"Can we look at the concept of Moral Injury from the medieaval period in Europe and how it might apply to what happens when a society undergoes radical change. I think there might be a number of chronicles written about knights of old, military men going a bit nuts, not to mention my own unfounded conviction that the Carmalite Monks were soldiers damaged by the impossible mental and physical demands of combat."
They were promised by the Pope that killing the infidel was a fast-track to heaven, a holy penance. But the human nervous system doesn't care about papal bulls. When these knights came back from the slaughter at Antioch or Acre, their minds were shattered. Medieval chronicles are full of accounts of veterans returning in 'fugue states,' unable to speak, waking up at night screaming from the ghosts in their dreams.
"So what did they do?"
They dropped their swords into the sand, refused to return to Europe's legal ledgers, they remembered how the divine had told Elijah to escape the wrath of an angry king Ahab by going to the Brook Cherish and hide, the wounded men of the ciusade climbed up into the silent, desolate caves of Mount Carmel. They didn't build a massive, administrative monastery; they lived as isolated hermits in the rock, near the spring of Elijah. Their early rule of life, given by the Patriarch of Jerusalem, didn't focus on academic smart-asary, it focused on unceasing prayer, total silence, and solitude.
They traded their iron chainmail for what they called 'the armor of God.' They were men so damaged by the impossible mental demands of combat that they needed the absolute, silent vacuum of the desert just to stop the screaming in their heads. The flight wasn't a runaway, it was an attempt to re-imagine the real and themselves. The Carmelite Order wasn't born out of abstract piety; it was a spiritual field hospital for medieval combat trauma.
"Is the Spring of Elijah where Elijah defeated the profits of Baal and as a result of Elijah's victory the Hebrew Nation was persuaded to surrender their Goddess and turn their God into an incel."
I think you'd piss a lot of people off calling the God of Jews, Christians and Muslims an "incel." Please try and remember that we have discussed the path trode lightly so as to avoid the recyling bin behind the Data Centers. But, yes, unless it's a trick by the Devil's AI Advocate, worth remembering, if only briefly, that incel in the corridors of meaning is dictionary define as "Involuntarly Celibate." Elijah's victory over Baal's 450 earthly prophets was an absolute slaughter that made the rivers run red, but no redder than the streets of Antioch or Acre.
To his credit Elijah did let the girl goddesses, Yahweh's consort and the like, disappear peacefully without being noticed, maybe a backroom somewhere, however it happened, the Yahweh was deuteronomized, obviously the New God's Oneness had to be absolute. Eitherway, while Elijah entered a Fugue State following his own self inflicted Moral Injury, he painfully accepted that he was no better than his ancestors, he'd done terrible killing, he did have his forty days and forty nights, his broom tree, a crow to feed him, a voice in the clouds to talk to and possibly he found comfort from his allowing goddesses to live, if only on rooftops washing clothes.
"Did Elijah suffer a Moral Injury or was it shell shock, or PTSD of the Vietnam war?"
It was a while ago, something definitely happened to Elijah! Following his victory he didn't enter the city to fanfares, fireworks and adoring cheer-leaders. Like the Carmalite Hermits that followed him nearly two thousand, maybe three thousand years later he took to solitude to find peace from the visions in his mind and the tremble in his fingers.
"Is it politely called the Fugue State by the minds that wrote papers that reinterpreted the reality of cowardice or battle fatigue."
Medieaval Monks saw Moral Injury as a wound to the Auctoritas (authority) of the self. It happens when you participate in, witness, or fail to prevent acts that violate your deepest moral beliefs. It is the realization: 'The world is not the way I thought it was, and I am not a good person.'
"How sweer!"
Comrade, in medieval Europe, this tension was agonizing. It wasn't ironic. Christianity preached a gospel of peace, mercy, and the sanctity of life. Yet the ruling class was built entirely on a military caste that retained its power through raw, territorial violence. When a society underwent a radical shift, like the total mobilization of the Crusades or the brutal, mercenary efficiency of the Hundred Years' War, the traditional spiritual buffers broke down.
The church tried to manage this by prescribing intense penances - telling knights to fast for years or build chapels to pay for every man they killed. But for the pious knight, the believers, the internal contradiction was terminal. The 'sane logic' of the feudal ledger told them they were heroes; their Pascalian heart told them they were murderers
When a society undergoes a radical, systemic change - whether it’s the expansion of a brutal medieval empire or the current, hyper-accelerated enclosure of human life by the AI industry - Moral Injury is always the primary byproduct.
Think about what we are doing to the population in 2026. The corporate managers are forcing millions of people to participate in a system that treats their own neighbors as 'human capital' to be optimized, automated, and discarded. They are forcing teachers, writers, doctors, and workers to feed their own data into the servers, essentially building the machinery that will liquidate their own trades.
"Leonard Cohen's point was the rich get richer, the poor get lied to and stay the same. Hallelujah."
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