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March 20, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:13
693 The Most Unknown Soldier (Video Available)

The tickertape parade that will not happen in our lifetime...

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Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It is the 20th of March, 2007.
I received an email last night from a listener.
I'd like to read it, and then we can talk about it on the way to work, but not for too long.
Oh, I'm going on vacation for two weeks as well, starting Saturday, so we shall see what I can do.
Steph, I have begun but not finished your most recent call-in show podcast, the one in which you describe the wounded Canadian soldier.
This is FDR 690, Call and Show, March 18, 2007.
After you finished that half-hour intro, I broke down crying.
I did so partly out of relief of realizing that what I had previously thought of as a moral failure on my part was not a moral failure at all, and partly out of remorse for the position on war that I held today.
Let me start by describing why I had previously thought I had a moral failure.
I joined the U.S. Air Force right out of college because I had looked at my life and realized that I had never really had a challenge of any sort.
I had been spoiled as a child in many, many ways and wanted to prove to myself that I could accomplish something difficult, something challenging in a way that memorizing facts and figures and analyzing classical literature was not.
I chose the Air Force over the Army, Navy, and Marines because there is a joke among military types, if the Air Force is on the front lines, we have already lost the war.
In other words, even though I would be able to prove to myself that I could have been on the front lines, I would not ever have to be.
In the Air Force, I was almost a complete failure by their standards in almost every way.
I failed basic training, a.k.a.
boot camp, twice before finally making it in.
If I had failed a third time, they would not have allowed me a fourth try.
I was known as Airman Duffelbag because my uniform was never quite right.
I was never good at following orders.
In fact, I never finished my four-year enlistment.
I only stayed in two and a half years.
I saw a counselor, a military one, because the stress was too much for me.
What was stressful for me was not the work itself, but the fact that I felt like a slave.
I began to write poetry to relieve my stress, and printed out copies of it to show close friends of mine.
One copy somehow wound up in the hands of one of my supervisors, and then it wound up in the hands of the first shirt, who then ordered me into more counseling.
I knew what that meant. They wanted to see if I was fit for duty.
I knew approximately how long this process would take.
I knew, also, approximately how long getting kicked out for, quote, weight management would take.
Less time, and it would look better on my resume.
You see, very often for a job application, if you claim the military as a past employer, they will want to see proof.
I would rather that proof say I was kicked out because I was overweight than because I could not hack it, wouldn't most people?
So I began to eat more and exercise less, a choice that still affects me today, but at least I got that paperwork right.
In the end, I was successful.
The audit counseling did have some beneficial effects, though.
I was in during the Afghanistan war and was never sent into duty.
I wasn't even sent to Saudi Arabia, a.k.a.
the Sandbox, where we had several bases at the time.
I would have been were it not for the counseling.
Until that podcast, I had thought of this as a failure on my part.
I realize now that it was perhaps because of my moral strength that I was such a failure in the Air Force.
Now to my past positions on war.
It was not this podcast alone, but a combination of this podcast and the Golden Gun podcast, which is a few before.
Neither alone would have changed my mind.
I have heard the anti-war position explained many, many, many times before from many points of view.
I have heard Pat Buchanan's conservative approach.
I have heard many of the libertarian positions from Reason and Liberty magazine.
I have heard the standard leftist tribe as well.
Yours is the first explanation that I actually found convincing.
Thank you. I now feel truly free.
Well, thank you, my friend.
That is a wonderful, wonderful email to receive.
I massively appreciate it.
And I won't go into my position regarding soldiering and warring.
I'm sure it's not that hard to figure out, but you can listen to this podcast 690, probably just the first half hour or so, wherein I talk about The way in which we view soldiers and the commonality between soldiers and those who are supposed to be enemies.
And take a brief dip into the rather significant moral quandary that soldiers are essentially people who will kill whoever you tell them to for money.
Soldiers are people who will kill whoever you tell them to, whoever some superior points at, for money.
This is not morality, this is being a hitman.
And I have an enormous amount of sympathy for soldiers.
I really, really do.
Because they are raised in state schools, they are raised with an enormous amount of propaganda.
This is the one thing that corrupts an empire, particularly as we have in the American empire.
The one thing that corrupts the empire is the propagandizing of the youth.
In order to maintain an empire, you must lie to your children about what is right and what is wrong and what is virtuous and what is evil.
And what always happens, of course, is that obedience and violence, mindless violence, mindless murder in costumes.
If you put the costume on, it's not murder anymore.
But this is the great vice of governments that grow in power, is that they must lie to their children about that power.
And it is that lying that is more harmful than the power itself, except for those, of course, who get their arms or heads or legs blown off in some foreign conflict.
It is the lying about the power that is really the most destructive thing, from a cultural standpoint, not from a sort of physical integrity standpoint.
And one of the things that is significantly difficult, I think, In this realm is this sort of basic paradox.
It's that soldiers are taught that their country is good.
That their country is good.
And of course the foreigners' country is bad.
Or if the foreigners' country isn't bad, the people who are in that country, who are fighting them back, who are defending themselves, are evil.
And nobody ever really asks why.
Nobody ever really asks why.
Well, people would say, well, why would America be considered more virtuous than Afghanistan?
Or Iraq to take Iran?
Yeah, well, that'll come. And it's a fascinating question.
It's a fascinating question.
The superiors that you obey within a military context must be more moral.
Than you are, because otherwise why would you be obeying them, right?
So the people who command you to kill and who pay you your money for doing the killing, I guess I'll even pay you if you don't do the killing, but the killing is the whole point of it.
They must be more moral than you, because you are obeying them.
Logic is more logical than me, so I obey logic.
Right? Reality is more consistent than me, so I submit experiments, if I'm a scientist, to physical reality and see if I can reproduce it, see if other people can reproduce it, and so on.
That which we submit to must be better.
Must be better than ourselves.
My wife runs all the finances in our household because she's way better at it than I am.
I'm not a spendthrift, by God, you can't pry money out of my cold, dead fingers, but...
Except for philosophy.
I will spend on philosophy, my goddess.
Because she's much better at it.
And I watch the emotional nature of our relationships and make sure we're not developing any problems through being busy or inattention or, you know, whatever my brother phones or her parents' phone or something like that.
Because I'm better at that.
The division of labor is totally fine.
And there's a division of labor when you obey someone.
Hopefully you're obeying them because they have something of truth and value to say.
But the soldier must be, by obeying his superior, he must say that his superior is his moral superior, not his hierarchical hegemonic superior, but his moral superior.
It must be. Because otherwise, why would you obey somebody?
Or if you did obey somebody who was not morally superior to you, then you would be doing great wrong.
And of course, the point of the army is not to enable the military leaders or the sergeants or the corporals or whoever to start to think for themselves.
It's not like you go from being a grunt to being a sergeant and you suddenly get to think for yourself.
No, you just obey the guy at the top.
All the way to the commander-in-chief, the president of the United States, POTUS, who is a slave to the people who paid for him to go there.
There's I mean, it's a big freaking plantation, a modern society, and the slave owner is in some ways the least free.
He's trapped with illusion and pleasure as well as corruption and vice.
But what is the evidence that the person who orders you to go and shoot strangers and pays you your money for doing so, what is the evidence that that person is so morally superior?
Because we're not talking about the United States.
Because the United States doesn't exist.
The United States is a color on a map.
It is a word in the mouth.
It is a letter on the page.
It is not something that has consciousness and volition.
There is no such thing as a country.
It is a complete fantasy.
It's as much to say that the United States is moral as to say, my garden gnome is looking at me funny.
Although the garden gnome at least has painted eyes, which...
The United States as a mere concept, as a mere geographical tag, as a boundary of the local state mafia in terms of the people they can pillage for money.
Here, but no further.
We pillage to the 49th parallel.
After that, we turn it over to the Canadian government for pillaging.
It's the line. It's the family line, so to speak.
And in more ways than one.
So there's no such thing as the morality of a country.
There's only the morality of people.
And there is no comparison between a soldier and his received orders and any kind of external morality.
The only morality that you're allowed to view in terms of being a soldier is the morality that says, if I disobey, I am evil.
If I disobey, I am evil.
And some people find that that's amazing, that level of discipline, that level of Commitment.
But it's not. This is empty.
Empty people. These are empty people.
These are empty people.
They have no self. They are nothing but fearful and brutalized illusions.
And that is why they love to fit into a structure where they get told what to do.
Because they don't know what to do.
They don't know what to do with their lives.
And so they go into a place where they're told what to do.
And that gives them a kind of structure.
It's like pouring water into a container.
Suddenly it has a shape. It's not just a puddle.
They have no self. They have nothing to give up.
They have nothing to give up.
If I were to be drafted into the military, though I would rather go to prison, if I were to be drafted into the military, actually I'd rather be shot.
If I were to be drafted into the military and were not able to escape, then I would lose everything that was valuable in my life.
I would lose everything that is valuable.
Actually, I shouldn't say I'd rather be shot.
I'd probably just try and hide out and drop my weapons and make it back to my wife.
So the people who end up in the military, as this gentleman points out, he was spoiled.
And I don't know what that means.
And if you could send me more about that, that would be very interesting.
I doubt that it was the mere act of being spoiled that ended up with you in the military.
And you mentioned that you'd been analyzing classical literature beforehand, and that is interesting as well.
I would imagine that you did not grow up with a strong father figure, and you confused murder with masculinity.
You confused being a hitman with being a man.
And that's understandable, given the level of propaganda, but it's something that is a good idea to not end up believing, of course.
So what is the evidence that...
The person who's giving you the orders is infinitely more moral than you are.
It's like you're taking a test, and certainly the willingness to murder somebody for money could be said to be a fairly important moral test, because if you're wrong about it, then you've just become a paid killer.
And it's exactly like in the very most complicated test that you would ever take in university, the professor refuses to let you study and dictates the answers to you and calls it knowledge.
Right? It's not knowledge if the answers get dictated to you and you don't even really understand them.
It's in a foreign language.
Or he just calls out a series of colors and tells you to write them down.
You don't know what the hell they mean.
That's not knowledge. Obeying orders is not virtue.
It's not virtue. You have to believe, as a soldier, when you obey orders to go and kill people, that somewhere up in the hierarchy, and it flows down perfectly without interruption, it's not a game of telephone, is an incredibly virtuous and wise human being who knows exactly when genocide and mass murder is the most moral action.
If you want to claim virtue, you can just say, hey, I'm a thug, and I like to shoot people, and I like the money, and I like to travel.
I know it's not virtuous. I know it's not good.
It's just a job. And I'm exactly morally equivalent to a hitman.
I got no problem with that.
Of course, soldiers don't say that.
Nobility! Iron the crease in your pants until it can shave you.
But they must believe that somebody up the moral chain, somebody up the chain of command has exquisite, deep, wise, powerful, noble, beautiful, rational, consistent ethics.
Who can make the decision, say, to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and to smash the lives of thousands of Americans and to traumatize hundreds of thousands more and to bleed hundreds of billions of dollars from the pockets of future generations.
That somebody can make that decision and be perfectly, totally right.
And then that decision flows down in its execution in a perfect moral, drip-down triangle hierarchy where nothing is lost.
Nothing is lost. Everything is perfect.
Nothing is mistranslated.
And then what translates down to the grunt on the ground is shoot these bastards and it's perfectly moral.
Because everything has been communicated down from a perfectly moral philosopher king With no mistranslation, with no hidden agendas, with no personal glory, with no emotional destructiveness, with no negative traits, because the people in the chain of command have to be pretty much perfectly moral themselves to not misinterpret, to not impose their own agendas, to not act in an unconscious or destructive manner, or any of these sorts of things.
Do you see the improbability of a soldier being told to pull a trigger and it being morally correct?
It's impossible. It's the opposite of possibility.
It's the exact opposite of possibility.
The philosopher king, George W. Bush.
The ultimate philosopher king.
How does that sit with you? Wiser than Plato.
Who, despite his faults aboard war, wiser than all of the philosophers throughout history who have questioned the validity of war.
Wiser than Clausewitz who said war is hell.
That George W. Bush is the wisest human being in history.
And all of his commandments are perfectly followed all the way down to the soldier.
And there's no financial incentive, despite Dick Cheney being an ex-board member of Halliburton.
And all of these other, the Carlisle Group and all these other vile warmongers.
There's no corruption in politics.
There's no corruption in the self-interest of war profiteering.
There's no corruption and no emptiness and perfect moral judgment in those who decide to make killing their business, to make slaughter their calling card, to put hitman or orderer of hits on their business card.
That there's no moral problems with people like that, that they're perfectly wise and moral, because they've got a costume on, you see, and that changes the nature of the object.
You can turn Ken into Barbie by taking off his shorts and putting on her dress.
Suddenly she has pointy plastic breasts and the Virgin Mary's genitalia.
And it's the purest nonsense, of course.
Politics is corrupt completely, because violence corrupts.
Not power, violence.
The people who serve in this hierarchy serve at the pleasure of the president.
People who serve in this hierarchy are empty sociopaths who've been broken by their histories and by propaganda but have turned into an active virus in the world.
The commands are brutal from the top and nonsensical and irrational and vile.
As they flow down, they get progressively more and more corrupted until you end up like situations which we saw in 60 Minutes recently where this guy is confessing to After an IED hit his armored vehicle, a Humvee, I think it was.
Well, semi-armored.
Got a multi-hundred billion dollar budget, but don't have enough for armor.
For the troops, right?
Because... Well, you don't give facelifts to your livestock, right?
What happened was he thought that gunfire that they were experiencing may be coming from a house up the road.
So he went up the road and he began rolling grenades into houses and blew the limbs and heads and arms off women and children.
Ended up going from house to house slaughtering people.
An inevitable result, Abu Ghraib, an inevitable result of the corruption of violence.
And these broken souls, I think that until a few years ago, and it may still be the case, there were still men in hospitals from the First World War because they could not leave the hospital because their lungs had been so damaged from mustard gas.
And this is the moral hierarchy and this is what this gentleman gets.
And it's amazing how close this truth is.
I don't have to spend years explaining morality to this guy.
He knows it deep down. We are addicted to propaganda because the alternative to propaganda is isolation.
And moral horror at how we were raised, which is not the easiest thing in the world.
In fact, I have found that it is the hardest thing in the world.
The alternative to believing lies is to recognize that you were lied to.
And to recognize that everybody else believes lies and speaks them, though knows that they're not true.
Everybody knows that this is nonsense.
Everybody knows that this is nonsense.
You ask anyone, and you can have this in a two-minute conversation.
Learning quantum physics is not a two-minute conversation.
Excuse me, my nose is tickling me.
Learning Chinese is not a two-minute conversation.
The ethics of soldiering is not even two minutes.
It's a minute, 30 seconds.
So they kill people because they're paid to kill people.
Yes. They kill people because they're ordered to kill people.
Yes. How is that moral?
They're serving their country.
That doesn't mean anything.
There's no such thing as a country to serve.
It's like prancing around a mall empty-legged and saying, I'm riding a unicorn.
It doesn't mean anything, although at least you're imitating.
Well, they're imitating. There's no such thing as a country to that fault.
They are individuals who shoot people for money because other people tell them to.
That's it. I mean, there's really nothing to be said in response to that.
I mean, you can make up all this stuff about honor and this and that, but that's nonsense.
The honor is only in the obedience, not in the ethics.
The honor is only in the obedience to the cultural norms and the obedience to your superiors and the obedience to the myth of the virtuous murderer.
The myth of the golden gun.
In Little Italy, people murdering each other for pay when they're ordered to is evil.
Slap them on a uniform and ship them overseas and give them far deadlier weapons and have them roll grenades into children's rooms.
Suddenly, they are virtuous heroes.
Warriors of virtue.
Christian soldiers in more ways than one.
It's all the purest imagination and fantasy.
And of course it is a tsunami of blood that washes back and forth across the world.
The price that we pay for fantasies is death.
The price that we pay for illusion is death, corruption, failed lives, failed souls, child abuse, rape, murder, theft, violence of every kind.
This is the price we pay for illusions.
You believe in the government, you're a slave to taxation.
You believe in the virtue of soldiers?
Then you're either a soldier or a supporter of genocide.
And what does that do to your moral sense?
Because we know the truth. If there was no truth or we did not know the truth, there would be no such thing as mental illness.
There would be no such thing as depression.
There would be no such thing as unhappiness.
Chronic unhappiness. There'd be no such thing as rage.
All of these are effects of us knowing that the truth is two millimeters below our thoughts and we must constantly fight it.
It's the Captain Ahab and the White Whale is the mere truth, the mere simple truth.
And we must fight, fight, fight, fight, fight it, and attack anybody who speaks even the remotest hint of the truth.
Support the troops. Jesus Christ.
Who supports the troops more than those who call them murderers?
Nobody. Nobody.
Get them out.
Get them help.
It's amazing.
I've even had arguments with Republicans on this matter who tell me that Ronald Reagan calling the Soviet Union the evil empire somehow made the whole thing fall down.
So that calling something evil that is in fact evil is a virtue and has great power.
And then you mention it about soldiers and they hit the roof because they're just in a nonsense fairy tale of propaganda, of obedience, right?
Of obedience. So the soldiers are out there obeying their moral norms, obeying the moral norms that have been inflicted on them in their society.
That's what they do. Obey, obey, obey, obey, obey, obey, obey.
There's no truth. In fact, there is nothing but virulent cancer thought in the merest scrap of it.
But they simply obey orders and they obey the moral norms of their society.
And this is the argument I was making on Sunday.
This is a slightly different approach, but the conclusion is the same.
The only virtue is in obeying what they're told, doing what they're told.
And what the hell do they think that the Mujahideen are doing?
What do they think that the insurgents are doing?
What do they think that the Arabs are doing?
That the Muslims are doing? They're just obeying their cultural norms.
They're doing what they're told.
These guys are raised to believe that obeying some IQ 90 superior who tells them to kill and gives them money is the most moral thing in the universe?
Well, what do you think is happening over in Afghanistan, in Iraq?
These people are obeying the imams who have an IQ of 90 who are paying them money to go and kill people.
And whether they're paying them directly with money or promising them an afterlife with the virgins doesn't matter.
They're being paid to kill.
And that's the cultural norm and that's what's called virtue.
And it's exactly the same On both sides of the trenches.
You're shooting at a mirror.
You're shooting at a mirror.
You're murdering a mirror while you're murdering yourself.
Fundamentally. So I can completely understand how and why this gentleman burst into healthy, releasing positive, strong tears.
And he was waiting for the truth.
As I said, listens for half an hour.
Probably felt emotional very early on.
Bursts into tears because it's all right there.
It's all right there for us. We don't need to go hunting for it.
It's all right there. Truth is not invention.
It's going like this to a line of sand.
Oh look, the truth.
That's all we got to do. It's all we got to do.
Don't have to have a PhD.
Don't have to go meditate with a Tibetan monk for 20 years.
You've just got to look at the thin layer of dusty bullshit you've got over this gleaming gold of truth and go, oh shit, there it is.
How tough was that?
Bare facts. Soldiers are individuals who get paid to kill for money.
How tough is that? That's not learning Mandarin.
It's not learning Mandarin. But the emotional consequences result in that most people would end up rather learning Mandarin than going to the truth about your family.
Are they noble, honorable, virtuous, decent people?
Do they treat you with respect and value your opinions?
That's all you've got to do. The fallout is intense, but that's all you've got to do.
And this guy was able to do it, let's say, after listening to some podcasts, but it could have been just this podcast if he was ready.
That's it. He gets it.
He bursts into tears. He feels free.
Because it's all right there waiting for us.
All ready for us. And not being a good murderer is not a vice.
Not fitting in and feeling comfortable with genocidal sociopaths.
Not bad. Getting kicked out of the mafia is Pretty much a Medal of Honor, I would say.
Pretty much a Medal of Honor.
I would give you one more suggestion, if you don't mind, my friend, which might help propel you even further into the realm of truth.
Two. Two suggestions.
The first, my friend, is that a way to really cement this liberty and this knowledge in your soul Is to not think only of the life which is yours that was saved.
This is important.
Just mull this over.
It is essential to really cement this freedom and to really understand the fate that you saved yourself from and the fate that you avoided.
It's not just to think of your relief in not joining this Singing band of killers.
but it is essential for you to think of the people who are alive because you ate some ho-hos and ding-dongs your gut is your oscar schindler The sacrifice that you were willing to make so that the people that you would have otherwise killed Will now live.
It is a monument to life.
Ah, your gut is a mound of joy for those who you did not kill.
And I think that is the aspect that is a little harder to get a hold of because obviously there are some issues that, and again, therapy is a wonderful thing.
Find the right therapist. Go to a therapist.
It is an investment like no other in this world.
If you get the right relationship with the right therapist, Your soul just flowers.
Your soul comes alive. Or your soul marches to victory, if you like.
More manly metaphors. But you need to think of the dozen or so people who walk this earth oblivious to the bullets that would have entered their heads had you stayed in the military.
I'm talking probability.
To some degree. Whether or not it's your bullets or you handed the guy the bullets, maybe you were just in, I don't know, a quartermaster or supply or whatever.
Whether you shot the guy or you repaired the Humvee that carried the guy to shoot the guy or whatever.
The fact that you're not contributing means fewer people are getting killed.
Whether you would have shot them directly or not, I don't know.
It doesn't really matter because it's an unknown.
But it is known that if there were no soldiers, then no murders would occur in this way.
And every soldier that joins multiplies the murder.
So it's important, I think, and essential.
And you might want to cut out a picture of an Iraqi family, post it on your wall, and just say, well, you're alive because I ate my passion flakies.
And that, I think, is the empathy that will make an enormous difference in your processing of what it is that you did.
Yes, you were saving yourself. From a fate in some ways worse than death.
But more importantly, you were saving from a fate that was death, those who you would have murdered.
And if somebody runs into a burning building and ends up saving 12 people, drags them out one by one, and they're unscathed, would we not call that person heroic?
Would we not be full of nothing but pains of praise and hagiographies for this kind of soul who raced into a burning building and saved a dozen women, children, and men?
Think of all of the men, innocent men, that you did not arrest and send to torture in Abu Ghraib.
Their limbs are whole, their thighs are unbitten, they're not killed or tortured because you ate your food.
Twinkie Liberty. We would have a ticker tape parade for somebody who rescued a dozen people from a burning building and they came out unscathed.
And he had done damage to himself.
We would regard this person as heroic.
Maybe he would be.
I don't know.
I mean, I'm not going to try and figure that one out just now.
We would have a parade in his honor.
We would give him the key to the city.
There would be newspaper articles about his heroism.
For you, I'm afraid, my friend, because you are doing something that is more noble than that, there are no ticket tape parades.
And I'm very sorry for that.
I really am very sorry for that, because there should be.
There should be. You should be lauded as a hero.
But it is a sad state of this world where you must hide your heroism as a guilty secret.
Where you must hide your heroism as a guilty secret.
Can you imagine the man stands outside the orphanage where the children are screaming for help?
And he does nothing.
In fact, he locks the door so they can't get out.
And he is praised for that.
he gets a ticket tape parade.
But the man who runs in to save them says, man, I'm a total failure.
I should have locked that door. The man who carries out the living bodies of children who would have otherwise perished in the most awful manner, and women, comes out and they vanish into the night without a thank you.
Maybe they think it's a guardian angel that protected them.
I don't know. People in Iraq, I'm sure, pray to Allah for not being killed when they should pray to this guy as thanks for not killing them.
And the man, coughing with soot in his lungs, with burns on his body, having saved these dozen or so people, then castigates himself, attacks himself, lashes himself, in some sense hates himself and feels that he is a failure because he did not lock the door and watch people burn.
This is the moral equivalent.
This is the madness that we live in.
This is the madness that we live in.
This is the moral insanity that we inhabit and that inhabits us.
A virus or a plague.
Think of the lives you have saved.
Your life will now forever have deep and rich meaning because people are alive because of what you did.
Directly, indirectly, doesn't matter.
You have saved souls, my friend.
You have saved lives. You are a hero.
You are a hero. I'd give you a ticker tape parade if I could, but this world is so corrupted at the moment, mentally.
I mean, the thoughts are so sick that the people who lock the door to the burning orphanage get a ticker tape parade and are called heroes, and the people who rescue And take damage themselves.
The children from the burning orphanage are castigated and must hide their virtue as a guilty secret and hate themselves for what they do.
The reason that you burst into tears is that somebody was implicitly calling you heroic.
In my description of the wounded soldiers, I was implicitly calling you heroic by saying this is the faith that you avoided.
And your true self, your reality processor, got it, and you burst into tears, which is wonderful, and I'm very glad for that.
I've got to take you a step further, though.
Now I am explicitly calling you a hero.
I am explicitly calling you a saver of bodies, a surgeon, who does not even need to operate to heal people, because he prevents wounds rather than cures them.
Prevention is far better than cure.
And we would lord as noble.
A man, a surgeon, who managed to save the lives of people who've been desperately injured.
But of course, we do nothing to praise those who prevent these desperate injuries.
They get no ticket-tape parade.
They get no honor. They get no medals.
They get a semi-honorable discharge.
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