Thrust and Parry

In any group of people - being social creatures - there are always the more powerful and the less powerful - though this can also be stated, the less submissive and the more submissive, depending upon how one "sees oneself" - but the end-result is always the same. Someone takes control, and the rest vie for control (or shudder in the background), utilizing certain techniques that society has taught them - head bowing, fawning, taunting, trickery, subterfuge, teasing, direct bodily confrontation, etc.

Being civilized creatures, no longer living in caves, and killing their neighbors for food and sex, that drive - of the powerful to remain in power, and the powerless to strive to overcome the powerful - has shifted, from the realm of the body to the realm of the mind.

Today, we are still driven to take control, utilizing whatever methods and techniques we've been taught by the society, but with certain safeguards and protections in place, laws, social norms, religious tenets - primarily for the sake of the continuance of the body - but, curiously, with no such safeguards and protections in place to protect the mind.

Picture, if you will, two men trying to become the most important man in the group - however large or small, from head of the bird-watching club, to the head of the state or country. Neither will directly attack the other man physically, but will engage in all manner of personal attacks of the other man mentally - and without shame or guilt. It is actually expected that if a person can't defeat someone intellectually, then it's perfectly acceptable to attack him personally (attacking his reputation, his associations, his present and past actions, etc.), even while it's unacceptable to attack him physically.

By taking another's words (and, his verbalized or written words are necessary - that is, you can only attack someone for what they've said or written, never for what they think), and turning them, spinning them, altering them in some way, they can be used as weapons against the other. It's the time-honored and age-old warring technique of, "thrust-and-parry", only applied in the realm of thought.

By the time a person has graduated from grade-school, at the latest usually, s/he has become a master technician in the art of thrust-and-parry in order to become the most powerful kid in the house, the neighborhood, the schoolyard, and this includes females, who in fact are more deadly than the males.

This is not learned behavior, believe it or not; it is built-in to the organization of the brain, with it's two competing hemisperes and the never-neverland between them, that is virtually off-limits except to the most most powerful. This is where the established tyrant and his trusty strawman setup their strategies for dominating, both the individual and the environment at large.

Everyone's inner life amounts to nothing more than monologues by a tyrant, or worse, the dialogues of a tyrant and a strawman. And EVERYBODY is in this condition if they are not presently conscious without thought - or, if not "without thought" at least not within thought.