The Warrior Ethos

by Steven Pressfield

Does a fighting man require a flag or a cause to claim a code of honor? Or does a warrior ethos arise spontaneously, called forth by necessity and the needs of the human heart?

A Spartan mother handed her son his shield as he prepared to march off to battle. She said, “Come back with this or on it.”

The Warrior Ethos embodies certain virtues—courage, honor, loyalty, integrity, selflessness and others—that most warrior societies believe must be inculcated from birth.

Every warrior virtue proceeds from this—courage, selflessness, love of and loyalty to one’s comrades, patience, self-command, the will to endure adversity. It all comes from the hunting band’s need to survive.

At a deeper level, the Warrior Ethos recognizes that each of us, as well, has enemies inside himself. Vices and weaknesses like envy and greed, laziness, selfishness, the capacity to lie and cheat and do harm to our brothers. The tenets of the Warrior Ethos, directed inward, inspire us to contend against and defeat those enemies within our own hearts.

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.

The Spartan king Agesilaus was once asked what was the supreme warrior virtue, from which all other virtues derived. He replied, “Contempt for death.”

Courage—in particular, stalwartness in the face of death—must be considered the foremost warrior virtue.

The dictionary defines ethos as: The moral character, nature, disposition and customs of a people or culture.

First, tribes are hostile to all outsiders. This has been true, anthropologists tell us, of virtually all tribes in all parts of the globe and in all eras of history. Tribes are perpetually at war with other tribes.

Tribes value the capacity to endure hardship.

“You’ve got the watches,” say the Taliban, “but we’ve got the time.”

Tribes are tied to the land and draw strength from the land. Tribes fight at their best in defense of home soil.

The Warrior Ethos, on the contrary, mandates respect for the enemy. The foe is granted full honor as a fighting man and defender of his home soil and values. From Cyrus through Alexander to the Greeks and Romans and on down to Rommel and the Afrika Korps (with some notorious lapses, be it said), today’s enemy was considered tomorrow’s potential friend—and thus granted his full humanity.

The terrorist’s aim is to so outrage and appall the sense of honor of the enemy that the enemy concludes, “These people are fiends and madmen,” and decides either to yield to the terrorist’s demands out of fear or to fight the terrorist by sinking to his moral level.

Sociologists tell us that there are two types of cultures: guilt-based and shame-based. Individuals in a guilt-based culture internalize their society’s conceptions of right and wrong. The sinner feels his crime in his guts. He doesn’t need anyone to convict him and sentence him; he convicts and sentences himself.

A shame-based culture is the opposite. In a shame-based culture, “face” is everything. All that matters is what the community believes of us.

“These scars on my body,” Alexander declared, “were got for you, my brothers. Every wound, as you see, is in the front.

Warrior cultures (and warrior leaders) enlist shame, not only as a counter to fear but as a goad to honor. The warrior advancing into battle (or simply resolving to keep up the fight) is more afraid of disgrace in the eyes of his brothers than he is of the spears and lances of the enemy.

The interesting thing about peoples and cultures from rugged environments is that they almost never choose to leave them.

But Cyrus knew, as the proverb declares, that “soft lands make soft people.” His answer became famous throughout the world: Better to live in a rugged land and rule than to cultivate rich plains and be a slave.

There’s a well-known gunnery sergeant in the Marine Corps who explains to his young Marines, when they complain about pay, that they get two kinds of salary—a financial salary and a psychological salary. The financial salary is indeed meager. But the psychological salary? Pride, honor, integrity, the chance to be part of a corps with a history of service, valor, glory; to have friends who would sacrifice their lives for you, as you would for them—and to know that you remain a part of this brotherhood as long as you live. How much is that worth?

The greatest counterpoise to fear, the ancients believed, is love—the love of the individual warrior for his brothers in arms.

Fight for this alone: the man who stands at your shoulder. He is everything, and everything is contained within him.

The soldier’s prayer today on the eve of battle remains not “Lord, spare me” but “Lord, let me not prove unworthy of my brothers.”

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

The group comes before the individual. This tenet is central to the Warrior Ethos.

Selflessness produces courage because it binds men together and proves to each individual that he is not alone.

The hero (though virtually no recipient chooses to call himself by that name) often acts as much to preserve his comrades as he does to deliver destruction onto the foe.

Among all elite U.S. forces, the Marine Corps is unique in that its standards for strength, athleticism and physical hardiness are not exceptional. What separates Marines, instead, is their capacity to endure adversity. Marines take a perverse pride in having colder chow, crappier equipment and higher casualty rates than any other service.

Marines take pride in enduring hell. Nothing infuriates Marines more than to learn that some particularly nasty and dangerous assignment has been given to the Army instead of to them. It offends their sense of honor.

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

The payoff for a life of adversity is freedom.

Death Before Dishonor

In warrior cultures—from the Sioux and the Comanche to the Zulu and the mountain Pashtun—honor is a man’s most prized possession. Without it, life is not worth living.

Honor, under tribal codes, is a collective imperative. If a man receives an insult to his honor, the offense is felt by all the males in his family. All are mutually bound to avenge the affront.

The American brand of honor is inculcated on the football field, in the locker room and in the street. Back down to no one, avenge every insult, never show fear, never display weakness. Play hurt, never quit.

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

“Look you for a kingdom far greater than ours, my son. For Macedonia is plainly too small for you!”

The will to fight, the passion to be great, is an indispensable element of the Warrior Ethos.

The evening before the fight, Epaminondas called his warriors together and declared that he could guarantee victory on the morrow if his men would vow to perform one feat at the moment he commanded it. The men, of course, responded aye. “What do you wish us to do?” “When I sound the trumpet,” said Epaminondas, “I want you to give me one more foot. Do you understand? Push the enemy back just one foot.” The men swore they would do this.

Spartans liked to keep things short. Once, one of their generals captured a city. His dispatch home said, “City taken.” The magistrates fined him for being verbose. “Taken,” they said, would have sufficed.

Another time, a band of Spartans arrived at a crossroads to find a party of frightened travelers. “You are lucky,” the travelers told them. “A gang of bandits was here just a few minutes ago.” “We were not lucky,” said the Spartan leader. “They were.”

The remarks confront reality. They say, “Some heavy shit is coming down, brothers, and we’re going to go through it.”

Civilian society rewards wealth and celebrity. Military culture prizes honor.

When the Three Hundred were chosen to march out and die at Thermopylae, there was weeping and wailing in the streets of Sparta—by the wives and mothers of the warriors who were not chosen. The wives of the Three Hundred walked about dry-eyed and proud.

The greatness of American society is that our citizens are still debating it—protected by those who have freely chosen to embrace the Warrior Ethos. And still debating it freely.

When an action is unjust, the warrior must not take it.

Alexander, in his campaigns, always looked beyond the immediate clash to the prospect of making today’s foe into tomorrow’s ally. After conquering an enemy in the field, his first act was to honor the courage and sacrifice of his antagonists—and to offer the vanquished warriors a place of honor within his own corps. By the time Alexander reached India, his army had more fighters from the ranks of his former enemies than from those of his own Greeks and Macedonians.

Cyrus of Persia believed that the spoils of his victories were meant for one purpose—so that he could sur...