Warrior Philosophy in Game of Thrones (6 page)

All too often in life we polarise our choices.  We think it all has to be either black or white, right or wrong, good or bad.  This happens unconsciously in so much that we do, and it happens in power dynamics as well.   Many people who feel victimized – by a person or just by life's circumstances, consciously or unconsciously – will think that the way out is to become a persecutor.  Few people would recognise it in those terms consciously, but what might be easier to recognise is a mindset that says “If you don't want to be the prey, become a predator.”

Sadly, if you choose to be a predator, others have to be prey, that's the way it works and whether you mean to or not, while you're trying to free yourself from fear, you become the object of others people's fear.  That is what happened to Jon Snow in this example.  He felt the victim of fate and, that life had played a cruel trick on him, and in taking our his frustrations on his fellow trainees he became a predator.  With a sword in his hand on the practise ground he could beat people up and feel powerful.  It was a salve for his wounds.  I would say that Ser Alister Thorne's bullying of the young men he was supposed to be training is something very similar – a wounded man trying to erase his wounds by making those around him suffer.  As the Persian poet Rumi put it:

“People of the world don’t look at themselves, and so they blame one another.”

What Tyrion helped Jon to do was look at himself, and see that he was fighting the wrong enemy.  These other men were to be his sworn brothers, and Jon's circumstances were not their fault.  Moreover, he was only making his circumstances worse by making enemies of the very men who must one day watch his back.  Jon's life was only going to consist of time served on The Wall and dog-hard work (a bitter dose of Kung-Fu).  As long as he was caught up in resenting this, he was incapable of doing anything to improve the situation.  Once Tyrion helped him get a hold of himself and start taking responsibility in the face of the cards that life had dealt him, Jon was able to start working to help those around him and make his own little patch of the world a slightly better place.  He could,

“Shine one corner of the world”
[xv]

As the Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki put it.  This is the Warrior's Choice: to refuse to be either victim or persecutor, predator or prey.  I believe there is always a kind of magical third option in any situation.  Life is rarely only black or white, and Tyrion helped Jon to see that and act responsibly.

The final aspect of responsibility I want to explore is how we can end up punishing ourselves out of a misguided sense of responsibility.  What we are really doing is blaming ourselves and as I discussed at the beginning of the chapter, true responsibility has nothing to do with blame.  The irony is that in this kind of self-blame we actually limit our capacity for true responsibility because our pain will cloud our judgement and probably inhibit our awareness.  The example of this from 'Game of Thrones' is when Arya Stark is speaking to her father Lord Eddard Stark (Ned) and says that it is her fault that Mycah (the butchers boy) is dead.  This is off the back of Mycah having been killed by Sandor 'The Hound' Clegane because Prince Joffrey has accused Mycah and Arya of attacking him when in truth, he was trying to bully them and fight them with a steel sword when they had been playing with sticks.
[xvi]
  It is one of the first instances where Prince Joffery is shown to be quite as monstrous in his arrogance and viciousness as we come to see is his modus operandi. 

Arya is faced with a terrible situation and the fact that she wishes to take responsibility for Mycah's death is, in my judgement, a noble wish.  But it is misplaced as Ned tries to help her to see.  Arya is not responsible for Mycah's death, she is responsible in the face of it.  She is responsible for her behaviour towards Joffrey, and perhaps there was another or a better way of diffusing the situation when it originally happened, I don't know.  It would be easy to judge and blame Sansa for not coming forwards with the truth of the situation and backing up Arya's story, but as I've said before, responsibility is not about apportioning blame and as Ned Stark points out, Sansa is in a very difficult situation as she is betrothed to Joffrey.  As it turns out, just the fact that she has seen him shamed is enough to have turned him against her but she was not to know that.  As I will discuss in the chapter on Duty and Service, sometimes we are 'in service' to many different masters (or values) and when they clash and emotions are running high it can be hard to find our centre and make conscious choices about our priorities.  For that matter, by the time Sansa is brought forward I think Mycah has already been killed.  Many people could be held partially responsible (or held accountable) for Mycah's death – Joffrey, King Robert, Queen Cersei, The Hound, very probably other Knights and Guardsmen – but that is not the key message here.  The thing I am most wanted to explore here is that Arya is not responsible
for
his death, she is responsible
in the face of
his death.  She makes the classic error of those of us who are prone to taking the weight of the world on our shoulders (and no wonder, I find it hard to manage this in myself and I have over 20 years experience on her!), that of blaming ourselves.  As I have said, not only is it not accurate, it is also debilitating – it stops us doing the real work of responsibility.  The blame game, whether we turn on others or turn on ourselves will only cause more pain, it never heals.  That is why this distinction around responsibility which Fred Kofman has made so concisely is so important:  We are unconditionally responsible in the face of our circumstances, we are not necessarily responsible for what life brings us in the first place.  If we wish to be true Warriors then we must get a hold of this distinction and live it as fully as possible, otherwise we will constantly be compromised in our capacity to respond consciously to our environment.  Our energy will be tied up with blaming – either ourselves or others.  Responsibility requires great awareness and no small amount of courage, but it is the gateway to our greatest power.

Knowledge

Chapter 3 - Self-Knowledge

“Let me give you a some advice, bastard:  Never forget what you are.  The rest of the world will not.  Wear it like armour and it can never be used to hurt you.”

        - Tyrion Lannister speaking to Jon Snow
[xvii]

Self Knowledge or self-awareness is the foundation stone of everything else I will talk about in these pages.  In truth all of these warrior virtues is completely interdependent upon all of the others.  It is very hard to be one of these things without embodying the others – as I said in the last chapter, it is very hard to be truly responsible without a high level of awareness.  I'd also say that once one of your principles slides, the others are likely disappearing with it.  This is the meaning of the phrase:

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions”

You can have the best intentions in the world but unless your actions consistently follow those intentions then even a small slip in one area can undermine all of your principles frighteningly quickly.  If you slip, you need to get back on track fast, and if you don't have sufficient self-awareness then you can be making slips left, right, and centre and never notice it.  Pretty soon, you're in a hell of your own making!  In the scene I have quoted at the start of this chapter Tyrion Lannister opens the door for Jon Snow to be much more honest with himself and thereby, much more self-aware.  Tyrion Lannister is a great example of the power of self-knowledge as he makes such great use of the gifts he does have and manages his weaknesses well most of the time although his temper and sharp tongue run away from him a fair bit!  I will speak more of how Tyrion uses his gifts in the chapter on Honour.  For this section I want to focus more on how Tyrion helps Jon Snow to foster his own growing self-knowledge.  In the scene I have quoted from above, Jon is ashamed of his illegitimate birth, and understandably so in the world he lives in.  In Westeros many people will make all kinds of assumptions about your character just because you are born outside of wedlock and much closer to home, Ned Stark carries a great deal of shame about his infidelity no matter how committed he is to raising Jon as his own Son.  Lady Catelyn Stark clearly and fiercely resents Jon's presence.  While I can completely understand why Jon would want to deny and reject his origins his suppression of this aspect of himself doesn't stop it playing out in his consciousness and his life, Tyrion is right: there is no getting away from what you are.  As Carl Jung said:

“Until we make the unconscious conscious, it will rule our lives and we will call it fate”

I believe this is true socially as well as personally.  Whether Jon owns his illegitimacy or not it's impact on his life is the same.  He can go on feeling like the victim of his birth or he can embrace his circumstances and make the most of who he is.  At least if he embraces being a bastard he can be who he is and live his own life rather than trying to be another Robb Stark with a starting handicap.  This is connected with what I was discussing in the last chapter about accepting that life is suffering.  Jon has had a tough start to life in some ways (very blessed in others).  His pain is created by his rejection of his own nature.  What Tyrion is pointing out is that if he embraces the facts of his life then they cannot be used to harm him.  There is an old Native American teaching about thanking people who upset you which I first came across in one of Jamie Sams' books:

You should thank those who upset you because they have shown you where you are hurting yourself.  We may hear a hundred potentially hurtful things a day but most we just shrug off as not being true, or embrace because we are happy with those qualities in ourselves.  The one or two that hurt and stay with us for days or even years are the ones where someone has echoed a criticism we have already levelled at ourselves.  In this way, those who hurt us have opened the door to us healing our relationship with ourselves.

For me this goes a step further than what Tyrion says because rather than needing to armour yourself with your perceived flaws, once you have owned them and healed your relationship with this aspect of yourself then they aren't flaws any more.  Syrio Forel, Arya's sword teacher and a master swordsman in the tradition of the Water-Dancers of Bravos teaches something similar to Arya:

“Syrio says every hurt is a lesson, and every lesson makes you better”
[xviii]

Obviously Syrio is referring to physical lessons in swordsmanship, but this is another way that I see the path of the warrior turning up in everyday life.  How can you take every hurt you receive and instead of letting it harm you further by brooding on it or seeking revenge, use it as a lesson in self-knowledge and an aid in healing your relationship with yourself?  In this way you become a warrior in every day of your life, a warrior of your own emotions and psyche.

Although her strength of character often gets her into trouble, Arya Stark does know herself well – it is one of her strengths and I would say it is part of why she does feel responsible for Mycah's death (as discussed in the last chapter), because she reflects deeply on what she's done and how her actions have affected others.  There is a wonderful, though slightly sad moment where she is speaking to her father Ned Stark about what the future holds for her, and he says: