Read Warrior Philosophy in Game of Thrones Online
Authors: Francis Briers
Robb:
“My lord-father taught me it was death to bare steel against your liege-lord. Doubtless the Greatjon only meant to cut my meat for me.”
There is a pregnant pause as everyone holds their breath to see what will happen...
The Greatjon:
“Your meat....(he still sounds angry and everyone remains uncertain)... Is bloody tough!”
Jon and Robb begin to laugh and soon everyone joins in.
[lxv]
This is a defining moment for Robb because if he does what the Greatjon wants him to do then all these older lords will see him as a boy and he will lose the command in that instant. Equally if he is too harsh he could sow dissent amongst the very men he most needs behind him, before they have even begun their march to war. He manages to strike a perfect balance and in his merciful treatment of Jon Umber, wins respect from all of them and a staunch support from Jon.
The second of these examples of Robb's wise mercy is when he and his lords are planning their first direct move against the two Lannister armies, one led by Tywin, one by Jaime. As they are speaking some of Robb's men march in a Lannister scout whom they have captured. Robb asks him questions about what he's seen and how many men he's counted. It is clear everyone believes he should be killed and Ser Rodrick (who was the master of arms at Winterfell) says:
“You don't have to do this yourself, your father would understand..”
Robb cuts him off:
“My father understands mercy when there is room for it. And he understands honour. And courage. Let him go.”
Lady Catelyn interrupts:
“Robb.”
Robb moves closer to the scout and says:
“Tell Lord Tywin winter is coming for him. 20,000 northerners marching south to see if he really does shit gold.”
The scout:
“Yes my Lord, thank you my Lord.”
And for me there is a real sense of respect and gratitude from the scout.
[lxvi]
This could seem like foolishness, and certainly Jon Umber challenges his authority again, but Robb is not only doing what he believes is right in treating even his enemies with dignity and honour, but he is sowing the seed of his plan. He has fed Tywin Lannister false information which is what enables Robb to divert Tywin and go and attack Jaime's smaller force and catch them by surprise. In both of these examples I'm sure you can see how Robb manages to be both merciful and powerful. He stays focused on his true enemy – Tywin Lannister – and gives mercy as a gift which is part of what wins people to his cause and makes him a great leader. Mercy is not about being soft, or fluffy, or a push-over. Mercy is about wielding your power wisely and compassionately and Robb demonstrates that masterfully in these moments.
Exercising mercy does not always end well though as we see in for Ned Stark. When Ned has been imprisoned, Varys visits and asks him:
“What madness led you to tell the Queen you'd learned the truth about Joffrey's birth?”
Ned replies:
“The madness of mercy, that she might save her children.”
And later in the scene Varys says:
“It wasn't the wine that killed Robert, nor the boar.... The wine slowed him down and the boar ripped him open, but it was your mercy that killed the King.”
While Varys can be wise in his observations about many things, and Ned is definitely acting out of mercy when he speaks to Queen Cersei, I would still contend that it was Ned's blind assumptions around matters of honour which killed the King, not his mercy. Ned's mercy led him to want to protect Cersei's children, his honour-blindness led Ned to judge Cersei and others by his own high standards and it is this misjudgement which killed the King in the way Varys is talking about. Honour is Ned's madness, not mercy. Ned seeks to be merciful in the matter of killing Daenerys Targaryen as well and it is this which first causes a rift between him and King Robert. Again, I would say that it is not Ned's mercy which gets him into trouble but his rigid ideas about honour. When he challenges Robert on his choice to murder the girl princess he says:
“You will dishonour yourself forever if you do this.”
He appeals to Robert's honour, when Robert is a man of pragmatism so it is easy for him to dismiss Ned's perspective and tell the rest of his council:
“Speak sense to this honourable fool.”
[lxvii]
King Robert realises and admits on his death-bed that it was the wrong thing to do and Ned was the only one to challenge him. Perhaps if Ned had appealed to Robert differently he may have come to this realisation earlier and Ned's fate could have been a better one.
As I mentioned we see Ned's gift of mercy in some of his other children as well as Robb. Sansa has much more of his idealistic, trusting blindness, but we have glimpses of it in moments with Arya. However, Jon is the other of Ned's children who really seems to have learned to be merciful. We see this in various aspects of his character and behaviour, but it is most clear in his treatment of Samwell Tarly. Although at first he is tough with Sam and tries to tell him to 'toughen up' he swiftly realises that Sam just isn't built that way – and that doesn't mean he is not a worthwhile human being. I see it as one of Jon's defining moments, and one of the acts that most clearly sets him out as a leader amongst his batch of recruits for the Wall when he persuades them all to look after Sam:
“Sam's no different than the rest of us. There's no place for him in the world so he's come here. We're not gonna' hurt him in the training yard any more, never again, no matter what Thorne says. He's our brother now and we're going to protect him.”
[lxviii]
Jon shows here a great deal of maturity and compassion. This is really what mercy is about, and this is what power is about. He lives the Knight's oath to protect those weak and defenceless. In this environment Sam is pretty defenceless, and Jon is in a position of power due to his skill at arms. While democracy and equality are in so many ways wonderful things to strive for, one of the tragedies of the modern drive for these ideals is that we are forgetting the art of the responsible use of power. Everyone is so busy pretending that they don't have power, that they're just the same as you and me and we're all OK, that when people do have power, often they are not particularly conscious about how they wield it. Because people do become powerful. Power is really just about being influential so whether you have a formal position of leadership or not, you can be hugely influential if people choose to follow you, and by that influence you are powerful. At the
US
military academy at Westpoint, my friend Lance Giroux
[23]
told me they used to define a leader as:
“Anyone who influences others to effective action.”
They may well still be using that definition. When talking about this, one of the examples Lance uses is: When a baby cries and it's mother picks it up, who's the leader?... It's the baby! The baby has influenced it's mother to take effective action. We are quite literally leading from birth, we are powerful through influence from birth. Anyone who has ever held and melted in the presence of a new-born will attest to that. And yet unless you have a management job, most of us never receive any leadership training. It's not part of our schooling system in spite of it being such a core human capacity. Leadership, influence is about wielding our power wisely whether that power is big or small. Even if it's just with our friends or kids, we all have power. As I have said, I see mercy as being about wielding power wisely, responsibly, and compassionately. In this, while he may be flawed (as all of us are) Ned Stark is a wonderful example of leadership, and his sons Robb and Jon Snow have evidently learned something from him. I think if we can all learn to wield the power we have more wisely, responsibly and compassionately, then our world will be a better place. In walking the Warrior path we must embrace our own capacity for influence and power, and in this task, mercy is a better name for our sword than anything more glamorous, adventurous or overtly war-like. As my colleague Cathy Glass is fond of saying:
“Kind eyes, sharp sword.”
I was recently reading Sam Sheridan's excellent book on martial arts and fighting 'A Fighter's Heart.' Towards the end there was a particularly intriguing section which spoke to me about the connection between the Warrior's path and love. In this,
Sheridan
is himself referencing a book ('On Aggression' by Konrad Lorenz). He says:
“Lorenz studied tropical reef fish and geese, and used the observed behaviours to draw inferences about all vertebrates and thus ourselves. He first noticed that on the reef, “fish are far more aggressive towards their own species than any other” (outside of eating and being eaten, of course). The male fish viciously attack other male fish of the same species, the females the females, while allowing the myriad others to coexist peacefully.... He talks about geese and says that two furiously aggressive animals must bond and live together in a small space, all without weakening intra-species aggression. They have evolved inhibitors, behaviour-changing devices, that turns the aggression they normally feel towards others of their species into something else when they mate. The same thing, albeit in a more complex way, takes place among men and women of the same tribe or family unit... friendship is only found in animals with “highly developed intra-specific aggression”... the more aggressive the animal, the deeper the friendship. The ability to love and form bonds has evolved as a way to temper aggression, to turn it into something more powerful when defending hearth and home. Friendship and love are essentially evolutionary by-products of aggression.... That's the secret: It's all about love.”
[lxix]
This may seem a little odd, even counter-intuitive, but it gives me hope and is further confirmation of something I have long suspected: If we can embrace the fierce warrior which resides in all our hearts', then that same warrior can teach us how to live together better, more peacefully, and with a greater capacity for love.
Chapter 10 – Honesty
“
A lie will easily get you out of a scrape, and yet, strangely and beautifully, rapture possesses you when you have taken the scrape and left out the lie.”
~Charles Edward Montague
[lxx]
I am not going to draw out lots of examples and quotes here. The story of 'Game of Thrones is so riddled with despicable dishonesty and inspiring truths that you can see it very well for yourself. In some ways it is precisely these lies and truths which have formed the topic of every chapter thus far, they have been the illustrations for our brief wander down the Warrior's path.
What I want to bring to your attention here in this last chapter is that all of the other values, qualities, and principles I have spoken of are nothing without honesty. I have said before that all of these qualities are interdependent, that if one is undermined then the others are likely to fall, but really without honesty it all falls apart. That is why this is called a 'Path' or a 'Way', because while I can talk about parts of it, specific skills or capacities if you will, the truth of it is a whole way of being, not a set of reducible skills. These chapters with their themes point the way (or Way) towards a whole-hearted commitment to living life as a Warrior, not just having a hobby and doing some warrior stuff. So when I say that without honesty it all falls apart I'm not just talking about honesty with others, although that's an important, I am talking about honesty with yourself. In the privacy of your own mind, can you tell yourself the truth? It is so easy to embellish and invent a slightly better, slightly more attractive version of what happens in our lives. It is so seductive to re-tell our own stories in our minds in such a way that we come out slightly better, braver, more virtuous, or more generous of spirit than we were, but you can never improve what you can't see, and these little internal deceits camouflage our areas of greatest learning. You have to keep asking yourself the question:
“Am I being the person I have always dreamed of being?”
And answering as honestly as possible. Not so you can give yourself a hard time about it, but so you know where you stand. From that place you can face the truth and make choices. That is the best that anyone can do, and it is what will give you the power to shape your life as much as is humanly possible. It's a hard path to be this rigorously, or even ruthlessly honest with yourself, but as Montague's quote at the start of this chapter suggests, I think it's worth it.
As I spoke about in my introduction, I believe that part of what an epic story like 'Game of Thrones' offers us is inspiration. We can live through and learn with these great characters, and from that become better equipped to be the heroes of our own lives. What could be more important than that?
One of my favourite quotes speaks of the power of this eloquently, so I shall finish with that:
"Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."
- Howard Thurman
Book List 1
For living a learning about the Warrior's Path:
A little book on finding your Way: Zen and the Art of Doing stuff - by Francis Briers
◦
This is a book to help you take any activity and turn it into a 'Way' or life practice
I have several more books out soon, listed in the front of this book, particularly 'My Tao Te Ching' if you are interested in Taoism and 'Paths' or 'Ways'; and 'The Art of Dad-Fu' if you're a father.
Hagakure – The Way of the Samurai
by Yamamoto Tsunetomo, translated by William Scott Wilson
In Search of the Warrior Spirit – Teaching Awareness Disciplines to the Green Beret's
by Richard Strozzi-Heckler
On the Warrior's Path – Philosophy, Fighting and Martial Arts Mythology
Daniele Bolelli
Kishido – The Way of the Western Warrior
by Peter Hobart
A Fighter's Heart – by Sam Sheridan
The Way of the Peaceful Warrior
by Dan Millman
Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior - by Chogyam Trungpa
The Way of Aikido - by George Leonard
Mastery - by George Leonard
The Art of Practice – an audio program on CD by Lance Giroux available from his website www.alliedronin.com
The Lone Samurai – The Life of Miyamoto Musashi - by William Scott Wilson
Bushido – The Soul of
Japan
- by Inazo Nitobe
Conscious Business – by Fred Kofman
The Four Agreements – by Don Miguel Ruiz
Manual of the Warrior of the Light – by Paulo Coelho
Book List 2
Great Fantasy Writing:
◦
Assassin's
◦
Liveship Traders
◦
Fool's
I recognise that not all of this is 'High Fantasy', the sort with swords and dragons and stuff, but I'm not a purist and it is all great!
Articles
I have included here some articles, mostly written originally for my blog, which I feel support, enhance, or enlarge upon what I have been writing about in this book. There are more on the blog and I'm writing more all the time so check it out:
The Warrior's Heart Blog: www.fudoshin.org.uk/blog
Warrior's for Peace
It may seem odd to some to consider the Warrior archetype in conjunction with an orientation towards peace, however, I see the 2 things as not only linked but necessary to each other. One symbolic way of looking at the connection would be through the lens of Taoist beliefs that opposites create each other, as shown visually in the Yin Yang symbol – the black half contains the seed of the white half, and the white the seed of the black. In a slightly more concrete illustration, when I say yes to one thing I am simultaneously saying no to many other potential options. Yes and No are opposites but are interdependent upon one another.
To deal more specifically with the matter of the Warrior and Peace, a perfect example can be seen in The Samurai Game®. George Leonard who created The Samurai Game® was a senior grade Aikido practitioner and former World War II fighter pilot. This was a man who had seen war and had deep experience of martial arts. He originally created the Game after he had met with a bunch of his old war buddies. They had all been reminiscing about their time together during the War and most of them had been saying that life had seemed dull by comparison since. This was not George's experience but it did set him to thinking about a question he had pondered often before: Why, when we know the consequences, do we continue to make war? There are many possible answers to this question ranging from the surface of any political considerations which are specific to each conflict but can be categorised as essentially being questions of power and control; right through to much deeper considerations of fundamental aspects of human nature. After many years of sitting with and experimenting with this question, one of the possible answers George came up with was:
Maybe it's just the juiciest game in town!
This could seem light or even crass, but pause for a minute. There is a part of the human psyche which craves vivid experience and as we have become increasingly 'developed' and 'civilised' this has become less and less nourished as time has gone on. When aspects of us which need expression are suppressed or ignored they will find ways to leak and burst out on their own. This is the nature of the human shadow. Maybe part of what keeps human beings making war is a basic craving for vivid experience. I think this is part of what George Leonard learned from running The Samurai Game® for many years, with all different kinds of groups. Certainly, part of what I see people coming into contact with through the Game is not only a deep connection with their own Warrior selves, but an experiential understanding of the consequences of war. This runs the range of very positive in that they have lived brightly, vividly, profoundly and completely connected to a higher purpose; right through to the truly terrible consequences of massive loss of life and ultimate futility. Here we have a fascinating dichotomy: a game about War where we learn profound and lasting lessons about Peace. In the modern world this is a rare, example of the beautiful balance of being a Warrior for Peace. Some martial arts dojo’s manage to embrace and explore this but even there it is not as common as you might think.