When we develop the complementary strengths of predator and prey, the lion transforms from aggressor to protector, from the murderer of sensitivity to its champion, helping us access the courage to feel and the willingness to act. A human who embodies the wisdom of lion and horse neither suppresses emotion nor becomes paralyzed by it. She uses her keen prey-animal instincts to sense aggression underneath the toothy smile of a colleague and employs her agile, nonpredatory intelligence to evade trouble without engaging in a carnivorous battle to the death. She holds her ground without ordering everyone else around. She embodies true assertiveness, becoming neither tyrant nor victim. She develops focused, goal-oriented thinking alongside a responsive, heartfelt, process-oriented mind capable of nourishing relationship.
Bringing our predatory nature back into balance is the challenge of a lifetime for individuals, and a multigenerational project for humanity. Luckily, we have living, breathing horses to help us reawaken the wisdom of the prey while demanding that we own our inner lion and put it to good use.
The Hidden Revolution
If might always made right, and survival of the fittest depended solely on competition and brute force, American revolutionaries could never have defeated the British. As the grossly outnumbered colonial army ran out of guns, food, clothing, shoes, men, and finally, morale, it was nonpredatory wisdom that repeatedly turned the tide, challenging widespread, long-standing notions about the nature of power, ultimately paving the way for a truly collaborative society of free men and women.
In this respect, George Washington was at the head of a hidden revolution, changing the face of leadership itself. Early in the war, he blatantly rejected flamboyant, alpha-style dominance tactics in favor of a more thoughtful and compassionate approach, leading by example rather than by intimidation, adopting a role similar to what trainer Mark Rashid calls the “passive leader” in a horse herd. Remember, this is the strong yet steady, collected leader that others choose to follow, one who conserves energy for true emergencies, who doesn’t cause the group “unnecessary stress or aggravation,” someone with “quiet confidence, dependability, consistency, and a willingness not to use force.”
As Ron Chernow reveals in his intricate biography Washington: A Life, the general was consciously evolving a style of leadership the likes of which the world had never seen, working tirelessly to educate and uplift his long-suffering soldiers while dealing with constant assaults from a capricious, inexperienced, in-fighting Continental Congress and a skeptical public. Battling accusations that he was weak and indecisive (accusations by people who either wanted his job or were afraid that his popularity would make him too powerful), he nonetheless stayed the course, eventually proving himself worthy of the public’s trust through the very act of valuing that trust to begin with.
Washington’s tenure as commander in chief featured relatively few battles, often fought after extended intervals of relative calm, underscoring the importance of winning the allegiance of a population that vacillated between fealty to the Crown and patriotic indignation. The fair treatment of civilians formed an essential part of the war effort. Washington had a sure grasp of the principles of this republican revolution, asserting that “the spirit and willingness of the people must in a great measure take [the] place of coercion.” No British general could compete with him in this contest for popular opinion. With one eye fixed on the civilian populace, Washington showed punctilious respect for private property and was especially perturbed when American troops sacked houses under the pretext that the owners were Tories. His overriding goal was to contrast his own humane behavior with the predatory ways of the enemy.
Rejecting slash and burn, rape and pillage, techniques that the British still used at times, Washington guarded against needless trauma perpetrated by and on friends and foes alike. During those long stretches between battles, he recognized the value of a feminine presence in camp to counteract the despair and disillusionment of an army stretched to the limit, enlisting the support of women, not as prostitutes, but as social activists capable of providing comfort, care, and a host of other essential services to the soldiers. Even on the battlefield, his willingness to adopt a nonpredatory perspective saved the army on more than one occasion and, arguably, won him the war. In this respect, he managed to tame the inner lion of his own naturally aggressive, risk-taking, goal-oriented personality, resurrecting long-forgotten evasion maneuvers used by an ancient nomadic culture three thousand years earlier.
The Fool’s Progress
Despite being vastly outnumbered, sometimes three to one, by the British, Washington made several bold attempts to win the war quickly, heroic efforts that ultimately cost lives and territory. Like the ill-fated plan to tame his mother’s sorrel colt, a casualty of aggressive teenage idealism, Washington’s initial wartime experiments in gutsy, overtly confrontational strategies backfired for the most part. By January 1777, American forces had lost New York City and were about to lose Philadelphia. Colonial troops, which had numbered twenty thousand a year earlier, had dwindled to less than three thousand when enlistments expired that winter, as did the kind of popular support capable of producing new recruits. As one French observer remarked, “There is a hundred times more enthusiasm for the Revolution in any Paris café than in all the colonies together.”
Washington had two choices: surrender or adopt a “Fabian strategy.” Named after Fabius Maximus — a Roman general who, in the third century BCE, fought off a much larger enemy force through less-confrontational, defensive tactics — the second option was still hard for Washington to embrace. In His Excellency, Joseph Ellis reports that the general had to grapple with his own self-image and long-standing beliefs, finally relenting “less out of conviction than a realistic recognition of his limited resources.” As Ellis explains, “A Fabian strategy, like guerilla and terrorist strategies of the twentieth century, was the preferred approach of the weak. Washington did not believe that he was weak, and he thought of the Continental army as a projection of himself. He regarded battle as a summons to display one’s strength and courage; avoiding battle was akin to dishonorable behavior, like refusing to move forward in the face of musket and cannon fire.”
Washington also had to deal with the damage his reputation would initially suffer upon activating this obscure evasion strategy. It wasn’t a matter of swallowing his pride so much as volunteering to be misunderstood — and knowing he would be mocked for it — again. A year earlier, Washington had managed to hold the British at bay on a ruse, suddenly and inexplicably showing restraint in battle, when in fact his troops had run out of gunpowder and didn’t have the funds or connections to buy more for a good six months. And the general’s reward for keeping this deadly secret from all but his closest associates? To be portrayed as a yellow-bellied, bumbling fool in a well-attended Boston theater farce, by an actor stumbling around in a big, floppy wig, waving a rusty sword.
So here he was again, in the winter of 1777, concealing yet another potentially fatal weakness: if the British had known he’d been left with a mere twenty-five hundred men, they would have attacked without mercy and easily won the war. Through no small amount of intrigue and posturing, Washington managed to obscure the facts while devising a strategy based on what he called “the melancholy Truths” — namely, that the states would never raise enough men or money to wage a conventionally successful campaign. In late March, Washington sent Nathanael Greene to brief Congress on the necessity of fighting an evasive war of attrition, luring the enemy away from port cities to exhaust their men and their supplies. (The British at that time had the best navy in the world, but they were less impressive on solid ground. And in the wilderness, those bright red coats made easy targets.) Yet as Greene subsequently reported, the idea “appeared to be new” to colonial representatives. Ellis notes