The post I’ve Read Ayn Rand. Now What? appeared first on New Ideal - Reason | Individualism | Capitalism.
A YouTube video titled “Marine Corps Boot Camp Is Stupid & Spiritually Depraved” has received more than 1.1 million views since July 21, 2026. Its creator says he completed recruit training at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego and later served for several years at Parris Island. He describes the video as a collection of his memories and observations about recruit life, drill instructors, and “the stuff nobody usually bothers to mention.”
Much of what he describes rings true to me. I went through Marine Corps boot camp in 1988, and I recognize many of the practices, attitudes, indignities, and institutional stupidities he depicts. I saw arbitrary punishment, pointless exercises, petty abuses of authority, and conduct that contradicted the Marine Corps’ stated values.
Those failures deserve criticism. The Marine Corps should not hide them behind slogans, tradition, or recruiting imagery.
The video, however, goes beyond recounting them. It presents them as the essential meaning of Marine Corps recruit training. The author offers a long and often perceptive account of what goes wrong while giving little attention to what the institution exists to accomplish or to what many recruits actually achieve.
The incidents the author describes may be true. The judgment built from them remains incomplete.
The author may accurately describe what happened to him. His platoon may have endured every absurdity, indignity, and abuse he recalls. Marines from other eras will recognize many of the same experiences.
His title nevertheless makes a claim that his personal account cannot establish. It does not say that boot camp includes stupid practices or that parts of its culture encourage hypocrisy and abuse. It declares that Marine Corps boot camp as a whole is stupid and spiritually depraved.
The opening makes that judgment explicit. The author calls boot camp one of the most degrading experiences available outside prison. He dismisses the familiar idea that recruit training pushes young people through a difficult transformation and says that the reality is considerably more stupid. He also argues that an average person with below-average determination will eventually graduate.
A personal account can establish that particular things happened. It cannot establish the character of an entire institution without examining the institution’s purpose, the relationship between its methods and that purpose, and the results it produces.
The video recounts real faults but interprets nearly everything about boot camp through them. That approach may produce an accurate description of particular incidents while still producing a misleading judgment of the whole.
Marine Corps boot camp lays the foundation young men and women will need to function in the universe of battle.
That universe is chaotic, hostile, exhausting, savage, ruthless, cruel, and inhuman. A Marine may have to act while frightened, sleep-deprived, confused, physically depleted, wounded, or surrounded by injury and death. He or she may have to make decisions with incomplete information, control panic, follow lawful orders under intense pressure, and remain dependable when a moment of hesitation or carelessness could kill other people.
Marines do not prepare for battle because battle is desirable. They prepare because defeating aggression may become necessary to restore justice, liberty, security, and peace. Someone must remain capable of confronting those who use violence to conquer, terrorize, enslave, or destroy.
Because the Marine Corps cannot train recruits in actual battle, it must isolate and simulate some of battle’s demands. It uses stress, fatigue, urgency, confusion, discomfort, uncertainty, and dependence on others. Recruits must learn to continue thinking, acting, and meeting their obligations when they feel exhausted, confused, or afraid.
This does not justify every stressful practice. Some serve no rational purpose. Others may once have served a purpose but now survive only as tradition. Some may work when competent leaders administer them and become abusive when poor leaders take control.
The author gives extensive attention to abusive stress, collective punishment, and coercive forms of cohesion. Those dangers are real. But he rarely considers whether properly designed and administered versions of these methods can help prepare recruits for combat. He treats the abuse or corruption of a practice as evidence against the practice itself.
He also treats the artificiality of many exercises as proof of their stupidity. Repeatedly dressing and undressing, responding to abrupt commands, maintaining equipment under pressure, cleaning an already clean space, or meeting an unforgiving deadline can look ridiculous when taken out of context.
Sometimes those exercises are ridiculous.
All training, however, creates artificial conditions. Rifle drills, fire drills, medical exercises, athletic practice, and mock trials place people in circumstances that do not naturally exist at that moment. Their value depends on whether they prepare participants to perform when the real demand arises.
Boot camp deserves the same type of examination. The relevant question is not simply whether a practice feels humiliating, unpleasant, or irrational by ordinary civilian standards. The Marine Corps must ask whether the practice helps recruits become disciplined, competent, courageous, and dependable under combat conditions.
The video rarely examines that question on its merits.
I do not defend a training practice merely because drill instructors have followed it for generations. I judge recruit training by two related standards.
First, every burden the Marine Corps imposes on a recruit should have a clear, evidence-based, mission-related justification.
The Corps should identify the capability each practice aims to develop, determine how it will assess whether the practice works, examine the harms it causes, and revise or abandon it when the evidence no longer supports it.
Not every part of military training lends itself to a laboratory experiment. Leadership, cohesion, discipline, judgment, and resilience involve human beings acting in complex circumstances. Difficulty of measurement, however, does not excuse the absence of evaluation.
The Marine Corps can examine injury rates, performance outcomes, disciplinary records, retention, operational experience, historical comparisons, after-action reports, and the judgment of experienced leaders. It can compare methods and determine whether a practice improves combat readiness or merely survives because no one wants to challenge tradition.
When leaders cannot identify a practice’s purpose or assess whether it achieves that purpose, tradition alone cannot justify continuing it.
Second, the methods used to prepare Marines should remain consistent with the virtues the Corps claims to teach.
The institution invokes honor, courage, commitment, discipline, and integrity. Its training methods should reinforce those principles. Pointless humiliation, arbitrary punishment, dishonesty, unsafe practices, sadism, and petty abuses of authority undermine them.
I oppose the hypocrisy that arises when the Corps preaches one standard while tolerating another. The institution should not demand integrity from recruits while accepting dishonesty from those who train them. It should not teach responsibility while allowing leaders to avoid responsibility for abuses committed under their authority.
My respect for military discipline does not require me to assume that military institutions always recognize or correct their own failures. My partner’s late husband, Army Captain Philip T. Esposito, was killed in Iraq. A soldier under his command was accused of the killing and later acquitted by court-martial. I have spent years confronting what I regard as horrific failures of discipline and accountability surrounding that case. That experience has not made me less committed to military discipline. It has made me more conscious of what discipline is supposed to accomplish and of the consequences when leaders fail to enforce it. Proper discipline places conduct under known standards rather than personal whim. It gives leaders lawful means of addressing dangerous behavior before anger, resentment, or insubordination develops into something worse.
That experience is one reason I object when the video treats discipline as though it were merely another form of degradation. The quality and consistency of military discipline can determine whether dangerous conduct is checked, ignored, or allowed to worsen.
The seriousness of the Marine Corps’ mission increases its obligation to examine its methods. Cruelty for its own sake damages recruits and the institution. Dishonesty destroys trust. Pointless injury produces injured recruits rather than effective Marines.
An account of boot camp that excludes the reality of battle nevertheless begins from the wrong premise. It judges military preparation as though the institution exists merely to force civilians to tolerate an unpleasant bureaucracy.
The video also leaves out many of the recruits themselves, especially what they wanted and what they achieved.
Not every recruit arrived as a passive victim of institutional coercion. Many wanted to rise to a worthy challenge. They wanted discipline, competence, comradeship, self-command, physical improvement, and a serious test of character. They wanted to become better than they had been in civilian life. They wanted to earn something.
I saw those recruits because I was one of them.
Some recruits failed. Some behaved badly. Some discovered that they had enlisted for the wrong reasons. Some drill instructors abused their authority, and some practices deserved elimination.
But many recruits became stronger, more disciplined, more dependable, and more capable. They did not merely survive a period of institutional degradation. They accomplished something important to them.
The author’s own account points toward this larger reality. At the end of the Crucible, drill instructors awarded the recruits their eagle, globe, and anchor, shook their hands, and called them Marines for the first time. He says that most of the recruits cried.
That reaction does not prove that every practice they endured served a proper purpose. It does show that many recruits understood graduation as an earned achievement rather than merely an escape from confinement.
The author might answer that the institution conditioned them to value the title. But that explanation protects his conclusion from any contrary evidence. He can cite resentment as proof of abuse and pride as proof of manipulation. Nothing the recruits say or feel can count against his interpretation.
The author describes what he calls a time-honored tradition that every Marine he has met experienced in some form.
According to his account, drill instructors tell recruits that a terrorist attack has occurred, that the president has declared a national emergency, and that the government will disregard enlistment arrangements and send everyone into combat. The drill instructors then offer recruits a supposed opportunity to leave before humiliating anyone who accepts. The author says the entire announcement constitutes a lie.
That never happened to me in 1988.
Many of the other incidents he describes happened to me or closely resemble things I witnessed. I have no basis to say that this incident did not happen to him. It may also have happened to every Marine with whom he discussed it.
His experience and the recollections of his acquaintances do not establish a Marine Corps-wide tradition across different eras, depots, and commands.
This example illustrates a recurring problem with the video. The author moves too easily from describing what happened in his platoon to announcing what Marine Corps recruit training essentially represents. Those claims require different kinds of evidence.
The phrase “spiritually depraved” condemns the moral character of the entire recruit training enterprise. Such a judgment requires serious consideration of the values boot camp seeks to cultivate, the military purpose it serves, and the achievements of those who complete it.
The video describes the degrading and coercive features of boot camp in detail. It gives much less attention to the recruits who sought discipline and achievement, the cohesion that effective units require, or the relationship between training and preparation for combat.
It also applies unequal standards when interpreting misconduct.
The author explains his own evasions, retaliation, pranks, and misconduct as responses to the pressures of boot camp. He shows much less willingness to consider whether misconduct by drill instructors might reflect individual failure, exhaustion, poor leadership, or the abuse of an otherwise legitimate training method.
His account of the LSD incident provides a good example. He says that he remarked to another recruit that he would probably need to take a sheet of acid after boot camp. When the comment was reported, he says that he kept his bearing and “stuck to a single talking point”: everyone present had understood the comment as a joke, although he acknowledged that the other recruit acted correctly if he misunderstood it.
His explanation may have been entirely true. The comment does not prove that he used drugs or intended to use them. But he never examines his own judgment in making it. Instead, he describes the recruit who reported him as arrogant and spiteful and attributes the report to a desire to curry favor. His own conduct receives context and the benefit of ambiguity, while the other recruit’s motives receive the least charitable interpretation—even though he concedes that the report itself was proper.
The senior drill instructor also behaves reasonably in the account. He hears the allegation, permits an explanation, accepts it, and warns the author to exercise better judgment. That episode does not fit comfortably within the video’s broader portrayal of institutional authority, and the author makes little effort to consider what it might show.
None of this relieves the Marine Corps of responsibility for the conduct of its drill instructors. An institution must select, train, supervise, and discipline the people to whom it gives authority. Repeated or tolerated misconduct can reveal a systemic failure.
A fair analysis must still distinguish individual wrongdoing from official purpose, tolerated abuse from legitimate training, and the corrupt application of a method from the nature of the method itself. The video often fails to maintain those distinctions.
In 2005, I wrote an essay titled “Jarhead: Heroes Do Not Exist,” criticizing the film adaptation of Anthony Swofford’s memoir.
The film portrayed Marines as empty men who drifted through life without meaningful purpose and compensated through emotional eruptions, sadism, and degradation. I did not argue that Marines never behaved badly. I served five years in the Marine Corps during the period the film depicted, and I could recount stories both humorous and horrific.
My objection concerned what the filmmakers treated as fundamental.
Jarhead presented breaches, failures, absurdities, and degradation as the essence of Marine life while largely omitting the Marines who pursued strength, endurance, courage, self-improvement, and the defense of their country.
I wrote then that almost every Marine I knew served for a purpose and that the purpose was good, noble, and just. Marines did not discuss those ideals every day, and some failed badly to live up to them. But those failures did not define the whole.
This video makes the same basic error. It need not invent the faults. It selects them, gives them most of the explanatory weight, and produces an account in which aspiration, achievement, and legitimate military purpose scarcely exist.
The video ends with a dedication to the combat-camera Marines of Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island and San Diego, “who somehow manage to make all this dumb shit look cool.”
The line is funny, but it also helps close off a possible objection. The author can dismiss any positive impression created by the footage as an effect of cinematography rather than evidence of something real in the training.
If viewers see discipline or genuine achievement in the footage, the closing dedication tells them that they are responding only to the camerawork.
The Marine Corps plainly knows how to present itself in favorable terms. It uses imagery to recruit, inspire, and preserve its institutional identity. Skilled filming can romanticize an institution.
But skilled filming does not mean that the discipline, effort, or achievement shown in the footage is fictional. The author uses disturbing footage as evidence while dismissing its positive content as mere camera work. This allows him to use disturbing images as evidence while dismissing any positive content in the same footage as mere presentation. And that’s unfair.
This video offers one former Marine’s vivid account of the failures and indignities he encountered in recruit training. Many of those incidents may be true, and many deserve criticism.
The problem lies in what he asks those incidents to prove. He treats failures and abuses as though they explain the entire experience, while giving too little attention to boot camp’s military purpose or to what many recruits sought and achieved there.
Those omissions are not incidental. The author chose a title that condemns the institution as a whole, selected the experiences that support that condemnation, and interpreted contrary evidence in ways that prevent it from challenging his conclusion. He may sincerely believe the resulting portrait. But it remains a portrait constructed to show Marine Corps boot camp from only one direction.
More than 1.1 million people have watched the video. They have not received a complete assessment of Marine Corps recruit training. They have received a deliberately constructed polemic in which real failures are selected, arranged, and interpreted to condemn the institution as a whole.
"Universities do not exist to promote 'marginalised voices.'
They do not exist to promulgate social engineering experiments.
"They do not exist to engage in social justice activism.
"A university exists to expand the boundaries of human knowledge, to defend truth, and to create an ecosystem for intellectual enrichment. Once a university optimises the wrong variables, we end up with the parasitised minds that we now see populating academia, business, politics, journalism, culture, etc.
"The West in general and the US in particular were founded on a set of key ideals that are unique to human history. Do not presume that these ideals are the default reality. There is always a tsunami of miscreants who are working day and night to end our liberties and freedoms, and destroy these ideals. Be vigilant. Fight for our civilisation. Activate your inner honey badger."~ Gad Saad
“New Zealand MPs are so keen to be seen to be 'doing something' about cyber-bullying that they are about to pass a poor piece of law that will do something terrible. If the Harmful Digital Communications Bill passes, MPs who feel sad because of a media story can have the publisher jailed.”~ composite quote from 2015 from No Right Turn and Tim Watkin
“[Given] that defamation would [otherwise] have applied. One wonders whether the point of the [Harmful Digitical Communications] Bill, in the view of some MPs, was to silence critics.”
~ Eric Crampton from his 2015 post 'Harmful Digital Communications and chilling effects'
In what we are told is the streaming era, this epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas. In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the “death of the humanities,” translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves. Some of those who buy the book or show up in cinemas to watch Tom Holland may go on to study ancient Greek. Perhaps the film will persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language, and history departments. Nolan, who studied English at University College London—where students still study The Odyssey as a first year “foundational text”—is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful.
This is the gracious ending of Emily Wilson’s review of star director Christopher Nolan’s new film version of Homer’s Odyssey. (The rest was not so gracious, especially considering that Nolan has made Wilson a rich woman. More on that review in a moment.)
One of the compensations of this year is that amid some less edifying debates, everyone has been taking a little time this summer to debate the proper interpretation of a three-thousand-year-old Ancient Greek poem. I regret I haven’t had the time to participate before now, particularly because this new adaptation has a lot of relevance today.
For those who know their Ancient Greek history, I can describe the film in one sentence: Nolan set out to film The Odyssey and ended up filming the Melian Dialogue. For those who don’t know what that means, read on for an explanation.
But first, let’s deal with the earliest wave of controversy, a freakout among reactionary conservatives—there does not seem to be any other kind these days—over the film’s multiracial casting. Helen of Troy is played by the Mexican-born Kenyan-American actress Lupita Nyong’o. Athena is portrayed by Zendaya, whose father is a black American of Nigerian descent. Eurylochus, right-hand man to Odysseus, is portrayed by Himesh Patel, a British actor of Indian descent by way of Africa. Transgender actor Elliot Paige (formerly Ellen Paige) plays Achilles—no, scratch that. That was the rumor spreading around before the film launched, but Paige actually plays a young Greek warrior named Sinon (a character plucked from The Aeneid but never mentioned by Homer).
Even worse, they cast some pallid Northern European guy as the Greek hero Odysseus.
Log in
