The Lion was never afraid
You can hear Hilary speak on the Power of Soft at #NoDust on #Brexit on Sep 5, 2016. Hilary’s Friday Club is here.
If we take children to the Zoo one of the things they will usually want to see are the lions. Somehow a zoo without lions is missing something. If we simply want to cuddle up with animals we can go to a farm or a petting zoo and get close to safe animals. But if we want to experience the true raw power of animals we expect bars to protect us and something unpredictable and scary. The monkey house is fun, elephants are amazing but for the ultimate thrill, tigers and lions are the top attraction.
This attraction is far from just a thrill for children. Like a good horror movie, there is something deeper going on here. It is man’s relationship with power and crucially our relationship with our deepest fears that is at stake. We are captivated by it because it matters but do we really understand it? If we stop to think about this relationship and the effects it has on us, then we might learn something important from it.
London Zoo is the world’s oldest scientific zoo and was founded in 1828. But the zoo’s lions and many of its bigger beasts had been around in London much longer. In the late 12th and early 13th Century King John started to amass a collection of beasts at the Tower of London and in 1235 this collection was enhanced by the gift of three lions given to Henry III by Frederick II The Holy Roman Emperor.
What became known as “The Royal Menagerie” was thereby established at the Tower of London and this collection of animals including Elephants, Tigers, Kangaroos and Ostriches continued to live at the Tower for some 600 years until their relocation to the Zoo in the early 1830s.
The Menagerie was based at the western entrance of the Tower of London which became known as the “Lion Tower”. The beasts and principally the lions, became active symbols of power for a succession of Kings. “Being fed to the lions” was far from simply a hollow threat, it was a very real and possible thing if those lions were visible, chained up to a tower, guarding the entrance to the King’s prison. The lions helped to define what the King’s power meant.
Visit the Palace of Westminster or any other place of power today and lions will be seen. They take their place in heraldry, on flags and pennants and are captured in stone outside important buildings. As we move into hallowed halls of power, the lion is likely to rear its head in reinforcement of its deep relationship with the traditional origins of power; a structural relationship now so embedded that we don’t tend to question it.
If we take ourselves back to the birth of human consciousness on the savannah some hundred thousand years ago, we were in a different age well before Kings. In this age we were predated upon. Lions and Sabre-Toothed Tigers sat at the top of the food chain. At this time we were in fear of these predators for good reason. If they caught us we got eaten. We, humans, gathered in caves for safety and sat in fear of the predator. Every so often one of us fell prey to the big cat.
The core fear we have, born in this age, of being eaten, is our primal fear. It is the fear that still sits behind all modern fear and it stays with us because our brains were formed in this age. In the short tens of thousand years that have just gone past our core neural wiring hasn’t changed that much.
When we put ourselves in a modern situation. A speaking engagement perhaps, an exam or a new responsibility, we very likely feel the frisson of fear. Logically, this fear is very different because, however much it troubles us, it is not the very real primal fear of death. The problem is that our internal systems don’t tend to differentiate that well. The fear of failure is difficult to see for what it really is — more social anxiety than real primal fear. There is no lion to attack us in these situations yet we can easily attach to the default setting for that kind of fear. Logic is lost, as something else entirely takes over.
Like any victim our easiest route out of victimhood is to take the place of the predator. This is what mankind has done brilliantly. Through our intelligence in sharing information though stories, in building strategies and in the exercise of new forms of dominant power we have slowly but surely beaten and then taken the place of the lion. We have now worked our way to the top of the food chain where we now sit.
We might say that the lion is our current structural model. In this age the symbols of that previous dominance such as the Lion, the Jaguar, the Eagle become our aspiration. We attach them to our vehicles and our culture as we struggle to ascend this power based hierarchy. In this model we seek to be the Lion. We exercise dominant power and we have become supremely good at it.
Lion has a problem however. It is an interim strategy only and it exists in stages. We are mostly now living through the last stage of the Lion. We are in what General Sir John Glubb, who analysed the fate of 11 separate empires and who irritatingly found them to all to do much the same, described as the final “decadence” stage present in any empire, where excesses abound and we desperately seek new heroes.
In this stage more and more people take this lion behaviour into their own hands grabbing it for themselves in a behaviour that inevitably finds other victims. We see those excesses more and more because we live in an increasingly transparent society. The problem with everyone wanting to be the lion becomes obvious. There only ever was room for a limited amount of lions.
Over time we learn that in any villain and victim situation, being the victim and then seeking to become the villain is only ever a partial and temporary solution. Like a bullied child becoming a bully, simply adopting the strategy of our oppressor simply turns us into the oppressor. This strategy fails to take us forward — we have trapped ourselves as the continuing victim of the original villain. This is where “Me too” has its limits.
Many of us increasingly sense this issue at an instinctive level. It exists between what we, deep down, internally, know to be human and what we see being played out externally in society, politics or business. For example, we cannot understand the success of Trump yet this theatrical extension of a dying world order goes on attracting supporters.
This fear based story pulls people in because it brilliantly represents a mass constituency who are living in Lion, with the tools of Lion, but who are still fundamentally scared. We underestimate the cocktail effect of fear when mixed with honestly held beliefs. The fear filled victim easily becomes highly positional, tribal and polarised. With the right message it is a constituency that is easy to play to.
When a leader chooses to shake this cocktail of fear, Lion roars. The mindset that we ascribe to Lion combined with Man’s 21st Century tools is a mighty dangerous beast. This is now a Lion that can kill in massive numbers.
Any impression of supremacy that we, as man, create is a fallacy though. It is a fallacy because the Lion that scared us in the first place was never afraid. Lion was just being a lion. Only man felt fear and only man let it affect his consciousness. Man became the Lion’s victim and in mimicking the Lion he remains so today.
We are in Lion’s thrall still and many leaders exploit this. This victim state ultimately disempowers us. If we remain as a victim of fear our opportunity to evolve further is necessarily curtailed. If we want to evolve the next step is to internalise the power we have rather than externalising it, living in its grip.
This is where the tipping point lies. There is no point in stopping at this stage if we are going to continue to be afraid. This is power based on fear. In it we remain vulnerable, even if we think we are Lion. We are not Lion and we never were. We have the opportunity to evolve beyond simply copying our original predator. To truly move ahead of the predator we have to have a different strategy, not merely an adopted one.
It is true that our role model, the Lion, was never afraid but Lion also had no choice. Lion had no apple offered to it in the Garden of Eden. We are different in that we have our gift of imagination, which allows us to see options and to choose. That same gift to imagine, that separates us from animals, is annoyingly what also makes us a victim of our fears. There comes a time though to understand that fear, rather than be consumed by it.
We also know that our expression of Lion power has for many centuries now been slowly undergoing a change. Lion started as a dominant power player whose currency was power in the form of force; the ability to raise an army or subvert villages with fire spears or guns. At some point economic power also joined the fray as money stopped being simply a tool of trade and became a measure of power. As economics took over, the money need to raise an army became power itself.
In our modern era, ultimate force has finally passed its peak of usefulness as we realise its ultimate expression, the atomic bombs that ended the Second World War, are ultimately useless. To mark this, and having fallen out of any real understanding of the enormity of this power, we measure these new excesses by how many times bigger than the 1945 Atom Bombs any such new weapon is.
To address this and in response of a wave of peace protest in the 1960s, Neo-Liberalism has in the last 50 years or so set us on a renewed economic course as it captured a generation with a different clear agenda — money as power. It is this monetary power that has now become the overriding global doctrine.
Instead of soldiers and weapons what we see is money as power. In this stage of the age of Lion, things are mostly done for economic reasons. Good initiatives are refused simply because they don’t wash their face economically just as other ways of acting are promoted because they are more profitable. The narrative is an economic one and woe betide an argument that tries to buck the model. Money Lion roars with money based fear. If money based fear is now the narrative, that is what scares us today.
There is however less romance in pure money and the cynicism of its purpose becomes ever more apparent. Lion may have been attractive for a while as a glorious warrior but Money Lion is an unattractive oaf. Politicians now lead with monetary arguments rather than grand visions because the Money Lion model is at its bankrupt end.
We are now slowly all realising that monetary wealth is not real wealth and that the endless acquisition of assets is a somewhat pointless thing. It becomes clearer and clearer that growth for the sake of growth is not actually a human thing or even a basic human need, it is instead the ideology of the cancer cell. We struggle to end it however because it is the governing model to which all who benefit from it are all tied. Money needs to be put back into its place, as an enabler only.
Money Lion is also broken because the three legged stool on which economic theory sits is broken too. The old view that labour, capital and land were what mattered worked in the days of cotton mills and steamships. Nowadays labour has exploded as a factor. Artificial Intelligence has arrived to fill the gap of pure process work, zero incremental cost has arrived and humans now are racing into new ideas, sharing information and creating new possibility faster than the factory production line can cope with.
Now the heart of every new business depends on the energy of visionary people. The power has fundamentally shifted and the tweedledum and tweedledee of capital and labour are struggling to keep a lid on the human explosion. Land and capital are now fully negotiable and where that change is not respected, a conceit that capital is more important than human value is planted. That monetary instability will like poisonous ivy, if unchecked, eventually kill the host.
At the same time capital is everywhere chasing ideas and, since 2008, it’s worth very little. We may have missed the chance to explode capital in 2008 but with the resulting hospital treatment of bail-outs, quantitive easing and cheap money the dying addict was simply strapped in bed and put on a costly drip. With money sitting in an expensive hospital bed we have the choice between continuing to feed the patient or looking for a cure for the disease.
In any cure the first thing we have to understand is the fear that causes it — the fears we have and the fears of others. This can be anything from uncertainty, fear of loss or threats to our self-image. In the presence of fear we close up and become fighters and fleers. Fear drives us into unhelpful behaviours, like the lion’s victim we become angry and positional. In the absence of a real lion we are happy to blame anything we see visible and culpable as the cause.
The danger is that as long as we stay in a fear and fighting based state of mind, the world beyond can be made to sound dull and elusive. Like captives in a long-term hostage crisis it’s too easy, in a society wide version Stockholm Syndrome, to start to identify and cling to the known host. This is the understandable behaviour of the long-term addict, who clings ever more tightly to the toxic drug.
Increasingly in society and politics we fall into conflicts because we take different underlying structural views. If we are a captive of the warring Lion (where Russia seems most comfortable) or developed Money Lion (the prevailing Western view) we see life differently from people who see the possibility of life, beyond either war or money. Our fear, our strategies to deal with that fear and the structure of the world we live in tends to colour our worldview. If we can see that our views are coloured by our structural viewpoint, then this might act to influence our view.
All stategies based on fear are doomed to the same end since they lead to “power over” outcomes which divide, whatever their currency. Line drawing and fence building are ultimately the tools of the scared. It is only when we go beyond fear that we can move to a basis where we are curious about the real basis of power — that we each have. From that interest we build very differently. If I act out of trust to raise your power, we can suddenly grow together as you return the favour. Each raises the other in a yo yo effect.
So why don’t we do this? Well, maybe to some extent we do. Mother Theresa once summarised her stance by saying “The problem with the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small”. It is this smallness of circle drawing that is how the issue manifests itself. We easily end up with a viewpoint where we are encouraged to draw the circle narrowly and perhaps even defensively. It is easy to draw the circle simply around ourselves and from there we hopefully move out to our direct group. If something is good for me or my family then surely it is good? If something is good economically then surely it is right? These are the ways in which we draw the circle.
Currently we are encouraged to draw circles politically around country borders but if we start to the draw the circle more widely, beyond factions or national borders, instead around humanity or around life on earth, then the answers we get to our questions may well be different. As soon as we start to do this the important of trust, a lack of fear and also a degree of inner confidence in ourselves begins to make its need clear. Widening the circle and lack of fear walk hand in hand.
In the strategies that we create now, instead of seeing power as something external to us we have to make the most of the power that we all have within us. We have to become the best that we can be and we have to encourage others to do the same. What if the ultimate measure of growth is a human one rather than an invented economic one? Do we measure the success of a service like the NHS in monetary terms or do we measure it in the health, well being and growth of those who work in it and are the users of it?
What will happen if we get beyond our fear and can have the courage to draw the circle of our family wide enough to encompass all life?
Instead of dividing in fear we can start to define love as the desire to help others to build their power instead of simply stealing it for ourselves.
The chief characteristic of our next steps are that they acknowledge and encourage our need for connectivity with each other. This is an approach where instead of dividing and separating, the aim is to live as close together as we can.
Technology and a world without fear makes this connectivity not just possible but joyous.
In the space rocket of time, this is a turn, by small increments, away from a path to divisive destruction, back towards unity.
And, as Tim Berner-Lee, the creator of what must be the most connecting, technological breakthrough ever, tweeted during his participation in the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympics: “This is for everyone”.
The space rocket is ours and only we can change its course — by our own small actions.
The lion was never afraid and, to evolve, nor should we be.
It’s time to face up to our fear and to reach that circle outwards.
It’s either that or its inward looking, victim based, opposite.
