 a perspective that I hope will be congenial to you. I have reason to believe it will be. It's basically the perspective that every human being is at every instant that you're not the coma. Mind, brain, society, and culture. And that these four manifestations are each other's environments. And that astonishingly, military trainers have really nailed a lot of important practical wisdom in the area of brain, mind, society, and culture. Because they cultivate all of them in the course of creating a new military service member. So, with that I will launch into my prepared remarks. I'm going to introduce you to very few, possibly only one Greek word that you may or may not be familiar with. And that word is thumos, T-H-U-M-O-S, sometimes spelled T-H-Y-M-O-S because of the vagaries of how Greek letters are transliterated into English letters. I believe that the norms of doing these things requires me to disclose that I prepared this talk originally for a symposium at the Einstein Stiftung in Potsdam, Germany. A great joke if you can get it. And that was, of course, Albert Einstein's hometown. Anyway, Homer uses the word thumos more than 700 times into two epic poems. Plago told us that it was one-third of every human soul. But the reputation of thumos has been quite turbulent over the millennia since then. So, is it that we have outgrown thumos, left behind in humanity's childhood, and in each of our own childish histories, along with the scholar Francis Fukuyama, who I believe many of you are familiar with as an author, and others, I've been trying to put this juicy Homeric word back into current circulation. It's a very odd thing to want to do because for both Homer and Plato, it seems to be something or other to do with killing rage, or at least with anger, but accept to condemn it. It might be suspected of one of those per post-World War I intellectual chatterers who was in Thomas Lund's Doctor Fastis. These chatterers are the folks whose eyes sparkle when speaking of violence. My interest springs from 20 years of clinical work as a psychiatrist with psychologically injured US combat veterans. I quickly learned of what took the greatest toll of their lives, their families, workplaces, and communities, was traumatic damage to good character. The veterans we worked with had been incarcerated. Many have led violent lives since their return to civilian life. Their own violence had lighted their lives, and ultimately, I came to know that most of these men hated their own bad behavior. They suffered great humiliation when they contemplated it, and the damage it had done, the damage it had rained down on their families and themselves. They could, however, recall times when they considered virtue possible. Even somewhat, in the clinic they were destroyed, they demanded, they made self-important claims to have been players in the most significant events in all of human history. They were friends of what they understood to be their dignity. Occasionally, they would insist that they would only deal with the person they called the head of the snake. They could be either the chief of the clinical service, the hospital director, whoever they identified as this person. The, quote, global destructiveness of their fantasies, wishes, and occasionally behavior. Their vulnerability to collapses of morale, which would leave them so apathetic that they would not want to work, even just getting out of bed. They were also like the convry of preoccupations and psychosomatic disorders. All of these were frequently swept together by psychiatrists and done with the psychotrugin narcissist. I will attempt to persuade you to see the word thomas as a suitable bearer for the load that we want. The word sort of has a good vibration to it. You might be wondering at this moment, why does this die out to me? Anyway, so, stay tuned. Traumatic damage to character is a phenomenon that actively refused and denied by American psychiatry. Interestingly, it is accepted by the World Health Organization. An explanation for this strange disparity is that American psychiatry follows the flag that we first see marching with Plato and carrying forward to this day. And here's what's on that flag. If you make it out of childhood with good, good character, nothing in the way of later experience can budge you off of your firm stand on virtue. Plato spoke of good breeding. We would say good genes. I emphasize that Plato was no fool and he said, and good upbringing. Both of these two good ingredients, your character would set up rock hard like cement and experience can change, or at least Plato said so. But his Athenian contemporaries would consider that crackpot. Once you accept Plato's position, you end up viewing someone who misbehaves as damaged goods to begin with. The general position of American psychiatry is that any new behavior after bad experience in adulthood is only the current expression of a pre-existing flaw. Perverse and controversial evidence of, and here this is in quotes, betrayal of what's right. In a high-stake situation, by people in legitimate authority is taken as rationalization merely an attempt of a character-disorder patient to get over on, deceive, and manipulate the clinician for some personal advantage. That's the expression, the experience that a person with traumatic damage to good character has in most mental health settings. Interestingly, in Germany, Professor Michael Linden and his group at the Rehabilitation Center in Berlin has been working persistently and creatively to expand our knowledge of this territory. This territory of post-chromatic character change through a diagnosis they propose called post-chromatic embitterment disorder, the embitterment of personality. They have developed a wealth of new understanding through their work, interestingly with East Germans, whose honorable life trajectories were shot out of the sky by the reunification of Germany. There were such a astonishing historical cleaver stroke in our life. So, Professor Hummer translates the word hummus as the energy of the spirit of the East, Swedish scholar Ernst Artmann, who was writing in German, offered an ilummus as die Ichsel, the I soul, the soul of this I, the my soul. A very evocative, it's narcissistic dimension, but also sparks over into the concept of identity as it currently is used in the phrase identity politics. The conventional English translation of spirit, and that is the conventional translation of this German word, is opaque or misleading. Maybe the German dust commute is better because of its connection with self-respect, but if so, in modern German it is so frequently used sort of to make a joke of it. Resurrecting the unfamiliar Greek word hummus has some advantages. I'm here, I expect that a good many people in this room especially are familiar with the name of the, not sure how to get the sign of a professional title to them, but Francisco Cugliano, I see a lot of heads nodding around the room. He's a well-known person who's written on military philosophy and affairs. As Frank Cugliano has pointed out, modern democracies often fail to recognize honor and the desire for recognition as part of the universal and normal makeup of humans. Noticing this phenomenon only in its pathological and deformed states, deformity of hummus is a common and disastrous complication of the primary psychological injuries of war and is what is currently tagged to PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, which you'll discover that I'm no great fan of this diagnostic formulation. According to Hegel, all human warfare originates in a fight to the death over honor. A fight for unconditional recognition and acknowledgement, but to skip German phrases, because it's burdensome to people who don't understand German enough, well enough to. So unconditional recognition and acknowledgement by an equal, which only one of them can win. Now this is, there are two ways to lose. Death were they all encompassing dishonor, the social death of enslavement. Honor is a social thermal. Its interior psychic mirror is hummus, guardians. So this whole line of investigation goes back a very long way. Commenting on Plato's Guardians, Aristotle says from the politics, quote, The attitude which some require in their guardians is to be friendly to all whom they know and savage to all who are unknown. This is the attitude of the high spirited temper, and I'll spare you my pronunciation of the long brief word. Going on, hummus is the faculty of our souls, and I'm still quoting Aristotle here, which issues in love and friendship. And it is a proof of this that when we think ourselves slighted, our spirit is stirred more deeply against acquaintances and friends than it ever is against strangers. This faculty of our souls, and still Aristotle, this faculty of our souls not only issues in love and friendship, it is also the source of any power of commanding, any feeling for freedom. It is hummus that causes affection in this, or spirit as hummus is the capacity of the soul whereby we love. It is from this faculty that the power to command and love of freedom are in all cases derived. That is one big load for one concept to carry. And yet, this is exactly the frame that I want to cut the idea of character to carry. Many of you want that too. I have worked enough with military personnel, almost always officer personnel, to know that the word character has huge resonances in that word. Huge resonances. So I object for emphasizing that current psychiatric terminology calls hummus narcissism. Narcissism is simply a new word for an old concept. It calls us from Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and the Athenian tragic poems. Pride or vain glory from Hobbes, a more quote from Rousseau, Desire for recognition, sings of Anarchimus from Engel. Narcissism from psychoanalyst Heinz Kogu, who developed and fundamentally modified Freud's ideas, first threw us to the modern psychojordanic narcissism because of the way the latter term has been pathologized and turned into a general purpose blame word. And I will spare you the usually obscene utterances that one encounters when somebody is anguille, peace, and narcissistic, blank, we all can hear in our ears what the next word was. These thinkers over 3,000 years from Homer to Kogu have seen this feature of mental life as normal and universal, even if it can develop dangerous excesses, deficiencies, or deformities. I believe that Thumbos is a human universal that evolved out of warfare in our ancestral evolutionary past and still explodes in killing rage when violated. Many legal, cultural, and social changes have more or less removed these reactions from the individual realm. And I point out that we no longer teach our children, as the Vikings did, that a man of honor must kill someone who makes a joke at his expense or steals food from his cooker. But this was true of the Vikings, apparently. However, such reactions are very much alive at the collective level, and lamentably they are regarded as both patriotic and virtuous. The modern adult's cloak of safety and guarantor of his or her narcissistic stability is the society's image of, and I put this in quotes, what's right, and the implementation of what's right by our elders, along with concrete social support of a face-to-face community to whom one is attached. Now, I don't pretend to have a universal meter to say which of those is more heavily weighted at any moment. I'm trying to figure this stuff out myself. I don't have it all in my backpack. Narcissism, allegedly the most, quote, primitive of psychological phenomenon, is much inclined on the body, on the one hand, but is just as deeply enmeshed in the social, moral, and political. So here is my definition of thermo-musk, or modern practical use, a definition that still accommodates over and there a style without doing violence. Number one, the historically and socioculturally constructed content embodying ideals, ambitions, and attachments. That's the content of thermo-musk. And then there's an energetic term, the intensity with which these commitments are energized. So strength and weakness and content are in very independent, unfortunately, way bold. Having counter people can shatter old, beautiful sentiments about good and bad and so forth, but who just blow in the wind. So those vary independently. In the normal appraisals, control the emotions and moods associated with shifts and plumes, specifically cognitive appraisals of agency, agency in and of the direction of change in the condition of ideals, ambitions, and attachments. This is a big lump to swallow up all at once, but the basic ingredients are simple and pretty familiar. Are my ideals, ambitions, and attachments, and my attachments I mean to people we love and care about, are they improving or deteriorating in the real world? And if so, how fast and how much? Who is doing this and why? During my years in the veterans clinic, I became fascinated with what I now call moral injury, which Pache Plato lay at the root of the veterans deformities of character. My current preventive psychiatry work was presented to military forces as the prevention of psychological and moral injury. I have made the expansive claim that psychological injury as well described by the diagnostic manuals term PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, goes deep into our evolutionary ancestry and one can observe that kind of learning about danger in one's pets. One can observe it in raccoons. If a bear leaps out of a berry patch at a raccoon, that raccoon will probably steer clear of berry patches for a long time afterward. This is part of our pretty much universal inheritance as probably as vertebrates. Main interest is in the prevention of personality deformities, which I now tag with the phrase moral injury. The breadth of the Homeric usages seems both useful and truthful to me. The 700 plus occurrences of the word are almost all very emotionally charged, but with the whole range of emotions you would expect from what I have just, love and pity as well as anger, feel, fear, joy, as well as sorrow, elation, and despair. I want to restore this breadth to any current use of the term. Achilles identifies Hector and all Trojans as the agent of Metropolis's death. For those of you who don't recall, Metropolis was Achilles' battle buddy. His second in command were their regiment and also his foster brother. They had grown up together. They don't use this and just sort of lay to rest question of were they also lovers. I don't know and frankly I don't care if there is extra evidence that Aeschylus was sure that they were lovers because there is a surviving fragment that's pretty torn and honestly I don't give a damn. Plato uses Thumos primarily in an anger-riddled martial context to which Aristotle necessarily had to respond but Aristotle returned to the broader Homeric use as you heard in the earlier quotation and abstracted it to the point that it seems to mean in part the capacity to have emotions at all. Thumos is thus a container for the English word character. Briefly from Homer, the character exists in dynamic relation to the ecology of social power and how that is modeled and remodeled throughout life by how well or badly those who hold power fulfill the culture's moral order. This allows us then to define moral intrigue as the state arises in a person when he or she has suffered three things. One, a betrayal of what's right and that is in the culture. By a person or social institution with legitimate authority that's something in this social system and I emphasize here that it's legitimate authority that has committed the violation. It's not clear to me that moral injury at least in this line of thought is possible in a criminal assault. Now I can see that there might be coaching arguments that that might be not reasonable. So that's one into three in a situation with high stakes for the injured person. So that the stakes obviously reside in the mind of the injured person. Whatever their, whatever the ultimate social and cultural origin of those states we learn to value things the way we learn pretty much everything else those human beings from our experience. Significantly well-throwing up. All three of these are present. The trail of what's right by someone with legitimate authority in a high-state situation the body reacts massively and the way you react is as though a physical attack is in progress. And obviously this neural and humoral response is operated by the brain being surprised. So there you have the human critter as a whole. Culture, society, mind and brain. With none of these have an ontologic priority. Meaning that just one of them is the really, really, really, really, really anxious. And maybe when we're sweet I can tell you I don't know what happened to me on that. So this is a pitch sort of an anti-reductionist pitch here. One of these is epitome of one of the others. It's a way of sort of sticking a thumb and play those eyes. Wanting to get away from any claim these is merely a do-so. Others and environments must exchange suitable inputs and outputs with each other if they are to persist in time. I would add that in the sense of biological evolution they all co-evolved at the same time. When the physically modern at the time, when the physically modern human first appeared in the upper paleolithic probably all four were present. There has never been a time when a river or species has had a third of a language or consciousness, an eighth of a mind or half of a social system. If you take the view that the physical brain is prior to the artifacts that it creates, which makes possible, I point out that this is true but only in a trivial sense. It is a general biological phenomenon that organisms evolve and adapt. The environments of their thrown into what create the environment to which they adapt spare you a brief digression into permits and their amazing nests. So the so-called evo-devo for an evolutionary development community in embryology has shown that it is possible to do rigorous science in this kind of conceptual framework. Okay, I can't blame people for hearing the rolling of their stomachs or the complaints of their bottoms from sticking so long. I have shot far into the outer space of abstract concepts and want to close by bringing it back to Earth. In Achilles and Vietnam, I described a rare state of solitary, rapid killing frenzy that can arise in war when a soldier has experienced the trail of what's right by a commander in a situation involving the death of a beloved comrade. I use the Norse term Berserk term for this. The Berserk phenomenon has riveted people's attention to a degree far out of Earth proportional to its frequency, which is rather rare. Murder rampages anywhere in the world generates a flurry of references to the Berserk state. These are horrible and tragic, but frankly they are not the stuff of my nightmare. What keeps me awake at night is the post-military phenomenon that the Germans experienced firsthand during the 1920s, the Freiburg. Is this a familiar term to at least some of you? I see some nodding a bit. Today we would call these right-wing paramilitary death squads. I fear that the historical, social, and cultural conditions in America are now favorable to the formation of such a path to save will be an illustration of the ways that interdisciplinary analyses of this work I sketched out can be applied to very practical, real-world needs. According to historian Bruce Goodman's at Marine Corps University, which I believe you folks have heard of, that according to Dr. Goodman's news of dear ground, when the visions of the Reichscare, that's the general army of World War I, were demobilized after World War I, they mainly returned from war as units to the geographically compact regions from which they had originally been stood up. Their reintegration into civilian life was fostered by the social bonds that they had formed by training together, going to war together, and coming home together. Their reintegration was even fairly smooth in places where the hometowns lay on the other side of redrawn national after the Versailles treaty. That's sort of astonishing, but it's a historical fact. According to Goodman's, these regular soldiers were poor candidates for attraction into the pride poor and the like. In contrast, recruits to the elite Yeager units were drawn into these formations as volunteers throughout, from throughout the Reichscare. They were demobilized as individuals and scattered as individuals across Germany. These were particularly responsive to recruitment into the elite patriotic ideologies and tightly cohesive group practices of the pride poor. The thought of such a phenomenon in America makes the air span above the background. Here are my practical conclusions. I anticipate that I'm about to tell you a story that puts the elite formations like the Army Special Forces, the Navy SEALs, and so on in bad life. But I'm going to veer into a direction you may not be thinking of. The analogous group at greatest risk of attraction to such formulations is not the demobilized veterans of elite military formations such as the ones I just mentioned. But rather, the tens of thousands of armed private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, the trigger force among the contractors. Most of these will have had prior military service but may have few persisting social links to their earlier military units. They will come home from theater alone carrying whatever psychological and moral injuries they have suffered as contractors alone. If they were to ask for mental health treatment, their treatment by the U.S. government veterans health scheme known as the VA would be greatly endowed and their former contract employer possibly heightening whatever indignant rage they carried from their moral injuries. This would render them extremely vulnerable to recruitment to violent political and also criminal gangs. While idle health treatment as a cure-all for such potentially dangerous problems, any incremental societal risk reduction is worth pursuing, especially if it involves fostering stable communities of such veterans in a context that remains open to the wider world. My clinical observation is that recognition by peers in a stable community of peers is the most potent anti-inflammatory treatment for injured umbas, various members of the United States Congress. And I propose anything that might come look like an answer to what I just said. When I proposed extending VA mental health benefits to contract veterans to various congressional staff members that I've worked with, their reactions ranged from intense interest to worse, and I'll spare you the actual language. This staffer wanted the contractors to be liable for providing such benefits, which is hard to disagree with, but you will see that it's a swamp. Reconnecting these contractor veterans to military unit associations reflecting their prior military service may also satisfy their, and this was Hegel's term, Zenzuka Anarkano, a longing for recognition. He earned sociologist group and one of the best books ever written on this up here called The Veteran Comes Back, published in 1944. He said, the veteran comes home angry. He pointed out that the organized groups of veterans are noisy, demanding, and annoying, but that their mutual support and recognition assuages the most dangerous excesses of their anger. The typical American psychiatrist faced with the angry, quote, narcissistic veteran usually cannot see beyond the end of the pen with which he writes out a prescription to modify some chemical or other in the veteran's brain. We are so much better able to do something constructive with and for our fellow humans if we sought to save all four human avatars, brain, mind, society, and culture at once. And I hope that you take in the whole model of doing that that I attempted to portray in this talk. Now, I very much like to hear your comments, questions, and criticisms. We're talking about your time. I think this is a really important topic and my own feeling is that it's one that has only began to gain some traction or awareness within our institution. I think we have a better understanding of what the war does psychologically to the veterans and I think this workshop is a regulated type of a spot like that. My question is going to talk a lot about, you know, the tired of the cafeteria, the drawings, writing, whatever you are. What I'm wondering about is how do we prepare the next generation of veterans? This all seems to be kind of an expo cycle, you know, a retrospect. What is the prospect for a rural injury? How do we address this so that we can better help the next generation of veterans come up with a kind of a working product? My belief is, and I cannot prove this with a sharp scientific principle, my belief is that the key to prevention lies all in the hands of military leaders and policy makers. And the touchstones of their films and their thinking must be how do we improve cohesion? That's a face-to-face quality within military units. Leadership which folks in this institution spend a lot of time thinking about and I don't think I have to explain. Cohesion, leadership, and training. Now, those three things are like motherhood and apple pie to military professionals. Everybody's toward it. And the question is, what are we doing to ourselves inadvertently or sometimes because emotions are aroused or ambitions are inflamed, we manage to do things that are profoundly harmful. Hopefully we'll be interested to hear what leadership has got to be. Expert, ethical, and it's our tall hierarchical institutions that we're talking about. Every leader needs to be properly supported. Obviously if a leader is totally unsupported from below, the thing is a complete mess. So, I really support an expert, ethical, and properly supported. So, there are my slogans. You get no expert charge. I think you probably put them out. And that's a big battle. What I mean by that is... I didn't quite... Lead faculty. Lead faculty, yes. Lead faculty. The big buzz... What's the big buzz in the DC area right now? I'm one of these policy makers. I'm one of the top rats. It's near peer competition. What that means is against China or Russia. And the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, they saw the things that I'm reading and what they're about. It's publishing and what they're talking about. It's great, great, great. Yeah, they're talking about training the body. So, they can kill more Russians than they can kill more Chinese. You know, everyone is talking about getting into this end-of-sit war that's going to be huge, the likes of which we haven't seen since World War II. Because of the Chinese, eventually. And I just don't see how, if that happens, God forbid that happens, I actually put that line in our cultural tribulations. God forbid this happens and the other may take out. God forbid that happens because if it does, this country is not going to have where we're all to deal with all these millions of Americans that are going to have to go into service and be trained to kill. To be trained to, you know, get up to these stands and leak out and get all the top rats down. And I don't really have a question. I just want to pitch that out there to you. Because this indices on, you know, this is why we have military top brass and not only do we deal with better issues, but we're interested in getting ready for the next conflict. And what's scary to me is everybody's saying the next conflict is going to be a Chinese, right? Shut up, right? Wait, think of that as a possibility. Hopefully not, but just like I said, I don't think we have where we're all to, one, pay for something like that, conflict like that, and two, deal with ramifications of that and for generations afterwards. Well, it makes my heart sink. It puts a lump of lead in my stomach to contemplate. It seems to me what you're describing is a land war in Asia, which America has. Well, they do that next week. Well, so that's in there, too. In fact, in general, this is after all the Naval War college and it's part of your job description to try to do your very best to think through plausible scenarios for future wars that they might, in the United States, might be compelled to be fattened. I prospect, and any decent person bought to shudder at such a prospect is fascinating to me that I have yet to encounter a real warlocker in uniform. Plenty of submitters who I would characterize as warlockers and people have actually been a great percentage of people who actually been trained for war below the Air Force Academy. There was a very profoundly respected Marine Pearl who was also part of this gig. And he and I were billeted in the very bossy Bachelor of Officer's Quarters at the Marine FAA Air Force Academy. And I said something that fairly unconsidered and offhand way about the human practice was not deeply considered or my part to even use that term phrase with his eyes wide and said, I dream of that. I dream of that. He had led troops in Korea, I think pretty much all of you in this room know what another elite fight that he fighting in Korea was. I was astonished because this fellow was generally known as the Marine Tough Guy in the Mississippi's practice. The only way I don't have to imagine not in the city, not in that city, I don't have an answer to the geopolitical complexities and dangers that we are required to come. I know that's not a satisfactory answer. I was expecting to have a definite answer so I just wanted to put that out there. I mean, I don't know what I see at the very beginning of this but I'm going to focus in the sense that you know Fenerbahce, Transics, Nationality, Race, Generation, Social Women's League I think that kind of perverse the Chair kind of barn you know where there's a cultural gas that exists and then Fenerbahce is our shrunken population. Well, I hope that we're going to shrink a lot of things at a point, but I will allow where it is that soon, based on how everybody's talking in DC or Fenerbahce, some of you are talking here that we're going to have a pretty big new generation of veterans that have just participated in some of the Najiva and other small minorities in every medical way. So it's just a impressive thing about our guests. I think that it's easy to talk about the value of pushing the value and the need for it when you don't understand how it's going to impact you. So, again, the point of understanding where veterans are going through is that as you said, sir, it's the leadership that's constantly making decisions that they need to understand the repercussions of the decisions that they're making and what that actually means to the individual. Because how we're going to have an 18-year war right now, I would say that we were in force and, you know, that's going to be a big ask if we're going to actually, we're going to fight some year-to-year battle. I think after, as I said, 18 years, I don't think they would have to have something that is largely lost on our policy makers. And so, getting this message out, educating people and bringing that signal by is going to be absolutely imperative to making sure that you don't fight yourselves into fighting the war that we cannot outspot from. That we can't possibly do that. But we're going to be a great strong person, so... A land war in Asia certainly fits that description. I mean, if that's what people are forcing which is what I understand to be comments, questions I I haven't gotten any arguments on that disappointment. I have a question. Your description of some of the risks that minor contractors will be there to mobilize a cohesive military unit that's so escalating to the war. I mean, is there a... I'm not going to answer that for long now, so it's very evidence that there actually is higher rates of incarceration higher rate. Do we actually see it? I think that's a very important question and I am an unlicensed philosopher. You might even suspect me being an untethered philosopher because I the number of plausible hypotheses and conjectures that I can generate far exceeds my capacity to research them. And I don't have a clue as to what the answer is if anyone has gathered the data that it worries them that no one actually would be able to do that. That is a product of some of what I think that probably my ignorance of this is the reflection of the fact that for this invitation, it's a great pleasure to be here.