THE BLACK-OPS MYTH OF SHEEP, WOLVES AND SHEEPDOGS
Neville Raymond
There is a scene in the film, American Sniper where a father sits around the dinner table and pontificates to his sons about three types of people in the world. Sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. Sheep don’t believe that evil exists and are helpless to protect themselves from it. Wolves are predators who use violence to feed off the weak. Sheepdogs are those blessed with the gift of aggression who use it to protect the flock.
The sheep are the mass of humanity. The wolves are gangsters and mass murderers. The sheepdogs represent a rare breed of men - the cops and soldiers who live to confront the wolf.
The entire scene is one heaping dollop of black propaganda - bogus information that purports to come from the good guys, but is actually coming from the bad guys. Before we get into that, observe how the camera cuts away from the dining table to a schoolyard scene. The wolves are represented by a bully pummeling his victim. The sheepdog is the boy who steps in and starts punching the bully in a way which is indistinguishable from the bully punching his victim. Thus a phony duality is set up between sheepdog and wolf. It is not supposed to occur to us that the circle of children, shown egging on the combatants, could just as easily have used their superior strength in numbers to intervene and stop the fight. No, no! That would have taken them out of the sheep role - and completely dispensed with the sheepdog role to boot!
At the end of this little charade, the father delivers a stern warning. We are not raising any sheep in this family! He then goes through the motions of removing his belt as if to thrash his kids. The guy could be trapped in a time warp. You would never know from his parenting style that western democracies have banned corporal punishment for its brutalizing effects, and research increasingly shows that the motherlode of violence in the world is violence in the home.
Leaving that aside, let’s unpack the black-ops nature of this analogy. As analogies go, it blazed through military and police circles and took the rightwing blogosphere by storm. Not because it is an accurate representation of reality but because it reflects the gun-toting, war-crazed, militarized mindset that thrives on a politics of fear. The tripartite division into sheep, wolves and sheepdogs is no metaphor at all. It is an obsolete reality that once described a pastoral society. But once it is twisted into a self-serving metaphor, it applies to the kind of society that cannot mount an authentic defense against evil because it has founded its very existence on it.
The basic flaw in the analogy is its failure to ask the obvious question.
Who do the sheepdogs answer to?
Obviously sheepdogs do not operate in a vacuum. They may be an intelligent breed of canine, but they are no match for the humans who breed, train and put them to work. And by humans we mean not only shepherds but those who employ their services. The shepherd is the most critical component of this tripartite model. Without the shepherd, the whole analogy of sheep, sheepdogs and wolves falls apart like an elaborate snowman in the desert.
So if the sheep are people, wolves are evildoers, and sheepdogs are warrior-cops, who exactly are shepherds? A quick look at the shepherd’s business gives us the answer. And just what is this business? You don’t want to ask. And people like Dave Grossman - who popularized the sheepdog analogy in a book on the psychology of deadly combat, and goes around the country like a hysterical huckster of doom, hyping a militarized police force - don’t really want you to know. Because the business of the shepherd is an ugly business. Like much else in the Bible, the Good Shepherd is a myth. The practical reasons why the Shepherd is in the business of caring for his sheep is to fleece them, milk them dry, castrate them and butcher them.
So who in society corresponds to the shepherd’s predatory role? Well duh, the ruling class - the plutocracy, oligarchy, power elite, Wall Street. Whatever name you assign it, this class exists in relation to the majority of the human race exactly as the shepherd exists in relation to his sheep. As a predatory class that feeds off the people as the shepherd feeds off his flock.
Its banking system systematically fleeces the people. Its corporate system depresses their wages, deprives them of their livelihoods and depletes their life savings. Its mainstream media dumbs them down, much likes its education system, and distracts them with three-ring celebrity circuses that rob them of their thinking, critical faculties and cause them to undergo a kind of psychological castration. And lastly, the plutocratic power structure maximizes its market share and its lion’s share of the world’s resources by sending them out to be butchered en masse in battle.
Thus Sniper Dad gave us kids three parts of the story. The last and most important part is left out. Now that you know the rest of the story, go ahead and wear T-shirts peddled by Sheepdog Inc, sporting slogans like “Shirts for heroes who hunt down evil”. Go ahead and wallow in a gun culture and learn self-defense from “Sheepdog Seminars Churches.” Just don’t go telling half-truths when it comes to revealing the sheepdog’ s real function. Sure, it is to fend off the wolves - but finish the sentence, for goodness’ sake! It is to fend off the wolves so that the Shepherd can be left in peace to guzzle his sheep’s milk, keep warm in his sheep’s wool, and wolf down his mutton pie.
Truth to tell, many social commentators have exposed the Good Shepherd analogy as the sordid piece of propaganda it is, from Thrasymachus to Aldous Huxley. It still keeps turning up like a bad penny. Perhaps this time we can melt it down and bury it in a slag heap for good. The takeaway lesson is not that there is no Good Shepherd. Or that the sheepdog is no warm, fuzzy friend of ours. It is that people are not sheep. It is precisely because We the People are not sheep - precisely because we rebel and revolt and every so often mobilize to rise up and protest a rapacious regime that treacherously preys on us - that the sheepdogs put on their body armor and snarl and bite to keep us in line. For the sheepdog’s role is not to confront the real enemy but to provide it with every aid and comfort to be able to sleep well at night. It is to provide tactical and logistical support and security so that the predacious class can keep on getting away with murder, as it has done for thousands of years.
And that is why the Sheepdog Myth is the ultimate piece of black-ops propaganda. Those who disseminate it purport to be on the side of the people, when in fact they are valiantly trying to pull the wool over our eyes. They go around acting like they deserve our gratitude for serving as our guardians, saviors and protectors, when in fact they have one job in life that trumps all the others - and that is to safeguard the monopoly of those who exist to prey on us.
