Honour, Courage and Fear

They say that a man can lose anything in his life and still be himself. But if he loses honour, then the man that was him does not remain. We will all disagree because in this world of ours, honour counts for nothing. Honour is just another commodity that people are willing to sell in the market for some price. Maybe it is money, maybe a favour or maybe even the hand of a person you have wanted for years. In any case, the word honour and the ideas associated with it have disappeared or are fading away like a dying sun in winter. Maybe a twilight sun but dying away nevertheless. To such an extent that a man who keeps his honour is called a fool, taunted and made fun of behind and in front of his back.

In times like these, a man of honour should have one more thing. They call it courage. This is not the courage that you associate with a person on a battlefield. Yes, the basic ideas are the same but then the essence will change a little bit when the courage a man possesses is for the protection of his honour. Contrary to what the multitude thinks, courage is not the antithesis of fear. Courage is not even the absence of fear. Courage is what keeps a man going even when he is afraid. Fear is a sickness. A man living in a community, if he becomes afraid of anything, starts reeking of fear. The fear that he walks around with is contagious it spreads around him wherever he goes. It brings a feeling of unease into people even when they do not know what they are afraid of. Maybe nature has programmed us to be afraid when we do not know what is waiting for us out of our eyesight. This makes the mind make up a figure that maybe waiting for us. For people who have had a bad experience in life with something else, a frightening one maybe, this figure in their mind takes that shape. For the others, this figure remains a faceless one, on without identity or name. Maybe we are made that way so that we survive a longer time. What is waiting beyond your sight maybe a harmless monkey. But it may also be a ferocious and wounded lion. The dangerous kind. So why take chances, isn’t it?

Why take chances….this seems to be the mantra which people follow in their daily lives. If anything is going on well, why take a chance and ruin it all? There is only one area where people have been known to take great risks believing that that elusive lady called Luck may kiss them one more time. It is called Gambling. But then when a man is confronted with the possibility of losing his comforts, wealth, happiness and all that he holds dearly if he takes a risk, will he go for it?

I am drifting away from the original topic. Courage is a great thing, and one that is for a honourable causes automatically becomes greater. But then excessive courage becomes something that we are all very familiar with. Folly. Courage and folly are cousins, according to some and brothers according to others and twins according to the cowards.

Modern literature does not say much on the concept of honour. Some areas where you can see courage and honour are in the ancient epics, be it Indian, Geek, Norse or Egyptian. Commentaries on these books are abound with mentions of honour of heroes, heroes who would give up everything to keep their honour intact. And in the end what does it serve them? A man will die no matter what. So why can’t he keep his honour in some dark corner of his conscience to save what he loved?

We cannot answer this question. Why? Because we don’t know what it is to have honour. We don’t know what it is to feel like when we and our nearest suffer to save the honour. Weird thing, this honour. Coming back to modern literature’s take on honour, if one searches hard enough, he will reach the realm of fantasy literature in his search of honour. No, I am not talking of Harry Potter. His world is set in our own time and hence the concept of honour does not apply. But if one cares to look at those literatures which create a timeline and world of their own like Tolkien’s Legendarium, or George R.R Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire”, honour stares back at us from every page. You always have people saying yes or no according to the situation for the sake of honour. Not necessarily theirs but for honour nevertheless.

Bismarck said once that the End Justifies the Means. This is the line that is a reflection of our thoughts. No one cares how success was achieved as long as it was achieved. Loss of lives or honour does not faze these success addicted people. A good example would be of course The Great Adventures of George.W.Bush, Jr. I am not going into this topic as it is a clichéd subject and there are many others who will willingly write a 1000 page treatise on this topic.

I have been thinking about the thing called Fear. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that it s a disease. Two people traveling in a plane talked to each other in sign language. A woman who saw this got scared. Pretty soon the whole flight was scared to death and the next thing you know, two fighter planes escorted the plane to an airport and the people who started it all were interrogated for hours. This is what the terrorists are so good at doing. All they have to do is strike fear in the hearts of the common folk and the next thing you know is that half the countryside is scared shitless.

Even history is full of accounts in which invading Kings have used nothing but the power of fear to conquer cities. One good example is Genghis Khan. He would attack a city and sack it. The battle finishes fast but the slaughter continues. You have rape, pillage and murder all going on side by side. Women are raped and killed in front of their husbands, children are killed in front of their mothers and in the end, Genghis would have a mountain of heads belonging to the former occupants of the city. The few people who manage to flee the sack rush to the nearest city and pretty soon all the cities in the neighborhood are drowned in fear which makes it easy for the great conqueror to finish off his job.

But there are also instances when armies pushed off fear and fought to the death instead of cowering like cowards. Take the case of the Battle of Thermopylae. A huge Persian army numbering million according to some, hundred thousands according to others were facing an army of less than thousand Spartans. The Persians waited for days hoping to intimidate the Spartans by the size of their army. The Spartans, seemingly unconcerned about the opposing army’s size also waited for the Persians to attack. The Persians were incredulous that an army numbering barely a thousand would dare to face its huge army. So then they fought, and the Spartans made the Persians pay dearly for each life that they lost. The Persian army won but not before the bravery of those Spartans was etched for eternity in the annals of history. I believe they are now making a movie out of it…

Read history, it is a fun thing. So much can be learnt from it that no one can teach…

Targaryen