Hall of Fun House Mirrors

I wonder if the military, and those who use it, aid and abet it, venerate it over civilian/diplomatic spheres, are prone to fall into self-reference, where the military is in and of itself virtuous and its mission, as defined by civilians, increasingly secondary. And a characteristic of institutional self-reference is further and further remove from those outside, an ever greater concentration on its own priorities rather than those of the society supporting it, with fell consequences almost inevitable.

You could argue similarly with cops, ever more isolated from their populations and protective of each other's prerogatives; religious fundies ever more dismissive of a common humanity with pagans; docs facing malpractice lawyers and bureaucratic nightmares; on and on. You might even argue that the whole, entire kit and caboodle of Western society is moving in such a direction, because it's inevitable if economics, especially 'free markets' where profit-making is exalted over all else, and financial markets ever more removed from actual assets in the real world, displaces any other way of thinking about our lives together. 'Rugged individualists' living a libertarian fantasy, or daydreaming of one, trapped in a hall of funh house mirrors, trapping, too, everyone...