On The Four Virtues

The works of Carlos Castaneda were a big early influence on me, mostly on account of their having been a big influence on my father. One of my favorite bits of teaching from Castaneda is when he lists the four essential virtues one must have in order to be a warrior (the term "warrior," as Castaneda uses it and as I use it, is more akin to "Jedi" then to, say, "samurai"). A warrior, he says, must be "cunning, ruthless, patient, and sweet."

Like most valuable lessons that I was presented with in my youth, there was a gap of about twenty years between the time I could quote this and the time I actually understood it well enough to apply it usefully in my own life. But these days I find it invaluable. To really live well, powerfully, and happily, one must cultivate all four of these virtues. If a person is easily made miserable by day-to-day interactions with others, it can often be traced to that person being deficient in one or more of these four virtues.

Patience and sweetness are almost universally regarded as virtues, even by those who don't possess them, while cunning and ruthlessness are generally not regarded as virtuous traits. This is because so much evil is perpetrated by those who possess cunning and ruthlessness but are deficient in patience and sweetness. Ruthlessness, as I understand Castaneda's use of the term, isn't the same as callousness or bloodlust. It's the ability to draw a line, to stand firm, to do what has to be done no matter who it pisses off, to do the right thing even if it's not the polite thing. Gandhi and Martin Luther King were masters of combining ruthlessness, patience, and sweetness.

Cunning, as near as I've been able to figure out, is largely the ability to make clear-headed tactical decisions, including decisions as to how and in what measure to apply the other three virtues in a given situation.

I suspect that Castaneda used the terms "cunning" and "ruthless," instead of, say, "clever" and "strong-willed," as a cunning and ruthless strategy to challenge the bullshit of the sort of people who constantly resort to passive-aggressive obfuscations in order to continue thinking of themselves as "nice" people.