KATANAGATARI 1

On the subject of whether people who have something to protect are stronger than those who don’t, time and place and circumstance are all factors, but if you zoom all the way out and gain a little headroom, I think it’s common for the thing you’re protecting to be protecting you, without you noticing, which makes me think it might be better to have something to protect. If you don’t have something to protect, I suppose that makes you free to do as you please, but freedom is no easy thing to wrangle. While it’s true that having something to protect may put you on the defense, that doesn’t mean not having something to protect will force you onto the offense, and thus treating the two situations as opposites is, in a certain sense, misunderstanding the issue. When you think about it, the “thing” in “something to protect” doesn’t always refer to a physical thing, or a living presence, like friends and family, or a lover, but oftentimes something more like dignity, or honor, or pride. If we’re including these metaphysical things under the rubric of “something to protect,” I think we can say there isn’t a person in the world who doesn’t have something like that. It might be going a little too far afield, but apparently, whether it’s a world war or a contest between individuals, when one side is on the offense, fighting to get something (to be blunt, trying to steal), and another side is on the defense, fighting to protect something (to be blunt again, trying to prevent something from being stolen), the defender wins in most cases. There’s a major gap in motivation, since people worry more about losing things than they do about acquiring them. Which is perfectly natural, but if you think about it this way, the concept of protecting something is not as pretty as its language suggests.