Wheels and Heroes

7/30/2019 Wheels and Heroes

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Wheels and Heroes 20/5/2005

Written by You-Sheng Li

From Authors Website: http://taoism21cen.com

Traditionally people name wheels as the greatest invention in human

history. With the speedy progress in science and technology, we are still

relying on this ancient invention today. From the sophisticated space-crafts

and satellites to our cooking facilities such as microwaves and refrigerators,

not to mention cars, trains, and airplanes, are all consisted of some wheels

as the essential parts. Volcanoes are often cited as the symbol of the power

of nature but they can only throw rocks miles away, but a man with wheels

can move things thousands of miles away from its original location.

If we extend the definition of invention to cover social science and

culture as well, I would say the worship of heroes who kill human beings for

the benefit of others is the greatest invention in human history. It is the very

basis on which modern civilization is built. One of the definitions of countries

is the organization that has the right to kill by its own reason. Army, police,

and prison system are the professions that have the right to kill.

The founder of Communist China said, "Political power grows out of the

barrel of a gun"; "Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with
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bloodshed". Killing is the essential way to force one's will on others. With the

sophisticated social stratification and prison system, we do not need to kill to

force one's will on others but killing is still the basis. Like the wheels

overcome the physical nature of our world, military power is a social device

to overcome human nature.

Jane Goodall once observed in the wild that chimpanzees kill their

infants and eat them. The mother chimpanzee protected her infant by

running away from the chasing males. Peace assumed once the infant was

dead, since chimpanzees lacked the social concept to ether demonize or

glorify the killer.

Humans do have a strong innate resistance to killing their own kind.

According to a trained psychologist, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman (G.

Dyer 1995), you can train and arm a man, put him on the battlefield, and

expose him to the imminent danger of death, and in most cases, he still

wont kill. However such non-killers were shamed of their cowardice and

did not talk about it since soldiers are supposed to be heroes. It was only in

the final years of the Second World War that USA army historians conducting

post-combat interviews with several hundred infantry companies under the

promise of anonymity, discovered that only 15 to 20 percent of the soldiers

ever fired their weapons in battlefield. Some of them even fired their

weapons deliberately aiming high. The result was the few who could endure

the killing were doing almost all of the killing. This must have been the truth


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for thousands of years without being noticed and studied. For example 90

percent of the abandoned muskets picked up after the battle of Gettysburg

(1863) were loaded but not fired.

The military overcomes this innate resistance by a combination of

desensitization and conditioning techniques. The soldiers are asked to

practice shooting at a target in the shape of a human being. They also make

the shooting so easy and so automatic and reflexive that the soldiers have

no time to think about it before the shooting. Such techniques worked well

during the Vietnam War, and up to 95 percent of American soldiers were

firing their weapons at the enemy. As a result the Vietnam veterans suffered

a very high rate of post-traumatic stress disease since they were tricked into

killing against their will. It is certainly not an easy job to be a hero.

Like many scholars who are familiar with both Eastern and Western

cultures, David N. Keightley noticed the striking difference of the image of

Chinese legendary heroes in comparison with the Greek ones.

According to Keightley, Because cultures are man-made and serve

to define mans conception of himself, it is helpful in considering the

question of what it means to be Chinese to start by comparing the

conception of man as hero in ancient China with analogous conceptions in

Classic Greece (fifth to fourth century BC), a culture that has contributed so

much to our Western understanding of human condition. The legend of

Achilles and the Amazon queen, for example, which was popular in both


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Greek and Roman cultures, expresses strategic views about the individual

and society that would have been entirely foreign to Chinese

contemporaries At the moment when Achilles plunges his sword into the

breast of his swooning victim, their eyes cross---and he falls in love! That

moment of dramatic and fatal pathos is the one the artist has captured.

The above story reflects one of the major assumptions of the Western

tradition that the human condition is tragic and poignant from the

perspective of the individual. In contrast the Chinese contemporaries

emphasized the ideals of social harmony and the heroes were models worthy

of emulation from the view of man as a social being. Keightley also noticed

that in ancient China the lord as the administrator hired an Assassin-Retainer

to do the killing in comparison to the story of Achilles who did the killing

himself.

The primary society usually emphasized the unity of the community

but used only the public opinion to ensure unity and stability of the

community rather than appealing to a super powerful hero.

The Western civilization was originally based on the tradition of

ancient Mesopotamia and Greece where city states were the rule for the

emergence of the secondary society while the first Chinese secondary

society was an administrator class built above numerous small primary

societies. This administer class took the primary society as their model.


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There was no need at all to worship a hero who killed other human

beings in the primary society and in the administrator class society that

modeled after the primary society since the internal harmony was essential

when the people faced the nature directly: The powerful beasts and natural

disasters were the concern and not other human beings.

Only when what the people was facing was no longer nature but

numerous hostile strangers, the worship of the heroes who killed other

human beings became practically beneficial.

At the moment when Achilles plunges his sword into the breast of his

swooning victim, their eyes cross---and he falls in love! When you see

another human being dying on your hand, you may suddenly realize the

mutated nature of your act. That was exactly what Achilles felt. He did not

fall in love with the Amazon queen but fell in love with the basic human

nature, a nature every of us, including the artist who captured the moment,

shares.

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Wheels and Heroes