Sweet Little Lies

As a facet of my enduring fascination (my family calls it obsession) with martial arts, I tend to do a lot of associated reading, in which ninjitsu and ninja are recurrent terms. But what are ninjas doing in books on martial skills?

Ninjas were, according to Western imagination, the ultimate warriors. They could be invisible, they had superhuman skill and strength... but the truth is, they were spies and assassins. They weren't warriors at all, necessarily. As much as we like spy movies and the James Bond franchise, we still don't much like the idea of spying. It goes against the grain to admit the need for duplicity, for betrayal as a given. And yet, we all do just that. We all lie – whether in shades of white or grey or black. Whatever the lie or the motives for it, it's still an untruth. And it's essential to nature, to life itself.

After all, what is a predator's camouflage if not a lie? The natural world, the animal and plant kingdoms are stuffed to the brim of little lies to promote the longevity of the individual and the species.

So maybe we should admit and even embrace the fact that honesty can be overrated, and the mouse's strategy of lying his way out of trouble in 'The Gruffalo' is a valid one.

Nothing Left To Lose

Freedom, if Kris Kristofferson is to be believed, is another word for having nothing left to lose. He’s not the only one to think so – the idea of not having roots in order to spreads your wings, of not having ties in order to be more reactive, more flexible – these are not new or even radical concepts. We stymie ourselves by giving ourselves things and people and commitments to worry about, to consider before we can choose a course of action.

This is why warrior caste societies went to very sophisticated lengths to avoid tying their warriors down with possessions while at the same time, giving them a sufficient stake in the society to want to fight for it. The entire Spartan world was set up around this idea.

Hollywood loves it – take away the hero’s love or family and watch him tear the world apart to get it back, or get revenge. He can be as spectacularly reckless as you have the budget for because he has already lost what he values most. He has nothing left to lose, and therefore the ultimate freedom to act.

The unemcumbered life is hard to pull off, in the modern world. We’re social creatures, we tend to nest, to put down roots and forge ties to people and places. Technology makes it increasingly possible to take these roots with us – the Cloud, portable hard drives, e-readers and iPods allow us to take our movies, music, libraries with us very easily.

Yes, that’s semantics: these are still things we have, however compact their form, and if we have them, we have them to lose. The question is how much it’ll cost us to lose them. You only have it to lose if its loss will matter.

Girls and boys

I recently spent an afternoon with my niece and 2 of her friends. Over supper, they were playing a game of a show of hands for likes and dislikes, and it occurred to me, listening in, that girls learn duplicity early on. I don’t know whether it’s innate, or if we teach them this, but even at age 7, they’re asking loaded questions, like “hands in the middle if you don’t like me” amid more innocuous ones about liking ice-cream and disliking tomatoes.

I don’t recall my brothers, my cousins or any of my male charges being this aware of the popularity stakes at that age. But I do remember being acutely aware, at that age, of who was popular and who was not within my own class – and that the girls in general were far more aware of social hierarchy than the boys.

It’s a worrying beginning of a lifelong trend – girls tend to be clique-y, tend to use gossip, trends and appearance as social litmus tests to assign each other into the relevant category and relate to them accordingly. Our social definitions of women – good girls, bad girls, tomboys, brainiacs, domestic goddesses – don’t allow for a lot of leeway, honesty or mercy. And girls learn early on that the best way for them to operate is to be ruthless and duplicitous and underhand. Unfortunately. 

What Little Girls Are Made Of

I saw an article in the Huffington Post about girls and our obsession with their appearance: the standard ice-breaker is a compliment on how pretty, how cute, how adorable.

The trouble is, however harmless a boost to their fragile little egos it may be to tell them they’re beautiful, the side-effect is that they grow up thinking their looks are what matters most.

Every year, the make-up threshold gets younger, eating disorders and cosmetic procedures go up while the age of patients goes down. Even the books marketed to little girls reinforce this: stories like Purplicious, which is about how girls’ clothing choices define their identities and social status. This may be the way our world works, but that doesn’t make it the way it should work.

When more young women aspire to win a reality show than a Nobel prize, and even academically and professionally successful women would prefer to be considered hot than intelligent, we have a problem.

When primary school girls openly aspire to be glamour models and exotic dancers in order to get boys more easily, we have a problem.

When the automatic opener to a conversation with a girl is to compliment her appearance, especially with a generic compliment, we have a problem. Sure, it’s a safe opener, but if you must go down that road, if you truly can’t think of anything else, surely it’s just as easy to pick a detail that reflects on her choices (where did that bracelet come from? What was it about those tribal earrings that took her fancy?) and might open new topics that respect her mind, her personality, not the accident of genetics that makes up her appearance.

Mass Warfare

Mass protest is back in fashion. Since 9/11, really, the idea that the people can influence the politicians by visibly banding together has had a new vogue. It’s been done before – in the 60s, in colonial India, in all kinds of places and times. These days, the internet, smart phones and social media have made it ever more possible to arrange flash mobs, sit-ins and marches. When these gatherings appear to be spontaneous, they’re hard to predict, prevent or police. It’s a kind of peaceful offensive by the masses against the officially empowered few – which makes it mildly ironic how often it’s used to protest against war.

Generally, every time mass protest makes a difference, or even makes the news, it inspires others to revisit the tactic for their own agendas. The Occupy movement, anti-bank and anti-greed, started in Spain, was inspired by the Arab Spring, which protested against tyrannical government.

Seems like these two aims have nothing in common – except that the behaviour of the mega-rich and the biggest banks borders on despotic, and the West’s governments seem powerless to discipline them even if they wanted to (which, it appears, they really don’t).

Mass protest works by sheer force of numbers – the general populace always outnumber the elite (whether that word is currently describing the rulers or the rich), it’s part of the definition of elite. And the elites know, on some level, that they are ultimately just as human as the masses, so when the hoi polloi rise up against them, they can either choose to surf the wave of public opinion or be drowned by it.

Occupy has been largely dismantled now, but that doesn’t mean the 1% has won. Just that the protest’s on hiatus – until next time.

Bravado

Rango: Warning, this blog contains spoilers.

Rango is a film about a pet lizard lost in the wilderness. I suggest you go see it, and count the number of other movies it references throughout (I lost count around 30).

Rango is targeted as an outsider and a soft city-slicker type who will never survive in the harsh conditions of a desert. So he does the only thing he can think of – ill-advisedly, he lies. And the audience cringes, because this can spell nothing but disaster. Rango creates, off the cuff, a persona and an alias a lot tougher than he is, as a front to intimidate his tormentors. He bluffs. It’s all bravado, bluster, boasting. There’s no substance to it whatsoever. Is there?

But that’s the thing – we all become whatever story we hear about ourselves most often. He tells a convincing story about his heroics to a crowded bar, and is treated like the tough guy he pretends to be – is now expected to be. And so what can he do, but live up to it?

The word bravado implies empty boasts, bluster, a front. But there’s a place for it when we bluster ourselves into a corner from which only actual bravery can extricate us. And that corner, back to the wall, facing off with the villains and the monsters, is exactly where the great stories come from – at least, as far as Hollywood’s concerned. 

Chi

The Law of the Conservation of Energy, as stated in the 1800s, tells us that total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant over time. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be transformed and transferred. These are the scientific facts, in our universe. Which is interestingly similar to the position of Oriental philosophy, with the concept of Chi and how it flows. According to physics, everything is made of atoms, and atoms themselves are made of charge and empty space. Charge is energy – so everything is made of energy (generally chemical potential energy, if I recall my high school science correctly). If I accept this scientific information, then it’s not really such a stretch to get to the idea of energy flowing, as in Eastern practices from martial arts to Feng Shui. The law of the Conservation of Energy lends itself to a person being able to borrow energy from her opponent to then use against them (a central principle of yin or internal martial arts such as tai chi, wing chun and chi kung).

This idea is what enables a small woman to disable a much larger man, should she need to. It should also enable us to manipulate the flow of energy to avoid feeling drained – if everything is energy, and the total amount of energy remains constant, and energy flows, then all we need to do is find a way to put ourselves in the way of that flow and absorb as much energy as we need to emit: as movement, as heat, as whatever form is required.

We live on borrowed energy then – all of us, all the time.