Читать книгу The Art of Waging Peace - Paul K. Chappell - Страница 16

In Greek mythology, the Sirens were monsters who killed sailors passing by their island. Possessing a woman’s head and bird’s body, they lured people to their deaths by hypnotizing them with their magical singing voices. When Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s epic the Odyssey, sailed by the island where the Sirens lived, he ordered his sailors to plug their ears with beeswax. Because he wanted to hear the Sirens’ beautiful music, however, he did not plug his ears and instead had his crew tie him to the ship’s mast.

The Sirens quickly hypnotized Odysseus with their magical song, calling him to them. He tried desperately to break free from the ropes, but he was tied too tightly. So he begged his crew to untie him, but the sailors knew he would be killed if allowed to visit the Sirens. Eventually his ship passed beyond the reach of the Sirens’ mesmerizing voices, and Odysseus survived.

Today the term siren song refers to a temptation that is difficult to resist, but if pursued will lead to our destruction.¹¹ The more a person has been beaten, abused, and humiliated, the louder the siren song of rage becomes. The seductive voice of rage tells us to kill, maim, and destroy. If we obey its sinister commands, it promises to protect us. It promises to never let anyone hurt us again.

When people are physically threatened they often experience the fightor-flight response, which gives them the options of becoming aggressive toward the threat or fleeing to safety. But what happens when fleeing is not an option? What happens when someone is trapped, unable to run away, and terrified? What happens when someone has been abused for so long that he or she would rather die in a violent confrontation than continue to live in fear? When nothing else in the world is able to protect us, rage can come to our rescue.

When a person is drunk with rage, it is known as going berserk. Just as doctors must understand illness in order to promote health, understanding the berserker mindset is essential for healing the worst forms of violent behavior and creating a more peaceful society. The factors that cause people to go berserk are rarely discussed today, but Sun Tzu understood them over two thousand years ago. In The Art of War he said, “When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard.”¹²

Sun Tzu realized that a combination of two factors, like an explosive chemical reaction, causes people to go berserk. The first is feeling that one’s life is in imminent danger, and the second is feeling trapped and unable to escape. Accordingly, Sun Tzu advised military commanders to always give an opposing army an escape route, because when soldiers are trapped and about to be killed they are more likely to go berserk. In his book Achilles in Vietnam, Jonathan Shay explains: “When a soldier is trapped, surrounded, or overrun and facing certain death, the berserk state has apparent survival value, because he apparently has nothing to lose and everything to gain from reckless frenzy.”¹³

In ancient battles, most casualties were inflicted by forcing an opposing army to retreat and killing the fleeing soldiers as they ran away. When an opposing army was trapped and unable to escape, the berserk state became a desperate “Hail Mary pass” in the struggle for survival, a last-ditch effort to stay alive. Similar to humans, wild animals are also most dangerous when cornered and unable to flee. If death seems imminent, going into a reckless violent frenzy can seem like the best option. What do you have to lose?

The berserk state helped our earliest ancestors survive in the wild. To understand how, consider the following scenario. If you lived on the African savannah thousands of years ago and saw a large male leopard sneaking toward you, how would you protect yourself? You could flee, or you could try to frighten the animal away by yelling, waving your arms to appear larger than you really were, and throwing rocks. These attempts to frighten the animal away in order to avoid a violent confrontation are known as posturing. But what happens if a large male leopard sneaks up on you and jumps on your back? At that point you can no longer flee or posture. Your only options are dying or going berserk.

Now here is a question for you. If a large male leopard jumped on you right now and you had only six seconds before he inflicted a lethal wound, how would you convince him to leave you alone? Would you play dead? Would you punch him? Would you scream? Take a moment to ponder this. If it takes you more than six seconds to think of an answer, it’s too late.

To stay alive in this extreme life-or-death situation where there is no time to think, we must go into a beastlike state of mind where thinking is not necessary and instinct takes over. The berserker mindset knows exactly what to do when a large male leopard has knocked you to the ground and is six seconds away from inflicting a lethal wound. Gouge out his eyes with your fingers. Use your hands to tear off his genitals, or if necessary bite them off. Rip off his ears or a chunk of his nose. With insane frenzy, use your hands and teeth to pull off any piece of flesh within your reach. This will not guarantee your survival. It might not even give you a good chance at staying alive. But in a situation where you are about to die and have nothing to lose, it will give you the best chance of causing the leopard so much pain that he lets you go. As I mentioned earlier, the berserk state is a desperate Hail Mary pass in the struggle for survival, a last-ditch effort to stay alive.

The sensory and reproductive organs of animals are very sensitive, and to inflict as much pain as possible the berserker can fixate on damaging those parts of the body. The berserker is not just intent on killing, but mutilating flesh and causing immense pain. Most people would cringe at the thought of gouging out a leopard’s eyes or ripping off his genitals, even if they were about to be killed. To commit these horrifying and revolting acts, a person in the berserk state becomes practically insane. A chemical change occurs in the brain that makes the thought of gouging out a living creature’s eyes no longer seem disgusting, but irresistible—like a dark and seductive siren song. The siren song of rage tells us: “If you have no mercy, you will find safety.”

This is one reason a soldier who goes berserk in war can gouge out people’s eyes, cut off their ears, and mutilate their bodies in other grotesque ways. These forms of mutilation are directed not only at the living, but also at corpses. Like smoldering embers that remain long after a fire has died, berserker rage can linger long after a threat has disappeared, especially in the hostile environment of war where a person never truly feels safe. When the inferno of berserker rage has been ignited but not fully satisfied, innocent people can also become targets. A berserker can perceive women and children as if they were leopards—as lethal threats that must be destroyed.

Jonathan Shay tells us, “The berserker is figuratively—sometimes literally—blind to everything but his destructive aim. He cannot see the distinction between civilian and combatant or even the distinction between comrade and enemy. One of our veterans was tied up by his own men and taken to the rear while berserk. He has no clear memory but suspects that he had become a serious threat to them.”¹⁴ The army views berserkers as potentially dangerous, because they can endanger their own comrades. There are many examples of berserkers engaging in extremely reckless behavior that puts their fellow soldiers at risk.

Evidence of berserker rage can be seen throughout military history, from the ancient Greeks to modern soldiers. The word “berserker” originally referred to Nordic warriors who fought with uncontrollable rage. During the Vietnam War, both sides demonstrated berserker rage by mutilating living people and corpses in horrific ways. To understand why people are never the same after they go berserk, I am reminded of something I learned in the army. The army taught me that when people suffer from heat stroke for the first time, it creates a physiological change in the body that makes them more vulnerable to heat stroke in the future. In a similar way, Jonathan Shay theorizes that when people fully go berserk for the first time, it permanently changes the brain, making them more vulnerable to future incidents of berserker rage. He shares an account of a Vietnam veteran that illustrates how a person can descend into the dark tunnels of berserker madness:

I was walking point. I had seen this NVA [North Vietnamese Army] soldier at a distance. We were approaching him and he spotted us. We spread out to look for him. I was coming around a stand of grass and heard noise. I couldn’t tell who it was, us or him. I stuck my head in the bush and saw this NVA hiding there and told him to come out . . . He fired and I felt this burning on my cheek . . . I emptied everything I had into him. Then I saw blood dripping on the back of my hand and I just went crazy. I pulled him out into the paddy and carved him up with my knife. When I was done with him, he looked like a rag doll that a dog had been playing with. Even then I wasn’t satisfied. I was fighting with the [medical] corpsmen trying to take care of me. I was trying to get at him for more . . .

I felt betrayed by trying to give the guy a chance and I got blasted. I lost all my mercy. I felt a drastic change after that. I just couldn’t get enough. I built up such hate, I couldn’t do enough damage . . . especially seeing what they did to guys in the outfit they got hold of—cut off their dicks, cut off their ears . . . Got worse as time went by. I really loved fucking killing, couldn’t get enough. For every one that I killed I felt better. Made some of the hurt went away. Every time you lost a friend it seemed like a part of you was gone. Get one of them to compensate what they had done to me. I got very hard, cold, merciless. I lost all my mercy.¹⁵

Many soldiers in combat don’t go berserk, and many people attacked by wild animals don’t descend into a berserker rage. It is unclear why some people go berserk and others do not, but the situations that make people most likely to go berserk are well known. The feeling of being terrified and trapped is the most common cause of berserker rage. In addition, the brutal death of a loved one and extreme forms of humiliation and betrayal can also cause people to snap and go berserk. It seems that the berserk state can be ignited not only when our physical body is threatened and trapped, but also when an important part of our identity is severely threatened or destroyed.

The numerous examples of soldiers going berserk show that people can experience berserker rage in different amounts. Some people go berserk to greater extremes than others, yet anyone who goes berserk shares similar characteristics. Jonathan Shay uses the following words to describe the berserker mindset: beastlike, insane, enraged, cruel, without restraint or discrimination, insatiable, intoxicated, frenzy.

In Achilles in Vietnam, Jonathan Shay says:

The Iliad climaxes with Achilles’ beastlike and godlike rampage. The berserk state is the most important and distinctive element of combat trauma . . . Achilles defines himself here as a lion or a wolf, not a human . . . Homer compares attacking warriors to wild animals dozens of times. This was clearly a conventional metaphor used to praise warrior ferocity . . . However, when veterans and Achilles refer to themselves as animals they are not using conventional metaphors of strength and ferocity . . . When soldiers speak of themselves this way they are speaking of a loss of human restraint, powerfully symbolized by Achilles’ longing to eat Hector’s raw flesh.¹⁶

War is not the only experience that fills people with berserker rage. Mike Tyson, the youngest heavyweight champion in boxing history, suffered from berserker rage throughout his life. After Evander Holyfield headbutted Tyson multiple times during their 1997 rematch, he bit off part of Holyfield’s ear. In the excellent 2009 documentary Tyson, he explained what went through his mind:

He butts me again. He’s taller than me. What is his head doing underneath my head? I received a cut eye. He started looking at the eye. He butts me again. I complain to the referee. The referee doesn’t do anything. I become ferocious . . . I’m mad. I get so mad I want to kill him . . . At the moment I’m enraged and I lose all composure and discipline. I fight and fight and fight and I want to choke him. I bit him . . . I wanted to just kick him right in his groin . . . I wanted to kill this guy . . . And I’m insane at the moment. I’m a good person, but at that moment I went insane. I was enraged . . . he butted me with his head intentionally to hurt me and my eye, so I wanted to intentionally hurt him, and so when I bit him again and [referee] Mills Lane came and disqualified me, I didn’t really care. I wanted to inflict as much pain as possible on that man, because I was totally insane at that moment.”¹⁷

My other books show that human beings are not naturally violent, by citing abundant evidence from military history. But if people become extremely violent when they go berserk, does this contradict my view? Exploring the berserker mindset actually supports the view that human beings are not naturally violent by offering four pieces of evidence. First, people are not born as berserkers, and going berserk requires certain kinds of trauma, conditioning, or feelings of desperation. Second, going berserk is a last resort that results when other options, such as fleeing from danger and posturing, seem unlikely to work. Third, going berserk isn’t a part of our normal human experience. Like a rubber band that is pulled so hard it breaks, people go berserk in extreme situations: when they are threatened and trapped, their loved one is brutally killed, or they are severely humiliated or betrayed. Fourth, even in extreme situations many people do not go berserk, and many go berserk only after repeated instances of abuse. When Tyson was a child, he was afraid of fighting, and it took years of abuse for him to slip into his first berserker rage. He describes how he was bullied as a child for being short, obese, and wearing glasses, yet he chose to run rather than fight:

I can remember going to school and being bullied and people taking my glasses and putting them in the trunk of a milk cart. I’ve never had any kind of physical altercation with anybody at that particular time in my life, so I couldn’t believe a human being would do that. I never dreamed somebody, an absolute stranger would do that to me. I didn’t know why . . . I just ran. And I think that’s why people like myself become more assertive in life and become more aggressive . . . because they fear that they don’t want that to happen to them no more and they don’t want to be humiliated in that particular fashion any more. And that’s why I believe I’m the person that I am. And people have a misconception that I’m something else, but I’m just afraid of being that way again, of being treated that way again, of being physically humiliated in the streets again . . . And I just wish I knew how to fight back then . . . I was afraid to fight . . . I was so afraid.¹⁸

Although Tyson was afraid of fighting, a traumatizing incident led to his first street fight. Growing up in one of the most violent sections of Brooklyn, he loved raising pigeons. They gave him the sense of security and comfort all children need and provided a sanctuary from his abusive surroundings. Unlike people, his birds were loyal and did not hurt him.

One day a group of bullies found his pigeons and took one. He shouted, “Give me my bird back!” The bully holding the bird responded by ripping off its head and throwing the dead bird at Tyson, saying, “There, you can have it.” Enraged, Tyson beat up the larger boy. It was his first fight but would not be his last.

By the time Tyson was thirteen he had been arrested thirty-eight times. Like many people who become violent, he was the product of the kind of abuse, fear, and humiliation that breeds violence. In the documentary Tyson, he described how he felt after learning to box. Barely able to hold back his tears, he said, “I just never had to worry about anyone bullying me again. I knew that would never happen again. Because I knew I would fucking kill them if they fucked with me.”¹⁹

As a teenager I was fed up with being bullied by other children and beaten by my father. When I started lifting weights during high school, my father sensed a dark change in my behavior. He stopped hitting me, because I think he feared I would retaliate and possibly kill him. The siren song of rage told me, “If anyone tries to hurt you again as your father did, I will protect you. Your parents taught you about the dangers of not being white in America, but I am here for you. Your enslaved ancestors suffered so much, and if anyone tries to harm you in that way I will keep you safe. I will make you invincible and give you the power to kill them.”

Jonathan Shay says going berserk also makes people feel invincible, immune to physical pain, and godlike. If a leopard were on top of you, sinking his claws and teeth into your flesh, not being distracted by physical pain or even your own safety would allow you to focus all your energy on the act of maiming and destroying. The sensation of feeling invincible can be very addictive, especially for people who have been abused. If you had to choose between feeling constant fear, physical pain, and helplessness as a result of being beaten up all your life, or you could instead feel invincible, immune to pain, and godlike, what would you choose? The siren song of rage is so seductive because it promises to protect us. The more abuse and trauma a person has experienced, the more seductive the siren song of rage becomes.

Because berserker rage makes people feel invincible, it can cause them to behave in ways that appear suicidal. Berserking soldiers often expose themselves to extreme and unnecessary danger during combat. For example, when soldiers feel trapped and go berserk they may run wildly toward the enemy or stand up in the middle of a firefight, shooting their rifle or machine gun with reckless frenzy. This is not because they are suicidal, but because they feel godlike and invincible. As I mentioned earlier, this is why Sun Tzu advised military commanders to never trap their opponents into a corner but to always give them an escape route. Sun Tzu knew that berserking soldiers are extremely dangerous. Adachi Masahiro, a Japanese martial artist and military scientist who wrote during the eighteenth century, described how dangerous a berserker can be:

Once when a servant of a certain master of the One Sword school was summoned by another distinguished personage, toward whom he’d committed a discourtesy, the sword master called his servant to him and said, “You were discourteous to so-and-so, and now he’s asked me to turn you over to him. I’m sorry, but I have no choice but to send you to him. No doubt he’s going to kill you. Your life is over anyway, so I’ll give you my sword and you can go away if you kill me. Otherwise he’ll kill you.”

The servant said, “What can someone like me, with no skill at all, do to a famous person like you, master? Please excuse me.”

The master said, “I’ve never faced someone who’s gone berserk before. It’ll serve as a test. So since you’re a dead man anyway, I’m taking you on as an opponent for a test. Fight with all your might!”

The servant said, “Well, then, I’ll have to take you on.” Then when they dueled, [the servant went berserk and] the master unexpectedly retreated and was ultimately driven back to a wall. When he saw he was in danger, he shouted and cut his servant down in one fell swoop.

Turning to his disciples, who were watching, he said, “Well, now—going berserk is scary stuff! . . . If even a menial without skills is like this, how much the more so someone with first-class training—if he were to fight berserk, no one could stand up to him.”²⁰

At first glance the berserk state might appear to give people an advantage in combat, but looking deeper allows us to see a much different story. Feeling invincible in combat is not necessarily a good thing. Jonathan Shay tells us, “Berserking American soldiers invariably shed their helmets and flak jackets. They had no other armor. As one veteran said, ‘Got rid of my helmet, got rid of my flak jacket. I just wanted to kill.’ All the berserker feels he needs is a weapon; everything else is in the way. Achilles [when he goes berserk] wants to go after Hector just moments after he hears the grievous news of Pátroklos’s death, despite the loss of his own armor.”²¹

But don’t many children also take dangerous and unnecessary risks? Don’t many children also think they are invincible? When teenagers perform dangerous stunts on a skateboard while not wearing a helmet, does it mean they have gone berserk? The invincibility most children feel is different from berserker rage. As I explain in Peaceful Revolution when discussing the “universal human phobia,” the vast majority of us are terrified of violence when it is up close and personal, and around 98 percent of people will have a phobic-level reaction to human aggression when it is directed at them. Most teenagers who perform dangerous stunts on a skateboard while not wearing a helmet would flee in terror if a man with a machete started chasing them. When the school shootings occurred at Columbine High School in 1999, most of the teenagers panicked and went into shock; some of the high school students were so terrified they clung to the SWAT team members, sobbing in horror and refusing to let go.²² What makes berserkers unique is not only that they feel invincible, but also that they lose one of the most deeply ingrained instincts in human beings—the fear of lethal violence.

As I mentioned earlier, going berserk is a desperate Hail Mary pass in the struggle for survival, a last-ditch effort to stay alive. A berserker who feels invincible may appear to have an advantage in combat, but appearances are often deceptive. Feeling invincible can be useful in certain rare circumstances—such as when a person is trapped and has little chance of surviving—but it also leads to extremely reckless behavior that can easily get a berserker killed. Another problem is that berserking soldiers are nearly impossible to control, and the last thing most generals want is to lose control of their soldiers. Generals win battles and wars by utilizing strategies and tactics, but berserking soldiers have trouble obeying strategies and tactics because they are difficult to control and unable to listen. When Achilles goes berserk he shouts at his mother, “Do not attempt to keep me from the fight, though you love me; you cannot make me listen [emphasis added].”²³

Not only is feeling invincible not necessarily a good thing, but berserking soldiers can endanger their comrades, friends, and family. Jonathan Shay explains:

One [Vietnam] veteran went berserk after the death of his closest friend-in-arms and remained in that state for two years, until his behavior became so extreme that his own men tied him up and took him to the rear . . . [The veteran said] ‘I carried this home with me. I lost all my friends, beat up my sister, went after my father. I mean, I just went after anybody and everything. Every three days I would totally explode, lose it for no reason at all. I’d be sitting there calm as could be, and this monster would come out of me.²⁴

Frederick Douglass was abused to a point where he began to exhibit some characteristics of berserker rage such as complete disregard for personal safety in the midst of lethal violence.^* After being beaten throughout his life, he started to court death as only a berserker does, by displaying the kind of rage that cares more about hurting others than personal safety. The penalty for a slave hitting a white man was death, but Douglass was determined to attack and potentially kill any white man who ever tried to beat him again. He realized that any white person who hit him would have to kill him, because he was prepared to fight to the death.

People go berserk to different degrees, and although Douglass never demonstrated full-blown berserker rage, he described an incident where he exhibited some characteristics of the berserk state. When he was a teenager a group of white men at a shipyard started insulting and hitting him. He became so enraged that he attacked the white men, even though they had weapons and greatly outnumbered him. And when they stopped attacking him and left him alone he ran after them, trying to assault them with a handspike, before some carpenters intervened and he was able to calm down. Doesn’t Douglass’s behavior seem suicidal? It was likely the armed group of white men would kill him, and if they did not he would have been lynched for hitting a white man, even if it was in self-defense. But like a berserker, he lost his fear of consequences and even death during the fight. Douglass described what happened:

They began to put on airs, and talk about the “niggers” taking the country, saying we all ought to be killed . . . they commenced making my condition as hard as they could, by hectoring me around, and sometimes striking me. I, of course, kept the vow I made after the fight with Mr. Covey, and struck back again, regardless of consequences; and while I kept them from combining, I succeeded very well; for I could whip the whole of them, taking them separately. They, however, at length combined, and came upon me, armed with sticks, stones, and heavy handspikes. One came in front with a half brick. There was one at each side of me, and one behind me. While I was attending to those in front, and on either side, the one behind ran up with the handspike, and struck me a heavy blow upon the head. It stunned me. I fell, and with this they all ran upon me, and fell to beating me with their fists. I let them lay on for a while, gathering strength. In an instant, I gave a sudden surge, and rose to my hands and knees. Just as I did that, one of their number gave me, with his heavy boot, a powerful kick in the left eye. My eyeball seemed to have burst. When they saw my eye closed, and badly swollen, they left me. With this I seized the handspike, and for a time pursued them [emphasis added]. But here the carpenters interfered.²⁵

After the carpenters blocked Douglass’s pursuit, he seemed to calm down and think about consequences and his personal safety. At this point he no longer resembled a berserker who felt invincible, and he decided to retreat: “I thought I might as well give it up. It was impossible to stand my hand against so many. All this took place in sight of not less than fifty white ship-carpenters, and not one interposed a friendly word; but some cried, ‘Kill the damned nigger! Kill him! Kill him! He struck a white person.’ I found my only chance for life was in flight. I succeeded in getting away without an additional blow, and barely so; for to strike a white man is death by Lynch law.”²⁶

Douglass first exhibited characteristics of berserker rage earlier in his life, when he was trying to escape a beating from the “slavebreaker” Mr. Covey. Unable to avoid the beating and feeling trapped, he noticed a dramatic change in his behavior. Comparing the way he felt to insanity, he called it “fighting madness.” Douglass explained, “Whence came the daring spirit necessary to grapple with a man who, eight-and-forty hours before, could, with his slightest word, have made me tremble like a leaf in a storm, I do not know; at any rate, I was resolved to fight . . . The fighting madness [emphasis added] had come upon me, and I found my strong fingers firmly attached to the throat of the tyrant, as heedless of consequences, at the moment, as if we stood as equals before the law . . . I held him so firmly by the throat that his blood followed my nails.”²⁷

Douglass would have been put to death for fighting back against a white man, but Covey did not report this fight because he did not want people to know that a sixteen-year-old slave like Douglass had overpowered him. This would have ruined Covey’s reputation within the white community, where he was valued as a man who could break even the most difficult slaves into submission. During the fight Douglass was focused on defending himself rather than causing harm, but after this incident he started having strong urges to seriously injure Covey. Exhibiting characteristics of berserker rage, he seemed to lose his fear of lethal violence, and maiming another human being became more important to him than staying alive.

Douglass explained: “[During my first fight with Mr. Covey] my aim had not been to injure him, but to prevent his injuring me . . . After this conflict with Mr. Covey I did, at times, purposely aim to provoke him to an attack, by refusing to keep with the other hands in the field, but I could never bully him to another battle. I was determined on doing him serious damage [emphasis added] if he ever again attempted to lay violent hands on me.”²⁸ Covey seemed to know better than to get in another fight with Douglass. But just as berserker rage can sometimes protect us, it can more likely backfire and get us killed. Berserker rage is not a reliable form of self-defense, because it is based largely on illusions.

The comic book Incredible Hulk is a metaphor for the berserker mindset and its illusions. The main character, Bruce Banner, is a kind and mild-mannered person, but when he loses his temper he becomes the Hulk. Like the berserker, the Hulk is beastlike and drunk with rage. Immune to most physical pain and practically invincible, his power is godlike. Bruce Banner is afraid of transforming into the enraged Hulk because of the violent rampages that usually follow. Because of the Hulk’s superhuman powers, he is nearly impossible to kill.

Unlike the fictional Hulk in the comic book, however, real-life berserker rage only creates the illusion of being invincible and godlike. When I broke the window in my apartment with my fist, the pain gave me so much pleasure that it is difficult to describe. It reminded me of the times I used to cut my arms in high school. Imagine feeling suffocating agony and not being able to cry or even scream. As the misery gets bottled up inside you, like a clogged pipe ready to explode, cutting yourself temporarily releases the tension that is strangling you on the inside. As the blood flowed from my wounds, it felt like the pain was dripping out of my body.

I broke the window because I missed a small typo when proofreading. I had read the words numerous times without seeing the mistake, and when I finally noticed it my temper erupted. When we are lost in the mazelike tunnels of our psychological wounds, it is like seeing the world through the distorted reflection of a fun-house mirror. Just as a fun-house mirror can exaggerate the size of our heads in relation to the rest of our bodies, trauma can blow something small out of proportion, causing us to see something harmless as a lethal threat. As a child I was often beaten for making small mistakes. Enraged at myself for missing the typo, my self-loathing caused me to explode. When I punched the window I wanted to hurt myself as much as I wanted to damage the glass. After the effects of berserker rage wore off and I calmed down, I was brought back to reality. My hand started to hurt, and because injuring myself did not deal with the source of my suffering, I knew that self-destruction cannot lead to peace.

So far in my adult life I have not assaulted anyone, and in Peaceful Revolution I explain how discipline has helped me control my rage. I am writing about berserker rage not to excuse the violent actions of those who go berserk, but to help us understand the causes and consequences of the berserker mindset. Only by exploring the nature of rage can we develop techniques to heal it. This chapter may help you have more compassion for those who go berserk, but we must remember that people are always responsible for their actions, even when drunk with rage. Mike Tyson took responsibility for biting off a part of Evander Holyfield’s ear, saying, “I lost my composure. The worst thing a warrior, a soldier could ever do is lose his discipline.”²⁹

In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, psychiatrist Victor Frankl says we should not excuse people’s crimes, but hold them accountable for their actions and help them change for the better through rehabilitation. Frankl says attributing violent crime entirely to someone’s circumstances is “tantamount to explaining away his or her guilt and to seeing in him or her not a free and responsible human being but a machine to be repaired. Even criminals themselves abhor this treatment and prefer to be held responsible for their deeds . . . When I addressed the prisoners in San Quentin, I told them that ‘you are human beings like me, and as such you were free to commit a crime, to become guilty. Now, however, you are responsible for overcoming guilt by rising above it, by growing beyond yourselves, by changing for the better.’”³⁰

I am sharing deeply personal information about myself not only to illustrate the ideas in this book, but to also help remove the taboos around trauma that prevent us from healing the violent behavior in our society. We must not be ashamed or afraid to discuss the underlying causes of violence, because that is where the truth can be found. Just as doctors understand illness, we must also understand violence. We must have terms and metaphors that give us the means to truly talk about violence and its causes, and we must be empowered with the tools to help each other. Like all people dealing with trauma I have good days and bad. Pursuing spiritual change allows us to have more good days than bad.

Many years ago the siren song of rage promised to protect me. For a long time I believed it, but then something odd happened. As the years passed I became more afraid of my own rage than I was of other people. I had been relying on a desperate Hail Mary pass, which should only be used as a last resort in the most extreme situations, as a way of keeping myself safe. But this was a dangerous way to live. How could I convince my rage that I no longer needed its protection? How could I transform the siren song of rage into a melody of peace? If I wanted to survive I would have to find a way, and that is why I developed a system of waging peace I call the infinite shield. I developed it not just to protect me from other people, but to also protect them from me.