When I was young, I was immersed in the full spectrum of popular culture—stories, myths, comics, and games that framed the world through conflict, difference, and the clean lines of good and evil. What later generations found in computer war games, I first found in Commando comics, Greek epics, Tolkien, and tabletop quests. These weren’t propaganda; they were artefacts that spread because they were transmissible—simple, vivid devices that reproduced themselves through culture with the same efficiency any system displays when conditions favour its continuation.
It would be too neat, too conspiratorial, to say these stories were designed to mould boys into soldiers. The truth is stranger and more banal: narratives that simplify conflict and identity spread because they are easy to carry. They compress complexity into legible shapes. They offer meaning where life offers chaos. And even the institutions that benefit from conflict end up aligned with this reproduction, not because of master plans, but because systems converge on whatever sustains them.
No point being angry at that. The world is already messy enough. One of the most enduring lessons I learned from Commando comics was that anger and betrayal might carry you through hardship, but if you survive long enough, the anger falls away and the truth stands alone. PTSD may linger; the stories we tell about honour and duty may be simple; but the real fights any of us face rarely involve flags or ideology. They involve necessity, fear, loyalty, and the instinct to protect the people we care about.
The camaraderie, resilience, and quiet strength in those old stories still matter, even if they were caricatures. I still gravitate to simple narratives—perhaps more analytical ones now—but the gravitational pull remains. It makes me wonder how much of a life’s arc is shaped by the stories that first captured our imagination, and how much of civilisation’s technological and cultural evolution has been shaped by the aesthetics of conflict those stories carried forward.
I’m glad I never took up arms. I understand that people sometimes have no choice—when home, family, and community are at risk. But I also see clearly now that the simplified mythologies through which we portray war are part of what keeps us circling back into adversarial traps. Honour is real. Pride is real. But our orientation toward suffering and death—our willingness to accept them as inevitable or noble—comes from narratives that were never built to hold the full weight of human life.
Life is beautiful. War is its most enduring corruption. The problem has never been the military—ordinary people doing their best in impossible situations. The problem is the misanthropes who chase power by turning us against one another, ensuring we never recognise that the enemy they point to is so often a mirror held up to ourselves.
Daedelus Kite 