My brother and most of my cousins are marines. Obviously the armed forces has cult-like aspects (command hierarchy, motivating ideology, whole-life institutions), but even there I dunno. Most people ~10 years in just treat it like a normal government job with a pension. There’s no stigma (and even a kind of prestige?) for leaving and getting a normal civilian job and writing a book about how everything is terribly mismanaged / your experience was shit. More often I get the vibe that active service members nostalgically resent the bouncy-castling & HRification that’s happened over the last forty years and wish it was more like what they imagined from TV.
This video showed up in my Youtube recommendations today, and IMO is quite good coverage of what early military education looks like, which yes, really strikes me as obviously extremely cult-like:
(The title and thumbnail is more clickbaity than the actual video, which has a lot of really great footage and mostly measured analysis of what’s going on in these bootcamps)
My brother and most of my cousins are marines. Obviously the armed forces has cult-like aspects (command hierarchy, motivating ideology, whole-life institutions), but even there I dunno. Most people ~10 years in just treat it like a normal government job with a pension. There’s no stigma (and even a kind of prestige?) for leaving and getting a normal civilian job and writing a book about how everything is terribly mismanaged / your experience was shit. More often I get the vibe that active service members nostalgically resent the bouncy-castling & HRification that’s happened over the last forty years and wish it was more like what they imagined from TV.
Yeah, my sense is long term service is really mostly like working at a large corporation, but early boot camp experiences are very cult like.
Also plausible this changed over the years.
Also, I do have to point out that some cultishness really is necessary in order to do the job of maintaining an effective military.
This video showed up in my Youtube recommendations today, and IMO is quite good coverage of what early military education looks like, which yes, really strikes me as obviously extremely cult-like:
(The title and thumbnail is more clickbaity than the actual video, which has a lot of really great footage and mostly measured analysis of what’s going on in these bootcamps)
We need a video from MAPLE to compare. :D