Comment by glup
5 years ago
To add to what's in the article: the Swiss have compulsory military service that puts almost all young men (and many young women) of hugely varying backgrounds together and forces them to work together in really hard contexts. This seems to do a lot to bridge divides like urban/rural, socioeconomic status, and language backgrounds.
The army was considerably downsized in the last decades, so while this used to be true for men, it isn't anymore. And the number of women is and always was more or less negligible.
Well the army was downsized yes but most men still do their military service. I just recently completed my service and almost everyone I know did it too with maybe one or two exceptions. So this is still true. Except the women part yes this is really not significant.
Most != almost all, the number seems to be between 60 and 70% per year.
> compulsory military service
You can sort of opt-out by doing civilian service. This consist of general interest public work (mostly work in retirement homes, but also farmer's aide, museum guardianship, and in this time of pandemic, help doing COVID contact-tracing).
Well, there are three cases of patological societies, where one is forced to coexist with other people and unable to opt-out: school, prison and military service.
I'm not really seeing how that's bad.
You can't opt out of society in any significant regard, and without being forcefully exposed to very distinct facets of society we close ourselves off to our own little bubbles.
One cannot opt-out of society (short of moving to a different society), but one interact with society (as a whole) only through laws, contracts and formalized/ritualized interactions.
On personal level one does not interact with society, but with other persons. Probably tens or at most hundreds. And one can opt-out of each of such personal interaction (and perhaps find a differend set of persons to interact on personal level). And that is one of the most important personal freedoms.
By now the majority of people and the waste majority of woman do not go to military service. May 'military' service consisted of writing web application for the hospital and cleaning service as a 9 to 5 job.