IRON WILL

How Defeatism Works: a Poison You Cannot See

Every army in history has known one thing: battles are lost in the mind before they are lost on the field. Napoleon put it as a rule, that morale counts three times as much as everything physical. A unit with rifles and no belief breaks. A unit with belief holds.

Scientists call the mechanism emotional contagion. In 1993 the psychologists Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo and Richard Rapson showed that people catch the feelings of those around them without noticing it: the tone of a voice, a sigh, a joke about giving up. One man says "we are going to lose" in chat, and ten men read it. Not one of them decides to feel worse. They simply do.

Bad news also weighs more than good. In 2001 Roy Baumeister and his colleagues summed up hundreds of studies under one title: bad is stronger than good. One sneer cancels out several words of praise. That is why a single defeatist can undo the work of a whole officer corps.

A study by Will Felps and colleagues in 2006 found that one negative member in a team could drag the whole team's results down by thirty to forty percent. The others started to copy him, to stop trying, to wonder why they bother.

Worst of all, the defeatist never sees it. He thinks he is only being honest, only joking, only saying what everyone thinks. But the sociologist Robert Merton described the self-fulfilling prophecy in 1948: say a thing will fail often enough, and people start to act in ways that make it fail.

Our own creed was born of this. Aleczaender created Richterism in 2018 as an answer to the defeatists and shitposters who put themselves before the cause in the groups he led. The creed still says it plainly: defeatism in a mobilisation, and lack of faith in a project, are symptoms of disloyalty.

Now see it from the Leader's chair. He plans the event, gathers the men, sets the line. And while he does, one voice in the back keeps saying it will not work. Every officer must spend his strength fighting that voice instead of the enemy. That is what defeatism is: doing the enemy's work for free.