Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/235821
The Art of Manliness Continued JOBS for TEAMS were closely connected. One type of man with unbridled thumos is he who wants to fight everyone about everything.The guy at the bar who starts a shoving match if he simply thinks you looked at him funny. He's filled with anger, but it has no specific target – it's just boiling inside him all the time, and the littlest thing can set it off.Thumos is much like fire – control it and it becomes an enormous power, handle is loosely and it can burn you and consume everything you touch. For the Greeks, Achilles was the archetype of a man who yielded too much to his thumos. Achilles' thumos imparts many good qualities to this consummate warrior; he is strong, brave, aggressive when wronged, driven to success, and nearly invulnerable. But his white-hot anger and concern for honor sometimes lead him to stubbornness and dishonor. The Iliad describes him as being moved by menos [anger] and overweening thumos," and its first two lines tellingly read: "Sing, Goddess, of the rage of Peleus' son Achilles/the accursed rage that brought great suffering to the Achaeans." When Agamemnon robs Achilles of his war prize and lover, Briseis, Achilles bristles at this dishonor and refuses to fight or lead his troops. Before he slays Hector, his nemesis pleads for an honorable burial, but Achilles roars in reply: "my rage, my fury [thumos] would drive me now to hack your flesh away and eat you raw – such agonies you have caused me!" He then kills Hector, ties him to a chariot, and shamefully drags his lifeless body around the gates of Troy. Because of such acts, Ajax says that Achilles has let his thumos become "savage, implacable, and even straightforwardly bad," and Apollo labels his thumos as "arrogant." The Greeks also warned that unbridled thumos could be "foolish" and "flighty," carrying a man after one flash of inspiration after another.They were speaking to the second type of man who leaves his thumos unbridled – he who gets a new idea, burns with excitement for it for a few days or weeks, but doesn't have the drive to keep it going. He quickly gets bored and moves onto the next thing he's "super passionate" about. His thumos is always chasing after one thing or another without clear aim or purpose. Thumos Under the Sway of the Dark Horse Besides failing to utilize the white horse, or letting it run wild, an additional problem the charioteer must avoid is letting his thumos get in-sync with the dark horse, rather than the other way around. As you'll remember from last time, the white horse, when properly trained, becomes the ally of the charioteer. Ideally, Reason and thumos work together to pull the rebellious dark horse in line with their mission and cadence. When there is a conflict between what Reason knows is right, and what the appetites want to do, thumos springs into action to defend Reason's aims. But if Reason isn't careful, the dark horse can get the white horse to team up with it instead. When this happens, what you get is what we'll call "spirited hedonism" — something the Greeks saw young people as especially susceptible to.Thumos feels the desire to do great things, to be passionate, to take on adventure and risk, and live life to the fullest, but the dark horse takes this motivation and shunts it off into a narrow and inferior channel – the mere penchant for partying hard.Thumos wants to really live, and the appetites convince him that nights out getting smashed at the same bars, repeated on an infinite loop, is real living. | 24 JobsForTeams0114_manliness.indd 5 www.jobsforteams.com 12/4/13 11:41 AM