It seems to me that the archetype of the Soldier is grouped largely around two points: the noble Soldier and the banal Soldier. The noble Soldier is valued and valorous and meaningfully dedicated to a cause; the banal Soldier is an expendable cog in a machine that cares for aet not at all. One is often used to sell wars, the other to condemn them. You will find in their overlap in complicated tragedies. (I use banal rather than ignoble here because the banal soldier is not necessarily ignoble by nature; aet is simply inconsequential, being an expression of the archetype as something vulgar and flawed rather than admirable or even significant.) While there is much made where I live of stolen valor and the wrongness of lying about being a soldier, the Soldier as an archetype is adopted relatively lightly. Or, if not lightly, at least easily. Perhaps the closest thing to archetropal identity as a soldier in the mainstream is the Christian "Soldier of God," a metaphor that many Christian communities have run with to the point of treating it as literal on some level. On another hand, US Army fanboys seem to enjoy larping their ideal of a soldier or militia person wherever they're allowed to. On another, laymen who are asked to give up their comfort in the face of a war or tragedy may be encouraged to think of themselves as in-category with soldiers. I do not consider my experience of a kind with any mainstream archetypal expression of the Soldier as an identity -- in no small part because they tend to sit well into the category of the "noble Soldier," and I find many expressions of the noble Soldier to be repulsive -- but I do think it's interesting to see the precedent of this archetype existing outside of fiction and outside of the actual job that aet's built off of. It makes sense that the archetype as aet is invoked outside of fiction would be the noble Soldier far more often than the banal Soldier: aet is invoked, aet is voluntary on some level even if you are being pressured to adopt aet, and aet is often, as with the soldier of God and the layman doing his part for the war, a source of comfort. Nobody wants to be the banal Soldier. Nobody is comforted by the idea of the banal Soldier, except the person who cannot help but be the banal Soldier.
Of the various archetypes that I might see myself in, or see in myself, the Soldier is the most fundamental. The Drifter is retrospective, the Knight is aspirational (to the extent that it is anything yet) -- I am a soldier. I have always been a soldier. If I were to choose not to be a soldier, it would require active pursuit of an opposing path. Even then I might just come back around to the same place. It's in my history and in my personality. From a perspective grounded in this world I might say it's a consequence of fictivity, or of knowing the purpose that I was formed for as a pluran. From a spiritual perspective it's been stamped on me from life to life; in the same way that the archetype stuck with me after the job was lost within a single life (and perhaps within others), the archetypes that defined me in that life stuck with me after the life itself had passed.
The center of the Soldier archetype to me is the willingness to follow orders -- or perhaps the absence of opposition to it. This might be a need to follow orders, or a want, or perhaps it was something taught. The Soldier follows orders. This is the point at which I take issue with the noble Soldier as an archetype: in aets purest form, in the form of propaganda and comforting stories, the noble Soldier is good because aet follows orders. The less aet follows orders, the further aet gets from the archetype of the Soldier -- the more he becomes a Renegade, or a Vigilante, or an Antihero. The noble Soldier is good because aet does whatever aet is told to do, whatever aet has to do, even if it is hard, even if it puts aet in danger, because whatever cause aet has dedicated aetself to is more important than aetself. We will not ask "what if aet is ordered to do something appalling." If we do ask that, and aet does not do the appalling thing (because aet is noble, because aet is a soldier) we will not ask "doesn't this entire setup punish people for not doing appalling things" or "why is the noble Soldier exempted from the very rules that are established as making the Soldier noble." The noble Soldier, at this propagandistic height, is a farce and a personal irritation of mine. I see aet like looking into a funhouse mirror, or like hearing a backhanded compliment.
My ability to put myself and my own thoughts aside and follow orders does not make me a better person. At best it is a neutral trait; at worst it is a flaw. It made me a good guardian at one time. A good protector, a good babysitter -- a person who never put himself above what he understood as the point of him. But it also made me act in ways that were painful to people who cared about me. I solved problems by taking damage onto myself. I considered myself expendable. The important thing was always what somebody else needed, or wanted, or what I thought they wanted, even at the expense of my values or theirs. It was an incredibly self destructive way of thinking and acting, which I felt at the time was recompense for a life where I killed who I was told to. I think on some level I thought that if my ability to compartmentalize myself away and do what was expected of me could save one person, that would make up for some fraction of the war that it wrought in the past. In reality I was just falling into old habits in a way that happened to be less outwardly destructive than it had been in the past.
It is hard to come out of that rut. Even today, it's a comfort and a predisposition to stop thinking and act on some external command. While my past life memories are narratively incomplete, I think I was raised into it once -- maybe that's why it stuck so well, because there was nothing before it. I certainly have nothing before it now; springing forth fully formed from the foam here, having no childhood in this life or in those narratively incomplete memories, all I am left with is the grown man who puts himself aside when he's told to. As much as I may grow my identity as I understand it will always be built on top of that (unless and until I forget it, as I have forgotten whatever came before it). This is what I mean when I say the Soldier is an archetype that I can't get away from, or which would take a great deal of effort for me to get away from. Many of my most closely held values are reactions against the Soldier in me. I know I find it too comfortable to outsource the thought behind my actions, so I value forethought. I know that I have a certain capacity for violence, and I try to resist the poeticization of that violence. My experience as a soldier by occupation in past lives, and as an archetypal Soldier beyond that, was banal. I do not want to forget that it was banal; I keep my distance from the noble Soldier.
Strongly associated with the Soldier and often equated to the willingness to follow orders is a sense of duty. This is one place that I do skew a bit toward the noble Soldier. The banal Soldier furthest from the noble Soldier does not need a sense of duty. If aet has one, it comes either as a flaw or as an ideal whose brightness and distance serve to throw the darkness of aets reality into contrast. I have an innate sense of duty, or an innate tendency to value what I adopt as duty, and I consider this a positive trait. It is not a trait without risk or drawback; a strong sense of duty is often an easy point of manipulation, to the point that high control groups may try to cultivate it in their victims. A strong sense of duty can turn into dogmatism, can turn self destructive, can turn destructive toward others. It must be upkept to prevent it from eating itself and becoming tautological. When your sense of duty toward something refers only back to your sense of duty, when you find you are beholden to something only because it is identified as the thing you are beholden to, you have a problem. But a sense of duty can also be a point of consistency, of reliability, and of honesty. It is an intensifier of whatever you choose to commit yourself to. In my case I find it helps me to establish a sense of direction, something I often find woefully absent when there's no external force telling me what to do.
The sense of duty is, as I said, associated with the willingness to follow orders, but they are not the same -- although they may in some cases have to be wrenched apart. As a job, not as an archetype, the given duty of the soldier is to follow orders. On paper a soldier may be committed to an army or to a state or directly to their superiors, but in practice it is understood that even if their commitment is to a state or a people the nature of that commitment is that they act out the orders of whoever decides what is best for that state or people -- "whoever" being, in the vast majority of cases, somebody other than the soldier. The archetypal Soldier gets a bit more leeway, but there is still generally a sense of hierarchy and structure; to be a Soldier is to be subordinate. If you are a "Soldier of God" you may not not literally receive orders from God, and depending on your denomination there may be no human being you are beholden to -- but you are beholden to God, and your duty is to fulfill whatever you perceive as God's expectation or command. I don't think I would say that the Soldier's duty always takes the form of subordination; subordination and duty may even be conflicting aspects of the archetype, especially in narrative media that produces drama from that juxtaposition. At the same time, the sense of duty can fill the same space as subordination. There is something above you from which you derive direction, even if it is nothing that could be said to give that direction itself. I have some difficulty knowing what to do with myself when nothing is expected of me (or when I can't or shouldn't do what is expected of me), and this is often how I cope with it: by leaning into a sense of duty as a means of defining my own expectations.
In this sense perhaps subordination is really more central to the archetype than the actual following of orders or the attitude toward such. Following orders is an expression of subordination, but subordination is not expressed only by following orders. Subordination can also be abstracted and made metaphorical in a way that is difficult to replicate with the act of following orders, and it seems to me that the potential for abstraction is one of the key differences between an archetype and a literal role. By interpreting subordination in a relatively straightforward manner we arrive at a willingness to follow orders; by abstracting it we can arrive at duty or discipline.
Discipline is another positive or neutral trait that is often used to godawful ends. The discipline generally associated with the Soldier is incredibly rigid, expressed in tightly regimented schedules and uniform motion or stillness. On a small scale I find comfort in discipline of motion and exercises of personal control, but broadly I find my lack of discipline in this life to be a point of shame and insecurity. To be clear, when I say "discipline" here I mean not "punishment," but control over one's behavior, the ability to act (or not act) based on intent over feeling or impulse. That control is often seen as the result of punishment, but in reality there is considerably more to it even in situations where it is enforced by punishment. The punishment is debatably efficient at best. The control is useful. The degree of control I expect from myself is not achievable for all people under all circumstances; it is not currently achievable for me. I think a greater degree of discipline than I currently express is possible, but I also think that shame and punishment are very ineffective means of getting there in this life. Still there is a part of me that expects me to have the same discipline I had in another body, in another life, and thinks of me as weak and without will for failing where I struggle. While the failure is personal, it is not a failure on my own behalf. It is only an annoyance that I lack the discipline needed to benefit myself; the failure is that I lack the discipline that would allow me to be useful to someone else.
The Soldier is not a lone creature. To be the Soldier is to be in some sense a part of a unit. Sometimes this comes with a sense of camaraderie, sometimes of facelessness -- sometimes both. Even when the Soldier is narratively a hero and an individual, a last man or a stand-out, aet is also a part of aets army. This may be paradoxical; noble Soldier narratives can make much of a protagonist being a team player and an everyman while also making them fundamentally better than and separate from everyone else, at once an example of why the rules are infallible and personally exempt from the rules. Inversely facelessness may be made into an example of the Soldier's nobility, aets willingness to work without singular recognition a virtuous abandonment of vanity and pride. The banal Soldier's facelessness is generally more mundane. Both, however, are fundamentally a cog in a machine -- the difference is the worth of the cog. Do you notice the loss of the cog or only the way the machine grinds to a halt after? Do you try to fix it when it fails or do you simply replace it? I have always seen myself as expendable, because I have always been expendable. A soldier, an alter, a corporate employee -- either I am useful or I need to be pruned. The absence of the Soldier is not felt, the space is filled. The integration or disintegration of an alter is not supposed to be felt as a loss, nor the firing of an employee, nor the exit of a drifter or a poor man or a queer. The habit of thinking about myself like this was in a way useful very early in our understanding of plurality, as it kept me from despair at the idea that I might be a symptom that would later disappear or even the idea that I was already nonexistent, but it is a largely unhelpful way of thinking in essentially every other situation. It is a kind of nihilism that discourages a rounded habit of caring for oneself and instead suggests a kind of skewed utilitarian approach to living. By viewing myself as a disposable tool I developed a very low standard of what was worth risking my life or health over. After a decade or so of working on that I have developed somewhat healthier priorities, but I do still tend to see myself as replaceable on a grand scale in a way that many other people seem to find distressing. For my part I find the opposite distressing: I am mortal, I have no illusions of surpassing competence. I am a spirit in a delicate body. While I would like my place in the machine to be appreciated, I would still rather be a cog than some expensive and difficult bit that will muck things up for everyone when I am inevitably taken out by a stray bullet or a strong wind -- or than a unique tchotchke isolated on the shelf, irreplaceable and part of nothing. If I am to believe I mean anything to the world, I must believe the world will move on without me.
If the Soldier is a tool, it must be said that that tool is a weapon. The capacity for violence is a part of the Soldier even when the Soldier does not perform violence. The violence may be metaphorical in the case of the archetype -- I think I would define it here as something like "action with intent to do harm," thereby including harm to abstract things like identity or culture and excluding consensual and mitigated violence such as full contact sport -- but the Soldier would not be a Soldier without the expectation that it is within aets role. One might loosely associate the noble Soldier with protective violence and the banal Soldier with destructive violence, but the noble Soldier just as often destroys evil and the banal Soldier protects what aet does not know, or does not care about, or ultimately cannot protect. As far as I'm concerned the only real difference between the violence of the banal and the noble Soldier is narrative. All violence is destructive, even if it is also protective. No violence is good; some violence is necessary. This is a framing of violence that places me somewhere toward banal. Fully on the banal end we might have "all violence is always wrong," a framing that renders the Soldier inherently pointless or evil by virtue of being built around action that should never be carried out. Fully on the noble end, if "necessary violence is good" or "violence against evil is good" the Soldier is good not despite of but because of aets capacity for violence. Any act of violence on the Soldier's part can land nearly anywhere on this scale depending on who is describing it, so the nature of the Soldier's violence has less to do with the Soldier or his actions and more to do with the way aets violence is framed among the other traits of the archetype. The noble Soldier can commit war crimes and still be noble if aet is an expression that would either never obey an evil command or never receive one. The fact that it is the noble Soldier committing the war crimes makes the war crimes good.
This is a place where identifying with archetypes that have an inherent aspect of violence may get hairy. My system has personally known some Soldiers of God and imitative army fans who seemed to believe that because they were subordinate to something that they believed was inherently good, any action taken on behalf of that thing was good: they had created a personal narrative in which being the noble Soldier meant that the violence that they chose to do was always right. Similarly, somebody who is very very eaten up by the idea of duty in subordination may feel that the violence that they do, even if it is not right or good, is always justified. By placing their duty to their perceived position above their duty to anything else they rob themselves of agency and absolve themselves of responsibility. But the narrative does not overwrite the reality of their actions and their personhood. Returning to the beginning of this essay, although I have described several features of the archetypal soldier as neutral traits I have treated the tendency to put oneself aside and follow orders as more of a flaw. The capacity for violence and the capacity to reframe that violence through frameworks of duty or discipline is a major reason that I consider my tendency to put myself aside something that I cannot simply leave alone. No matter how much I feel that I have a duty to do what is expected of me, no matter how natural it feels to mindlessly follow orders, I am not mindless, and the responsibility of being a person with agency surpasses any duty to a third party. An actual person cannot truly be trapped within the narrative of their archetype.
I do not consider myself a violent person, but compared to the rest of my system I lack discomfort with the implication of physical violence. I am less afraid of the potential, I am less disturbed by the aftermath. I also largely lack the impulse toward violence in anger that seems to be shared by every other current member of my system. When I say the Soldier carries with it a capacity for violence that does not necessarily mean tendency toward violence as an impulse or reaction -- it can be that, but in my case it isn't. I also do not mean joy in violence, or even being undisturbed by violence, though the Soldier may be undisturbed or find joy in violence. I said before that every person has the capacity for violence; if there is a difference between the layman's capacity for violence and the Soldier's capacity for violence, it may be that the Soldier is useful for it. The Soldier's violence is expected. Violence is the Soldier's job. In the past I have felt that violence was the only thing that I was useful for. Obviously that is not true, but that was my understanding of myself, first literally and then metaphorically. My purpose was to destroy something or to be destroyed in something else's stead. Now I find that even though this body is fragile and shared and unsuited for violence, one of the things I am best at is handling the possibility of it.
For me, everything that I have described here links into everything else, even in ways not described. All of it reaches into other aspects of my life. I find joy in many of my hobbies because I like to feel useful for something other than violence. I have spent a lot of time lifting boxes or bussing tables for our jobs because I feel at ease doing rote, thoughtless work. The habits of thought and action that I associate with the Soldier have led me to value independence and nonviolence and gentleness as counterweights to the weights of my mind -- and to value discipline and duty and violence in their own right. The Soldier is not everything that I am, but the root and tree of it have become fundamental to the structure of my self.
There are other traits and experiences that I think can contribute to building the archetype of the Soldier; there is a physicality for me, there are aesthetics, there is a kind of mundanity to categories like "any able-bodied man" or "anyone who can hold a weapon." I feel that these are much less fundamental to the archetype than what I have already touched on here. My sense of physicality, my choice of weaponry, the degree to which I am unspecialized -- these things are all relevant to the archetype for me, but they are also very specific to my individual experience and my time period. These are not things that would identify the Soldier or even a broad category under the Soldier like noble or banal, they are the details that you would pull to get to something as specific as a medieval infantryman. Even expendability and duty and the actual disposition to follow orders I would not exactly call fundamental, only heavily weighted. The absence of any of these things would strongly imply something about the Soldier, but I'm not sure they would make him less recognizable. I would, however, struggle to recognize the Soldier without some aspect of discipline, of subordination, and of violence.
All of the fundamental and the heavily weighted traits that I have established are traits that I find to be somewhat fraught, especially in the context of the Soldier. The soldier as an occupation is an extant part of an extant institution that is is, put as lightly as possible, often unkind to the people it touches. Both historically and in the modern day, soldiers are drafted or recruited to kill, and to die, and to be broken, and to break others. This is an unbroken tradition of humanity which, whether you consider it necessary or obscene, destroys lives -- and the archetypal Soldier is used to sell it. Often, the archetypal Soldier is used to lie about it. As important as it is to me to accept and better myself without denying something that is undeniably a part of me, I also don't want to romanticize or idealize an archetype whose idealized form is used as a tool to deny the reality of the thing that it is built on. Nor do I want to place myself into a version of my archetype that is counter to my actual experience with that archetype; to wring the noble soldier out of me would be to erase the mundanity and ignobility that is foundational to my worldview even today. Though I do not feel the archetype of the noble Soldier is irredeemable, I think that using it to erase the banal Soldier might be. More practically, I think that completely overwriting the banality of the Soldier with nobility and glory and positive light is how you join the ranks of the intolerable -- without acknowledgement of risk or unpleasantness outside heroic suffering all that is left of the Soldier is war propaganda, and the person who tries to embody propaganda is going to wind up wildly out of touch with reality whether they do so in the context of actual war or spiritual war or simply in pursuit of perceived "coolness." Like a weapon, the most dangerous wielder is the one who believes that they are above being careful.
Ultimately I suppose the archetype of the Soldier is something of a mirror to me. I have called it a foundation or a root and I don't think that's wrong, but it's also something that I look to to understand myself. As my understanding of myself changes so does my understanding of the soldier, from a point of self-hatred to something narrow and barely archetypal to the mess I have described in this essay. It is a point of reference that facilitates a certain ease of exploration because it exists both within and outside me. It is also equal parts a comfort and a disturbance, but I don't think the unease that I feel about it is different from the unease that I would feel recognizing the traits I associate with it outside of this context. In these ways I might separate it from expressions of archetypal identity that are aspirational or uplifting; my experience with the archetype of the soldier is extremely grounded in what has happened and what is now, and in my flaws as much as my virtues. It is a meaningful but ultimately rather sober framework. It grows with me and I with it. Perhaps someday I will have grown to the point that it will no longer be recognizable in me, but that future exists at such a distance that I can't foresee it. In the present all that I can do is find some balance between the banal and the noble.