"An advantage the Dalai Lama offers over Rambo and the Godfather is the vision of peace and happiness realizable through sustained, difficult, and gratifying disciplines of examining the inner self and outer reality in ways that allow for changes from destructive, adversarial behavior to that of compassion, mutuality, and love."
"Rambo and the Dalai Lama" is a sociological and psychological expose of the human compulsion to compete with and domineer over one another in adversarial relationships. Fellman explores multiple facets of our society including politics, religion, sports, popular music and films in order to portray how adversarialism permeates our culture and threatens it at the level of global warfare. Although adversarial behavior persists deep within our interactions, institutions, and modes of thought, there are also seeds of "mutualism." Mutualism represents a shift from competition to cooperation, from perceiving people as "other" or as "enemy" to perceiving connectedness through empathy and love. Fellman offers the reader insight into this new paradigm and proposes ways to pursue more mutualistic behaviors and tendencies. One of the strengths of his analysis is his infusion of personal experience in his pursuit of overcoming his own adversarial tendencies and the mental tribulations accompanying his undertaking. Fellman encourages exploration and experimentation both internally and externally, weather by reappropriating our self or looking for and fostering mutualism in our environment. Like a ripple in a pond, our own experiments in mutualism have the potential to stimulate a global paradigm shift, something that the author would like to live to see.
Citation Information:
Fellman, G. (1998). Rambo and the Dalai Lama: The compulsion to win and its threat to human survival. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
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