Yesterday, I watched a good portion of the Masters and it was very exciting, believe it or not. There were 6 or 7 people in the running for first place at different times and the final round is always the most interesting to watch because we finally get to see who wins. But at the end of a grueling 72 holes, there were 3 people tied for the lead. But, of course, there was only one green jacket. So they had to end up playing 2 more holes just so they could satisfy their need for who is better beyond a reasonable doubt. It wasn’t enough that three people played just as good as each other in regulation. They had to play 2 more holes for an evenaul winner. The pressure must have been unbelievable. But I hated this. What was so bad about having 3 people co-win the Masters? Why does it always have to be just one in sports? One team, one golfer, one champion? It’s very exclutory. If that’s even a word.
Why can’t sports be entertaining without a winner or a loser? It doesn’t seem like they are maximizing their fun potential. Everyone could have fun if there were no winners and no losers, but society would never allow that. We always have to keep score, tally up the winners and losers, just so that we can feel good or bad about our supposed team of choice. And we have absolutely no say in the outcome, except to the extent that we support our team through purchasing merchandise to better fund their overpriced players. It truly is amazing what some athletes can do and they should be commended for it. But this obsession with the best and the worst is becoming rather obsessive and pathological. Nobody ever remembers who came in second in the last year’s tournament. You’re either on top, or in the gutter. That is such an American mentality.
The American mentality is that since we’re one of the most powerful nations in the world, it’s good to be proud of it. It’s good to gloat our power over other countries like we’re so much better than them. We are superior in every way because we say so and if you argue with us, we’ll bomb the crap out of your country. We’re willing to die to defend our superiority and to defend our way of life. That’s such rhetoric that it doesn’t even really matter because we’re told these propaganda on a daily basis. When you’re in the good position to win, it’s good to have other people lose, but when you’re in the losing position, it’s not fair. Why do you think the elites of this country set all the policy while the poor and uneducated just do the menial jobs and collapse from exhaustion every night? Because the people at the top are playing to win, and playing so tha they are the only ones who win. It’s a game to them, just like any other spectator sport that generates more revenue than most anything else.
Sure, sports are entertaining, but they are very individualistic. There’s always only one winner. There can only be one best. Why? Why only one? Why can’t everyone just have a good time and not keep score? Because there is such a need in humans to be better than other people at different things. People use this to polish their self-esteem, at the expense of others’. These types of things can scar a child for life. Being in the loser bracket in sports makes him look like a nerd. Being in the loser bracket in academics makes him look like a dumbass. And so on and so forth. Since birth, we are constantly competing with our peers in various activities instead of just enjoying ourselves and this, to me, is a big problem. We’re so addicted to better that we train our kids to be better and the cycle continues. It really is sickening.
People just can’t enjoy themselves anymore. It’s all about winning now. Being the best. It sickens me to my very core, but what can I do about it? People are not going to change their ways across the globe because of one of my blog posts. And if a certain subset of the population does, the people who are still striving to be the best will take over them. So it’s a lose-lose situation for everyone in reality. We all lose at some point. America will lose a war and feel defeated and see what they’ve done to hundreds of countries in their brief history. They’ll feel what the Native Americans felt when they were systematically exterminated by the White man. Because the White men thought they were better than those “savages,” so they’d better remove them from view because seeing losers is so unbearable that only the winners of anything should ever be seen. Even if that means killing those pesky natives and destroying all their environments so they can no longer sustain themselves.
This all stems from the part of human that is flawed. The part that is very domineering and pathologically bent on destruction and uniformity. I fear that the only way to end this terrible world as we know it today is to exterminate humans. But that’s not politically viable, now is it? Sure, Hitler exterminated a bunch of people, but it was a different race than the one he glorified. It was the loser race, the Jewish, the people that were not desirable in Hitler’s eyes. There had to be a “best race,” one that would make the most powerful people who would dominate the world even better. But that’s the problem. You see what progress does to us? You see what being better can turn us into? Massarcing people just because they have a different race or religion than us because our way of life and point of origin is better. Yeah, that sounds really enlightened. But anyway, I had no idea that this post would go from sports and end up at the Holocaust, but that’s why I freewrite instead of doing pointless outlines.
The onlly answer to this is that we are highly habitual in nature. I’d like to close this entry with a quote from an essay called The Effects of Highly Habitual People. Sure, it was written in 2003 and it talks about Bush a lot, but it’s very insightful and answers a very difficult question to answer: What is evil anyway? I suggest reading the whole essay, but the sample is below:
I’m not just talking about loving our cars, which eat friendly downtowns and shit strip malls, and demand the massacres of people living on top of the oil, or loving television, which treats us all like we’re the stupidest person watching, and replaces the last shreds of our cultural diversity with a global monoculture where the meaning of life is to be richer and thinner and buy standardized products and services. These are just the latest manifestations of an out-of-balance groove we’ve been in for thousands of years. When ancient civilizations made bronze weapons to go kill and enslave their neighbors, what were they getting out of it?
It’s complicated. On one level you’ve got your evil individuals who love killing and dominating because it gives them an opportunity to contract their empathy. Then you’ve got the “economic” motivation, but that doesn’t seem to make any sense, since stone age people already had everything they needed — but hold that thought… Also you’ve got group narcissism, the same thing we have today with flags and sports teams, where people have had their sense of their innate value so hammered out of them that they can feel valuable only by identifying with some dominating abstraction to which they fictitiously belong. But why must these symbols dominate, or even compete? Why can’t soldiers and athletes all play cooperative games with no winning or losing? Why does your group have to be “better”?
Because “better” is what we’re addicted to. It’s what attracts so many people to Bush, who represents more weapons, more concentration of wealth, more control. It’s what drives so much labor beyond what’s necessary for survival, billions of poorer people sacrificing the trillions of hours of their lives so their kids or grandkids can move up the pyramid, can fail to enjoy the trappings of higher social status while stepping on the next person down.
It’s a narrow, quantitative “better,” a tight, competitive, judging “better.” It has nothing to do with the feel of warm sand on bare feet, or the pleasure of hanging out with your friends. It’s about things that can be numbered and ranked, things that are scarce and demand striving. It’s because of this addiction that people who go into the wilderness don’t just relax by a stream all day, but push themselves all day up a trail. What “better” really means is “requiring more labor.”
If the ground were littered with diamonds and gold, and we could get mud only by digging deep mines, mud would be “better,” and people in shameful golden houses would work their whole lives for the privilege of living in classy mud huts. It sounds absurd, but the world we live in is even more satanic, because what’s actually all over the ground — soil and clay and grass and wood — is good for growing food and making houses, while what’s deep in the earth — iron and gold and oil and uranium — is good for building weapons and social inequality and alienating machines.
So we’ve got several habitual behaviors going at once. There’s the tension between the unsatisfying experience of the moment and the ideal image in our heads. Then there’s the stressed-out activity driven by this tension, and the satisfaction of “succeeding,” contracting our reality toward the ideal. And also there’s the terror of having nothing to do — we call it “boredom” but it’s really free time, truly open time in which all the painful truths we’ve been hiding threaten to flood our awareness.
But at the same time that we must be busy “improving” things, we also love sameness, recognition, being where we’ve been before. We resolve this paradox by striving for more and more unattainable versions of the same thing: the lawn we’re used to with fewer and fewer “weeds,” the TV programming we’re used to on better TV sets, the driving we’re used to in newer classier cars, a higher position in the labor career we’re used to. Whatever it is, it’s never truly different, and it’s never enough.
So civilization as we know it is a bad groove, or a giant intertwined nest of bad habits, and how it got started we can only guess. But deeper than this, why are we habitual in the first place? Why do we tend to get in grooves and stay there? Grooves themselves are not civilized — they are natural. People are habitual because biological life is habitual.
If you found this post funny, insightful, helpful, or throught-provoking, feel free to donate to my site.
