Personally, I’ve found that one of the most effective ways to view phenomena is as pure information; not as insults or compliments, not as tragedies or glory. This way, I don’t take things so personally. The “I” fades away as I focus on what’s being said to me, and the proper way to respond to it.
Although this seems robotic, I experience intense fulfillment when I pull it off. Not only that, I manage to get stuff done, and if there is indeed something greater trying to communicate with me, I feel that I’ve done my best to try and listen to what it’s saying.
Dirty Sci-Fi Buddha 
[…] via Musings — Dirty Sci-Fi Buddha […]
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Thanks for the share! 🙂
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The way that things are said, contains also information. That must be the difficult part to absorb with a stoically attitude.
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I don’t think one has anything to do with the other. A stoic attitude doesn’t preclude one from detecting shifts in human behavior. Ask any great military leader. Jocko Wilink is a prime example of this.
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Well then consider the dead penalty, stand your ground and euthanasia; the daily dilemmas regular citizens have to face. Don’t think too big. As far I’m aware of, military personnel has a license to kill, delivered as a mandate that is the ultimate expression of its country’s foreign policy. There are very little incidents known of military officers killing their own or vice versa.
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Your extrapolations depend on me sharing your understanding of what a “stoic attitude” means. I see it as engaging with the world without giving proportional hints of any extremes of emotions that may be occurring internally, and quality-checking actions by trying to make sure they present the soundest case possible for carrying out my intent. I don’t understand what fratricidal murder within the military has to do with your argument, (which seems to be that possessing a stoic attitude automatically cuts one off from detecting the information contained in communicational tone) or any of your previous examples for that matter, but there are plenty of examples of it throughout history, to the point where a slang term, “fragging” was coined for it. Colonel David Hackworth had to build protection around his sleeping quarters when he first assumed command of the 4/39th for fear his men would kill him for instilling unwanted discipline, I have personally known one person who claimed to have observed friendly forces deliberately bring down a friendly helicopter because it had a delusional officer onboard who got people killed, and also another person who put his loaded rifle against his teammate’s head and threatened to kill him for constantly falling asleep on patrol during a combat operation. I’m not sure how you qualify “exception to the rule,” but it seems that you’re making the assumption that just because people wear the same uniform, we don’t need to factor in the frequency with which they kill each other. As far as the original argument goes, to what end? I would rather draw my conclusions on an inductively reasoned understanding of human nature, then in circumstances of ambiguity, make my best deduction based on the available information, if that’s what it comes down to.
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