~ Gorean Tactical Thinking ~
A Gorean Warrior will not run his opponent's body through with a sword if the same effect can be acheived by slashing the enemy's throat with a shallow cut. To his way of thinking, it would be foolish to waste the time and effort involved in freeing the trapped blade from the victim's body. The same holds true for such daily activities as shopping for a new slave. Why pay a gold tarn disk for something when the same can be had for the price of a cup of paga? The Gorean Warrior is, as I have already put forth, already counting the remaining time of his life in Ihn ... therefore, he is certainly not going to waste time or effort upon something he does not take seriously, or which means little to him. Though Gorean males are often categorized as cruel and callous, it is not callousness which drives them; it is a genuine habit of cutting through all the unnecessary trappings of life and getting straight to the heart of the matter, that which is most important to him.
Oddly enough, therefore, a Gorean Warrior will often spend a great amount of time mastering a skill, training a slave or other animal to serve him, or even eating a large feast. Though this may seem incongrous to the layman, the truth is that these habits are based upon his hatred of waste, and his determination to spend as little time as possible upon unimportant activity. The way that this works is simple: A Gorean Warrior plans to do something one time and one time only, and he therefore strives to do it completely and correctly the first time he does it. There is nothing a Gorean hates more than repeating an order or action a second time. When given a larma, for instance, a trained Gorean Warrior will eat it. Completely. He will not cease his assault upon the larma until he has devoured every last speck of the fruit's flesh, picked out the seeds from the core, and probably eaten the core as well. He wants to eat a larma, so he will do so in a thorough and correct manner, if at all possible.
That does not mean he will defer other actions until he is finished with the larma ... not if they are pressing on him. He will be as effecient as possible, and then move along to the next task at hand. When cleaning his weaponry, patrolling his city, or instructing his slaves, he will be just as thorough. These things give him the satisfaction of accomplishment, and he knows that if he does this correctly the first time, he will have saved himself much wasted time in the future which he would have spent re-doing these things again.
When a Gorean Warrior says "there exists nothing but gold and steel" what he is saying is that when all matters of human existence are pared down to their essentials, these two items are the absolute sum in the equation ... the final driving forces whose interaction impacts his life to the greatest extent. A Gorean likes to get down to basics in such a fashion; not only does it remind him not to waste his time on foolish pursuits, it also allows him the luxury of forgetting trivialities and concentrating upon the most important things which currently exist in his life, whether those things consist of leading tarnsmen in an attack or an enemy cylinder or correctly lacing his sandals in preparation for a long march.
In short, he tactically picks and chooses what is most important to him at the moment, and performs each task in front of him completely and to the best of his ability, lest he be forced to pay for any inefficiency later.
Life & Death - Gorean Pragmatism |
Gold & Steel - Gorean Tactical Thinking | Summation |
