Goats

Eric Raymond has a very interesting post about gun control arguments, and how to get past the argument (the "superstructure", as he puts it) to get to the heart of the issue (the "substructure").

I think, now, that gun owners need to be replying more often to hoplophobes simply by echoing their “Baaa! Baaa! Baaaa!” back at them. Because only that reaches the actual fundamentals of the thinly-rationalized anti-firearms prejudice we so often encounter.

And besides being more effective, it’s in a sense a more honest kind of argument, too. Because for many of us the fundamental emotional issue is the same, seen from the other side. Yes, rational consideration of costs and benefits on both individual and social levels amply justifies firearms rights, but for many firearms owners that is surface structure. The substructure is more like this:

We are not sheep. We will not behave as sheep. We are armed because we refuse to be sheep.

Read the whole thing, and especially the comments - there's quite a discussion going on there.

One of the problems of getting to the heart of the matter - the substructure - is that the arguments are intellectual, but the issue is emotional. The key to speaking to that right-brain is proper use of symbols. The anti-gun crowd has done this pretty effectively, with the guns eek! argument. Raymond is turning symbols back on their users.

Now when I read the post, I didn't think of sheep, but rather goats. More specifically, a story by someone highly regarded by many hoplophobes: Joseph Campbell. He tells the story of the Tiger and the Goats, from Hindu mythos, and adds some commentary that I think touches on ESR's issue.

The Tiger and the Goats

The story I'd like to give is that of a tigress who was pregnant, and starving hungry. She came upon a little flock of goats. And in pouncing upon them, with the energy that she expended, she brought on the birth of her little one and her own death. So she died giving birth to a little tiger. The goats, meanwhile, had scattered, and they finally came back to their little grazing place, and they found this just-born little tiger and its dead mother. They had very strong parental instincts, and they adopted the little tiger, who grew up thinking he was a goat. He learned to bleat, he learned to eat grass, but the grass was very bad for his digestive system. He couldn't handle the cellulose. By the time he was an adolescent he was a pretty miserable specimen of his species.

At that time a male tiger pounced on the little flock, and they again scattered. But this little fellow was a tiger, he wasn't a goat. So there he was, standing. The big fellow looked at him, And he said, "What, you living here with these goats?"

The little tiger goes Maaaaa and begins nibbling grass in a kind of embarrassed way. The big fellow is mortified, like a father coming home and finding his son with long hair; something like that. So he swats him back and forth a couple of times because the little fellow could only bleat and nibble grass. Then he takes him by the neck and carries him to a pond.

And the big fellow says. "Now look into that pond." And the little one puts his face over it. And for the first time in his little life he sees his actual face. The big tiger puts his face over there, and he says, "You see! You've got the face of a tiger, you're like me, Be like me!"

Anyhow, the little tiger's beginning to sort of get the message. The big fellow's next discipline is to pick him up and take him to his den, where there are the remains of a recently slaughtered gazelle. The big fellow takes a chunk of this bloody stuff, and he says to the little one, "Open your face."

The little one backs off. He sways, "I'm a vegetarian."

"Well," says the big one, "none of that nonsense." And he shoves it down his throat. And the little one gags on it, as the text says, "As all do on true doctrine."

So, gagging on the true doctrine, it's nevertheless getting into his system since it is his proper food, and it activates his proper nervous system. Spontaneously moved by his proper food. he gives a little tiger roar, sort of Tiger Roar 101. Then the big guy says, "There we are. Now we've got it. Now we'll eat tiger food."

There's a moral here, of course, It is that we're all really tigers living here as goats. The function of sociology and most of our religious education is to teach us to be goats. The function of psychology [and the Mastodon Main Stream Media - ed] is to help us get comfortable with our inner goat. But the function of the proper interpretation of mythological symbols is to introduce you to your tiger face.

We see our tiger face; we don't need the Brady Crowd to help us get in touch with our inner goat. They've got the symbols all wrong, anyway.

The NPR crowd won't know how to argue with this, and it is very likely to make them stop and think - which was ESR's point. And even if you don't convince them, I'd think that you'd get double style points for the Joseph Campbell reference. For sure it would dispel the myth that only ignorant rednecks support gun rights.