Soldierisation

“So that's it —

You're making me The Goat :

The only completely innocent man 

in this whole affair.

I have only one last thing to say to you, George :

The Man you stabbed in The Back, 

is A Soldier.”

The Hive Switch 

In September 1941, William McNeill was drafted into the U.S. Army. He spent several months in basic training, which consisted mostly of marching around the drill field in close formation with a few dozen other men. At first McNeill thought the marching was just a way to pass the time, because his base had no weapons with which to train. 

But after a few weeks, when his unit began to synchronize well, he began to experience an altered state of consciousness: 

Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. 

A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual. 

McNeill fought in World War II and later became a distinguished historian. His research led him to the conclusion that the key innovation of Greek, Roman, and later European armies was the sort of synchronous drilling and marching the army had forced him to do years before. He hypothesized that the process of “muscular bonding”—moving together in time—was a mechanism that evolved long before the beginning of recorded history for shutting down the self and creating a temporary superorganism. Muscular bonding enabled people to forget themselves, trust each other, function as a unit, and then crush less cohesive groups.

McNeill studied accounts of men in battle and found that men risk their lives not so much for their country or their ideals as for their comrades-in-arms. He quoted one veteran who gave this example of what happens when “I” becomes “we”: 

“Many veterans who are honest with themselves will admit, I believe, that the experience of communal effort in battle … has been the high point of their lives. … 

Their “I” passes insensibly into a “we,” “my” becomes “our,” and individual fate loses its central importance. 

… I believe that it is nothing less than the assurance of immortality that makes self sacrifice at these moments so relatively easy. 

… I may fall, but I do not die, for that which is real in me goes forward and lives on in the comrades for whom I gave up my life.”