Unfortunately, while he sat astride his captive, the prostrate chieftain, the lieutenant was so overcome with elation that he died. At the same time, the chieftain was so overcome with anger and frustration that he also died. There are people who see the world as a set of adversarial encounters that they can only either win or lose. Perhaps our whole society, with its pervasive metaphor of sports and adversarial system of justice, is built around this emotional instability. Certainly this consciousness is the prevailing one in the acupuncture world.
Every group wants to see itself as the victim of other groups.
At the same time, it wants to win some sort of victory over them. The results include turf wars and the loss of focus on the work itself. I think that another collorary of this mindset is that people locked into adversarial relations focus on their enemies as the source of their own problems. All of us see this commonly in the clinic. It is also not rare in our profession, where each of the various groups of acupuncturists expend great efforts to criticize the training and practices of other groups while all but ignoring their own deficiencies and problems.