But not everyone could stop what they were doing and listen to the lecture. “Johanson, ya witless booby!” shouted the bosun to one distracted sailor. “I swear you shall never shite a true seaman’s turd! If ya leave that stirrup like that the next person on it might fall through to their death. Now get back up there and finish the job. Then go up to the masthead and stay there and consider the magnitude of yer sin until I tell ya to come down!”
Not in the least distracted, the monk continued his class. “Violence and discipline. First is violence. Violence is your duty. If you’re not capable of violence at the moment of truth, then you are a failure and all the effort and energy expended to equip, train, and transport you was wasted. And you’ll die like a dog. Worse than that, you will have failed those who are depending on you for their lives. But if you are capable of violence and you have no discipline, then we’ve created a monster, a danger, a threat to our civilization. Discipline is your honor.
“Violence and discipline. Duty and honor, in service to your country. Duty, honor, country. That is what makes a warrior, and discipline is the safeguard. We don’t require the uniforms and the haircuts for fun. We do it because if you cannot submit your will to authority about little things like how you wear your hair, at least for a short period of time, like in basic training, then you can never truly be trusted to submit your will to authority in big things, like attacking the enemy and not committing atrocities. Most great warrior cultures used some kind of distinctive haircut as a symbol of separation and submission to authority.” The warriors gathered around him, along with the monkeys on their shoulders, all nodded. This was good stuff. This was what warriors wanted to know about.
“Think about it. In the twentieth century, probably the single most violent century in human history, democracies like the United States sent millions of men to war. (I use the word democracy in its broad sense here, since the U.S. was actually a republic or a representative democracy.) In World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, throughout the century, they sent millions of men to distant lands. They gave those men weeks, months, years of practice at killing people. They were very good at killing. But when they came home those men were less likely to use that skill inappropriately, less likely to murder, than nonveterans of the same age and sex. Those who were taught leadership, logistics and maintenance came home and used those skills to build a nation. But those who were taught killing didn’t use that skill. Why?”
He paused and scanned his audience, then nodded as he answered his own question, his voice echoing with authority. “Discipline. Discipline. Discipline. Discipline, grasshoppers, is the safeguard. In this realm the captain has the power of life and death in the application of his discipline, and that keeps us alive. It also keeps our society safe from trained killers released into their midst.
“As I said, the other half of the equation is violence. Basic training is essentially a form of brainwashing. You participate willingly. You want and need the skills they are teaching, but it’s still essentially brainwashing. They own you day and night for months on end. The Stockholm Syndrome sets in, and you identify with your captors.” Here the monk grinned slyly and wiggled his eyebrows with a clever point that seemed to go completely over his students’ heads. He sighed, made a mental note to teach them later about the Stockholm Syndrome, and continued.
“You accept the discipline, and you also accept the violence. You know that there are people in this world who will hurt you, and your drill sergeant is at the top of the list.” Another pause and some appreciative chuckles, this was a bit of humor that struck home. Every one of these warriors was a product of some form of basic training and this was a concept they could understand. “And you become convinced that violence is an acceptable response to those who will hurt you.”
“That’s one of the things that went wrong in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Children were exposed to violent visual imagery. A constant barrage of it in the form of movies, television, and worst of all, the violent video games. I think that most of you have been exposed to these on mid- or high-tech worlds. If not, then you may get a chance later.
“For the little ones this violence was real, and like soldiers in basic training it convinced them, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there were people in this world who would hurt them. Most of them just became fearful, but some of them also became convinced that violence was an acceptable response to a violent world. Most of those became bullies, but a few became murderers. This was done not to military personnel, with discipline, but to children.” Petreckski’s monkey, which had been sitting benevolently on the monk’s shoulder, now began to look at his master with what seemed to be attentive horror.
“Many children were also bereft of discipline, just at the same time that combat simulators were developed; ever more realistic combat simulators in the form of ‘games’ became the primary pastime for many of them. You’ve all participated in training on high-tech worlds, using combat simulators, and you know what they do for us. This was military-killing enabling, without the discipline, and given to children. The result was horror. All-time record juvenile mass murders. Events unprecedented in human history. Body counts each year eclipsing previous years. The amazing thing was that it took them so long to figure out what their toxic culture was doing to their children.”
“Sir,” said Ngobe, with wide eyes, “they didn’t really provide combat simulators to kids, without any structure or adult discipline, did they? Why? Why would they do that?”
“Money, grasshopper. Money. The same reason men once enslaved their fellow men and fought wars to keep doing it. The same reason men once fought to keep selling alcohol and tobacco to children. ‘The love of money is the root of all evil,’ ” concluded the monk, suddenly looking old and tired.
“We know that real change began to happen in the early twenty-first century, when they began to release the brain scans showing the destructive, deadening effects of violent television and video games on the human brain. Once upon a time the doctors showed an X-ray of a smoker’s lung next to a nonsmoker’s lung, and from that point on the tobacco industry, with all their lies and lobbyists, started to be reined in. Next they showed the brain scans of a healthy brain, compared to that of a person exposed to high levels of TV and video games, and the effect was stunning. In the following decade the television and video game industry, and all their lies and lobbyists, were slowly but surely reined in. And our civilization took a step back from the brink of disaster.
“Technology provides a constant font of new innovations, each a potential blessing and a possible curse. Somehow the same basic lesson of caution and restraint has to be learned over and over again. Every time, those who would gain money at any cost lead the charge. Only afterwards do other, wiser heads clean up the shattered lives, families, and nations.”
The monk reached up and gently rubbed his monkey behind the ears as he continued. “There is another path though. A path that our civilization has been blessed with for centuries, and that path is retroculture. That is why we study the classics. Dickens, Dumas, and so very many others show us how to live in a retroculture. The secret is to draw from the past, the best of the past, accepting anything ‘new’ with great caution and suspicion. You don’t have to accept the latest fashion, the latest gadget. The fool is the one who flocks to the latest fad, while the wise man taps into the roots of his history.
“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost.
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”
“We ‘wander’ the galaxy gentlemen, but we are not lost. Warriors like Broadax, Westminster, Valandil and our good captain are solid ‘gold,’ but they hardly glitter. We tap into the ‘deep roots’ of our civilization, and they are strong: the ‘old that is strong,’ strong enough to form the greatest civilization ever known to man, perhaps the greatest in the galaxy.
“But we know that we need two things to prosper: roots, and wings. And so we also study the great works of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the truly magnificent genre known popularly as ‘science fiction’ and ‘fantasy’ and they give us wings. Thucydides tells us that ‘The state which separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards, and its fighting by fools.’ So, my friends, you must be warriors and scholars. You must exercise your minds and your bodies. And science fiction teaches us how to think. Not what to think, but how to think in the face of the unknown and unexpected. Most of those writers were only writing to make a living. They probably had no idea that they were writing timeless classics that would be venerated in the centuries to come, not just by their own civilization, but by others as well.