Metaphors suck, I know
The other brings machine guns.
Maybe there is such a thing as absolute virtue, and maybe the army of swords has found it. Maybe it's worth dying on this literal hill to defend the way of the sword. Maybe they believe insisting that the world "should" work some arbitrary way will make it so.
In any case, by fighting this way they've chosen to lose. By losing they've ensured the values they're supposedly defending won't survive—so what was the point?
If your actual true goal is to preserve the way of the sword, you bring artillery and tanks and wipe the other army off the map; then you go back to your way. Or make alliances in which your swords can serve some purpose, or use diplomacy to keep the war from starting. Just anything that's not the least effective strategy.
If your goal instead is to feel Right, you fight as Real Men do and guarantee the way of the sword is extinguished.
There is no world in which you fight with swords against machine guns while ensuring the continued existence of the way of the sword. (There's an echo of the paradox of tolerance here.) You have to choose between defending it effectively, preserving it as much as possible in the world that actually exists, or doubling down and losing everything on purpose for nothing.
It's tempting to insist there is such a world, but that's just insisting on the way of the sword, again, except about possible worlds.
Further, you have dehumanize the attacker. They have agency and don't have to attack in the first place. Even then, your analogy fails because you can disengage from the "attacking force" (quit or not accept an offer) without surrendering in the theater of operations of the professional world.
I try to be good. I'd like that from others.
But when your bubbles intersect and you're in the same game, competing directly, other people's ethics absolutely do constrain the ethics you can choose for yourself while remaining effective. I'm not saying you should sacrifice your principles; I'm saying you should mind the difference between sticking to your principles and winning, accept they aren't the same, and not insist they always are or would be "if everyone just." Because everyone won't just.
Your principles may make you better as a person in some way (they really might!) but that doesn't mean they'll make you win. Not admitting this will make you less effective at defending them.
Maybe I'm getting away from the point of the thread, I don't know.
I guess in my analogy the war has come to the army of swords, like it or not. Team Machine Gun could have chosen to be nice. They didn't, so what now? The answer cannot be, "Well, then they're bad." It doesn't matter if they're good or bad: they're here. They don't care what you think. So what do you do?
And the American Service-Members' Protection Act…
If there really are no sword hills to charge and it’s all machine guns - then I don’t mind going down that way. I can’t imagine that environment is anything but depressing anyways.
That's not the way I took it, but if you're right I wouldn't disagree. Sometimes you can play a different game. Though strategies designed to win will outcompete and replace ones that aren't, so you may not have that option in the long run.
> You have to choose between [...] or doubling down and losing everything on purpose for nothing.
If you choose to double down you might get lucky and win, or some outside-context thing might happen and who knows. There's a range of not-impossible outcomes. The outcome doesn't justify the strategy unless the strategy produced it.
If you make these your rules, you're virtually guaranteeing you'll play with others who think similarly. There is another move at every poker table: get up. Not everyone is playing poker. There are companies and people who interview with integrity. The veteran advantage is in knowing who they are.