Some observations by the 16th century ronin, Miyamoto Musashi
Insights into life from the famous Japanese swordsman and philosopher.
Miyamoto Musashi was a ronin born in Japan in 1584. As one of the most famous swordsmen in Japan’s history he had the distinction of never losing a duel with an impressive 60-0 record.
As well as a notable swordsman in his day he was also a philosopher, artist and a writer of note. His main work, The Book of Five Rings, is still in print. It covers a range of topics including his personal philosophy as well as strategies to manage conflict and navigate life itself.
His own life reflected the words he wrote and included an emphasis on self reliance, inner tranquility, acceptance of life as it is and extreme self discipline. He is often read today by those drawn to these qualities and many find his work insightful in the pursuit of developing resilience and mental clarity, key ingredients to a satisfied life.
While life today would seem alien to Musashi some things are eternal. Many of his preoccupations resonate with us in the modern era, especially his insights into human weakness and failings. These are captured in a number of famous quotes.
“Do nothing which is of no use.”
Today’s mantra seems to be, do lots of things that are of no use. Binge watching shows we don’t really care for, immersing in social media black holes that deplete our energy and shatter our attention spans, and mindless shouting matches from increasingly entrenched positions, arguing over emotive nonsense programmed into our heads. Lots of things are of no use and many of us despair we may never escape the grip of these destructive habits.
Musashi understood well the human tendency to squander our time and resources. We are inclined to take the path of least resistance and can sink into habitual behaviours that do not serve our goals. We engage in activity that is of no use to us as individuals.
Implicit in Musashi’s view is the notion we must take stock of our situation to examine where we are and make changes. He placed a strong emphasis on self discipline. But first comes observation. We identify what is not working then discipline ourselves to remove it from our lives.
Routine helps. Creating healthy routines around which we can build a better life. Ultimately the quote implies the need for restraint, a key attribute of the samurai. We must refrain from wasting our lives on those habits and activities that do not serve us.
Today this can feel impossible. We would perhaps not think in terms of things being useful or useless. Rather, the great enemy now is distraction.
Contemporary distractions include television, social media, computer games, pornography, twenty-four hour news cycles, doomscrolling on our phones; the list is endless. Most are attractive because they require little effort. Television is the oldest of these vices. It famously lulls viewers into a kind of waking sleep state where we learn to passively consume programmed material.
Social media has evolved along similar lines. It involves some interaction, but it is common to see people in cafes or in public spaces reach for their smartphones to gaze through an endless feed of automatically organized content related to past indulgences. Corporate news items, humorous videos, outrage porn and fads designed to elicit emotion, all of it expertly selected to reinforce a carefully sculpted view of the world. This is all the more compelling as it is shaped by our own interests silently analyzed by powerful algorithms and used to make future content difficult to ignore.
Musashi would perhaps be perplexed by the material we consume but he would instantly recognize the human actions driving it. Passivity, an absence of awareness and lack of self discipline.
He would also understand the antidote. His emphasis was on conscious living, making mindful, deliberate choices. Intentional decisions require a period of deliberation. What am I doing with my precious life, with my attention? Is this meaningful to me? Is it useful? Or is it of no use?
Musashi’s observation is about mindlessness. Habitual choices based on easy living that are ultimately destructive. Taking the time to examine these then making a choice to act differently. To do things that serve us better. To do things that are useful to us, and to attempt to do less that is of no use.
“Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is. And you must bend to its power or live a lie.”
One of the defining features of the modern world is the epidemic of fantasy ruling our lives. Men can be women, paying extra taxes can change the weather, governments cannot solve homelessness or poverty but can somehow manage economies. Denial of reality is commonplace.
Musashi understood the human tendency to invent a false view of the world and focus on that while ignoring real life. Avoiding truth is easy since we have a capacity to fantasize and believe fiction. All children have this skill and regularly invent stories which merge with the world around them. But increasingly we see adults engage in this make believe world too.
What Musashi warns about is the comfort inherent in a fictional world that only exists in our own heads. It is easier than real life with its setbacks and hardships. It is often preferable to the cold brutal truth, that some people are poor, that others make terrible decisions which lead them into difficulty, that life can seem unbearable in its cruelty. We are all aware of some of the horrors of real life; famines, war and conflict, aggression, the inherent meaninglessness of it all. Why face this? A comforting lie feels decidedly better.
It is the second part of the quote Musashi wanted us to focus on. Embracing the power of truth. Doing this sets you free. It may be difficult to endure but it has the advantage of being real. The real world actually exists and we must exist within it. It is the only place we can exist.
Musashi exhorts us to use discipline once again. To brace ourselves for the bleakness of the world we actually live in, not the fantasy we wish it to be. This matters. It is difficult. We grasp at any alternative, and that leaves us open to manipulation by those skilled at selling plausible sounding lies to comfort us.
We can have a war on poverty if only the government has more power. We can prevent nastiness online if someone else is allowed to censor disturbing content. A secret patriarchy conspires to keep some groups down, that is why you are failing in life. If we focus on bringing down this group of evil men your life will magically improve. These untruths appeal to different people at different times, but they all serve the same function, they help us avoid reality, our own shortcomings and feelings of inadequacy. They stave off the naked truth.
Musashi would be horrified by our world and the level of delusion we are subjected to, but he would recognize the underlying drive. He would understand the delusions are perpetuated by us and our own weaknesses not by the propaganda itself. That we want a pleasant fiction to take the edge off a truth or inconvenient fact we cannot face.
We see this everywhere. The homeless used to be called vagrants or bums. It was understood people ended up on skid row for a reason, and some of those reasons were unpleasant.
We are told we need elaborate affirmative action initiatives to reset society into some invented symmetry that has never existed; we must discriminate against successful groups to combat discrimination.
We have damaged the world through industrialization. This popular view is easy to process because it omits the reality of what a pre-industrial society actually looks like; high infant mortality - lots of dead babies - and grinding poverty with the masses living at subsistence level, all anathema to those attracted to simple fictions to feel better about themselves. Far easier to tweet about the evils of coal-fired power stations from the comfort of your centrally-heated home while condemning the pragmatic for their lack of visionary compassion.
More worrying is the observation that Western nations have embraced a slew of fabricated problems the rest of the world ignores since they are based on fiction. Women are routinely oppressed by men, homosexuals are abused by society despite living in the only countries that don’t abuse them, and affordable energy that makes first-world civilization possible is an evil that must be stopped.
These manufactured concerns are fantasy. They do not exist and are demonstrably absent in societies where people are forced to contend with legitimate problems like energy or food shortages. Implicit in Musashi’s view is this very danger. As we turn away from truth the mind runs free and creates its own hardships because they are more psychologically manageable than real problems. The indulgent experience the energizing smugness of tackling the Great Issues without the inconvenience of actual inconvenience. Lies have no limits, only truths do.
We must always face the truth, however unpleasant. The alternative is to lose ourselves in a fantasy we struggle to escape from. The final part of the quote warns us of the dangers of living a lie. When we embrace cold hard reality as Musashi advises we avoid the fiction. It is only ever in the real world with all its difficulties where we can get anything done. When we turn away from this and lose ourselves in a more pleasant fantasy we are deceiving ourselves.
Seen from a sufficient distance this seems like a form of voluntary madness. Why lie to ourselves? But Musashi understood why. Fiction is malleable; the real world is hard and unyielding. The outside world really exists and does not bend to fantasy. It comes with a litany of rules that govern its operation and some of those rules are problematic to the dreamers in society drawn to social engineering to bring about the biggest fantasy of all, the establishment of Utopia.
We must embrace reality because it is our shield against convenient distortions. It is only when we reject fantasy do we begin to evolve. And in time we can learn the beauty of the world. It may have pain and misery and death but it also has grace and magnificence. It has art, great symphonies and poetry, all of which can touch us deeply. It has the creation of life, a miracle like no other. While there is much Musashi would find confusing about our world there is also much he would endorse and all of it exists outside of our heads and in a concrete reality we so readily turn away from.
“Perception is strong and sight weak. In strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things.”
While it is important to turn away from fantasy, even looking at the real world comes with problems. Musashi understood the need to not just look at the world but to see it clearly and avoid being blinded by the superficial. The skilled strategist looks beyond the surface to deduce what is really going on.
We are dazzled by the obvious. In modern terms we are easily triggered. When this happens, particularly with emotive subjects, we lose sight of deeper structures and miss more distant issues that may have consequences for our lives.
Musashi understood this tendency in us. We focus on the immediate. We don’t look very far. We understand things in a superficial way because it is easier. Why think when you can just react or quickly judge?
However he also reminds us we can train ourselves out of this approach. We can cultivate the ability to scrutinize a thing, to look beyond its immediate features and consider what lies beneath.
Perception then is a skill. We all have it to some extent, but it atrophies through disuse. Similarly we can use self discipline to train ourselves to temper the natural predisposition to react, and especially to avoid overreaction, a modern disease we see all around us. Histrionic displays, threats of violence and disturbing behaviours previous generations would have recognized as inappropriate.
Today we see this propensity to focus on the superficial exploited at every turn. Deranged stunts by climate protestors, flagrant abuse of common decency by transgender activists and outrageous statements from some immigrant groups about the nation that has given them a home. These conspire to capture our attention and compel us to focus only on the superficial. These people are crazy, why won’t anyone say something?
Musashi would instruct us to look deeper. What is the purpose of these activities? Why are they indulged by authorities who are tasked with maintaining law and order? What are we not seeing?
While some of these topics are worthy of attention given the effect they have on society, the perceptive look beyond the headlines. There are many column inches devoted to climate change and transgender issues. There are almost none at all devoted to troubling initiatives like central bank digital currencies that threaten to destroy both our liberty and the ability to manage our own property, both important in a free society.
There is little scrutiny of related phenomena like using debt as the basis of an economy or the damaging effects of high taxation. Any discussion of the demographic effects of rapid mass immigration is considered absolutely forbidden despite it being readily visible in most Western countries. Why do these things happen? Why do we not discuss the important issues and instead see a steady supply of outrage porn?
Musashi would compel us to seek out the deeper currents beneath more obvious headlines. He would view the readily available sensationalized material as a potential distraction, and would focus instead on the societal changes eroding our freedoms. Digital biomedical passports to restrict travel, the rise of social credit scores to manipulate our behaviour, hate speech legislation designed to manage narratives and ultimately the urge by some to simply control everything. These must be distinguished from the more obvious superficial stories we are often fed. They must be sought out by looking through the blatant to the intentionally obscured.
To a skilled enemy our reactionary nature can be a tool. It can be fatal for us to be fooled like this. The countermeasure recommended by Musashi is to cultivate the skill of perception, to become more aware of what is happening under the surface, beyond the immediate. To pay attention to the things that will actually change our lives and to attend to them. At the very least we must train ourselves to look beyond the readily apparent. A rare skill in this era of omnidistraction.
We have much to learn from Musashi. These are just three points he made in a long life that included hardship, discipline, controlled violence, uncertainty and confusion. Yet they ring true for us today 400 years after he lived.
His observations encourage us to focus on the signal and learn to tune out the noise. Once we do detect a signal we must look beyond its obvious features and consider the deeper implications lest we be manipulated by others knowledgeable of human psychology. As a foundation we must also train ourselves to embrace better habits that compliment the development of perceptiveness; fewer distractions and more deliberation, a life with conscious choices that serve us better.
What this gives us is a toolset to navigate life. A range of options to build strength and above all mental clarity.
All this from someone who lived in an alien culture 400 years ago. Should we be depressed things have not improved in four centuries? Not really. Human weakness is not new. It spans time and geography. People are people. The superficial issues differ but the underlying human weakness is universal, all coalescing around indulgent consumption, fantasy to circumvent reality, and an aversion to thinking too hard to avoid emotional turmoil. All too human and all too universal, then and now.
We can be thankful us moderns have some wisdom from four centuries in the past to reflect upon. It is no exaggeration to state the enemies of Western culture want to rewrite history not learn from it. Their fictional narratives are too important for their plans to allow actual lessons from history to prevent all this glorious progress they imagine they are delivering.
The Musashis, both historical and contemporary, help remind us this is nothing new. Our enemy is us and our own indulgent tendencies designed to stave off the horrors of brutal reality. Our downfall is our own weakness, but Miyamoto Musashi reminds us its antidote is strength which we can cultivate if we put our minds to it.
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Important hard truths, thank you.