I think part of what’s going on here is that “armies are for organized violence” feels very similar to “armies are the outgroup and people associated with them should be scapegoated,” especially to people in the actor mode. I don’t actually think the latter, though, just the former.
I liked Ender’s Game a lot, and I’m enjoying Orson Scott Card’s new Fleet School series, which has a really good treatment of friendship and trust. The fictional Dragon Army wasn’t inherently bad, it was just a military unit of elite child-soldiers. That’s a very specific sort of thing, and one should be pretty careful in generalizing leadership lessons from it to nonabusive peacetime conditions like the ones Duncan set up for his group house.
I think part of what’s going on here is that “armies are for organized violence” feels very similar to “armies are the outgroup and people associated with them should be scapegoated,” especially to people in the actor mode. I don’t actually think the latter, though, just the former.
I liked Ender’s Game a lot, and I’m enjoying Orson Scott Card’s new Fleet School series, which has a really good treatment of friendship and trust. The fictional Dragon Army wasn’t inherently bad, it was just a military unit of elite child-soldiers. That’s a very specific sort of thing, and one should be pretty careful in generalizing leadership lessons from it to nonabusive peacetime conditions like the ones Duncan set up for his group house.