End Of The Warriors

Abstract

A primitive society is characterised by the absence of a state. As soon as the state emerges, human societies become divided into castes. Anthropologist Georges Dumézil discerned three such castes in all Indo-European societies: priests, warriors and producers. This paper seeks to understand why the producer caste was always considered the lowest of the three in terms of prestige, despite being the most numerous and arguably the most useful. Producers embody the values of life and nature; warriors are on the side of culture; they must resist the natural urge to flee in the face of mortal danger. The producer acts out of self-interest, the warrior does what is right. The debt owed by society to those who accept to lay their lives for its protection is infinite. It cannot be repaid in the producers’ currency (money), but only in terms of prestige and power. But in accomplishing their mission, warriors must resort to all the methods forbidden to producers, killing, deceiving, coercing. Warriors were kept outside of society, even physically, in barracks and camps, so that their values would not infect the producer's caste, nor would the bourgeois values of comfort, family life, and legitimate fear of death diminish the warriors’ morale. The state bureaucracy today has usurped the debt owed by society to its warriors. Albeit bureaucrats are hardly at risk of their lives, they claim to have become our protectors (against unemployment, illness, old age. . .) and they have found new wars to wage against drugs, poverty, crime and terror. They claim the moral high ground over producers, continuing the division of society into castes that primitives resisted for so long.