Throughout history every great society, in order to sustain itself, has had a warrior class. The societies whose warriors have been most successful and are the most legendary are not necessarily those that had the best fighting techniques, or who were the most fierce, or had the best weapons, or had the biggest armies, or best leaders, or had secret fighting techniques. The most successful warriors throughout history have been those who have followed a strict code of ethics based on duty and honor. Some examples are Japan’s Samurai, the Hwarang of Korea, the warrior caste of India, the chivalric orders of medieval Europe, many of the tribes of native America, and the United States Marine Corps. They lived according to strict codes of honor that focused on duty.To live your life according to duty and honor is not only the right way to live, it is also a powerful way to live. All men want to be brave. They want to have confidence, courage and the ability to be fearless in the face of confrontation, danger and death. This ability almost always eludes them because they search for it in the wrong places. They pursue it by acting tough, being a bully, mouthing off to people, getting tattoos, playing rough sports, having tough friends, getting dangerous jobs, joining gangs, fighting, bragging, putting others down, etc. These are all empty as a means of developing true confidence and the warrior spirit. The only path to true honor based confidence and courage is through the constant fulfillment of duty. It is achieved though living your life in a way where you no longer see things as tough or frightening or too overwhelming, but only in terms of ones duty to do what is right. It is through consistently doing what is right, no matter how dangerous, boring, embarrassing, tedious, irritating, mundane, emotional, or physically exhausting it happens to be. A person that lives his life this way won’t have to worry whether he will act in the face of great odds. He acts consistently everyday based on duty, so if that duty happens to require great risk, the risk is hardly considered. Only the obligation to do what is right by fulfilling his duty truly matters. So what is our duty as martial artists, as warriors? The same as it should be for every living person and the same as it was before we became warriors, to do what is right regardless of the personal cost. As warriors we should not only see clearer the weight of this duty, but we have an even greater responsibility, because we have a greater capacity to fulfill it. We have a greater ability to intervene. We have the ability to act, to fight back andto defend. It is also imperative as members of the warrior class that we recognize this responsibility, because conversely we have a larger capacity to abuse, to bully and to intimidate. If you don’t think you have a greater responsibility, you are like someone carrying around a gun pointing it a everyone that looks at you funny and then hiding under a table with the rest of the patrons, afraid to use your weapons, as the resteraunt that you are having lunch at is robbed by a man with a knife. Only accepting responsibility through honor and duty separate warriors from street thugs.