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Called it! “The opposite of fear,” Dienekes said, “is love.”

Dienekes asks his men to define the true opposite of fear, dismissing both fearlessness and fear of disgrace. Two younger men propose “women’s courage”…the strength to send sons and husbands into battle for the good of the whole. It made me wonder: isn’t that courage born of love? Love, not fearlessness, may be fear’s true opposite… why else act so selflessly for something you do not love?

I love Leonidas’ metaphor… As a soldier prepares for battle, he symbolically divides himself when splitting his “ticket,” a dog-tag-like token. One half is his humane self, left behind; the other is his hardened self, capable of killing & surviving in war. He explains that a man cannot fight w/o this division, and that if he survives, he reclaims his ticket, reuniting with the part of himself he set aside.