Dying for a Cause

Was listening to some report on NPR this morning that made me think: is there anything worth dying for?

We're always told that there is nobility in causes beyond our own little lives, that sometimes a greater issue is at stake. Sometimes it's soldiers in a battlefield, sometimes it's a cause like civil rights or voting rights or testing experimental medicines.

But I have a hard time picturing a cause that is advanced by somebody dying.

You could die saving a child. You could die, say, going into a failed nuclear reactor and shutting it down. You could die in a shootout with terrorists who had taken a school hostage, for instance. But in each case, the dying part is not integral to a positive outcome. In each case, heroism exists because the person has disregard for their own personal safety, not because they lost their life.

Is there any instance where a person has to die to achieve a greater goal?

Every time a soldier gets killed on the battlefield we're told "he gave his life for his country" but no.  He didn't die for his country.

He may have FOUGHT for his country (increasingly this is not true either; we're overseas at the behest of some multi-national energy company and their shareholders, not our country) but the dying part?  That's not of benefit to any fucking body, and it's an outrage to pretend it is.

Let's call it what it is.  A soldier dying in the field is a failure of military leadership.

A protestor dying on the streets is a failure of protest organizers.

A mother dying to save her son -- unless she traded herself to a hostage taker -- is a failure to achieve a complete rescue. Sometime selfless bravery -- the Japanese scientists who entered Fukushima to shut it down -- is the best way to handle a Kobayashi Maru no-win scenario. Those heroes sacrificed themselves for the greater good. But a better outcome would have been to safely achieve the same outcome without the personal risk.

The people stranded on the roof of the World Trade Center were not rescued because the helicopter pilots were afraid of getting that close to a burning building. The terrorists in the Nigerian mall were not rooted out by the police because they feared for their own safety. In cases like this, we give people accommodations for not risking life and limb, especially when clear outcomes and safe rescues are not ensured.

We don't expect people to "die for the cause" because it's not clear the risk is worth it.

So why is combat still fought by soldiers, with a real risk of dying?

A lot of your posts has to do with the bullshit rhetoric that is fed to us to make idiotic deaths more palatable.

No one gives his life for any reason; it is taken from him.

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A soldier dying in the field is a failure of military leadership.

This is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. A little simplistic to cover all circumstances.

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So why is combat still fought by soldiers, with a real risk of dying?

Because robots are too expensive.

But you are right that no soldier dies for his country. That is political horse shit. There are only three things one does - or tries to do - in combat.
1. Stay alive.
2. Keep your buddies alive.
3. Kill some motherfuckers.