Bret Devereaux

So I know I stopped live-tweeting my way through Steven Pressfield's 'Warrior Archetype' videos, but as I am finishing writing the last of my 'universal warrior' blog series I can only conclude that having to sit through these things was my own warrior-toughness-training. 1/18

Honestly, it's hard to even know which bit of silly nonsense if the worst! Is it where he uncritically accepts VDH's (quite bad) thesis that decisive battle is a distinctly western way of war despite also discussing numerous non-western armies engaging in decisive battles? 2/18

Is it the part where he describes the Scythians as 'surviving on banditry' apparently unaware that, as Steppe peoples they were pastoralists who survived on herding? Maybe it's the part where, with more than a dozen videos on Sparta, he never mentions the helots once? 3/18

Maybe it's the bit where Alexander III ('the Great') is an ideal expression of 'the warrior' but evidently Philip II isn't? Or the Macedonians? Is it where he uses anecdotes he invented for fictional characters as equally valid for evidence as the historical sources? 4/18

Is it the part where he says that a Greek xiphos was 'half the length' of a Roman gladius? Or that he can't pronounce ξίφος despite presenting himself as an expert on Greek warrior culture? 5/18

Is it the part where he uncritically accepts all Spartan shields had lambdas on them when Plutarch contradicts *himself* on this point? Or just generally the way he reads Plutarch, writing centuries after the society he described effectively ended, utterly uncritically? 6/18

Is it the part where the leisured Spartiate aristocrats (who do no work, but instead are served by numerous enslaved people) are held up as a model of selflessness(!!) even when a cursory reading of Plutarch's Agesilaus or Agis or Cleomenes show them to be anything but? 7/18

Is it the part where he just flatly presents Carl Jung's work as a valid way to think about the structure of the human mind, despite it having been long abandoned by actual specialists in the field? 8/18