Episode 96: Times to Be a Porcupine

What in life deserves our time and attention and what things don't. I hope that as we consider that question along with other topics on this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones - “Times to Be a Porcupine”.

Theodore Roosevelt has a popular quote that I love. Speak softly and carry a big stick. It seems ever more apparent to me that peace more frequently comes from being a little bit prickly than it does from being totally non-confrontational. If there's no threat of consequence for certain actions, then it only stands to reason that those actions will simply happen more often.

Porcupines seem to be a good example of this. Porcupines, to my knowledge, are not terribly aggressive animals. There are not very many predators willing to try to take them on. If a porcupine did have to face a predator, I don't think the porcupine would win very often. But the cost to any predator wanting to eat it is not going to be cheap.

A lot of violence is stopped long before it ever happens simply because the porcupine is covered in quills. So a while back I read the book, the Art of War by Sun Zu, and I recall one of the main themes is about winning the war before it even starts achieving that piece seems to happen more often than not through the process of both sides sizing up the cost and deciding what to do before it comes to violence.

As terrible as the invention of the nuclear bomb is, the world has never known less bloodshed because of it. The cost to any nation willing to risk taking that road is monumental. So as a result, the nuclear armed nations pretty much avoid going to war at all costs. Now, if we take that back down from a geopolitical scale and apply it more to a ordinary situation, I think you could compare it to schoolyard bullies.

Schoolyard bullies usually go after the kids that represent the least threat, not the other schoolyard bullies. Being completely non-confrontational is kind of like opening a door to allow others to take advantage of you. Even well-meaning people will take advantage of you if you don't let them know what things they're doing that you don't like.

The good news is that I don't think it actually takes much to dissuade most people from crossing boundaries. Most of us don't actually want to be seen as inconsiderate. So simply being told when we are crossing a boundary is enough, but where it really seems to matter is when we are dealing with people that have no problem making you unhappy and will take advantage of you.

So long as there isn't a consequence.  It seems like everyone preaches that we need to be soft and nonviolent. Yet at the same time, everyone also idolizes people willing to go there when it's appropriate. Why do we respect the tough guys of history? A few months back, I was reading a biography about Andrew Jackson, who is one of the more controversial former presidents of the United States.

He was the founder of the Democratic Party and had a reputation for being tough that made him something of a hero to the common man at the time. This guy had a bullet permanently lodged in him from being shot in a dual. He ran off the British when they tried to return in New Orleans and once when a man came to assassinate him while he was president, he literally beat him with his cane.

Whether he was a good or bad person is another argument to be had, but one thing for sure is that he was not the kind of person that would let others take advantage of him or of those that he [00:04:00] deemed he was responsible for. I think we're torn sometimes with the idea that says, in order to be good, we need to be harmless.

On the other hand, if you are harmless, then you don't really have a choice without some capacity to do bad things. We cannot be good because being good requires us to choose that. You might be thinking, what about turning the other cheek? Well, there's certainly a time and a place for that, but maybe there's also a time and a place to stand up.

It is one thing to remove hate from your heart, and it's another to allow bad behavior when it's within your power to do something about it. Forgiveness does not mean the other person behaves better. It simply means you allow your heart to let go of the animosity that you held. If you were paying somebody to work for you and instead of doing the work that they agreed to, they just came and hung out at your house, would you not refuse to pay them or ask them to leave?

You might forgive them in the sense that you aren't going to stay mad at them, but you certainly aren't going to hire them again. I think sometimes we need porcupines in this world to remind people that there are limits to how we can treat one another if we are willing to accept bad behavior from the people around us.

I think we're only perpetuating it. The internet is a perfect example of what happens when there are zero consequences. Fortunately, it's limited to words, but can you imagine if trolls spoke the same way in real life as they do on the internet? It doesn't happen because there are consequences to bad behavior in the real world.

The internet provides something of a mask for people to hide behind that allows them to avoid those consequences. I think it's a little ironic that most of us like to complain about people that complain a lot, but I think in some ways those people serve us. They may get upset about food being brought out too cold, and they may make a big deal out of having to wait too long for something.

It's also those same kinds of people that keep organizations on their toes without prickly people in the world; good service honestly might be non-existent. So even though those people obviously take it too far sometimes I know that I benefit from them. There are a lot of things in life that I do a good job on, not because I take such incredible pride in my work, but because I don't want people to complain.

And I think if we're honest with ourselves, that's how most of us often are. So maybe it's okay for a person to have some spikes on their back. It would be nice if we could all just get along, but for better or for worse, we're humans. And if one thing is true, it's that we will not always get along. But maybe it's just as well.

If we did all get along in perfect harmony, I think we would all be fairly bored in a world full of very imperfect people. It is good to be a porcupine. This is Skipping Stones - “Times to Be a Porcupine.” You can find this podcast anywhere you choose to listen to podcasts. For more information about me, feel free to visit skippingstonessr.com.

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