Sheep, Wolves and Sheepdogs

[KSprenk]

This article was sent to me and other people at my dojo by my instructor, it is a bit long but good.

a highly recommended read for everyone here at the York
Bujinkan Dojo...


On Sheep, Wolves and Sheepdogs…

By LTC (RET) Dave Grossman, RANGER, Ph.D., author of "On Killing."

One Vietnam veteran, an old retired colonel, once said this to me:

"Most of the people in our society are sheep. They are kind, gentle,
productive creatures who can only hurt one another by accident."
This is true.

Remember, the murder rate is six per 100,000 per year, and the
aggravated assault rate is four per 1,000 per year. What this means
is that the vast majority of Americans are not inclined to hurt one
another.

Some estimates say that two million Americans are victims of violent
crimes every year, a tragic, staggering number, perhaps an all-time
record rate of violent crime. But there are almost 300 million
Americans, which means that the odds of being a victim of violent
crime is considerably less than one in a hundred on any given year.
Furthermore, since many violent crimes are committed by repeat
offenders, the actual number of violent citizens is considerably
less than two million.

Thus there is a paradox, and we must grasp both ends of the
situation:

We may well be in the most violent times in history, but violence is
still remarkably rare. This is because most citizens are kind,
decent people who are not capable of hurting each other, except by
accident or under extreme provocation. They are sheep.

I mean nothing negative by calling them sheep. To me it is like the
pretty, blue robin's egg. Inside it is soft and gooey but someday it
will grow into something wonderful. But the egg cannot survive
without its hard blue shell. Police officers, soldiers, and other
warriors are like that shell, and someday the civilization they
protect will grow into something wonderful.

For now, though, they need warriors to protect them from the
predators.

"Then there are the wolves," the old war veteran said, "and the
wolves feed on the sheep without mercy."

Do you believe there are wolves out there who will feed on the flock
without mercy? You better believe it. There are evil men [and women]
in this world and they are capable of evil deeds. The moment you
forget that or pretend it is not so, you become a sheep. There is no
safety in denial.

"Then there are sheepdogs," he went on, "and I'm a sheepdog. I live
to protect the flock and confront the wolf."

If you have no capacity for violence then you are a healthy
productive citizen, a sheep. If you have a capacity for violence and
no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an
aggressive sociopath, a wolf.

But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for
your fellow citizens? What do you have then? A sheepdog, a warrior,
or someone who is walking the hero's path. Someone who can walk into
the heart of darkness, into the universal human phobia, and walk out
unscathed.

Let me expand on this old soldier's excellent model of the sheep,
wolves, and sheepdogs. We know that the sheep live in denial, that
is what makes them sheep. They do not want to believe that there is
evil in the world. They can accept the fact that fires can happen,
which is why they want fire extinguishers, fire sprinklers, fire
alarms and fire exits throughout their kids' schools.

But many of them are outraged at the idea of putting an armed police
officer in their kid's school. Our children are thousands of times
more likely to be killed or seriously injured by school violence
than fire, but the sheep's only response to the possibility of
violence is denial. The idea of someone coming to kill or harm their
child is just too hard, and so they chose the path of denial.

The sheep generally do not like the sheepdog. He looks a lot like
the wolf. He has fangs and the capacity for violence. The
difference, though, is that the sheepdog must not, can not and will
not ever harm the sheep. Any sheep dog who intentionally harms the
lowliest little lamb will be punished and removed. The world cannot
work any other way, at least not in a representative democracy or a
republic such as ours.

Still, the sheepdog disturbs the sheep. He is a constant reminder
that there are wolves in the land. They would prefer that he didn't
tell them where to go, or give them traffic tickets, or stand at the
ready in our airports in camouflage fatigues holding an M-16. The
sheep would much rather have the sheepdog cash in his fangs, spray
paint himself white, and go, "Baa..." ...Until the wolf shows up.
Then the entire flock tries desperately to hide behind one lonely
sheepdog.

The students, the victims, at Columbine High School were big, tough
high school students, and under ordinary circumstances they would
not have had the time of day for a police officer. They were not bad
kids; they just had nothing to say to a cop. When the school was
under attack, however, and SWAT teams were clearing the rooms and
hallways, the officers had to physically peel those clinging,
sobbing kids off of them. This is how the little lambs feel about
their sheepdog when the wolf is at the door.

Look at what happened after September 11, 2001 when the wolf pounded
hard on the door. Remember how America, more than ever before, felt
differently about their law enforcement officers and military
personnel?

Remember how many times you heard the word hero?

Understand that there is nothing morally superior about being a
sheepdog; it is just what you choose to be. Also understand that a
sheepdog is a funny critter: He is always sniffing around out on the
perimeter, checking the breeze, barking at things that go bump in
the night, and yearning for a righteous battle. That is what, the
young sheepdogs yearn for, a righteous battle. The old sheepdogs are
a little older and wiser, but they move to the sound of the guns
when needed right along with the young ones.
Here is how the sheep and the sheepdog think differently. The sheep
pretend the wolf will never come, but the sheepdog lives for that
day. After the attacks on September 11, 2001, most of the sheep,
that is, most citizens in America said, "Thank God I wasn't on one
of those planes." The sheepdogs, the warriors, said, "Dear God, I
wish I could have been on one of those planes. Maybe I could have
made a difference." When you are truly transformed into a warrior
and have truly invested yourself into warrior hood, you want to be
there. You want to be able to make a difference.

There is nothing morally superior about the sheepdog, the warrior,
but he does have one real advantage. Only one. And that is that he
is able to survive and thrive in an environment that destroys 98
percent of the population.

There was research conducted a few years ago with individuals
convicted of violent crimes. These cons were in prison for serious,
predatory crimes of violence: assaults, murders and killing law
enforcement officers. The vast majority said that they specifically
targeted victims by body language: slumped walk, passive behavior
and lack of awareness. They chose their victims like big cats do in
Africa, when they select one out of the herd that is least able to
protect itself.

Some people may be destined to be sheep and others might be
genetically primed to be wolves or sheepdogs. But I believe that
most people can choose which one they want to be, and I'm proud to
say that more and more Americans are choosing to become sheepdogs.

Seven months after the attack on September 11, 2001, Todd Beamer was
honored in his hometown of Cranbury, New Jersey. Todd, as you
recall, was the man on Flight 93 over Pennsylvania who called on his
cell phone to alert an operator from United Airlines about the
hijacking. When he learned of the other three passenger planes that
had been used as weapons, Todd dropped his phone and uttered the
words, "Let's roll," which authorities believe was a signal to the
other passengers to confront the terrorist hijackers. In one hour, a
transformation occurred among the passengers - athletes, business
people and parents. -- from sheep to sheepdogs and together they
fought the wolves, ultimately saving an unknown number of lives on
the ground.

There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible
evil of evil men. -- Edmund Burke

Here is the point I like to emphasize, especially to the thousands
of police officers and soldiers I speak to each year. In nature the
sheep, the real sheep, are born as sheep. Sheepdogs are born that
way, and so are wolves. They didn't have a choice. But you are not a
critter. As a human being, you can be whatever you want to be. It is
a conscious, moral decision.

If you want to be a sheep, then you can be a sheep and that is okay,
but you must understand the price you pay. When the wolf comes, you
and your loved ones are going to die if there is not a sheepdog
there to protect you.

If you want to be a wolf, you can be one, but the sheepdogs are
going to hunt you down and you will never have rest, safety, trust
or love. But if you want to be a sheepdog and walk the warrior's
path, then you must make a conscious and moral decision every day to
dedicate, equip and prepare yourself to thrive in that toxic,
corrosive moment when the wolf comes knocking at the door.

For example, many officers carry their weapons in church. They are
well concealed in ankle holsters, shoulder holsters or inside-the-
belt holsters tucked into the small of their backs. Anytime you go
to some form of religious service, there is a very good chance that
a police officer in your congregation is carrying. You will never
know if there is such an individual in your place of worship, until
the wolf appears to massacre you and your loved ones.

I was training a group of police officers in Texas, and during the
break, one officer asked his friend if he carried his weapon in
church. The other cop replied, "I will never be caught without my
gun in church." I asked why he felt so strongly about this, and he
told me about a cop he knew who was at a church massacre in Ft.
Worth, Texas in 1999. In that incident, a mentally deranged
individual came into the church and opened fire, gunning down
fourteen people. He said that officer believed he could have saved
every life that day if he had been carrying his gun. His own son was
shot, and all he could do was throw himself on the boy's body and
wait to die. That cop looked me in the eye and said, "Do you have
any idea how hard it would be to live with yourself after that?"

Some individuals would be horrified if they knew this police officer
was carrying a weapon in church. They might call him paranoid and
would probably scorn him. Yet these same individuals would be
enraged and would call for "heads to roll" if they found out that
the airbags in their cars were defective, or that the fire
extinguisher and fire sprinklers in their kids' school did not work.
They can accept the fact that fires and traffic accidents can happen
and that there must be safeguards against them.

Their only response to the wolf, though, is denial, and all too
often their response to the sheepdog is scorn and disdain. But the
sheepdog quietly asks himself, "Do you have any idea how hard it
would be to live with yourself if your loved ones were attacked and
killed, and you had to stand there helplessly because you were
unprepared for that day?"

It is denial that turns people into sheep. Sheep are psychologically
destroyed by combat because their only defense is denial, which is
counterproductive and destructive, resulting in fear, helplessness
and horror when the wolf shows up.

Denial kills you twice. It kills you once, at your moment of truth
when you are not physically prepared: you didn't bring your gun, you
didn't train. Your only defense was wishful thinking. Hope is not a
strategy.

Denial kills you a second time because even if you do physically
survive, you are psychologically shattered by your fear helplessness
and horror at your moment of truth.

Gavin de Becker puts it like this in Fear Less, his superb post-9/11
book, which should be required reading for anyone trying to come to
terms with our current world situation: "...denial can be seductive,
but it has an insidious side effect. For all the peace of mind
deniers think they get by saying it isn't so, the fall they take
when faced with new violence is all the more unsettling."

Denial is a save-now-pay-later scheme, a contract written entirely
in small print, for in the long run, the denying person knows the
truth on some level.

And so the warrior must strive to confront denial in all aspects of
his life, and prepare himself for the day when evil comes.

If you are a warrior who is legally authorized to carry a weapon and
you step outside without that weapon, then you become a sheep,
pretending that the bad man will not come today. No one can be "on"
24/7, for a lifetime.

Everyone needs down time. But if you are authorized to carry a
weapon, and you walk outside without it, just take a deep breath,
and say this to yourself...

"Baa."

This business of being a sheep or a sheep dog is not a yes-no
dichotomy. It is not an all-or-nothing, either-or choice. It is a
matter of degrees, a continuum. On one end is an abject, head-in-the-
sand-sheep and on the other end is the ultimate warrior. Few people
exist completely on one end or the other.

Most of us live somewhere in between. Since 9-11 almost everyone in
America took a step up that continuum, away from denial. The sheep
took a few steps toward accepting and appreciating their warriors,
and the warriors started taking their job more seriously. The degree
to which you move up that continuum, away from sheep-hood and
denial, is the degree to which you and your loved ones will survive,
physically and psychologically at your moment of truth.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and
degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that
nothing is worth war is worse. The person who has nothing for which
he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own
personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being
free unless made so and kept so by the exertions of men better than
himself. -- John Stuart Mill
__________________
"There are three kinds of people in the world. There are wolves and
there are sheep. And then there are those who protect the sheep from
the wolves...

...Which one are you?

[xen]

that was a damn good read, cheers for sharing it

[fire&steel]

while in general these type of articles on the surface may seem to have a ring truth to them , it is also a myth that seems to have grow a life of it's own with careful tending by those who have an agenda . All people have the capacity for violence if put into the right environment. There is no separation between the Sheep , Sheep dog , and Wolf they all reside within all of us, we are all of them rolled into one. However we tend to only put on the persona of the one that suits our personality culture or agenda so to speak. Some people can switch these persona with ease to and justify it with statements of the greater good etc. It is also a matter of perspective as to how one is viewed. Within your own circle/culture etc you may be one or the other
but you may be viewed outside of your own circle/ culture as quite the reverse.
I started a thread on Kutaki some years ago (I just did a search and it must have been lost in one of the server crashes). This thread was called Sheep People and was a response to some comments I read on another board.I won't go into great detail here, I will however outline the post.
I am an ex shearer and spent 10 years in the shearing industry and I very much though along the lines of the article about people and sheep back then.However my views change when I brought home an abandoned twin Ram Lamb and we raised him as a pet. He was brought up sleeping in the same kennel as my 2 Staffordshire Bull terriers. As he grew he just naturally acted like the dogs. He would sit , shake hands etc just like the dogs. I then went on to train him as an guard animal for my workshop and he was very very good at it better than the dogs. He could not be bribed with food being naturally territorial he would let no one in to his space (the area surrounding my workshop) He was also very very dangerous as he was a Poll Ram Meaning no horns , so just looked like an innocent (big) little sheep so was very deceptive.I taught him a party trick to break wood , I would hold up a lump of wood and give the command Lamb Chop and he would run at me and head butt the wood and break it. He use to back up 20 meters and run and rare up on his hind legs and head butt a steel and concrete phone pole outside the workshop all day just for fun. All our friends would ring before visiting us to ask if the sheep was locked up. One guy arrived with a very large Mastiff dog in the back of a ute one day, the dog jumped out and ran at the Ram to attack him and the Ram rared up and head butted the dog and knocked it senseless . However the one thing that really struck me was how devoted to their family sheep really are. He ended up with several Ewes and several lambs of his own and he would go off and collect all his male offspring every day and take them for lessons and try to teach them all the things I had taught him to do.
So to underestimate a Sheep can be a very costly indeed.
This holds true with this article, to think we are just one or the other of the Sheep Sheep dog or Wolf, is a very dangerous limited way of thinking, not to mention it can also lead to thinking we are different from others giving us then a reason (agenda) to justify our actions against others on those very shaky grounds.

[Cannibal Bob]

Very interesting read, but a little too idealistic IMHO.

I agree with fire&steel in that we have all three within us, and we have the capacity too unleash any and all as the environment or situation dictates.

The only other thing I would add is that there is a fine line between being prepared for the worse and being paranoid. I'm probably the only person in my very large family to properly study an MA, but my family has lived their lives just fine, with the majority of the deaths in my family being from old age.

Finally, I know it's just an article, but why are wolves always the ultimate bad guys, they're no more 'evil' than any other carnivore. Which I guess could be the flip side to fire&steel's argument about sheep, with some of the people we would consider wolves doing what they need to survive given their situation. I'm not condoning criminal behaviour, just saying it's all too easy making an 'us vs them' distinction without all the facts.

As a quick example, while doing an course on insurance investigation a few years ago, our teacher, who has MANY years of experience in the field, told us it is not normally the unscrupulous evil 'wolf' that commits insurance fraud, but the ordinary, middle/upper class 'sheep' who looses everything and panics who is the most likely to commit fraud.

Just my opinions though.

EDIT: Just thought I would add, that IMHO, the sheep are not disturbed by the sheep dog because he looks like the wolf, or is a constant reminder of the presence of the wolf, but because they have become weary of the 'wolf in sheep dogs clothing.' Again, just my opinion.

[Dale Seago]

Hey everybody, relax: Grossman is using a device known as "metaphor". Google it.

Certainly literal sheep can be protective. And literal wolves are in my experience fine people indeed: I've run naked with some beneath the moon in the mountains of northern California (literally), and wrestled and traded taijutsu tips with those and with another in southern Oregon (again, literally).

I still think Grossman's overall description is pretty good.

(so okay, my paternal aunt is a traditional Comanche medicine woman, maybe that helps explain this. . .)

[Grimjack]

But many of them are outraged at the idea of putting an armed police
officer in their kid's school. Our children are thousands of times
more likely to be killed or seriously injured by school violence
than fire, but the sheep's only response to the possibility of
violence is denial. The idea of someone coming to kill or harm their
child is just too hard, and so they chose the path of denial.

Just to cause people to think, let me take the other side of the debate.

(Check out my signature for my reasons. )

How many people in the martial arts, and the Bujinkan, see violence as the sole means of a situation? How many people say that they practice Bujinkan say they are doing so to protect their family, but don't have a smoke detector in their house? How many people in the Bujinkan you know have never been to CPR training? Or don't have a first aid kit? Or have read books on explosives but have never read the natural disaster precautions you can find in the phone directory?

[Rubber Tanto]

That's an excellent post Grimjack...the tastiest food for thought yet.

We know a man that put his 6 year old boy in TKD. "It's to build the kid's confidnce" he said. When the 2nd installment of Lord of the rings came out and we were all going to see it, he brought his son with him to the cinema. The kid got scared from that scene where the dead come out of the water. "Can we go," he asked his dad.
"Stop being such a baby!" the dad growled. "I paid 12 bucks for that ticket..stop being a scaredy cat...the others will laugh at you."
How's that for confidence building???

We see what we want to see and get out of life what we want, discarding the rest if we don't agree with it...kind of like Pizza Hut's Salad Bar.

[darcho]

Interesting story. Makes me wonder though: if there are sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs (who protect the sheep from the wolves), isn't there also a sheperd whom the sheepdogs obey?

[Kwajman]

Good one, if the sheperd is evil then the sheepdogs gonna take advantage of the sheep. Sound familiar anyone?

[saru1968]

Originally Posted by Kwajman

Good one, if the sheperd is evil then the sheepdogs gonna take advantage of the sheep. Sound familiar anyone?

If the sheperd is dodgy then he takes advantage of the sheep and possibly the sheepdog and the wolf!.

:-)

[Dale Seago]

Originally Posted by Kwajman

Good one, if the sheperd is evil then the sheepdogs gonna take advantage of the sheep. Sound familiar anyone?

Sounds like a joke about Scots. . .

[adouglasmhor]

I thought about the pig movie "babe". Not aout anything else.

[kouryuu]

Originally Posted by Dale Seago

Sounds like a joke about Scots. . .

Has to be when he calls the sheep Baaaaabra

[Rubber Tanto]

As this thread delves into so many issues regarding sheep...I think all Greeks and New Zealanders should refrain from posting...


mmmm sheep!

[Cannibal Bob]

Originally Posted by Dale Seago

Hey everybody, relax: Grossman is using a device known as "metaphor". Google it.

Certainly literal sheep can be protective. And literal wolves are in my experience fine people indeed: I've run naked with some beneath the moon in the mountains of northern California (literally), and wrestled and traded taijutsu tips with those and with another in southern Oregon (again, literally).

I still think Grossman's overall description is pretty good.

(so okay, my paternal aunt is a traditional Comanche medicine woman, maybe that helps explain this. . .)

I wasn't getting upset or anything, but Grossman posted an interesting article on a public forum, and so I decided to post my opinions on it. And as you can see by my reply, I also used metaphore, for example, the wolf in sheep dogs clothing thing.

I apologise if it appeared as if I was attacking the original poster, as I was merely attempting to illustrate my view on the topic.

On a side note, fire&steel's story about the sheep IMHO was relevant to the discussion, as what I believe he was trying to say was that even the sheepiest of sheep, depending on the situation and environment, can out sheep dog a sheep dog.

Err, did that make sense?

Anyway, I honestly meant no harm by this or my previous post, and think it is a very interesting discussion. (New Zealand jokes as well! )