The Soul of a Man Does Violence to Itself

“The soul of a man does violence to itself.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, II.16

There are plenty of ways to get hurt in the Army. Some of them come with Purple Hearts. Some come with profiles, surgeries, or a lifetime supply of ibuprofen and stories about why your knees make sounds that knees probably shouldn’t make. Some injuries are obvious enough that everyone around you recognizes them immediately. But Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor who spent a considerable portion of his reign dealing with war, disease, political intrigue, and the generally unpleasant business of holding an empire together, was interested in another kind of injury. He wrote that “the soul of a man does violence to itself,” and then explained the ways we participate in our own moral destruction.

That idea has stuck with me because soldiers spend a lot of time thinking about violence inflicted upon us and surprisingly little time thinking about the violence we inflict upon ourselves.

I don’t mean suicide or physical self-harm. I mean something quieter and probably more common: the gradual erosion of the person we once intended to be. It happens when resentment becomes part of our personality, when anger becomes an identity, when cynicism replaces judgment, when we compromise our integrity because doing so is convenient, and when we surrender responsibility for our choices by convincing ourselves that somebody—or something—made us do it.

The Army has plenty of opportunities for all of those things. So does life.

The Things That Happen to Us

It’s natural to have resentment toward the things that happen to us. But to interpret Aurelius’ many ruminations on this topic, his argument is essentially that raging against reality damages us because reality remains stubbornly indifferent to our complaints. The Stoics were big on that sort of thing, which is probably one reason military people keep rediscovering them every few generations.

Soldiers understand the concept intuitively. You don’t control the weather, the enemy, the promotion board, the assignment marketplace, your commander’s personality, or the fact that somebody scheduled a mandatory formation immediately before a four-day weekend because apparently the entire organization will collapse if the battalion commander doesn’t personally tell you not to get arrested. So while you don’t control any of that, you do control what you do next.

That’s simple to write and considerably harder to live. Some of the most miserable people I have known in the military weren’t miserable because objectively terrible things were happening to them. They were miserable because they had developed an expectation that reality owed them something different. Every assignment was an insult. Every promotion somebody else received was evidence of a corrupt system. Every bad boss became an excuse for their own bad leadership. Every organizational stupidity became personal. Eventually resentment stopped being something they felt and became something they were. That’s violence against the soul.

That’s not to say that anger is inherently wrong. There are things worth being angry about. Injustice should make us angry. Incompetence that gets people hurt should make us angry. Betrayal should make us angry. The problem begins when anger stops motivating us to act constructively and starts giving us permission to become someone worse. Simply put, there is a difference between being angry and becoming an angry man.

What We Do to Other People

Aurelius next turns to hostility toward other human beings, particularly the desire to harm someone out of anger. That’s an interesting warning for members of a profession whose job description occasionally includes killing people. But professional violence and personal hatred aren’t the same thing.

That’s something military ethics sometimes struggles to explain because it sounds contradictory until you’ve lived it. A soldier may be required to use extraordinary violence against an enemy. That does not require him to hate the enemy. In fact, hatred can make him worse at his profession because hatred distorts judgment. Anger says, make him pay. Professionalism says, accomplish the mission. The problem is, those aren’t always pointing in the same direction.

This matters beyond combat as well. Anyone who has spent enough time inside a large organization has probably fantasized about the spectacular professional demise of someone he dislikes. Maybe it’s a toxic leader. Maybe it’s the peer who stabbed you in the back. Maybe it’s the senior leader whose incompetence is surpassed only by his confidence.

Military organizations can be remarkably fertile environments for grudges.The danger isn’t primarily what the grudge does to the other person. Most of the time, the other person doesn’t even know you’re carrying it. The damage is what carrying it does to you.

You start interpreting everything through it. You enjoy someone’s failures more than your own successes. You begin making decisions based not on what is right but on what hurts the person you resent. Eventually another human being is occupying space inside your head without paying rent.

And if you allow it to get to that point, who exactly is hurting whom?

Pleasure and Pain Are Both Terrible Commanders

Aurelius also warns about becoming dominated by either pleasure or pain. Modern readers sometimes mistake Stoicism for emotional suppression, as though Marcus Aurelius spent his evenings staring humorlessly at a wall while reminding himself not to enjoy anything. That’s not the point.

The issue is control.

Military service exposes people to both extremes. There are moments of enormous satisfaction: promotion, command, recognition, camaraderie, victory, achievement. There are also moments of humiliation, loss, exhaustion, grief, and failure.

Neither should own you. Success can deform character just as effectively as suffering. Spend enough time being told you’re exceptional and eventually you may start believing the rules governing ordinary mortals no longer apply to you. We’ve all watched leaders begin their careers as decent, humble people and gradually become convinced that rank is evidence not merely of professional success but of personal superiority.

Pain creates a different temptation. Hurt people sometimes decide that their suffering gives them permission to hurt others. It doesn’t. The fact that your battalion commander treated you badly does not authorize you to treat your company badly. The fact that your father was emotionally unavailable doesn’t give you a waiver to be emotionally unavailable to your children. The fact that the Army consumed twenty years of your life does not mean your spouse owes you another twenty years of tolerating whatever version of yourself you bring home. Suffering explains behavior. It does not automatically excuse it.

The Person We Pretend to Be

Aurelius’s fourth form of self-inflicted violence is particularly uncomfortable: playing a part, behaving insincerely, saying things we don’t actually believe. The military provides plenty of opportunities for that too.

Every organization has theater. We have perhaps more than most. We learn the vocabulary, the facial expressions, the approved responses. We know when to nod during a briefing. We know how to say something is “tracking in the right direction” when everyone in the room knows it is a disaster. We learn that some truths travel poorly upward. Most of this is harmless institutional ritual. Some of it isn’t.

There comes a point when saying what is professionally convenient instead of what is true becomes a habit. You tell the commander the training event was successful because nobody wants to explain why it wasn’t. You give the subordinate an evaluation that doesn’t reflect his actual performance because confrontation is unpleasant. You sit silently while someone is treated unfairly because speaking up might cost you something. Each individual compromise is small. That’s precisely what makes them dangerous.

Very few people wake up one morning and decide to abandon their integrity. They trade it away incrementally. A little dishonesty here. A little cowardice there. One silence when they should have spoken. One signature on something they knew wasn’t right. Eventually the person in the mirror bears only a passing resemblance to the person who originally joined.

The soul rarely gets destroyed in one dramatic event. Usually it gets negotiated away.

Without an Aim

Aurelius’s final warning may be the one that resonates most with me. He warns against acting without purpose—doing things thoughtlessly, without connecting our actions to some larger end. Military people are supposed to understand purpose. We talk constantly about commander’s intent, mission statements, end states, objectives, and lines of effort. We will build a 37-slide briefing explaining exactly where an organization intends to be six months from now.

Ask the person giving the briefing where he intends his own life to be in ten years and things sometimes get considerably less precise. That should bother us.

Careers have momentum. So do organizations. If you’re reasonably competent and sufficiently ambitious, the Army can carry you from one assignment to another for decades without requiring you to seriously consider where you’re actually going. School. Promotion. Command. Staff. Another promotion. Another assignment. Another PCS. Always chasing that inner ring. Then one day somebody hands you a flag in a wooden box, your family is sitting in folding chairs in the front row, and the institution that structured your adult life politely wishes you good luck.

Now what?

Purpose cannot simply be whatever comes next on the career timeline. There must be something underneath it.

The Enemy Inside the Wire

We spend enormous energy teaching soldiers to recognize threats. That’s appropriate. Threat recognition keeps people alive. But Marcus Aurelius was pointing toward a threat that no amount of force protection can defeat: ourselves.

We can survive combat and still become bitter. We can achieve extraordinary professional success and become arrogant. We can endure suffering and use it as justification for cruelty. We can spend an entire career preaching integrity while gradually becoming dishonest. We can accomplish every objective placed in front of us and never stop to ask whether those objectives were leading toward a life worth living. And the frightening part is that none of this necessarily feels like failure while it’s happening. Sometimes it feels like winning.

That’s why the old emperor’s warning still matters nearly two thousand years later. The greatest danger to our character isn’t always the terrible thing somebody else does to us. Sometimes it’s the response we choose afterward.

We don’t control everything that happens to us. Soldiers know that better than most. War teaches it. Loss teaches it. Aging eventually teaches it to everyone. But we retain some authority over what those experiences turn us into. Maybe that’s the point.

The world will do enough violence to us on its own. We shouldn’t help it.
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Charles served over 27 years in the U.S. Army, which included seven combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan with various Special Operations Forces units and two stints as an instructor at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He also completed operational tours in Egypt, the Philippines, and the Republic of Korea and earned a Doctor of Business Administration from Temple University as well as a Master of Arts in International Relations from Yale University. He is the owner of The Havok Journal, and the views expressed herein are his own and do not reflect those of the US Government or any other person or entity.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.