Thank you Catherine. This wasn’t my normal military analysis, but I think it might provide some insight to those who may be confused about the essence of character.
He makes you *want* to be better, doesn’t he?? I hope the young men and women under his command took full advantage of the lessons he taught them. If I had kids, I’d have been confident turning them over to General Hertling’s care.
Another excellent article from the type of person our government & industry sorely needs. We're about the same age, but our paths were much different, aside from starting out with parents heavily involved in character development. My long career as a scientist built on that character. My "chapel" was the lab, where results of my work, more than the people I worked with, taught me lessons of humility, and often provided temptations to lie or cheat. But it also constantly reminded me of the importance of "following the evidence where it leads," even when I would have preferred a different outcome. Another lesson that I learned is that there must always be a positive correlation between authority and responsibility. Sadly, a negative correlation is too often glorified today.
When I was in college I did independent research and wrote a senior thesis, working in the lab of a professor who was researching a specific infectious agent in poultry, in the hope of producing a vaccine. My research was one small step in that work, and unfortunately my results showed that one of the methods they were pursuing was not going to work. It was definitely not what we were hoping for, but it was the work I had to present for my dissertation. (I received my Degree with Distinction.)
Even negative results can be essential in medical research—I may have saved the lab time and money pursuing a dead end. I’ll never understand why so many people seem to believe that researchers are likely to bury negative results. To do otherwise would be futile and a waste of precious resources.
Take this article and Sarah's June 22 article 'How to Unlock the Authenticity Trap,' staple them together and bind them with a book cover titled 'Uniform Code of Electoral Qualifications.' We can add others as we go along.
Thank you so much, General, I loved this! If this post was in a book, I would have highlighted every line. I think you are exactly right that character development should start early - very early. I am grateful to my parents for reinforcing that even when it might have been easier to overlook. The first character lesson I remember was playing Candyland. If my brother or I tried to cheat, it wasn't cute, that meant the game was over. Integrity became a muscle memory, which helped us throughout life.
I’m visiting my sister’s family at the moment. I have a teenaged nephew and niece, who went to/current attends a Quaker K-12 school. Yesterday at different times I was so impressed by the way they spoke about friendships and interpersonal relationships—with maturity that I did not expect. As an example, my niece, who is 14, has two friends she has grown up with, who have joined the “popular group”, and she says she knows they have been “talking about her”. So she told my sister it was ok, she was just going to “pause our friendship”—not fight, not ignore, not retaliate, but just spend more time with other classmates who she gets along with better. Like water off a duck’s back, she understood that this stuff happens and it’s not worth getting upset over. Some friendships she has “paused” have rekindled a year or two later as cliques form and reform.
My sister says the Quaker ethos is taught to them from the earliest years, teaching conflict resolution and self-esteem. Next year she will take a class in Global Relations and Justice, which sounds like something every school would benefit from. The downside of all of this, of course, is the *exorbitant* tuition they pay (my sister is much more financially secure than I am, lol). It is such a sad state of affairs that you need to be affluent to be able to send your kids to a school with such wonderful formation.
May I add that character, like critical thinking,cannot be taught as a subject in a class. Critical thinking is acquired by individuals studying deep subjects deeply. It accrues as a result of study. Similarly, character is only acquired by performing difficult tasks that require character. Both character and critical thinking, like the growing Redwood’s height, take time.
Critical thinking and character cannot perhaps be taught entirely in a classroom; they must be practiced over time, as you say.
That said I think that both topics deserve consideration in every educational setting. Scouts BSA, which like the author has had a great impact on my life, devotes a lot of time to the discussion of and reflection upon character; I believe that is a huge part of why the program is valuable.
I've only skimmed this (sadly, paid work is calling), but I can already tell it will stay with me and is worth thinking through. Really well said! Thank you for sharing this expertise and unique perspective with all of us.
Oddly enough, this has me thinking about a thought I had watching Star Trek way back in my 20s: how odd it was that Command was a job category like Medicine or Engineering, almost like it was a major you could take in college. Maybe command was, but certainly leadership (which it really seemed to stand in for) was something you could develop and would need to use in whatever kind of work you did. And if leadership is more specialized, virtue *definitely* is the kind of thing we all need, and helps us do whatever we do better. That's as close to its definition as I can come, and I studied philosophy.
Everything I needed to know about life I learned watching Star Trek. lol, I’m only half joking. I have such admiration for the society Roddenberry envisioned, and am somewhat leery of the fact that he set WWIII in 2026
We need to go beyond the character building taught in your generation. So many white Americans had a "de-formation" of their character when it came to race. They were taught not to question white supremacy. The other huge blind spot was success. It was often valued more than "character." People with more success were thought to be more valuable, and even to be more moral, than people with less success.
Conservatives often want to blame the therapeutic culture and the emphasis on self-fulfillment. But they don't want to admit that they valued success....which is tied to self-fulfillment, especially financial success.
The overemphasis on those two things ended up undermining ethics and morality. We need to be aware of where values we espouse compete with each other.
You may not want to judge anyone without knowing their background, and I'd also suggest you not take a wide sweep of what an entire generation was taught. I grew up in a lower-class household, in a racially mixed neighborhood. I had never left the city, never flown on an airplane, until I entered the academy, but I had been taught by the Christian Brothers to use my talent to serve others, and that was a key to a successful life. So yes, I had ambition, and I would not suggest that be thwarted in anyone; rather, ensure your character tempers your goals. As for values, I purposely didn't cite the four I try to live by, but I have found most of those I teach haven't even defined what their values are.
Outstanding, clear, and borne of experience, Gen. Hertling. Thank you.
You mentioned Scouts: in a bit of kismet, I responded to last week’s Secret Pod with a long anecdote (linked below) about my time in Scouts (and specifically post-Eagle, in emergency response Exploring, and my interactions with Police Scouts), and in an interesting comment exchange with JVL, I wrote,
> I am mystified how people who weren’t in Scouts [or the military] learn command.… I feel like if you’re actually drilled and trained in command and learn to think about such things in terms of your responsibilities and authorities, the limits of both, task and mission, taking, giving, delivering and ensuring orders, strategy, leadership and development, ethics, etc., that trusting people to do it intuitively is as mad as trusting doctors to figure out procedures on their own.
JVL responded, “I have never liked authority and always rebelled against it. I resented pretty much every authority figure, ever.” I replied,
> [s]ince he teaches it, I think you could have a fascinating conversation with Gen. Hertling about this if you ever got the chance. A good leader is the first to stick his neck out and the last in line for food. Your responsibility and job is, in one respect, to ensure people under you never have reason to resent you.
I learned the first question to ask about your authority when you get a new role is, “how can I use my authority to protect those under me?” It was clear from the replies that most people don’t see command authority in this way. They see it as stern disciplinarianism at best, bullying and thuggery at worst. Bad acts by untrained people are seen as indictment of the whole notion of authority and command.
To the contrary of the headline, and fully in keeping with the point of the article, character is profoundly cultural and without it no culture survives.
Modern Americans love to feel "counter-cultural" and "iconoclastic," it feels edgy and dangerous, but both are essentially ways of forgetting ourselves and our history. The challenge is always to remember what we, and those who went before us, have learned through hard experience.
The 60s counter-culture was about self-satiation, the culture war was waged to achieve domination by governmental power, and here we are with a counter-cultural conservatism that wields government to power acts of the self-satiation of its leadership.
Conservatism lost itself in its drive for power, and today it is a zombie movement that denies every military, economic, and medical lesson of the past as it claims to be restoring America...with its sole actual restoration being that of the dual state that bolstered first slavery then Jim Crow, and now detains people based on their look and accent and arrests (the drops charges against) those who oppose it.
Character matters. We are here today because Americans think everyone games the system in bad faith. No good faith system can survive the bad faith of its members, and every bad faith system collapses of its own corruption.
Beautiful, Mark. Proud to be your colleague.
Thank you Catherine. This wasn’t my normal military analysis, but I think it might provide some insight to those who may be confused about the essence of character.
Well done! Thank you
After reading your articles, I’m always reminded how important it is to “do and be better” everyday.
He makes you *want* to be better, doesn’t he?? I hope the young men and women under his command took full advantage of the lessons he taught them. If I had kids, I’d have been confident turning them over to General Hertling’s care.
Thank you, Amy, for all of your kinds words.
Absolutely excellent piece!! “Character matters” is crucial to a civil society
Another excellent article from the type of person our government & industry sorely needs. We're about the same age, but our paths were much different, aside from starting out with parents heavily involved in character development. My long career as a scientist built on that character. My "chapel" was the lab, where results of my work, more than the people I worked with, taught me lessons of humility, and often provided temptations to lie or cheat. But it also constantly reminded me of the importance of "following the evidence where it leads," even when I would have preferred a different outcome. Another lesson that I learned is that there must always be a positive correlation between authority and responsibility. Sadly, a negative correlation is too often glorified today.
When I was in college I did independent research and wrote a senior thesis, working in the lab of a professor who was researching a specific infectious agent in poultry, in the hope of producing a vaccine. My research was one small step in that work, and unfortunately my results showed that one of the methods they were pursuing was not going to work. It was definitely not what we were hoping for, but it was the work I had to present for my dissertation. (I received my Degree with Distinction.)
Even negative results can be essential in medical research—I may have saved the lab time and money pursuing a dead end. I’ll never understand why so many people seem to believe that researchers are likely to bury negative results. To do otherwise would be futile and a waste of precious resources.
Best read so far this week! Thanks for this.
With humility, with the purpose of serving others, in view of a larger purpose.
Take this article and Sarah's June 22 article 'How to Unlock the Authenticity Trap,' staple them together and bind them with a book cover titled 'Uniform Code of Electoral Qualifications.' We can add others as we go along.
Thank you so much, General, I loved this! If this post was in a book, I would have highlighted every line. I think you are exactly right that character development should start early - very early. I am grateful to my parents for reinforcing that even when it might have been easier to overlook. The first character lesson I remember was playing Candyland. If my brother or I tried to cheat, it wasn't cute, that meant the game was over. Integrity became a muscle memory, which helped us throughout life.
I’m visiting my sister’s family at the moment. I have a teenaged nephew and niece, who went to/current attends a Quaker K-12 school. Yesterday at different times I was so impressed by the way they spoke about friendships and interpersonal relationships—with maturity that I did not expect. As an example, my niece, who is 14, has two friends she has grown up with, who have joined the “popular group”, and she says she knows they have been “talking about her”. So she told my sister it was ok, she was just going to “pause our friendship”—not fight, not ignore, not retaliate, but just spend more time with other classmates who she gets along with better. Like water off a duck’s back, she understood that this stuff happens and it’s not worth getting upset over. Some friendships she has “paused” have rekindled a year or two later as cliques form and reform.
My sister says the Quaker ethos is taught to them from the earliest years, teaching conflict resolution and self-esteem. Next year she will take a class in Global Relations and Justice, which sounds like something every school would benefit from. The downside of all of this, of course, is the *exorbitant* tuition they pay (my sister is much more financially secure than I am, lol). It is such a sad state of affairs that you need to be affluent to be able to send your kids to a school with such wonderful formation.
Wonderful analysis and beautifully written.
Outstanding. Thank you, sir
All thanks to the General.
May I add that character, like critical thinking,cannot be taught as a subject in a class. Critical thinking is acquired by individuals studying deep subjects deeply. It accrues as a result of study. Similarly, character is only acquired by performing difficult tasks that require character. Both character and critical thinking, like the growing Redwood’s height, take time.
Critical thinking and character cannot perhaps be taught entirely in a classroom; they must be practiced over time, as you say.
That said I think that both topics deserve consideration in every educational setting. Scouts BSA, which like the author has had a great impact on my life, devotes a lot of time to the discussion of and reflection upon character; I believe that is a huge part of why the program is valuable.
I've only skimmed this (sadly, paid work is calling), but I can already tell it will stay with me and is worth thinking through. Really well said! Thank you for sharing this expertise and unique perspective with all of us.
Oddly enough, this has me thinking about a thought I had watching Star Trek way back in my 20s: how odd it was that Command was a job category like Medicine or Engineering, almost like it was a major you could take in college. Maybe command was, but certainly leadership (which it really seemed to stand in for) was something you could develop and would need to use in whatever kind of work you did. And if leadership is more specialized, virtue *definitely* is the kind of thing we all need, and helps us do whatever we do better. That's as close to its definition as I can come, and I studied philosophy.
Everything I needed to know about life I learned watching Star Trek. lol, I’m only half joking. I have such admiration for the society Roddenberry envisioned, and am somewhat leery of the fact that he set WWIII in 2026
We need to go beyond the character building taught in your generation. So many white Americans had a "de-formation" of their character when it came to race. They were taught not to question white supremacy. The other huge blind spot was success. It was often valued more than "character." People with more success were thought to be more valuable, and even to be more moral, than people with less success.
Conservatives often want to blame the therapeutic culture and the emphasis on self-fulfillment. But they don't want to admit that they valued success....which is tied to self-fulfillment, especially financial success.
The overemphasis on those two things ended up undermining ethics and morality. We need to be aware of where values we espouse compete with each other.
You may not want to judge anyone without knowing their background, and I'd also suggest you not take a wide sweep of what an entire generation was taught. I grew up in a lower-class household, in a racially mixed neighborhood. I had never left the city, never flown on an airplane, until I entered the academy, but I had been taught by the Christian Brothers to use my talent to serve others, and that was a key to a successful life. So yes, I had ambition, and I would not suggest that be thwarted in anyone; rather, ensure your character tempers your goals. As for values, I purposely didn't cite the four I try to live by, but I have found most of those I teach haven't even defined what their values are.
Outstanding, clear, and borne of experience, Gen. Hertling. Thank you.
You mentioned Scouts: in a bit of kismet, I responded to last week’s Secret Pod with a long anecdote (linked below) about my time in Scouts (and specifically post-Eagle, in emergency response Exploring, and my interactions with Police Scouts), and in an interesting comment exchange with JVL, I wrote,
> I am mystified how people who weren’t in Scouts [or the military] learn command.… I feel like if you’re actually drilled and trained in command and learn to think about such things in terms of your responsibilities and authorities, the limits of both, task and mission, taking, giving, delivering and ensuring orders, strategy, leadership and development, ethics, etc., that trusting people to do it intuitively is as mad as trusting doctors to figure out procedures on their own.
JVL responded, “I have never liked authority and always rebelled against it. I resented pretty much every authority figure, ever.” I replied,
> [s]ince he teaches it, I think you could have a fascinating conversation with Gen. Hertling about this if you ever got the chance. A good leader is the first to stick his neck out and the last in line for food. Your responsibility and job is, in one respect, to ensure people under you never have reason to resent you.
I learned the first question to ask about your authority when you get a new role is, “how can I use my authority to protect those under me?” It was clear from the replies that most people don’t see command authority in this way. They see it as stern disciplinarianism at best, bullying and thuggery at worst. Bad acts by untrained people are seen as indictment of the whole notion of authority and command.
—
https://substack.com/@treyharris/note/c-302222994
To the contrary of the headline, and fully in keeping with the point of the article, character is profoundly cultural and without it no culture survives.
Modern Americans love to feel "counter-cultural" and "iconoclastic," it feels edgy and dangerous, but both are essentially ways of forgetting ourselves and our history. The challenge is always to remember what we, and those who went before us, have learned through hard experience.
The 60s counter-culture was about self-satiation, the culture war was waged to achieve domination by governmental power, and here we are with a counter-cultural conservatism that wields government to power acts of the self-satiation of its leadership.
Conservatism lost itself in its drive for power, and today it is a zombie movement that denies every military, economic, and medical lesson of the past as it claims to be restoring America...with its sole actual restoration being that of the dual state that bolstered first slavery then Jim Crow, and now detains people based on their look and accent and arrests (the drops charges against) those who oppose it.
Character matters. We are here today because Americans think everyone games the system in bad faith. No good faith system can survive the bad faith of its members, and every bad faith system collapses of its own corruption.