Warrior Philosophy in Game of Thrones (4 page)

“There is certainly a legacy that distinguishes the warrior from war.  The sacred path of the warrior is part of an ancient moral tradition.  It includes the Indian warriors Krishna and Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita; Homer's hero Odysseus who outwitted his opponents rather than slaying them; the post-sixteenth-century Japanese Samurai who, in his finest hour, administered a peaceful government while still maintaining a personal discipline and integrity through not only the martial arts but the fine arts of calligraphy, flower arranging, and poetry.  It includes the American Indians who lived in harmony with the land and who's ritual wars were exercises in bravery rather than slaughter; the Shambhala Warrior of ancient
Tibet
who applied power virtues to spiritual development; and Carlos Castenada's celebrated warrior shaman Don Juan Matus.  These historical and mythical warriors found their strength and integrity by defeating their own inner demons, living in harmony with nature, and serving their fellow man.  I... believe that if we embody the virtues of these archetypal warriors we are acting in support of the whole planet instead of constantly fighting external enemies for petty ends.”
[x]

It is this kind of Warrior Philosophy which I will continue to explore in these pages.  I will use the wonderful characters from 'Game of Thrones' and their acts both beautiful and terrible as illustrations, and link this with both the historical warrior traditions of the world and, as much as possible, everyday life.  I have written this book out of a love of this exploration, but I want it to be relevant to your life.  So, I will end this chapter with a couple of questions:  What do you value?  What is your personal honour code?

Chapter 2 - Responsibility

“Ability to respond does not mean ability to succeed. There is no guarantee that what you do will yield what you want. The guarantee is that as long as you are alive and conscious, you can respond to your circumstances in pursuit of your happiness. This power to respond is a defining feature of humanity. Our response-ability is a direct expression of our rationality, our will, and our freedom. Being human is being response-able.”

- Fred Kofman in his book Conscious Business
[xi]

One of the qualities which I believe most clearly defines someone as a Warrior is responsibility.  Whether they wield a sword or not, true responsibility is core to the warrior mindset.  That might seem strange for me to say, you may have been expecting something more like courage, or honour, but responsibility is the one for me.  I could understand why this might seem odd, especially in the world we live in where responsibility is so often misused.  Many times when people say “Responsibility” what they mean is 'blame'.  How often have you heard someone say “Who is responsible for this?” and known that what they mean is “Who can I blame?”  However, this is not the real meaning of responsibility, it's real meaning can be found by breaking the word down: Respond-ability.  It is to do with the ability to respond consciously to what life offers us rather than having a knee-jerk reaction.  A wonderful distinction which has helped me to be clearer about this in my own life is made by Fred Kofman in his excellent book 'Conscious Business'.   If I say that responsibility is absolute and unconditional then that can seem like I am trying to say that there are no other factors in your life than your own actions, that if you are faced with terrible circumstances then you only have yourself to blame.... and there's that word again!  Blame.  The word 'responsibility' has become so thoroughly associated with blame it is hard to separate the two any more.  The distinction Kofman makes is that we are not responsible
for
everything, we are responsible
in the face of
everything in our lives.  I cannot be held responsible for the weather, but I am responsible for my choices in the face of bad weather.  On a larger and perhaps less abstract scale, I am not responsible for world hunger.  I did not cause it.  However, once I know that it is happening I am responsible in the face of it.  Whether I campaign, travel to feed people, raise money, donate money, donate food, do nothing, or actively contribute to the problem by acting in ways that will drive up the price of food (for instance), once I know about the issue I am accountable for my choices – if I am response-able.  If I refuse to be response-able (and that is a choice) then I can paint myself as a helpless victim of circumstance.  “I had no choice...”

Ironically Lord Eddard Stark who, once he reaches King's Landing shows himself to be one of the few in the capitol who is working to act responsibly, has a moment of total irresponsibility when he chooses to serve as King Robert's Hand
[9]
.  In discussing it with his wife Lady Catelyn, he says of his becoming the Hand of the King:

“I have no choice”

To which she replies:

“That's what men always say when honour calls.  That's what you tell your families, tell yourselves.  You do have a choice and you've made it.”
[xii]

We can speak more on the matter of honour in that chapter, and certainly in life there are times when it feels like we have no choices, but Lady Catelyn is right.  We always have a choice.  There may be times when all choices seem equally poor, or even just equally compelling, but we have choice.  Responsibility is about owning that choice rather than denying it even when that is difficult or painful.  Sometimes we may tell people we have no choice out of a desire to protect their feelings but even then we engage in a dis-empowering deceit and in our hearts we all know it.  I may say “I'm sorry I can't come to your birthday party,” but that is not really true.  I may be sorry, especially in the traditional root meaning of the word of “I feel sorrow,” but it is not accurate that I can't come.  The truth is that I am prioritising something else.  It would be more honest to say “I would love to come to your party, and there is something else that is more important to me that night.”  That may be a tougher message but it is more true as well.  Perhaps you can see from this example how pervasive the lack of true responsibility is in our daily lives.  These may seem like trivial things, just some small words, but as I say we all know the truth of this so we are in a constant mode of lying to each other.  We habituate ourselves to this deceit and over time we even begin to believe it.  By these many small lies I convince myself that I really don't have a choice.  I tell myself the story that I 'can't' go to the party.  In this way I build an internal dialogue, and through that a perceived reality that is restrictive, limited, and above all, beyond my control.  As I have said before, of course there are factors in my life which I don't control but what I do when I say “can't,” instead of “don't want to” is put even more things beyond my control.  I build a cage for myself and then lock myself inside it.  This is the worst kind of imprisonment – the one we build for ourselves.  Victor Frankl, psychiatrist, famous author and founder of Logotherapy formed many of the core ideas of his philosophy driven by his experience of being a survivor of a concentration camp in Nazi Germany.  He talks about how in the concentration camp he realised that while all of his external freedoms had been taken away, the one freedom that the guards could not take from him was his own response to his situation.  No matter what they did, they could not control his internal choices and responses to them as human beings.  This depth of internal freedom is rare but it is possible for all of us to access it, and I would say that we erode this internal freedom by increments every time we say “I can't” when we mean “I'm choosing something else.”

Just as we erode our relationship with ourselves through these moments where we deny our response-ability, so too we damage our relationships with others.  This is what we see in this exchange between Ned Stark and Lady Catelyn, and where normally she might accept his denial of his own power as a small and socially acceptable lie, here she is too distraught from the injury of her son and challenges him on it.  I wonder how different this conversation would have been if he had owned his responsibility and declared his choice – no less painful perhaps, but more honest at least and maybe less damaging to their relationship.  I think this is an expression of a deeper pattern of attitude, thought and behaviour for Ned Stark because he has such a strong sense of responsibility about so much.  I would say one of his flaws is that he abdicates responsibility when it comes to matters of honour and duty.  He reverts to unconscious, knee-jerk reactions based on a very rigid idea of how the world 'should be' rather than how the world really is.  This rigidity of mindset is part of his downfall.  As we look at this matter of responsibility you are probably seeing that it takes a very high level of awareness to be truly responsible.  It's tough!  To notice when you are denying your own capacity to choose, to spot it when you are telling a friend or partner a small, convenient lie, to know and acknowledge when your priorities are different than someone else would like them to be, or even to realise when you are acting from an old pattern rather than a live relationship to the world around you.  All of this takes a lot of commitment and mindfulness.  A wonderful illustration of this is an old story of the great Japanese sword master Tesshu:

Tesshu had several students studying with him to master the sword.  The best of them was walking down the street in the centre of town one day and as he walked past a horse, the horse startled and kicked.  Tesshu's student was so fast and skilful that he managed to deflect the horses kick.  Everyone nearby could see that a less skilled man would have been badly hurt or even killed.  Of course, the story of this young swordsman's skill spread very quickly through the town, but to everyone's great surprise, two days later he had been dismissed from Tesshu's school of swordsmanship.  When one of the town-folk got up the courage to ask Tesshu why such a promising student had been dismissed he said of the incident with the horse “The student had clearly failed to learn what I had to teach.”  This seemed utterly bizarre to the town-folk and though they pressed him to explain what he meant, Tesshu would say no more on the matter. 

So... the town-folk cooked up a plan to see if they could catch Tesshu out.  Surely he could do no better than the young student in the same situation, what more could a man do?  If there was some magic Tesshu could work, they all wanted to see it!  Tesshu walked the same route from his home to his school every day.  It was always the same, so it was not hard for the locals to find a particularly irritable horse and tie it up outside one of the shops on Tesshu's route.  They then all went about their business, surreptitiously keeping an eye out for Tesshu to come past.  A little while later at just his usual time Tesshu was walking  the way he always walked.  As he approached the horse, everyone watched with baited breath... but just before Tesshu got to where the horse was tied up, he crossed the street and walked by on the other side!

I would say that Tesshu dismissed his student for a lack of responsibility.  His knee-jerk reaction showed amazing skill, but he lacked the awareness required to be able to respond effectively to the world around him.  What if the horse had been injured or had got more distressed and hurt someone else?  That said, Tesshu was a master and it's important to remember that we are all human-beings and while we can aspire to the highest of standards we will all slip sometimes – I suspect even Tesshu had moments where he stumbled on the path!

One of the very clear instances where Ned Stark shows his strong sense of responsibility is right at the beginning where he is beheading a deserter from the Night's Watch.  He says:

“The man who passes a sentence should swing the sword.”
[xiii]

In this he is a true leader taking a very hard decision but he takes full responsibility for his decision and  bears the consequences of it.  He must take a man's life, rather than have someone else do it for him.  One of the other negative outcomes of avoiding taking full responsibility for our choices is that we can psychologically distance ourselves from them.  It becomes easier to make choices which we know in our hearts are not honourable choices, or even morally congruent choices when we can distance ourselves from the outcomes.  In a wonderful talk, economist and researcher Dan Ariely
[10]
talks about how this shows up in a small way.  Some of his research has been to look at honesty and dishonesty and how we apply our moral code.  In the example he describes they were getting people to do a task for the experiment and then report their own scores, the higher the score, the more they got paid for taking part.  They had university students as test subjects and found that the reported average was higher than the measured average (so clearly people were exaggerating their scores – lying!), but when they got people to promise on the honour code of the university that they were being honest the reported results became more accurate – even though that university has no honour code!  What this tells me is that when people are connected to their sense of values, they act with more integrity.  Without the reminder of the honour-code, they could 'fudge' it in their heads.  They could say to themselves “well, it's about right” or “it's only a little bit...”  Once they were connected with the reality that if they 'stretched the truth' they were breaking with their own sense of integrity, they got more honest – with themselves and others.  In a larger way, it is part of the dialogue around the warrior's path in the modern military that it is much less clear how to be a true warrior in modern times than in history.  When you have to stand toe-to-toe with someone and fight for your life then your courage is not in question, but when you can shoot them from two kilometres away, or press a button and end hundreds or even thousands of lives it becomes abstract.  How much do you really have to live with the consequences of your actions?  And therefore, how carefully do you consider your choices before you act?  Ned Stark deliberately keeps himself face-to-face with the choices he makes and in doing so, I would say that he holds himself to a higher standard and will think much more carefully before he sentences a man to die.