A point about warrior societies

In which our narrator expresses his view about the realism of the warrior societies, as depicted in films, against a background of snow and noisy gusts, such as that cutting wind that swept off the plains of Galgaroth into the steely-eyed faces of the Heroes of Etenathor...

Sorry about the wind noise.

www.LloydianAspects.co.uk

Category:

Education

Tags:

• warrior
• societies
• society
• taras
• bulbar
• vikings
• dark
• ages
• veteran

[thispandaispurple]

Yea its not a 50/50. Maybe if its just normal untrained then yes. But if you take like the spartans (not the OP 300 spartans) They were based around battle, and vigorous training. Its not long 50/50 if your opponent is trained since a young age and his hiding behind a big shield.

[lindybeige]

@thispandaispurple If you take one man at random and put him up against one other random man, and people have to take bets on the winner before the men are selected, the odds are 50/50. Yes, in reality, if every man in a society had to kill one other man, then the strongest would probably pick out weak opponents before someone stronger picked them.

[yerk3]

I always imagine warrior societies as being like gangland societies. Not all of the men had killed, but a lot had, and they developed some kind of coping mechanism to deal with the psychological damage of battle, and nobody was untouched by the violence. The death toll would have been high, but people would have had more babies for exactly that reason.

[lindybeige]

@yerk3 I doubt that people had more babies to compensate for a violent society. People have other reasons, cheif among them the desire to have sex. There were no contraceptives.

[maine1600]

A society where men were men and horses were horses and women were.. men as well possibly... or maybe horses.

[brandy1999]

This is simply not true.

Warrior society means a society that puts a lot of pressure on military training, therefore increasing fighting ability of their members. Therefore its not 50/50, its one guy who trained fighting for the most of his life and theres another guy who was chopping crops for the most of his life.

Just the existence of mercenaries invalidates your whole view.

[minigun20]

@brandy1999 you also have to factor in just blind luck, it could be good or bad for both, some one could make a tiny mistake and get his kneecap stuck or lose finger and drop his weapon. Also unless the fight is a fair duel between parties most "battles" wouldn't divulge into 1 on 1 struggles between soldiers, it would just either be a suicidal "Packing In" effect or just people taking opportunity shots at anyone in front of them

[ShitCrap]

Pouring beer to your face is the ultimate enterteinment :D

[oarfrost]

This lindybeige bloke comes up with some good points and is bloody well hilarious with it!

[Gnorian]

@brandy1999 Precisely right, Brandy.

[sortedm]

The Spartans were a warrior society in the exact way that Lindybeige describes, and they did indeed fall prey to depopulation.

Eventually there were too few Spartans to keep the Helots (the horrifically mistreated Spartan slave class) down and to protect themselves. As Aristotle wrote: "the city sank under a single defeat; the want of men was their ruin".

[Bankstercide]

What was my second point? Oh, yes: the whole notion of a "military society" is a moot one in the current age of industrial/electronic/internet warfare.

There has always been the argument that "our soldiers are better because our society promotes martial virtues". History tells us this notion is patently false, yet it is repeatedly promoted for political reasons. Two outstanding examples that come to mind are Imperial Japan vs. US in WW2 and pretty much every war between Pakistan and India.

[Bankstercide]

Two points to make here:

1: "Battle hardened" doesn't always mean a fight to the death mano-a-mano. IIRC, many military actions were raids or sieges. And even in battles you can rack up a lot of kills once the enemy army broke.

Considering how reluctant people generally are to murdering others for fun and profit, a warrior society would be one that essentially brainwashes them to overcome this reluctance. Naturally, the pychopaths in this society tend to stand out.

[blacksilkblacksilk]

Thumbs Up

Sound mathematics - as always.

But why complain about movie warriorn societies. I mean fairies aren`t real as well - I hope - still they are depicted all over the place.

I think by the way the har-haring beer-to-face crowd where probably the nameless youngsters who had never done battle.

Every veteran I know has a very sober attitude towards these things.

my guess is that was also the case in warrior societies of the past. But the teenager dream of valhalla sells so much better.

;-))