18 suicides every day by America veterans, who have post-traumatic stress disorder.

Why does this happen? Many recruits become institutionalised. If you have come out of school and joined the army at a young age, you don’t know anything except the military. When you eventually leave, or are discharged you may find it difficult to adapt back to civilian life.

In an article about ex-paratrooper Stuart Griffiths from the guardian online, he states.

“There is always a problem with them [veterans] accepting society, or society accepting them,” he says.

Many ex-forces personnel came from difficult family backgrounds, were institutionalised in the services and ill-prepared for civilian life.

Add to this what Stuart calls the “real problem with alcohol abuse”, and the unloading, in civilian life, of the the psychological traumas stored up during time in the forces - and the outlook is bleak.

Of course, this doesn’t happen to everyone. But you have to consider whether the military is the best place go for a career and a secure, happy future. It’s not. There are many alternatives which also offer on the job training, are geared towards offering a service or helping others, which allow you to keep your civil rights and don’t involve killing people.

In modern day western culture, we live in an affluent world full of choice and decisions. Generally, as time progresses, remaining pleased with a decision you made is likely to make you happy. Whereas becoming displeased with a decision you have made could make you unhappy, depending upon the importance and the ramifications of that decision. So the question is, what makes you become unhappy with a decision?

Usually, the unhappiness or stress is caused when it becomes apparent that the decision you made didn’t turn out to be the best one. Who will you blame for this? Yourself most probably, after all you were the one that made the choice. You will end up feeling regretful. Another source of unhappiness is the choosing process its self, the fear of regret and the desperate need to avoid it.

I’ll give you an example to demonstrate this. My farther recently had a decision to make regarding three different pension schemes. Without boring you with the details, I’ll just say that they were significantly different, but none of them were substantially better than the others. This was causing him quite a lot of unrest and displeasure, even though they were all very good financially and most people would have been delighted with any one of the options. The reason for this stress was because of the multiple choices that he had. If he was only offered one of the three options, he would have been very pleased with it. It wouldn’t have caused him months of unrest and worry about which option would be the best one.

So there is this idea that the more you have to choose from, the harder it is to make a choice and be satisfied with it, which leads to more people being unhappy with the decisions they make. We’ve all been in the situation where we order a meal from a restaurant, only to be dissatisfied with it when everyone else’s meals come out and you wish you had chosen one of theirs instead.

In many situations, if we only had fewer options to choose from, sure we might not have as much abundance of choice (some would call it ‘freedom’) but we would probably be more happy with the choice we made because there is less opportunity to think that we got it wrong and then blame ourselves for getting it wrong.

In most cases, I’m quite good at accepting the decisions I make, even if they were not the best in retrospect. But this is because I’ve thought about all this and I’ve seen on many occasions how decision making and regret can make people unhappy. I’d rather be more accepting and have more of an “oh well, nothing I can do now except learn from it” sort of attitude.

I’ll end with this illustration which was shown in a lecture by Barry Schwartz. It’s a great depiction of the old proverb the grass is always greener on the other side. This is another thing that can limit your happiness given a particular choice or sittuation. If you are always thinking about what could have been or could be, you will never live in the moment and always be looking at how you can change a given situation to make it better, rather than enjoying what you have.