The Art of Winning without Winning

As most of you know, I’ve done a fair amount of martial arts in my time. Over the years I’ve gone from Karate to Kung Fu until finally settling down in Aikido and in all that time hanging out with martial artists, there is one question that seems to come up more than any other.

“Which style is really the best?”

I’ve spent hours, particularly after a few drinks, debating the various advantages of different styles from Muay Thai to Capoeira . It’s sort of like comic book fans arguing over, Who is stronger, Superman or the Hulk. Fun to talk about but no real answers.

However, all that changed with the rise in popularity of Mixed Martial Arts. Suddenly, it was very clear which styles were most useful in a cage match, and Aikido, the art I’ve studied for almost a decade, was not among them.

All of which begs the question, Why am I wasting my time studying a martial art that isn’t “The Best?”

We all want the best: Best car, best house, best relationships. We want to elect the best politicians who have the best ideas and will execute the best policy. We want our children to go to the best schools so they can get the best jobs and live the best lives.

The question is, “How do we find the best?

The answer, almost invariably, is through competition. We turn the choices into combatants, put them in a cage, and have them fight it out. Our legal, political and, in many way, economic systems are predicated on the theory that, that which wins is inherently better than that which loses. In fact, “The Best” is so closely linked to winning as to be almost axiomatic.

However, we rarely stop to ask if this competitive system is really giving us the results we want.

Imagine this cage match:

In one corner, a 300 pound professional football player who has taken five kickboxing classes at the local Y. In the other corner is an 85 pound, 13 year old who has been a dedicated Jujitsu practitioner since he was five years old.

Will their match teach us anything about the relative merits of the martial arts involved, or even about the individual’s skill in the practice of those arts? No, because the strength, speed, size and athleticism of the football player will overwhelm any advantage of skill or style the 13 year old might have.

Does that sound like a ridiculous scenario?

Well, try this one.

Imagine two politicians are running for office. One is a tall handsome, articulate, well financed neophyte who knows nothing whatsoever about economics, foreign relations or public policy. The other, is a short, poorly dressed, ugly woman with a pronounced stutter and a deep, understanding of practical governance.

Is the person you want to see in office the same as the person who would win the election?

Once again, the traits necessary for winning are often very different from the ones we hoped the competition would favor.

To make matters worse, the media, who should be guiding us through the complex issues are, instead, covering the competition as if it were just another sport. Who’s up? Who’s down? Who made a mistake? Who can win?

“Who can govern?”rarely enters into the conversation.

The idea behind our political system is kind of like a cage match, except instead of a battle of technique it is supposed to be a battle ideas. Unfortunately, rather than bringing us the most qualified people with the best ideas, the crucible of election tends to sensationalize conflict, water down content and polarize the country.

This reality is so deeply woven into our political system that our highly qualified but, in all likelihood, unelectable woman would probably never even bother to run.

Our most important institutions are predicated on the idea that competition brings out the best. The result is a criminal system that favors the rich and penalizes minorities and an economic system that has concentrated the vast majority of our wealth in the hands of a privileged few while millions of others fight their own “cage matches” everyday merely to survive.

You would think that our incredibly competitive marketplace would ensure the healthiest, most durable products in the world, instead we get fast food hamburgers and electronics which are out of date almost before we unwrap them.

The American media system is more than competitive. It’s “Dog eat Dog”, with producers, networks, publishers and studios fighting tooth and nail for our attention. If winners are “The Best” then the most successful shows, magazines, movies and newscasts must be the most intelligent, well made, informative, dramatic and high quality media in the world, right?

Wrong. The opposite is true because the rules of the competition do not favor quality only eyeballs. The game is to get you to tune in and the easiest way to win is not by appealing to the best in us, but often the worst.

Of course, the biggest, most destructive and most terrifying cage match in the world is war and when it comes to war, the American military is the best of the best. They are the best trained, best supplied, best organized and in, every way, most powerful military organization the world has ever seen. So, if they’re so great, why have they struggled so much in places like Iraq and Afghanistan?

The answer is: They haven’t. By every military measure, the US Armed Forces have performed in an exemplary manner, defeating Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard in a matter of weeks and easily capturing the Taliban strongholds of Kabul and Kandahar..

Unfortunately, our expectations didn’t end with winning the war. We wanted them to win a peace. We expected an organization trained to destroy an enemy to become diplomats and nation builders. We demanded they navigate ancient religious conflicts, rebuild damaged infrastructure, and establish new governments for cultures they didn’t understand while surrounded by sectarian violence and the constant threat of terrorism.

The training, equipment and even mindset which makes the American military so formidable in war has worked against them because the skills necessary to succeed, sensitivity, patience, acceptance, restraint cooperation and compromise are non-competitive and as such are fundamentally antithetical to any military mission.

Or, to put it more simply, asking the same organization to conquer a country and save it from itself is almost a contradiction in terms.

Can you imagine a top MMA fighter trying to defeat and provide medical, psychological and economic aid to his opponent at the same time?

Make no mistake, I am not writing this to criticize our armed forces, martial artists, or anyone else fighting the good fight for what they believe is a good cause. I merely want to examine, more carefully, the premise that competition is the only pathway to success.

Competition can bring out the best in us and often does. However, it can also bring out the worst and the harder we try to win, whether it’s selling the most products, beating the other guy in an election or winning a war, the more we tend to lose sight of why we started competing in the first place.

In our families, friendships, workplaces and communities the biggest challenges we face are almost always about working together. There are no awards for the best cooperator and you can’t win at sensitivity or flexibility but those are the skills we need everyday to be a good friend, father, sister or citizen. They also help you to lead a happy life.

And it’s not just on an individual level. If we are to solve the biggest challenges our planet faces, the environment, energy, poverty and religious, racial and cultural conflict we must find ways, not to compete but to cooperate.

If human society is to survive, the only way to “win” is to stop trying to beat the other guy and start working together for the common good.

All of which, I suppose, brings us back to why I study Aikido.

The truth is, if you’re goal is to win a no-holds-barred cage match then Aikido isn’t for you, because the purpose of Aikido isn’t to hurt, but to harmonize, to meet anger with compassion and violence with gentleness. In the end, the goal is not to end conflict by destroying an enemy. The goal is to resolve conflict by the destroying the idea enmity itself.

The Worst Kind of Criminal

There is a certain class of criminals we hate above all others, a certain kind of deviant that we, as society, have always united to destroy.

It isn’t enough to decry them in public or mock them in private. It isn’t enough to imprison. It isn’t enough to torture or even kill them. They must be stamped out, eliminated, lest their ideas fester and spread.

No other group, not drug traffickers, sweat shop owners or even war criminals have been so consistently and tenaciously persecuted.

And yet no matter how many of them we threaten or imprison, no matter how many of their lives we destroy, no matter how many of them we kill, whether by assassin’s bullet or state sponsored execution, their ideas, like some malicious form of cancer, keep coming back to haunt us.

Who are these villains that seem to frighten us so much?

They are the lovers of peace, tolerance, forgiveness and compassion. They are the heroes of our highest ideals and they are the ones we, as a society, have united, over and over again, to destroy.

You don’t believe me? Compare the death of Jesus, Gandhi and Martin Luther King to those of Stalin, Mau or even Hitler.

Read the transcripts of the Nuremberg trial and see how carefully the charge of “War Criminal” is prosecuted and how relatively merciful the sentences. Then compare those trials and sentences to those of Nelson Mandela, Steven Biko, Lech Walesa or thousands of other peacemakers throughout history.

You might say that miscarriages of justice like that only occur under evil regimes like Soviet Dominated Poland or South Africa under apartheid but, to do so you would have to ignore HUAC under McCarthy, Nixon’s “enemies list”, the treatment of civil rights activists in the South and literally dozens of other miscarriages of American justice.

Most people when asked about things like peace, compassion, freedom and justice would say that they are for them. Just as most people decry war, poverty, and injustice on principle.

However, in reality, it often works out to be just the opposite.

It is those who march for peace who must face the fire-hoses. It is those who refuse, on principal, to kill that are labeled traitors and imprisoned. While those who fight for the poor are called communists or worse, “Community organizer”.

What does it say about a nation when rallies are held to save the taxes of a billionaire while millions fall below the poverty line?

What does it say about a nation that defends their right to wage pre-emptive war, while ignoring the battle scarred veterans who fought that war?

What does it say about a planet where men of peace like Martin Luther King, Jesus, and Gandhi and hundreds of other peace makers die violently or in prison, while dictators like the Shah of Iran, Fernando Marcos and Pol Pot die of natural causes?

How is it possible that a church, founded on the life of a peaceful man who was tortured to death could, in turn, torture non-believers and go to war in his name?

How is it possible for Gandhi to unite a nation through non-violence then watch that same nation fall apart in racial slaughter before being assassinated himself?

What does it say when the values that most of the world’s population hold dear, compassion, peace and forgiveness are constantly under siege while greed, aggression and vengeance are defended as if they were virtues?

It says that there is a great chasm in the human heart between what we claim to believe and the real motivations which drive us.

We might decry aggression, violence and revenge but we are still inexplicably drawn to them.

Turn on the TV, watch a movie or play a video game and the odds are you will see some form of violence. We romanticize violent struggle over just about everything else and our great heroes whether real or fictional are often people of violence.

Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Genghis Khan.

There is no question that these were great men. Great in the sense that they literally changed the face of history.

But they were also conquerors, killers, men who repeatedly chose war over peace.

They were great, but that did not make them good.

The good people, the ones who stood up against the conquerors, the ones who fought for peace were probably called traitors and their names have been lost in the mists of history while the characters of those who conquered have been whitewashed by time and elevated to the status of heroes.

Like millions of others, I have spent much of my life fascinated by the martial arts and there are tens of thousands of martial arts schools around the world to teach me martial ways.

Where are the schools for the peaceful arts?

Most of us understand that a world in which all the resources are controlled by a tiny minority, while the vast majority descends further and further into poverty is not only an unjust world but an unstable one and yet that is the world that we live in.

To make matters worse, those champions of greed are canonized in our libraries and magazines. We admire their private jets and opulent mansions. Where are the stories about those who work hard and live simply? If we idolized frugality and charity instead of extravagance and selfishness, our world would be a much better place.

Most of us believe that racism, and intolerance are wrong but we cannot help dividing ourselves into groups, teams, nations and religions and for some reason, all of us feel that the team we are on is the “good guys”.

If our world is to survive, all of this must change. We have become far too powerful to endure much longer the discrepancy between what we claim to believe and how we actually live our lives.

It is, in fact, time to side with the great criminals of history, with Gandhi, and Jesus and Martin Luther King.

It is time to put down the sword and become a criminal, a deviant...

A peacemaker.

Killing The Chicken

“Have you ever killed a chicken?” This is one of the questions that my good friend, Mike Hoover, likes to ask when someone is saying something particularly naive or insensitive. “Have you ever killed a chicken?”

On some level, Hoover divides the world up into, “Chicken killers.” and “non-Chicken Killers”, those who are connected to the world in all it’s brutal reality and those who are not.

Most people, in this country aren’t chicken killers. In fact, for most of us, the closest we get to killing is picking out our cuts at the local super-market. We don’t see the blood, or the suffering, all we see is a product, impersonally prepared and wrapped in cellophane.

I’ve never killed a chicken. My friend Jeff has and he said it was one of the hardest things he’s ever had to do.

So, why does Mike Hoover, a very, smart compassionate man, want all of us to start murdering birds? What’s the big deal?

There was a time when we weren’t removed from death. If we wanted meat we had to kill. So, does that mean we were more callous about killing then, more cruel?

No. The opposite was true.

If you look at hunter gatherer societies, the animals they hunted were not hated or vilified, they were given positions of great respect in the community. The plains Indians did not hate the buffalo, they honored it, not only because it provided much of the raw materials necessary for their way of life, but also because, through the difficult process of hunting, they had come to know the animal. The buffalo wasn’t simply a walking dinner, it was a living breathing creature with a soul and a value. To hunt it honorably, and kill it humanely was the nature of their relationship.

However, to kill the animal and not use every bit of him was considered the cruelest kind of waste. Imagine, the horror the native Americans felt when this animal they respected, who played a key roll in their spiritual life, was hunted, almost to extinction, by ruthless men who were only interested in their hides and left the rest of the animal to rot in the sun.

However, somewhere Back East there was a buyer for that buffalo fur who never had to look into the eyes of the animal that died for him and thus had no pang of conscious for paying for the slaughter. It was a business transaction, nothing more.

I’m reminded of a question in Jedediah Purdy's book, Being America He asks, “Which American slaveholder treated his slaves with greater cruelty, the rich plantation owner with a thousand slaves, or the small farmer with only one?” My first instinct was to say the rich plantation owner. After all, he can afford to be generous, while the poor farmer can barely survive himself. Of course, the opposite is true. The rich plantation owner never really sees his slaves. He lives in a big house with every luxury and has no understanding of how his workers live. The poor farmer, on the other hand, lives much closer to his slave. He works side by side with him in the field. He eats the same food and wears the same kind of clothes. This proximity makes cruelty, if not impossible, far less likely.

Today, we are much further from the animals we eat than in anytime in history and, like the big plantation owner, our distance, our ignorance of where our food comes from, has made us cruel. It is a cruelty which manifests itself not in how our animals die but rather in how they live. Cows, living their whole lives, packed into industrial feed lots knee deep in their own filth. Chickens squeezed into cages so small they cannot turn around. We have become masters of efficiency, experts in turning grain into meat and meat into dinner.

We have separated ourselves from the killing fields because we abhor cruelty but the greater the distance, has made us far crueler than the hunter who kills the buffalo with his bow, or the rancher who slits the neck of the chicken he has cared for all his life.

However, it is not only the animals we eat who have been damaged by this separation. We have been damaged. In my last blog, I outlined how our industrial food system, has left us obese, malnourished, and vulnerable to new strains of disease, but this separation from the natural world, has consequences far beyond diet.

One Hundred years ago, 85% of the worlds population lived on farms or in small villages. Today, 85% of our, much greater, population lives in cities and that number is growing at a breakneck pace. Cities are ecosystems all their own, however, the needs of the urban ecosystem are in almost direct opposition to the needs of the natural one. Success in the city means following the urban paradigm, which is that consumption is success and greed is good. This philosophy has a direct, devastating effect on the natural world but the city dweller does not see the consequences of their actions and so they do not care. That this disconnected relationship damages the natural world is without question, but I believe it is equally damaging to modern man. Are we healthier in our regulated, manufactured, commercialized, and heavily branded urban existence? Are we happier? Are we kinder? Or have we, in fact, become more isolated, overworked, stressed, depressed and unhealthy?

Disconnection is the danger and a disconnection from death is a disconnection from life.

The modern world fears death in all it’s forms. We refuse to see it and this denial of one of the most fundamental realities of life is intensely destructive. There was a time when we died in our own homes, surrounded by our families. Today, death occurs in the sterile, industrial hallways of the hospital with the only human contact permitted during proper visiting hours. There was a time when the greatest concern at the approach of death was our spiritual well being. Today, the focus is on a thousand incomprehensible, medical tests. There was a time, when the bodies of our dead were cleaned and dressed by their families. Today, our dead are locked away in cold storage before they can be attended to by a professional. Which system gives better care in our last moments? Which system better prepares us to say goodbye? We have endeavored to protect ourselves from the pain of death but our lives are no less painful.

Does choosing not to see death make us less cruel or more?

Is a nation that sees an endless stream of mutilated bodies more likely to an end a war than a nation that chooses not to see?

The first thing we must accept is that death in and of itself is not cruel. Death is inexorably connected to life. It is all around us. Every living thing on earth survives on death. It is not cruel when the lion kills it’s prey. It is merely the natural order of things. Cruelty is a uniquely human invention. A sociopath is cruel because he enjoys watching the suffering of others with open eyes but the majority of cruelties, the vast atrocities of our times, are committed with eyes closed. The more we disconnect, the crueler we become.

By separating ourselves from death we have separated ourselves from life. We have created a system in which we are at odds with the natural world and so, at odds with ourselves. Perhaps the only way to save the planet is to touch the planet and perhaps touching the planet is the only way to save ourselves.

Does that mean we should all run out and start killing our own chickens? Not necessarily. It simply means we should begin the long and, sometimes painful, process of opening our eyes.

On the Nature of Fear. Part Two: Fear and the Demon

By March of 1933 the United States was in the throws of the greatest economic disaster in its history. Half the banks had closed. Unemployment had passed 25%. Personal income had dropped in half and bread lines had formed across the country. Many people felt that they were witnessing the end of civilization, the final descent from American prosperity into a new Dark Age. It was in this atmosphere that Franklin Delano Roosevelt stood on the capitol steps and spoke, what would come to be, the most famous words of his presidency.

“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

It is one of the most often repeated phrases in the history of political speech but what exactly does it mean? “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” There are certainly many things worth fearing. Death, disaster, starvation, war. When Roosevelt said those words people were literally starving in the streets. Isn’t that a cause for fear?

But why were people starving? All records show that, despite the disastrous blows to agriculture, there was still plenty of food in the US to feed all its citizens. Thousands of banks failed and much of the population lost their life savings, but, according to their balance sheets most of the banks that failed were solvent when the crowds started lining up outside their doors. Why did the stock market crash? Why did factories close and businesses lay off long time employees? The United States, had as much food, resources, workers and talent in 1935 as it had in 1925 and yet the twenties were a time of great economic prosperity and the thirties an era of economic desperation. Why? What had changed?

The answer is that people became afraid. Of course, there were other causes, poor business planning, insufficient, banking and securities regulations, and a corrupt agricultural system. But those factors only made the system more vulnerable to the panic. If the panic had been avoided, if no one had sold their stock or lined up to withdraw their money from the bank, there would have been no depression.

“The Only thing we have to fear, is fear itself”

A few years ago I worked on a documentary on great white sharks. Sharks are among the most studied ocean creatures and great whites are probably the most studied sharks. Is this because the mating habits or migratory patterns of great white sharks are somehow more interesting than other animals? No. What makes white sharks interesting is fear. They quite simply scare the hell out of us. After all, there is no dolphin week on the Discovery channel.

However, as I worked on the documentary it became very clear that fear was not something inherent in the white shark; it was something inherent in us. The reality is, sharks represent a nearly, insignificant threat to human beings. Of the millions of humans who die each year fewer than 20 are killed by sharks. Compare this to the thousands that die from bee stings or tens of thousands that are killed in car accidents. The truth is you are far more likely to die slipping in your bathtub or falling down your own stairs than you are to be killed by a shark but none of us live in mortal terror of our bathtubs. (At least not as far as I know)

Mark Marks, the shark expert we worked with on the documentary once said, “When you demonize an animal, you elevate its status with fear.” In other words, by demonizing the shark we give it far more significance in our mind than it has in reality. This new status does not change the shark. It changes us. Demonizing the shark or the bee, or the terrorist gives us the right to become the demon ourselves and begin the slaughter because morality, justice, and mercy don’t count for much when your life is on the line.

We are currently hunting sharks to extinction, killing over 100 million animals a year, not for food, but for their highly prized fins and tails. After the appendages are cut off, the sharks are thrown, still living back into the sea. This despicable practice would not be tolerated on an animal that wasn’t so universally feared.

Of course, as in the parable of the bee, sharks do not exist in a vacuum but rather as part of a complex ecosystem. As we destroy them, we are irrevocably damaging the delicate balance that we depend upon.

We are afraid of sharks so we destroy them and through that destruction we destroy ourselves.

Fear isn’t listed among the seven deadly sins, but I think maybe it should be. Like the other sins at it’s heart is something which, far from being evil, is actually part of a healthy life. Lust comes from the desire to propagate the species. At the heart of gluttony is the basic need for sustenance. Work hard and try to improve the trappings of your life and you’re admired, become obsessed with possessions and it’s greed. The same can be said for fear, which is a valuable instinct for survival but, taken to extremes, fear itself becomes the real enemy.

Today, the fear is all around us. We are in a war on terror. Each night on the news we seem to be bombarded by a new danger, or disease. Crime rates have actually gone down in the last fifty years but we feel less safe. In our minds, our children have become more fragile, susceptible to every disease, prone to every accident and surrounded by the worst kind of predators. In short, we have become fear junkies, unable to turn away from the things, which terrify us yet willing to sacrifice almost everything, our civil liberties, sense of social justice, and even our future for the illusion of safety.

I recently saw an ad for a home security company. They were selling a high tech system complete with motion detectors, security cameras and panic buttons. The tag line was, “Making your family feel safe for over thirty years.” Notice it didn’t say, “Making your family safe…” It said, “Making your family feel safe.” They weren’t selling security at all. What they were selling was the illusion of security. Not freedom from danger but freedom from fear. This has become a common practice in everything from politics to medicine, to technology. First terrify us with the most disturbing aspects of life, then, sell us something, an idea, a pill or a law, to make that fear go away.

Once again, fear has played a decisive roll in presidential rhetoric. Only this time, rather than helping us to face our fears, our government, and our media has fed them. We have been told that the world is filled with “Evil doers” who, “hate us for our freedom” and that someday soon, “the smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud”. Terrifying words. And once people believe that their life and the lives of tehir loved ones are being threatened they will protect them by any means necessary. Who would’ve imagined, just a few years ago, that the United States, one of the staunchest supporters of the Geneva Convention, would be openly and brazenly advocating the use of torture? Just as demonizing sharks transforms us into far more dangerous predators. Demonizing the Muslim has transformed the United States.

Like the stock market crash of October 1929, September 11th, 2001 was a transitional moment in history. Before 9/11 the economy was booming, we had the first budget surplus in 2 decades and, although not everyone agreed with our policies, the United States was a respected member of the world community. Since then, the economy has crashed on the hardest working Americans, we have wracked up the largest budget deficits in history, and seen the US transformed in the eyes of the world from a bastion of democracy to an imperialist power who’s only interest is self-interest.

The tragedy of all of this is that, far from hurting our enemies, our actions are playing right into their hands. Like the man in the parable of the bee, we cannot lash out at the world without, in the long run, destroying ourselves. The more innocents we round up and torture, the more dictators we support, the more unwinnable wars we force our troops to fight, the weaker we become and the more enemies we have to fear. September 11th was a devastating attack but the disasters since then have been almost entirely self-created.

Sun Tzu, the great military philosopher, once said that, “A general with 100 men can defeat an army of 10,000, if they can manipulate the larger force into defending 1000 positions.” In other words, a weaker army can destroy a stronger one if the stronger army is afraid. How many positions are we trying to defend? Why is America, unquestionably the most powerful nation on earth, also the most fearful?

President Bush says we are in a war on Terror but what we seem to be fighting is of war of terror. The world has been warned that either they are with us or against us. These are words whose purpose is to control with fear just as the terrorists have controlled us. The real power of terrorism isn’t dirty bombs or biological weapons. The real power is that terrorism transforms the victim into the victimizer.

A frightened animal is a dangerous animal not only to others but to itself. If humans are the most powerful animals on the planet, how dangerous, then, is a frightened human? How dangerous is a frightened America?

We are in a War on Terror, or at least we should be, because the greatest enemy we face is far more powerful than the suicide bomber or Islamic Extremist.

The greatest enemy we face, is fear itself.