The Warrior Ethos

by Steven Pressfield

Be brave, my heart [wrote the poet and mercenary Archilochus]. Plant your feet and square your shoulders to the enemy. Meet him among the man-killing spears. Hold your ground. In victory, do not brag; in defeat, do not weep.

Courage is inseparable from love and leads to what may arguably be the noblest of all warrior virtues: selflessness.

This is another key element of the Warrior Ethos: the willing and eager embracing of adversity.

demanded of the Spartan king Leonidas that he and his 4000 defenders lay down their arms. Leonidas responded in two words: “Molon labe.” “Come and take them.”

Warrior cultures employ honor, along with shame, to produce courage and resolve in the hearts of their young men.

Honor is the psychological salary of any elite unit. Pride is the possession of honor.

Honor is connected to many things, but one thing it’s not connected to is happiness. In honor cultures, happiness as we think of it—“life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”—is not a recognized good. Happiness in honor cultures is t...

The will to fight, the passion to be great, is an indispensable element of the Warrior Ethos. It is also a primary quality of leadership, because it inspires men and fires their hearts with ambition and the passion to go beyond their own limits.

“Now eat a good breakfast, men. For we’ll all be sharing dinner in hell.”

Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

The war remains the same. Only the field has changed.

Let us conduct ourselves so that all men wish to be our friends and all fear to be our enemies.

Krishna instructs Arjuna to slay his enemies without mercy. The warrior-god points across the battlefield to knights and archers and spearmen whom Arjuna knows personally and feels deep affection for—and commands him to kill them all. But here’s the interesting part: The names of these enemy warriors, in Sanskrit, can be read two ways. They can be simply names. Or they can represent inner crimes or personal vices, such as greed, jealousy, selfishness, the capacity to play our friends false or to act without compassion toward those who love us. In other words, our warrior Arjuna is being instructed to slay the enemies inside himself.

Fix your mind upon its object. Hold to this, unswerving, Disowning fear and hope, Advance only upon this goal.

We want action. We seek to test ourselves. We want friends—real friends, who will put themselves on the line for us—and we want to do the same for them. We’re seeking some force that will hurl us out of our going-nowhere lives and into the real world, into genuine hazard and risk. We want to be part of something greater than ourselves, something we can be proud of. And we want to come out of the process as different (and better) people than we were when we went in. We want to be men, not boys. We want to be women, not girls. We want a rite of passage. We want to grow up. One way to do that is to go to war. Young men have been undergoing that ordeal of initiation for ten thousand years. This passage is into and through what the great psychologist Carl Jung called “the Warrior Archetype.”

Archetypes are the larger-than-life, mythic-scale personifications of the stages that we pass through as we mature. The youth, the lover, the wanderer, the joker, the king or queen, the wise man, the mystic. Legendary tales like that of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are populated by archetypes. Movies are full of archetypes. Even a deck of cards has archetypes: king, queen, joker, jack. Archetypes serve the purpose of guiding us as we grow. A new archetype kicks in at each stage. It makes the new phase “feel right” and “seem natural.” One of the primary archetypes is the Warrior. The warrior archetype exists across all eras and nations and is virtually identical in every culture.

Let us be, then, warriors of the heart, and enlist in our inner cause the virtues we have acquired through blood and sweat in the sphere of conflict—courage, patience, selflessness, loyalty, fidelity, self-command, respect for elders, love of our comrades (and of the enemy), perseverance, cheerfulness in adversity and a sense of humor, however terse or dark.