I just finished listening to "Pillars of the Earth" and "World Without End" on audiobook. It was funny to me that I identified with one group of people moreso than any of the others in the book.
Naturally, I should have gravitated towards the businesspeople. I am one and being a capitalist and businessperson is my primary calling in life. However, that is something so natural to me, that I just can't envision that a person could be any other way. It's too familiar. There's nothing exotic or interesting about it to me. When I was an employee I spent every day wondering how my other co-workers managed to get through each day without losing their minds because I believed that everybody was entrepreneurial by nature.
In the book, it isn't just the merchants who are entrepreneurial. There was very little "employment" per se, back in the middle ages. Even farmers were essentially pure entrepreneurs. Laborers were like free agent self-employed people with very short term labor contracts.
It is also odd that I didn't relate so much to the nobility. Granted, I have an absolute disdain for the nobility, but the men of that era were also their nation's (or more specifically, their king's) fighting men. I could relate to the warfare part, but the very concept of ruling people against their will, due to heredity goes against pretty much every bone in my body.
No, to me, I related most closely to the monks, which is most curious of all. I am not particularly a man of faith. I am a man of science by nature. I believe in the quantitative and the measurable. The observable and the demonstrable. I leave the miracles of metaphysics for others to figure out.
Yet the monks were the ones I related most closely to, and it is because of my service in the military that I say this.
Like members of the military, they were essentially a society separate and distinct, unto themselves. There have even been Supreme Court decisions that have reaffirmed the notion that the military is not like the society it defends as it is a "specialized society separate from civilian society".
They dress differently, live differently, and generally segregate themselves from the population at large.
That's not so different than the military. In fact, as I climbed higher and higher into the corporate hierarchy, it became painfully obvious that military service, the higher you go, is more and more rare to find on a resume. Not only do most of these people not have a family member in the military, there are broad swaths of affluent society where people literally may not be good friends with a single member of the military.
What appealed to me about the monks was that they had a belief and they were willing to commit their lives to that belief. That, ultimately, if they gave their lives in service to their beliefs, that was okay with them.
I have come to the conclusion that to the vast majority of people, my service in the military makes no sense. When I first enlisted at age 17, a lot of people's first reaction was "why would you do that?"
They would not have said this if I had announced that I was going away to college. Nor would they have said it if I were to take pretty much any other job.
But join the military? That's just crazy.
And this is from the perspective of a person who came from a family where military service was not just normal, but common. Of my father, aunts and uncles, I had 5 military members out of 5 of my grandparents' kids and their spouses. That's 5 out of 10 people... 1 in 2.
In my family, though it was not uncommon to join the military, it was very uncommon to stay. It was the norm for us to join, get college money, go to school, then live a productive life in the civilian sector.
A lifelong committment? Crazy. As crazy as announcing that you are running off to join the Jesuits or Fransiscans.
You find out quickly that you don't do this for public approval. Yes, there's a lot of public flag-waving, but anybody who has spent time in a Fortune 500 company knows that in a lot of companies, reserve service is not only not-respected, but it's an absolute career killer.
It's the kind of thing you do because you believe, deep in your heart of hearts, that it is the right thing to do.
So, the stories were interesting to me. The monks weren't always virtuous or clever and in some cases, they were downright deceitful and dishonest. The same can probably be said for some members of the military. However, by and large, I appreciated what most of them were doing by taking the oaths they took.
I have said countless times that I'm thankful to the US Navy for giving me the opportunity to serve. If a person is fortunate in life, they will find a calling that not only are they good at, but that they feel gives them a sense of purpose and a way to give back to society. A way to serve something greater than themselves.
I feel that to some degree as an entrepreneur, but I take special pride in my military service.
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