Killer Competitiveness (Book Three)

Killer Competitiveness (Book Three)

by R. E. Puhek;

.Preface;

A FLIGHT INTO FOLLY;

This work reflects a theme that lies at the heart of the glory and degradation that is humanity. Nothing better characterizes our existence than incessant struggle. When ice ages come and climates reverse themselves, we invent new methods for protecting our delicate bodies. No social oppression so far has been heavy enough to kill the human will to struggle. Even where deprived of the capability to do battle physically, we have waged the struggle intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually.

Nevertheless, this “will to power” in the service of ennobling aims has as often been perverted and misdirected into violence, war, rape, and the economic and political oppression of others. Indeed, Adolf Hitler entitled the work that inspired his drive to set up a murderous tyranny Mein Kampf-“my struggle,” “my battle.” The call to sacrifice, to do battle with opposing forces, has been the most persuasive call even when in the service of human degradation and destruction. So badly do we want causes worth struggling for that if none appears we will enter into a self-sacrificing effort whose intensity creates the illusion that we are serving a great cause.

What is highest in us is also lowest. We are paradoxes, living contradictions. What is worst about us is our ability and will to avoid facing this contradictory nature, or, upon facing it, to run screaming from the view. Whoever fails to see is wilfully ignorant, but whoever sees and flees is a cowardly fool. We will destroy ourselves and many others in our flight from truth.

That we glorify “free competition” in one part of our lives and roundly condemn it in another is a sign of how important it is. Another sign are the emotions stirred in us at different times for, and against, competition. The very organization that most glorifies competition and condemns communal cooperativeness-a business corporation in the United States, for example-actually contains much collectivism in its competitive life. Competing units, whether they are families, cities, or corporations, must have internal cooperation to survive and prosper in the competitive environment. Similarly, the very organizations that praise collectivism and condemn competition contain much competition in their existence. They use the cattle prod of competitive motives to stimulate the energy of members to contribute to the organization’s well-being. The former Soviet Union may have had a collectivist economy, but it stimulated individual workers to compete for honors within it. Contradictory attitudes towards competition reveal a human paradox and show why we need to understand it. A refusal to come to grips with the origin and outcome of competition may well condemn us to collapse. This is more true, not less, today when on the international level the value of competition appears to have defeated that of cooperativeness.

In the coming chapters, I shall differentiate between inevitable competition and unnecessary “killer” competitiveness. This will include the sketch of a distinction laying the groundwork for understanding how our good impulses turn destructive and anti-human. It also will expose the universality of the destructive power of killer competitiveness that touches human life at all levels-personal, family, civil, national, and international. It will illustrate the reason for this perversion, how it is related to a general lack of meaningfulness in life, and how its end can liberate us to creative existence.

Part I;

COMPETITIVENESS;

In our normal state we seem to be remote from the plainest and most important truths…. The insights of one hour are blotted out by the events of the next, and few of us can hold on to our real selves long enough to discover the momentous truths about ourselves and this whirling earth to which we cling. This is especially true of men at war. The great god Mars tries to blind us when we enter his realm, and when we leave he gives us a generous cup of the waters of Lethe to drink.

J. Glenn Gray

“The Warriors”

;

Chapter 1;

COMPETITION ;

AND ;

COMPETITIVENESS;

All nature competes for goods; only human nature finds good in competing. In this statement is locked the entire tragedy of competitiveness. Competition is natural, spontaneous, and inevitable while competitiveness is unnatural, forced, and entirely avoidable. Competition is ethically neutral; competitiveness is always evil. Competition is an objective environmental condition; competitiveness is a perverted subjective approach to living in that physical and social environment.

All life makes value judgments and, on the basis of them, struggles with the world. For non-human life, however, the judgments are spontaneous, direct, immediate, or even “instinctual.” Whether their value judgments are implanted by heredity or learned, animals or plants confronted with a “good” respond immediately. They may be frustrated in pursuing that good; they may face either physical or emotional obstacles to success. Only the human being is plagued by genuine ambivalence. Ambivalence is the existence of two contradictory inner values. You can get the one only at the price of the other, and you can give up neither.

What is the origin of this ambivalence? It might be-as many social-psychologists claim-that ambivalence exists because the physical environment presents you with two contradictory sources of material satisfaction or because the social environment conditions you into accepting two contradictory values such as the value of “loving” each other and yet remaining “independent.” Important in ambivalence is not, however, the presence of two contradictory values wherever derived. If that were all there was to the problem of ambivalence, then you could resolved it easily. You could select first one and then the other. You would follow, first, the more powerful and then, when you satisfy it, the less. But, no, you can hold two contradictory and unequal values simultaneously and be unable to follow one over the other. In its extreme form, ambivalence transforms itself into schizophrenia-“split mind” or “divided heart.” The primary symptom of schizophrenia is withdrawal from life. It can become so extreme that you become autistic, wrapped up in the self and unresponsive to any kind of stimulation.

In the form that affects us all, ambivalence gives human life its special characteristic: freedom. We are the only natural beings that are or can be free. We are the only beings in whom value judgments are established by neither heredity alone nor heredity combined with conditioning. Values can be “implanted” in us biologically or socially, but they present themselves to us, not one after the other but simultaneously so we must select in some fashion and, at least partly, independently which value we will follow. All animals may have to choose what will best satisfy their hunger, but only the human animal can chose between eating at all when hungry or dieting. If human life is anything, it is constant conscious choice of what value to select and follow in the world.

Once you determine your values, then you go off, just like any other animal, to realize them. It is then that you run into the system of competition. Anything you determine will satisfy you is in limited supply; you have to struggle with the environment to get it. Of course, you do cooperate with others at every level of existence; you work with nature, plants, animals, and other people. In the end, however, the limited nature of resources leads you to struggle or compete with others for them.

So far, all is natural, spontaneous, and very human. Now, however, life begins to transform itself from healthy competition into destructive competitiveness. This transformation makes you less than human, less than plant, less than mineral. From human heights, you fall into demonic depths. See how far Lucifer, the light bearer of knowledge, falls into the depths of darkness. Ignorance becomes so profound it is less than animal and so destructive that it can only be called demonic.

The key to growth and development as a human being is facing and transcending your ambivalence. When you encounter a contradiction in values, you cannot use your reasoning capacity to rank them and choose one or the other because one is a “yes” and the other is a “no” to the same thing. Instead, you have to abstract what is good in both sides and reconcile them so a third standard, at a higher level of goodness, guides your life.

Those who are the greatest human beings amongst us are always those who can tolerate the widest range of contradictions in themselves and then work to transcend them. This is because the unifying of contradictions raises you to a higher level of wisdom. Take one simple analogy from the outer realm: when you want light but not smoke and, therefore, light but not fire, you can work to discover a way to reconcile your contradictory desires. As a result, you invent the electric light bulb. The activities of inventors and creators in the inner domain parallel those of creators in the outer domain in that both need to face contradictions and work them out.

Ambivalence is the basis of all individual and group growth. Ultimately, schizophrenics are sick not because of their ambivalence, but only because, not knowing what to do with it, of their paralysis. They, in fact, may be the ones who have the greatest chance to become fully human. Their problem is that they are convinced that to be ambivalent and not able to be at peace in choosing options in life as the rest of us do is to be sick. That is why they end paralyzed in mind and in action, unable even to try to imagine a good that synthesizes both the “yes” that attracts them to something in life and the “no” that repels them from it.

Before examining the rise and destructiveness of competitiveness, let us look for a moment at an example of ambivalence. Boredom is one of the many concrete and experiential forms of ambivalence. As a form of ambivalence, boredom is both a mental and an emotional state. Your mind sees nothing to do; your emotions feel everything you are doing is empty. Boredom is the ambivalence of, on the one hand, valuing inaction because no activity is stimulating to your mind and emotions while, on the other hand, valuing action because inaction is not stimulating either. In the state of boredom, you value action and inaction simultaneously: doing something bores you, and doing nothing bores you.

Unfortunately, you can deal with boredom in not one but two ways. You can either face the opposing values and transcend them or you can kill your consciousness of the negative, confusing, and uncomfortable feeling by manipulating your thoughts and emotions to disguise or escape it. The second alternative is the essence of competitiveness and of its demonic destructive power.

Competition arises when you seek the goods you value. Competition is good both for the group and for yourself as an individual. When others challenge you, they test your judgment. You will not collapse when you face this if the value you seek in the world represents the faithfully good. If the opposition of other people does disturb you, they are providing you an opportunity to reevaluate and work out whatever contradictions you had not yet seen in your values. When this happens to individuals within groups, the groups themselves benefit by the emergence of increasingly developed people and products.

Competitiveness reverses this; it generates decay in both individual and society. Competitiveness sets up a situation where your motive stops being inner and the product of inner exploration and instead becomes whatever is established as valuable by others or by the rules of the game. It is one thing to work hard to hit a little ball into a hole with a stick because inwardly you judge perfection as such an activity to be highly valuable; it is quite another and opposite thing to “play golf” and become mentally and emotionally dominated by the game so that you feel and think that “hitting a hole in one” is a fantastic accomplishment just because it is hard or because the rules of the game value it. When this happens, your struggle for success is relative to or dependent on alien, artificial, and potentially inhuman values. Your whole life of sport, science, or business may be made up of mental and emotional commitments to values you have never judged for yourself.

It is hard to account for why, if it is really true that the goals of hitting balls or becoming a corporate executive do not come from yourself-doing the one or being the other-you think you have done good and feel so much pleasure. How dare anyone in a free country tell you that what you like to do is evil: aren’t critics just “into” their own little competitiveness games of one-upmanship where they try to show their superiority? Corruption and decay can, indeed, be in all styles of living and usually is worst amongst those who descry most the corruption in others. That is exactly why all of us need to ask ourselves questions like: “Do you really yourself value hitting little balls into holes with sticks?” For any of us who ask this kind of question the quick answer is invariably, “Yes, I do.” But why do you value it? “Because it is so much fun.” Most of us are willing to go only this far into an analysis of our values.

Fun, in the modern age, appears as a universal, and a universally acceptable, motive. However, unless you really believe that fun is an absolute value (“I can kill because to me it is fun.”), you still must ask yourself why it is fun and whether the activity that is fun is not itself either bad or at least not important enough to justify your level of excitement and pleasure in doing it. Reflection is likely to awaken you to a contradiction: you do not judge it intellectually to be a great good but emotionally it feels great. When something is emotionally significant but intellectually insignificant, it is a sign of ambivalence. Your task is not yet complete. You have not yet found your Self and the ground of your own, independent values. It is not that you should choose to follow your mind and stop playing golf because it is dumb or to follow your feelings and keep playing because its fun. It is always a mistake to “just say no” to either one. The contradiction should drive you to transcend the low level this confusion reveals about your self-knowledge.

When you examine this kind of ambivalence, you are likely to find another level in it. You realize that without golf you are bored to death-that golf is a means you use to avoid boredom. It creates the false belief that you are doing something significant and valuable. This illusion arises because the relative or game good you have not defined as good is manipulating your emotions and thoughts. You can, therefore, feel and think your life is significant when in reality it is not. Golf relieves your boredom by making you unconscious of it, but it does not cure the problem that the boredom symbolizes. Boredom is calling you to make a value judgment in the midst of ambivalence. But ambivalence is uncomfortable and painful-you feel it as boredom-you rid yourself of the boredom but the ambivalence remains. The greater the ambivalence (“I want to study this book so badly to get a good grade, but I can’t stand reading it”), the greater the experience of boredom; the greater the experience of boredom, the greater the intensity with which you play the game that relieves the boredom; the more intensely you play the game, the more the ambivalence is reinforced; the more the ambivalence is reinforced, the more the boredom, and so on in a vicious circle.

The result of all this is that (1) life increasingly dissatisfies you, (2) the competition, which before you got competitive was a force for human betterment, becomes a method for fogging your consciousness, and (3) you perpetrate increasing degrees of violence upon nature and others. The competition is no longer for a good you define. Moreover, it prevents you from reassessing the values you are finding inadequate. Thus, it finally works against the good itself. It can only be demonic. It despoils the physical and human environments. War, revolution, oppression, and pollution are all consequences of competition gone mad. You fight not for a good but for success or because you like the challenge. You despoil nature not really to get the “goods” you want but you want “goods” to prove yourself superior and successful. We can prevent the decline of human existence only if we can preserve competition without the poison of competitive motives.

Chapter 2;

GOD TRANSCENDENT ;

AND ;

GOD IMMANENT;

If to be human is to be ambivalent and if it is the discomfort of ambivalence, expressed in experiences such as boredom, that drive us to escape our plight through competitiveness, why is it that some cultures are more competitive than others? If ambivalence is equally distributed, should not the mechanism that conceals it be as equally distributed? Unequal degrees of competitiveness in cultures is a phenomenon extending from the ancient world to our own day. The pre-Christian Greeks, for example, were renowned competitors who took great delight in their games while the early Egyptians found religious sports uninteresting. Many defenders of competitiveness in our own time have tried to see a relationship between it and freedom and democracy. If such a relationship is there, it is peripheral. After all, some of the greatest competitors in Greece were from non-democratic and unfree states just in the twentieth century some of the greatest competitors have arisen from anti-democratic such as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

A massive emphasis on competitiveness in a culture derives not only from ambivalence but also from the lack of ways for transcending it. The famous theologian Paul Tillich described god as an “ultimate concern.” “Objectively,” your god is whatever ultimately concerns you. When your ultimate concern shrinks from the transcendent to the immanent-from what is found above and beyond to what is found below and near-you move farther from the chance of having a god that you can share with others. For example, if your most ultimate concern is your family or even your city, when its well-being is at odds with other families or cities, you will be placed in competition with them. If your ultimate concern is with having a good time, then you will compete with others for the scare means of having that good time. We connect freedom, democracy, and especially pluralism with a high level of competitiveness because they permit of many different ultimate concerns. In fact, the openly-proclaimed slogan of some liberal-pluralists is that each of us should have our own god or, even more radically, that each of us is our own god.

The diversity that constitutes a healthy competition in liberal societies is not itself killer competitiveness. Killer competitiveness arises amidst diversity and liberty when god (or “ultimate concern”) loses all transcendent character and is made wholly immanent. When the kind of ultimate concern we have becomes wholly “this-worldly” (a city, family, even a church) or when the nature of the good is what is visible rather than invisible, then we are unable to overcome our own ambivalence. When you are hungry and think of eating but your concept of what will satisfy you is confined to an object like an apple and you have to work and slave to produce the means to purchase the apple, then you are ambivalent-the apple is both your pleasure and the occasion of your pain. Unless you can understand that the good is not the apple but the ending of hunger, something wholly invisible, you may be unable to avoid the chains of slavery by filling yourself by eating the orange that grows freely in your back yard.

Since you lack an adequate image of the good, god, or ultimate concern that transcends matter, you will be unable to deal with your ambivalence. Unable to deal with it, you will try to hide from its tormenting pain. You seek to cover your nakedness. Under these circumstances you may involve yourself in competition to prove to yourself that your concern is truly ultimate-that your god is true or faithful. Since everyone’s god is different, in pluralist societies not only will everyone be a threat and challenge to you but also all your struggles with them will become religious wars. Even your most intimate associates, spouse, and children will all be challenges to your god. The religious war of all against all returns in a civilized form.

There is a prevalent tendency in countries like the United States to see a connection between authoritarianism or tyranny and the absence of competitiveness. Historians often suggest that what accounts for the lesser competitiveness of the medieval period was that societies fell under the authority of the church hierarchy. Similarly, they note that the Egyptians lacked competitiveness, and they had an authoritarian system. We like to think that the presence of competitiveness guarantees freedom. This simply is not true. Competitiveness does not only fail to preserve freedom, it is one of the primary methods you use to escape from freedom. A massive historical accident where the overthrow of monolithic religions coincided with the overthrow of a transcendent god has caused us to confuse the two. Unless we can end this confusion and can recover the transcendent, we are all most in danger of totalitarian systems when we seem most protected by apparent liberty and pluralism.

You suffer the grand illusion that you are serving your highest individual good (gods, ultimate concerns) when you submit to participating in the collective competitive system. However, if you betray yourself in thinking they are your gods when they are actually false-that is, you feel them to be good but only because they are means of hiding the pain of ambivalence from consciousness-then the society that serves them only apparently serves you and is in fact contributing to our destruction. The simplest examples of this betrayal are drugs and entertainment. You want alcohol and films. Your “free” choice of them turns those who supply them to you into big business. However, if they keep you in a steady state of unconsciousness, they are destructive though they seem to be your highest pleasure.

Our error is to confuse the humanly oppressive social hierarchy with the hierarchy of values. We want to submit to no heavenly god because our image of this transcendent god is a political tyrant who imposes laws and burdens and makes us feel inferior. If we could imagine the transcendent in a spiritual rather than a material way, the idea of hierarchy might be less hateful. For example, you like corn, chocolate cake, blueberry pie, but, above all, strawberry shortcake; or you like Johnny, Tom, and Carol, but you love Mary. If faced with the material alternatives of who to spend the afternoon with or which of the desserts to eat, you would not feel that your preference for Mary or for the shortcake was in any way an oppressive tyranny. Your hierarchies of values are spiritual not material. It is the same with a transcendent god who stands at the top of and above your other values. Where you experience this good as higher and stronger, you do no feel less but more free when you follow it.

The great danger in thinking about spiritual “hierarchies” is that you can misconstrue them. Considering the two analogies above, you can believe that the value hierarchies you follow are based simply upon intensities of physical or emotional excitement and pleasure. It is exactly because competitiveness generates a physical and an emotional “high” or “peak experience” that makes it such a good imitation of God. Competitiveness in games compels you to endure intense suffering to win. Both play and pain can generate ecstasy from the unspiritual patterns of normal life. The end of the competition releases the tension and the burden of pain. Still within the ecstatic state, the ending of the pain creates the illusion of a spiritual or transcendent pleasure.

What was wrong with the Egyptian and Medieval way of life was not their sense of a god who transcended the everyday values the people lived by. Instead, it was that those who sensed this transcendent god, defined it. Thus they fell into the illusion of defining what, as transcendent, remains ultimately indefinable. Few experienced God. Few had inner contact with the transcendent divine. However, since everyone talked and acted as if they did and elaborate religious ceremonies produced an emotional, if temporary, ecstasy that felt like communion with God, everyone could live a mundane life and pursue ambivalent values while believing in the presence of the transcendent and feeling fulfilled as their frustrated energy was siphoned of in the ceremonies. As the Greeks and later the Romans preserved the great error of the Egyptians so we, moderns preserve the medieval error. That error is the belief that we can define the good itself, God, or ultimate concern. Presuming that we can define it, we multiply our illusions by thinking that we have defined it and that we are serving it when we serve our definition.

It makes no difference whether you see the defined good in individual or in collective terms. The view that it not only does make a difference but also a decisive one is another modern deception. Two kinds of social arrangements always face each other, one individualist and one collectivist. Both become increasingly competitive. The presence of competitiveness in both is proof that neither is facing the basic problem. Unless they face it, within and between them human reconciliation is impossible. The only togetherness they can have is togetherness in death and destruction

International, national, personal competitiveness-all reflect the problem of God. You struggle for your God-what you know to be good. You delude yourself into thinking that what you deeply know not to be good is. Everyone does the same. The solution to the god problem, which is at the root of killer competitiveness, is to be found in the realization that the Egyptians and Medievals were right ontologically (they were right in their view that the good is beyond us and our understanding now or that god transcends us and our knowledge) while the Greeks of Athens and modern democratic liberals are right epistemologically (that the only way to get a better understanding of what is lies within the person-god is immanent to our knowledge). We must not love the transcendent god that social power defines for us (god is other), but we must neither cling to a god-good that is wholly immanent (god is me). If the wielders of social power, whether they call themselves a government or a church, accept that there is a transcendent god that they do not know but they are always in a process of seeking to know, then killer competitiveness can end.

The “death-of-god” theology of the past century was a hopeful beginning in this. It recognized the collapse or “death” of the illusory defined god. Unfortunately, too many of us became terrorized by a glimpse of the ambivalence represented by the contradiction between immanence and transcendence. Some reacted by madly reaffirming the existence of the defunct god. Others rid themselves completely of the notion of a transcendent god and passed so quickly through the ambivalence of simultaneous transcendence and immanence that they moved directly into following the mind-fogging devices of modern civilization as their ultimate concerns. If only we grasped the “death-of-god” notion as the death of god epistemologically (the realization we will never entirely understand good) and not ontologically (there is no transcendent god), we might get somewhere. Competitiveness is both based on the god problem (it is the preeminent escape from the realization of the emptiness of life) and contributes to the preservation of the god problem (“Why do we need to resolve a problem we don’t feel exists; after all, we’re all having a good time or will be soon!”).

Chapter 3;

PERFORMANCE ;

AND ;

PLEASURE;

Competitiveness justifies itself to the competitive person in two ways-performance and pleasure. Both are experienced. In them, you experience good in association with competitiveness. The good you find in competitiveness is immediate and direct; it is no mere abstract theory. On the other hand, arguments that competitiveness is bad have an academic, a dry and deathly feel. Your standing up for and defending the value of competitiveness looks like a defense of life against death: “How boring life would by without it!”

Your improvement in performance is objective evidence to you that your involvement in competitiveness is desirable. Every success, short of absolute and final victory, in the competitive field reinforces its value. Each promotion in a corporation, every score in a game, adds to the evidence that your ability is improving. Anything that improves your abilities must be good. This impression persists even when you do not yourself participate in a competitive game but only help and encourage others to play it better. The grade-school kick-ball coach can thrill to see pupils developing “motor skills” through their competitiveness in a game. English teachers know that the most effective way to teach spelling and vocabulary is through “spelling bees” where teams try to show their superiority by handling more words than others. Among the teaching and coaching staffs themselves, administrators argue, the best way of getting good work is to pit one person against another for jobs, promotions, or salaries.

Twin specters, however, sometimes arise to haunt the conviction that higher levels of performance prove the value of the competitive system. The first of this is achieving “success” and the second is falling into “failure.” When you justify competitiveness by its usefulness in squeezing out higher and higher performance levels, you are defining the quality of performance as the end-good and competitiveness as only the means. Success or failure, however, will call into question the value of performance. The questioning will show that competitiveness does not serve value. It creates value.

The first instance where you can see that competitiveness is creating value is when you are so talented at a particular mental or physical skill that it is easy for you to perform and you are so much better at it than any other person that your success in any competitive situation is total. When you are truly “number one,” you start falling into doubt. You find it hard to value something that is so easy. You may even, under those circumstances, appear arrogant to observers who resent you for it: “Just who does that asshole think he is-god?” What really upsets them is not your “arrogance” but their fear. They are afraid of your lack of care because it can reveal to them that their excitement never for the good they thought they could achieve by competing was instead simply an illusion of value generated by how hard it was to do. They feel the contempt you have not for people who try hard and fail at something worthwhile but for those who spend so much of their lives striving for something so meaningless. It is exactly because you are beginning to gain humility about the value of what you have been doing and so about yourself as a success doing it that they are upset.

Similarly, where your competitive struggle has led you not to success but to utter failure without hope of any success in the future, you either commit suicide, find another competitive game to play, or realize that you are worthy regardless of your inability to succeed. Even if you have never been involved in a competitive game where you are “the last,” at the bottom of the heap, the one who could do nothing and the one nobody wants on their side, still you cannot avoid imagining the possibility of being the complete failure. In imagination or reality, how can you tolerate yourself if you cannot perform? How can you relate to others? You can either doubt yourself and wallow in self-pity or you can doubt the value of performance and affirm yourself and others despite incapacities.

Both complete success and total failure force you to doubt either yourself or the competitive standard.

In addition to the objective criterion, improvement in performance, there is another, a subjective, justification of the value of competitiveness-pleasure. It is not only that you take pleasure in knowing that you can perform well but also that the performance itself is pleasurable. It feels good to do better than someone else; it feels good to do better today at something than you did yesterday; it feels good to be able to do what you could not do before and what few others can do. Win or lose, it feels good to be part of a team in a game.

This subjective evidence of the goodness of competitiveness is harder to dispute than the objective performance standard for several reasons. First, pleasure is immediate. You do not have to reflect on your performance to enjoy it. Moreover, since to undertake criticism of competitiveness is a slow, mediate, and laborious process, you experience it as pain. Second, that pleasure is good is the prevailing doctrine of our age. Third, the dominance of the ideology of individualism allows you to ignore suggestions that your pleasure may be hurtful. The ideology suggests pleasures are wholly individual; the individual and only the individual can know what is good for the individual.

Both because all of us have tasted failure in some area of life and out of sympathy for others who are physically or mentally limited and unable to perform, it is easy to question and even overcome our arguments against opposition to objective performance standards to justify competition. However, because of the factors listed above, it is very hard to reevaluate competitiveness when we experience it as fun. It is easy to reject contemporary views that rate people solely by their skills at competitive or even productive activities. Those who do so often say they value people because of their inherent humanity. However, they mean by this that everybody has a right to their own pleasure. The anti-hero, who fails to measure up to the normal rules and standards, replaces the hero in art, literature, sport, and life. Everywhere we emphasize the subjective states of pleasure of consumers. To some people this attitude looks decadent and irresponsible. To others it is liberation from the tyranny of the object. In reality it is nothing but a movement from objective to subjective forms of repression.

What determines whether the pleasure it gives justifies any object or activity you pursue entirely depends on the exact source of the pleasure. Even if we accept the hedonistic position that if pleasure is not itself good it always reveals the presence of some good, we must still reject the claims (1) that pleasure always comes because a pure Good is present rather than some limited and mixed good and (2) that the individual never mistakes the source of the pleasure. Eating sugar is pleasurable, but the pleasure is limited and is likely to produce more pain through heart disease, obesity, and tooth decay than it is worth. You may think that the pleasure is coming from the candy you eat rather than realize that it is coming from our hunger as well. Thus, with a different state in your stomach, eating a piece of candy could be an actual pain. As with performance, therefore, we can take pleasure as an absolute value when we use it to justify competitiveness-“It’s fun!”-But, in fact, neither performance nor pleasure are absolute values. Anyone who reflects for a moment will realize they are not.

The other obstacle to being able to judge the origins of the pleasure of competitiveness is that they are so many and varied. Each pleasure is at least slightly different for each person. Nevertheless, some common elements exist in all of them. First, there is one value universal to all competitiveness, excitement. You feel important and significant when you are absorbed in competitive activities. Even if you do not care about what the content of the competitive system is (you may make a game out of everything and anything from walking, reading, and sleeping to gambling, house-building, and watching television), you are likely to love competition because its excitement makes it fun. Your illusion is that the competitive situation causes pleasure. What you usually fail to consider is that the causes of the pleasure of excitement is not so much the activity as the lack of intensity, interest, and significance in your everyday, normal life that the game allows you to escape from. “Fine,” you say, “interest, excitement, and significance must be humanly good, and the competitive system is producing them.” It is not so. In fact the opposite is true. Whoever finds life uninteresting and lacking in intensity and, therefore, enters into the competitive system will achieve there only the illusion of intensity. The two aspects of the game generate the illusion for you. The first is that everyone else is excited. You catch their excitement and conclude that the game everyone is focussing on must cause it. Second, like climbing the mountain, every game presents you with a difficult challenge. The difficulty met makes the game feel important.

Each form of competitiveness differs slightly in why it brings pleasure to separate people but usually the differences are all variations of this false excitement. For most, the pleasures also have to do with the experience of power. Performance, therefore, is not only an objective but also a subjective standard. The good performance feels good because it shows that you “can do.” No doubt, for you to be able “to do” is a good, but competitiveness produces an unauthentic experience of power. It is those who feel powerless in actual life (and this must be more and more of us in modern civilization) who seek to play, or watch others play, competitive games to experience vicariously the power they otherwise lack. Their pleasure comes from the movement from impotence to potence. The more impotent you feel outside the game, the better you will feel about the pseudo-potency inside it. The movement gives you pleasure. True power may be humanly desirable, but it is not yours in the pleasure of competitiveness. If you need to return weekly or even daily to games to feel excitement and power, you clearly are seeking emotional support to sustain a lie about yourself to yourself.

All supports for the claim that competitiveness is good break down if followed to their roots. Complete success or complete failure forces you to understand this. Then not only might you think the competitiveness is empty but also you lose the good feeling for it. The constant victor no longer feels intense pleasure in each new victory; the constant loser gets little pleasure out of competitiveness. Indeed, only the limbo of being between success and failure is likely to keep you in the game, mentally fogged, and emotionally confused. “The agony of defeat, the ecstasy of victory” exist only in relationship to each other. If there is no agony of powerlessness in your life, then you will have no ecstasy of power from success. If there is no victory or success in the game, even the agony of failure will disappear. The agony exists only while you believe you have a chance of success. The pleasure of victory and the pain of defeat represent a state where you are divided against yourself but trying to become whole. Competitiveness not only preserves division but also reinforces it. Only by the ignorance and confusion produced by, and covering over, your inner division can the inhuman values enthroned in the competitive system continue to rule your life.

Chapter 4;

RELATIVITY ;

AND ;

EXCELLENCE;

Good, better, best. Were you asked which of these words expresses the pinnacle of human aspiration, chances are your answer would be “best.” “Good” expresses positive qualities; “better” expresses superior quality; “best” expresses the superlative quality. One sign of how far competitiveness has succeeded in destroying our minds is how deeply the term “good” has fallen and how high “better” and “best” have been elevated. Brief reflection will reveal that no praise given to you is higher than saying that you are good.

“Good” is an absolute value. “Better” and “best” are merely relative values. A best friend can never be higher than a good friend. “Best” merely surveys the range of friends and claims that of all your friends this one is the highest. All your friendships may be very bad. None is good, but, of the bad, this is the best. In the competitive system and to the competitive person what matters are relative, not absolute, values. If you are buying a washing machine, you want the best one on the market-as long as you can afford it. Manufacturers know this and advertise their machines as the best. They may be machines that barely get clothes clean and may waste gallons of water, heat, and detergent, but of what is available, they are the best.

The wrestler, President, corporate executive, or physician may want to be the best of their peers in the city, state, nation, or world. To them it would not matter that sport, government, business, or medicine are fundamentally corrupt and bad in human terms. What alone matters is whether they excel at them. Ironically, highly competitive people may congratulate themselves on being non-competitive. They may claim that they do not “compete” with others but only want to better themselves or be better today than they were yesterday. They please themselves with the claim, “I am doing my best; tomorrow I also will do my best, and it will be even better than today.” “My children will live still better than I.” “America is the best country in the world, and tomorrow it will be even better.”

Competitiveness is value relativism in two ways. It is not simply that competitive people hanker to be better or best and so pursue relative values. Even when they seek to “be good,” it is always good at something. This is the second aspect of relativism. The good for them is relative to that activity or thing. The struggle to make a good washing machine rather than the “best” is actually the first step toward the total relativizing of value. The original value judgment that it is beneficial to have clean clothes and an easy means to keep them clean lead to the invention of the machine. By devoting yourself to the production of washing machines, you make a relative good absolute. The value of clean clothes is always relative to the human good. At best, it is only part of what is that good. Competitive people get lost in trying to make good washing machines. It becomes for them an absolute value, not in their minds but in their lives. To make a good washing machine at least temporarily becomes the good.

The crucial danger in competitiveness, therefore, is not that it involves you in relative values but that it gets you to make them into absolutes. Competitive people are closest to the human good in spiritual terms-a deep unsatisfied longing afflicts them -but also are farthest in practical terms. Competitive people must believe the relative good that absorbs them is absolute. They could not get so completely absorbed in anything that was not absolutely good. Because they cannot see or do the absolute good, they therefore need to pretend that what they are doing is absolutely good. Of course, they do not deceive themselves consciously. In fact, they may even disparage the importance of what they are doing. While they are doing it, however, they experience it as absolutely good. Locked within the grip of competitiveness, their absorption is complete. For a time, they experience nothing as better.

Ironically, the closer you are to genuine, absolute human values, the less absolute and the more open and tolerant you grow while the more the smallest of relative values absorbs you, the more absolute and intolerant you get. This is why no true image of the good or God is a threat to freedom, but every faulty image is. Where freedom has to be framed in ideology and enforced by law, there you can be certain people are least free. They have become unfree because they have made the relative into the absolute.

You can produce an absolute out of a relative, however, only because you first had produced a relative out of the absolute. Your own humanity or our own hidden depths, is the absolute ground for all your activity. You find yourself, however, made relative to organization, machine, function, role. Your value, not your personal value but your universal human value, is made relative to some function you are called upon to perform. All activities are only relatively valuable. Their value depends upon the quality of life they give. You find not only your personal but also your human value made relative to activity. Your own humanity is never revealed to you as the basis of all value. You understand how you function but cannot understand the human value of your functions. To develop sufficient energy to perform them. You need to make the function an absolute above. In performing it, you then get a sense of value. Instead of giving value to what you do, what you do gives value to you.

If we consider in history the emergence of craftspeople who try to manufacture a good automobile, we find that the minute they lose sight of the relative place of auto transportation in human life and hide themselves in the making of the automobile as an end, they have become competitive. They are deriving their value from the product rather than giving value to it. The next step historically is into the market place where the producers seek to sell the automobiles so they can continue making them and prosper. At this point the center of motivation shifts from “good” car to “better” or “best” car. The concern is no longer to produce quality transportation but only a “better” car to convince people to buy it. The third and last refuge of competitiveness takes the form of prostitution. Prostitution means a complete loss of interest in quality itself and its replacement with an interest only in the appearance of quality. It also means the lack of any care for the productive activity itself but only for the payment. We move from the craft-motivated economy to the market-motivated economy and end in the multi-national-conglomerate-corporate-bureaucratic controlled economy. The first emphasizes manufacture; the second, sales; the third, profit. Conglomerate corporations are diverse by nature and are willing to get into anything that will turn a profit and maintain the continuity of the abstract “enterprise” itself regardless of what happens to its working members.

As societies pass through these three competitive modes, so do all the individuals. They become simultaneously craftspeople (if only in “hobbies” and games), salespeople (especially if the only “product” is themselves), and prostitutes primarily interested in gathering wealth in the abstract sense of money regardless of its use or usefulness. Each household becomes a craft, sales, and conglomerate enterprise.

The “pursuit of excellence” has become the most devastating trap for humanity. “Whatever you do (and, of course, in the modern world you can do anything since there are no universal human values to restrain you), do it well.” “Excel in school, work, sport, and business.” It is so severe a danger because it sounds so noble. “Grade the papers following the standards: ‘good,’ ‘better,’ ‘excellent.'” “This award is for excellence in art, literature, music, film, science, drama, journalism”-and on and on and on. To excel is only to go farther but only at some specific activity. “Excellence” attracts all of us today because it is abstract. The term fits anyone performing any activity. However, the function of the idea of excellence is to encourage us to be better or best rather than to find out what is good to do and achieve it.

“Rather be first in Hell than second in Heaven.” Be the number one murderer, the best murderer in all the earth, rather than be a second best human being even when to be first is to be evil and to be second is to be good. The competitive terms “better” and “best” place us in an impossible situation because they leave no room for being good. Better and best assume and imply that relative states of goodness are inevitable-someone must be less and someone else more. To be first implies today that you are closest to the good. The illusion is that by striving to become first and achieving it, you become good while not only is that not true but also your very striving to be first guarantees that you remain in a condition distant from the good. Being second best today implies that you can never be good. So you find yourself between two impossible possibilities: either reconcile yourself to second place or other inferior places and never achieving the good or seek first place having no assurance that it is good. In the second alternative guarantees that you have chosen an inferior to the good because you got caught up in the striving. The only alternative is to accept a non-competitive stance: that good is higher than better and best. It sees the ultimate state as not one of divisive hierarchies or excellence but equality in the good. We then neither resign ourselves to evil and inferior places nor struggle to be first and best. Instead, we keep our eyes on the good and refuse to rate ourselves relative to others or relative to any activity. We do not stagnate. We strive. We struggle, however, not for abstract “excellence” but for the concrete good.

;

Chapter 5;

THE RENUNCIATION ;

OF LIFE;

We have two and only two paths to knowledge of life. The first is the path that starts in the outer senses (smelling, touching, seeing, hearing, and tasting) and ends in mental theory -the Head. The other begins in the inner senses (feelings) and ends in mental intuition-the Heart. As long as you keep these two separate, you can have no true understanding of reality. You still may collect useful knowledge, but it will never bring you to the point of understanding, let along wisdom. Worst of all, while the separation remains, you will misunderstand the reality and value not only of objects but also of yourself. Actually, in the most literal sense, you will not exist. The life you live when your heart is estranged from your head is not your own life but a divided life, an alienated life, a life lived against yourself.

You do not exist when your knowing faculties are divided. This is because the division in knowledge induces disintegration in your understanding of what is good. Active energy gathers and focuses only when the head or heart apprehend a good. You accumulate energy, of course, by killing and eating other beings, by breathing, and by impressions your senses gather. This is the energy you spend on all your activities. However, these activities and, therefore, the life they compose are yours only when the goods you believe in and work toward are yours. The value judgments must be yours if the life serving them is to be your life. They will not be yours unless you create them by a combining the principle tools you have for understanding value. Moreover, it is certain that they will not be yours when your two faculties for knowing good are working at odds with one another.

Competitiveness is the device that grants the head and heart a divorce from each other and allows them to lead the rest of their separated existences in hostility to one another.

No human being can renounce life without a struggle. You can abolish neither the head nor the heart while the human organism is still there. You can, of course, destroy the organism and not merely by physical death. You can destroy it by a lobotomy where you cut out part of your mind that is necessary for the full range of human feelings and experience. You can also destroy it by electrical shocks that temporarily achieve the same result without the trauma of surgery, or, most gently of all, by mind-dulling chemicals of a kind that range from alcohol to Valium. There is even evidence of human death by hypnosis and self-hypnosis. None of these have so far been tried on a large scale. Indeed, the very motivation to keep using them is the continuing presence of the two opposite dimensions in human life. The need to use them is evidence that they have not accomplished their intended result. Competitiveness is the perfect solution-a way to renounce life without murder or suicide. It is perfect because it both preserves the two dimensions and maintains permanently the division between them. Thus, it preserves human renunciation forever.

The head can deal only with definitions. It can handle realities only if it sees them as structures, and all structures are definitions. Structures are created only when the eye and the mind cooperate to make cuts in the fabric of reality. The fabric presents itself to us whole, all and everything, and without seam. The universe is of one piece to each of our senses. The head can deal with the morass of impressions, however, only after it cuts in the hearing operation sounds from silence and one sound from another. It can use the flood of information the eyes collect only after, in the seeing operation, it separates shape from background, color from shape, and one color from another. It does all this by the device of naming and labeling.

Similarly, the head can deal with the good only after it defines it. The flow of negative and positive value experiences enfolds us just as reality does. The head can make nothing out of this until it has cut into pieces the value membrane that spreads over the fabric of reality. The head cannot deal with “the good.” It can deal only with “goods” such as good apples, good pies, or good earth. It must first define and delimit the good by some realistic term such as “apple” and “earth.” The head can, of course, remove itself from living experience and deal with the term “the good” but only as an abstractly defined category. If “the good” has no definition-neither material nor abstract-but is open to life, the head cannot deal with it.

Competitiveness is a device that alters the good so the head can appear to grasp it. Competitiveness is, indeed, the preeminent definer of good. Seized by the power of competitiveness, the head immediately “knows” that the good is getting the ball across the line, getting an “A” on an exam paper, getting more money. Competitiveness panders to the weakness of the head in two ways: it offers the good in the form of words that the head can easily apprehend, and it gives the head an easy way of serving this verbalized good. It can serve the good by reasoning-by using logic to figure out what you must do to achieve it. The words are simple and specific, and they point to a simple and specific activity: balls and lines, a mark on a report card, and a certain amount of money.

You might think that the head would rebel. It has defined the good with behavioral and verbal clarity, but the definition is arbitrary and illogical. Moreover, once it has made the definition, the head becomes nothing but its slave. But no! The more arbitrary the definition, the more it pleases the head. Why? Because the head craves clarity and certainty but finds only confusion and fog when it turns to life. It is only too ready to escape from the pain of confusion into clarity even at the price of truth. The more arbitrary the definition, the greater clarity it has. The rules of the game stipulate that it is good to cross the line with the ball in your hand. The less you have to deal with ambiguous or invisible factors such as “the good” or the “bad intentions” of the ball-player, the less you will experience confusion.

Not only does the primary function of the head cease with its enthronement of clear and arbitrary definitions of the good, but it is only after it has constructed such definitions that it comes fully into the area of its own competence. However clearly defined the value, disputes in life will inevitably arise over its application in life. What will become an issue is whether the value has “in fact” been attained. Where exactly is “the line?” When is a person “running?” Under what circumstances exactly is the player “carrying” the ball-when it is under his arm only or may it be when he is catching it on his finger tips after it has been thrown to him? The head works efficiently, effectively, and excitedly when it seeks to establish these facts in life. Moreover, the head also works well when figuring out what are the best means to achieve the given value in the competitive activity. Not only is the head active then, but its action appears to set up value, relative value it is true (value relative to the given defined goal), but the head often fails to make this distinction. Instead, since it pretends it understands absolute value (it has accepted the rules of the game) and then determines the best path to this absolute value (exercises its reasoning power), it develops the illusion of being master of values. The head is working in a utilitarian fashion. It has become the means to the defined values. However, since it “contains” (it holds the definition of) the value it takes to be absolute, it identifies itself with the absolute.

You are competitive. You are a player, and your life falls under the domination of the head. You try to figure out whether and when you and other players have actually achieved the game’s value. You are constantly striving to imagine and then act out ever more effective or “better” methods of achieving that good. Your head feels freed, but your life is in chains as the head devises ever new strategies demanding that you pour out your life energy not only into the mental processes but also to perform what the head demands. You are a slave bound to the servitude of a good defined in and by the game. Inexplicable frustration floods your life, but the ideology of competitiveness that all your thoughts have long surrendered to says you must not allow yourself to falter in your game and give in to your feelings of unhappiness. They would undermine your will and so your “toughness” and dedication to the battle. Worse situations may arise. It is bad enough when your head tyrannizes over your life, but worse when some other person becomes your all-powerful head and you become body-servant. Referees and coaches do your thinking for you, you are only to do the performing. Government, bosses, chairpersons-all become “heads” who determine whether you have achieved the goal and how better to marshal your energy to achieve it when they judge you have not. Then your slavery becomes social. Nevertheless, you still justify your slavery in your own weakened mind by the head-ideology of “necessity” or the desirability of not showing “weakness” and “cowardice” in the face of a hard job.

If you are living against yourself in this way, why do you not rebel? You do rebel-repeatedly. You rebel against your parents. You rebel against your employers. You rebel against your government. Yet all your rebellions miss the point. Even where you do not out of guilt displace your rebellious frustration into bouts of drunkenness and acts of minor crime late at night, even where you direct them at the parent, the employer, the school so you directly confront the “head” person who is tyrannizing you, your rebellion will not achieve freedom. These rebellions miss the source of your slavery and so slavery always returns only to lead you to another hopeless rebellion against it. You fail to rebel against the true tyrant. You fail to rebel against the tyranny of the head itself. You seek only to replace one head-the head of another-with another head-yours. In either case, you remain locked within the fetters of the competitive system.

There have, however, been long periods when rebellion never came while the tyranny prevailed. Does that mean there is a good tyranny, a benevolent dictatorship? No. Rebellion occurs only when the dissatisfaction of the heart reaches consciousness. Not only are there techniques-such as ideological derailments-that prevent this dissatisfaction from breaking out of its confines and bubbling up, but the competitive system can appease the heart with “achievements” even if they are illusory. The head lays many burdens upon the heart, but the heart has its consolations. One of them is the applause and recognition of others. Generous admiration and good feelings flow toward the successful competitor. However, most important to the heart is the way that the competitive system satisfies it by the ecstasy it grants when, after great pains and suffering, the competitive goal is accomplished. By virtue of this flood of good feeling, the head “proves” to the heart that it was right all along to force you to act despite the pain. Besides, the head always whispers “hope” to the heart and hope itself is a consolation even where it is blind and dumb.

The heart has its own tyranny. It is the tyranny of good feelings. Do what feels good. If victory feels good, it is good. If the hope of victory feels good, then it is good. If you think victory will be good, then it is good. Thus, you accomplish the highest level of the tyranny of the head and heart over your life in the competitive system. This is so because this competitive system keeps the head and heart separated and yet bound together in the game. It does not allow the heart to judge the burdens the head imposes as means to accomplishing the goal. It controls the heart with promises. The promise feels “fulfilled” in the heart’s illusory thrill of victory, but the competitive system never allows the head to judge logically the value of that victory. It never permits the head to ask, “What’s so good about running across a line with a ball.” The heart rebukes the head if it should even try to raise the question saying, “The heart has its reasons that the head can never penetrate.” “Be still and enjoy.” At one moment the head is the tyrant and at the next, the heart.

The heart should not win in the training field and against the coaches but neither should the head’s cynicism of the heart’s ecstasy in victory. Both head and heart must subordinate themselves to principles higher than themselves. The heart must yield to guidance from beyond its definitions. You find this higher principle in the self embedded in life. However, this Self does not exist and cannot be born in a divided house. At the beginning of the journey of self-discovery, the head and heart must operate as constant checks on each other and must operate simultaneously. There will be confusion. This is not the Self. It is the only path to Self. If you persist on the path, the Self will grow. While competitiveness remains, however, the Self is lost.

PART II;

COMPETITIVENESS KILLS;

The only chance of salvation would lie in a methodological cooperation between all, strong and weak, to accomplish decentralization of social life. The absurdity of such an idea strikes you immediately. Such a form of cooperation is impossible to imagine, even in dreams, in a civilization that is based on competition, on struggle, on war.

Simone Weil

“Oppression and Liberty”

;

Chapter 6;

CAPITALISM ;

AND ;

CORRUPTION;

When you enter certain kinds of stores, you sometimes feel flustered, uncomfortable, as if something is not right. The shops where you feel most disturbed are exactly the ones that prevailing opinion suggests you should feel most at home. They are often small shops or ones where the sales people try hardest to be helpful-furniture stores, department stores, restaurants with friendly waiters and waitresses. Cold, cavernous, and impersonal stores feel somehow less disturbing. Massive shopping centers and self-service discount businesses may be popular not so much because of lower prices because of how they provide an escape from the uneasy, discomfort of the smaller places.

According to contemporary ideas, you should feel more at home in the small, personal establishments and more alien in the large impersonal ones. The reverse is the case. If you measure yourself by contemporary standards, you might conclude that something is wrong with you: you are afraid to be close to others and at their touch you flee from intimacy to impersonality. This may be the case, but it may also be that the prevailing ideas are wrong and your feelings are right. Without being fully aware of it, you sense three distinct kinds of social relationships when you go shopping: the personal, the impersonal, and the personalized impersonal. The genuinely personal relationship can exist only where sales people are humanly present to themselves and in their work. Such a situation might exist today but it is very, very rare. Mostly, you have contact only with the impersonal and the personalized impersonal, and, of the two, personalized impersonality is the far more oppressive.

When sales people behave in a warm and friendly fashion but are not true to themselves in their work and so are not genuinely close to their customers, when they are acting as they do primarily because it is “good for business” or because it “feels good” to them, they add hypocrisy to their impersonal attitude. They do not know your needs and do not even have an interest in them, but they pretend they do and pretend they have. They may find their work insignificant, demeaning, and even depersonalizing to them. Their only motive is income and profit. Even in the depersonalized self-service store hypocrisy can enter at the check-out counter. There, if you are lucky, you get the cool treatment that forces you to realize the impersonality of the store. There, if you are less fortunate, you get friendly treatment and so also a dose of the hypocritical added to the impersonal. Emotionally, if not consciously, you know this, and inwardly you recoil. Nevertheless, you may respond automatically to pleasantry by being pleasant yourself and so get drawn into complicity in the hypocrisy. If you do not, then you look crude and cold.

Emotional discomfort is only one way that relationships with business organization betray a basic flaw. Other evidence includes the combination of high prices and low quality. Even in the most expensive products, such as furniture made by leading companies, a certain tackiness, indeed, a certain phoniness, makes it distasteful. Manufacturers produce an abstract chair and then add style on the surface to distinguish it from other chairs to sell it. At best, they copy old furniture. The more careful the copy, the more pleasing and costly the furniture gets. The state of the furniture mirrors the state of those who sell it-empty lives filled only with the need to work for wages overlaid with the hypocrisy of good cheer. Most of us can afford only the furniture that is phony in construction as well as decoration. The most expensive is genuine oak carefully distressed to “look” old and worm-holed. The affordable is a wonder of modern technology-cardboard and plastic cunningly altered to look like real wood. It is an imitation of an imitation. Even the sturdy pieces lack quality. They are phony and false.

Business leaders ascribe the lack of quality to workers who just don’t care about their work. Workers claim that management is responsible for the decline since it is interested only in “bottom line” profits. They point out that if management cannot make profits by reducing workers’ wages, it will cut corners in production to get them. Management establishes incredibly complex “quality control” techniques only to insist that workers ignore them. Either the employees hired to examine products for flaws stop caring, or, if they do reject a few inferior units of a product as excessively defective, management blatantly or discreetly ignores the rejection to keep the merchandise flowing down the assembly line to sales. In the end, everyone-corporate executives, consumers, and workers-knows that something is very wrong, but each tries to blame the other without recognizing that while the other is blamable so are those who accuse them. Unreasonable and over-demanding customers treat salespeople like slightly soured milk. Salespeople and other workers deceive customers and employers alike. Executives are interested in short-run profits and, at most, a veneered pretense of “responsibility” but couldn’t care less for workers and customers. It is bad. Everyone knows it is bad, but no one can do anything about it until they understand the reason it is so bad.

The source of the decline in economic life is competitiveness. The biggest illusion of nineteenth and twentieth century economics was the view that the stimulus of competitiveness increases both the quantity and quality of products. The unbelievably simplistic view ran that people do not need to want to produce quality goods as long as they strive only to maximize their profits, they will be forced in the “open market” to produce the highest quality at the lowest price. Otherwise their sales will go to another producer. In the abstract, and only in the abstract, this might make sense: hypothetical sense but real nonsense. The competitive profit motive unleashes two forces in the economy. One removes emphasis on the productive process and the quality of the product since the profit motive focuses interest absolutely outside the product. The other ends competition.

Where competition temporarily survives, things may not yet be as bad as they will later become. Competition, instead of competitiveness, is an external condition where all do their best at what they think is good and then the whole group can judge quality of their products comparatively. What is vital is that under competition producers devote themselves to the good in the product they make or the service they provide. Then competition does not disturb them. They may even welcome it since they can learn by virtue of it. Whatever is the outcome of the competition, they will continue to do their best, as they always have, but only at what they see as good.

Competitiveness, by contrast, destroys this attitude and approach to life. Quality suffers first. Once the focus of your interest is not on what you value and what you are doing but on what others value as expressed in their willingness to pay, you will be willing to produce whatever they want to increase your income. Once you, in your work, begin to pander to alien values, values not your own but those of the alienated “consumer,” your product becomes increasingly phony and loses quality. That it retains even the image of quality is only a deception. Eventually and on the bases of either conscious or unconscious knowledge that they have been bilked, consumers respond with deep hostility. The producers react with still greater hostility. Consequently, not only the craft but also the whole civilization declines.

The second problem unfolds slowly but inexorably. Competitiveness moves against competition. This is what happened in the United States between the middle of the nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth centuries. Producers stop engaging in the joys of producing what they experience as good. Instead, they take on the economic goal of earning higher wages and profits. They find what they now value, their income, limited or even threatened by competition from other producers who also desire high profits. Instead of responding by manufacturing higher quality products (They cannot do this because they have no sense of what is higher quality other than what is “demanded” in the marketplace while “consumers” in the marketplace who are also infected by competitiveness have no standards other than “cheapness.”), they maximize profits by tactics designed to eliminate competition rather than meet it. They end competition by destroying competitors or merging with them in a variety of ways. For a time, government may intervene to prevent the destruction of competition, but eventually there are only two alternatives: either huge monolithic multi-national corporate entities ruling the economy after competition has been eliminated or a huge government ruling the whole economy first in the name of preserving competition in it and then in the name of general welfare and the avoidance of recession, inflation, depression, and crime.

We must finally face the facts. Those in the society who speak most loudly for competitive institutions most want to end them. They may not even realize that they are the forces destroying competition. They destroy competition because they are competitive. Some competitive people see victory in the struggle, not competition as good. Others see good in the struggle itself. The first would end the competition if they could have the reward of victory without it, and the second would end it if it they could have the excitement of playing without the inconvenience of the play. Both, however, completely undermine any human value in competition: both turn away from evaluating the goal that confers the reward of victory on the one and that justifies the excitement of the struggle to the other.

The death of competition, closest to happening in the United States of all countries in the world, will mean the death of the illusion of competitiveness as well. Thus, if the apparent goal that all are fighting for-money, let us say-were ever attained, it’s hollowness would then reveal that the fight was over only what was an illusion of genuine satisfaction. We would all understand that we had been pursuing, not what we knew was valuable, but what the economic, competitive gaming system defined for us, and deluded us into accepting, as valuable. We had been fighting for the game’s goal not our own. We might even realize that we wanted to accept the illusion that the game goal was ours not because we were told it was valuable but because everybody was fighting for it. It gained the appearance of value to us because we were engaged in a struggle for it. Society’s trick is not to indoctrinate us into the value of money. It is to engage us in the game so that money actually appeared to us, because we were playing to get it, to be valuable.

Those who still defend economic competitiveness today, even as it is collapsing of its own weight, only do so because they think that the system produces things that are humanly valuable. Actually, whether or not these are valuable, they seek to preserve the competitiveness because they know that without it the illusory values they have made the essence of their lives will crumble, and the lives themselves will collapse. They wish to preserve the thrill of competitiveness only because it gives them their sense of value. They hunger to keep it not because they value it but because it values them. Without it, they would be valueless, and they know it and fear it.

Marx predicted much of what has happened in the twentieth century, but Marx made a basic mistake. He saw that the quality of life for everyone-worker, consumer, owner-was plummeting even as the quantity and quality of goods was increasing. He claimed that this was because their increase also for a time increased alienation. His error was to take seriously the reason everyone gave for competition: to achieve goods. He accepted the notion that the fundamental motive was economic, that scarcity of goods produced competitiveness. This may have been true at one time in ancient history, but today the deepest motive, the most basic drive, underpinning competitiveness cannot be understood in economic terms but only in political-psychological terms. Competitiveness survives today no longer out of a temporary or “alienated” confusiontemporary because it will be resolved once goods get plentiful and more fairly distributedthat elevates abstract money and profits into the goal of life. Instead, we preserve it because of a deep knowledge that without the illusion of goods, we have no sense of good, no sense of our own good, no sense of meaning. Without that, we are doomed. It is not fear of physical or material deprivation and death that compels us to compete now but the fear of psychological starvation and death. Neither recent economic developments that have made competitiveness irrelevant and undesirable nor the Marxian theory that recognized these developments are powerful enough to persuade people to surrender the chains of competitiveness that bind their souls. We will persist in our bull-headed ignorance. What we require first is concrete knowledge of a transcendent good that we can grasp immediately. Without this, all attempts to improve social conditions or even to see how bad they are will fall inevitably victim to the enemy they think they can defeat. Not only will they fail to conquer competitiveness but they will become competitive. The pursuers will struggle for “humanism,” “socialism,” “communism” not because they know these goals are good but the goals will become good because they are pursuing them. The game will go on.

The increasingly “open secret” of communism is that only through it today can the essential flaw of capitalism continue. By the middle of the twentieth century, leading “capitalists” already started not only to reconcile themselves to “Communist” systems but also to involve themselves in them. The essential game-competitiveness-was played in “Communist” countries such as the former Soviet Union as much as it was played in the United States. Only superficially were the two nations separated. The manager in a Soviet or Chinese collective industry was not a “capitalist entrepreneur,” but neither was the management of any major corporation in the United States. None of them “owns” the industry. All are high-paid employees who fight their way up in a competitive organization. The dreamy illusion continues but will worsen to nightmare proportions.

;

Chapter 7;

DEMOCRACY IN DECLINE;

Simple questions never have simple answers. “What is democracy?” “Why it is a form of government where the people rule.” But this definition in its verbal simplicity only masks enormous complexity. What, after all, is “a form of government?” Who are “the people?” What does “rule” mean? The most sophisticated thinkers give dual answers that refer to both structures and functions: Government is the process or function where authority enunciates and enforces values in the form of law; all structures organized to fulfill this function are known as government. Democracy, therefore, is the way of making and enforcing collective value judgments where the many or the public has a great influence.

Huge arguments once prevailed over whether or not democracy was good or better than other forms of government. These arguments have mostly disappeared in a climate of general acceptance of democratic principles. They have, however, been replaced by persistent disputes over what arrangement best achieves rule by the people. In truth, the people always rule. The only issue is and always has been what rules in them. The vital question is not who governs but what governs-what principles determine the choice the public makes and the direction it takes. The people may be said to rule without ever voting. A king who serves his subjects and especially one who serves their will can be considered a “democratic” leader. An elected official who deceives the people covertly and subverts their wishes is a tyrant.

Those who had argued in the past against democracy did not oppose voting but did reject what they thought would rule in the minds of the voters. They thought that the masses would be selfish, narrow, and base, while a hereditary ruling class could be selfless, broad-minded, and noble. This attitude continues among several of those who accept democratic procedures. They claim that since the people live narrow lives, since they carry out their everyday business in the context of a system of law and order maintained by police and military so they cannot appreciate it, and since their minds rarely operate on the sophisticated level of the complexities of the international system, the public cannot be entrusted with making decisions on foreign policy. Indeed, it is argued that even the people’s representatives, congresses or parliaments located in the capital cities, are ignorant and would base foreign policy and military decisions on ignorance. Elected administrative officials conclude, therefore, that they must decide against the wishes of the public and still retain the public’s favor to survive in office. This they can do only by acting in secret. Their position is exactly the same as that of the old opponents of democracy. While those who hold such positions as leaders today know that they are taking anti-democratic positions, they still pretend they are taking them to defend democracy from its enemies.

Opposition over political forms between the United States and the former Soviet Union, for example, were never over whether democracy is good. Both sides always proclaimed their love of democracy and wrote constitutions to prove it. They did not even dispute what constitutes democracy. Their disagreement was not over who but only over what rules in the government. One held that private power should rule in the economy while the other insisted that public power should rule there. The Soviet idea that keeping power in the hands of the public is likely to be more democratic than allowing private corporations to concentrate power in their hands even superficially has much merit. There is, however, less merit to the claim that such “democracy” makes a people better off. Most important in determining whether a political system will be good or bad in human terms is not its form. Instead, it is how far the principle, whether it guides the minds of the people who vote or the heart of the king who governs, is good.

The primary argument in defense of democracy was that when only one or a few people rule, they eventually become divorced from social realities. Therefore, narrowness, self-indulgence, and prejudice become the basis of their ruling principle. There may be a common faith that the nation shares, but the elite loses touch with it. The rise of democracy historically coincided with both a decline in a common or “universal” faith transcending social diversity and an absolute increase in diversity. Different life-styles, including separate religious beliefs, mean different experiences, and, if democracy is to be real, all elements of society must be represented in government decisions. Political theorists sometimes think that it was a miracle that a nation so large and diverse as the United States can be ruled democratically. Instead, that is the only way that it could be ruled. Since it was not one but diverse, it had to be “one-out-of-many” if it were to survive.

The conditions that existed in the pre-democratic age are returning. Political and social diversity are ending. Life throughout the American nation is incredibly uniform. The uniformity is economic, political, religious, and cultural. Our hearts are identical, despite growing conflict and unrest, because modern conditions have made our minds and bodies uniform. The media of communication, on the one had, have bound our minds together so tightly that millions of us have exactly the same thoughts, worries about the deadly disease of the day, and hearing and seeing the same sounds and images simultaneously. The huge corporations, on the other, have drawn our bodies together in uniform patterns of consumption, desires & work activity. We “freely” eat at the same Taco Bell from California to Kansas. We are at “liberty” to choose from the same range blue jean styles from Philadelphia to San Francisco. The post-democratic age is upon us while the ideology of democracy remains. Some cannot believe that diversity has ended. If it has, they say, why are so many distinct ethnic, racial, religious groups fighting each other so viciously, why is there such a resurgence of pride in nationality and ethnicity, and why are there such corrupt leaders who do not share this universal value system.

If you look more carefully, however, at the increasing consciousness of ethnic heritage, increasing militancy in defending it, and increasing sensitivity to insults against it, the real meaning of these developments should become clear. What you see and hear will let you realize that they represent the opposite of what they appear to reveal.

A nation like the United States had always conceived of itself as a melding of diversity into unity. It would gather all the great diversity in its cultures. The values of each diverse part would contribute to make the best political decisions government would draw on the wisdom imbedded in all of them. The best in each of the diverse cultures would graft together to form the distinctively American culture.

The growing emphasis upon cultural distinctions is not a sign of diversity but of uniformity. No one resists uniformity until uniformity exists. The desire for cultural diversity clearly shows that a pall of uniformity is descending upon us. We are fighting each other to avoid recognizing that we are the same. We stress diversity because we know there is uniformity. We reject political leaders not because they are different from us in their corruption but because they are exactly like us and force us to a self-recognition of a shared ugliness we refuse to accept.

What keeps the illusion of diversity and pretense of democracy alive is nothing more or less than Killer Competitiveness. You seek ethnic identity not because you know it is good. You find it is good because it is different. You do not fight other groups and political parties for values you have. Instead, you fight them because the fighting itself creates the illusion of value. The most successful politicians are not those whose values the people agree with. Instead, they are those whose only value is their own success. Success is our uniform, but fragmenting standard. Those who achieve success are those who can create the illusion of a national unity of value by dangling “enemies” around us to fight, whether they be media manufactured caricatures of foreign leaders or wars on “drugs.” Success at “being different” gives the illusion that what we are when different is better than what we are when the same. The fight itself and the fleeting successes in it produce the welcome lie that what we are fighting for is good. We do not fight for what we know to be good. What we fight for becomes good because we are fighting for it.

The goodness of any system of government depends on two conditions: how much it is led by people who are trying to establish in society what they genuinely find to be good and how correct is their judgment about what is good. Democracy was conceived as a system of government that sets up ways to correct the defective judgments of leaders whose thought and experience are too narrow. However, the value of democracy, like that of every other political form, depends on how far the people who vote and decide do so from their best understanding of what is good. Then, where there is diversity in knowledge of the good so the diverse elements need to come together to make decisions, conflict challenges the faulty definitions of value in each part. It forces the whole body of diverse members to dig deeper to find a truer basis for their unity. For example, a struggle or disagreement within a family, forces the family, if it is to remain one, to discover & unite on a deeper, more intimate, and more humanly valid and concrete level. This works, of course, only where individuals devote themselves to understanding the source of good in their lives.

Where the primary good is competitive-derived from the game rule-not only is the struggle for better judgments and better lives unauthentic but the outcome cannot be authentic unity. Thus, if your goal of greater wealth exists not because you know greater wealth to be good but you only think it is good because everybody’s fighting for it, then when you fail to achieve more wealth in your struggle with someone else, you cannot avoid dissatisfaction.

Only true diversity leads to true unity. If you base your value judgments only your value experiences and if you keep testing your value judgment by the standard of your changing value experiences, then you can give up your earlier position or “lose” and yet find yourself better off and happier than if you “won.” Not getting your way in a family dispute can actually increase your joy and bring greater unity. When a woman whose mind has been afflicted by competitive values (“I want to make money in the real world and not just stay at home.”) cannot follow them because of the demands of caring for her children, she may be endlessly unhappy being “stuck at home.” If, however, she breaks out of the competitive game’s values and focuses on the good she experiences in life rather than remaining fixated on the abstract competitive value of money, then her original frustration can turn into highest joy. This is in no way to suggest that work as a mother is higher or better for any person than work as a business executive, but it is to suggest something about competitive values. False pride in one’s children-using them to prove that your life is worth something-is no less competitive than pride in earning money.

The same holds true for democracy on the national level. When you lack definitions of value that reflect your concrete and human experience, then you want to preserve the competitive system you participate in at all costs because it creates for you the personal values you lack. The anxiety of political leaders when they speak of fear for the loss of the “two-party” (competitive) system is matched only by their active attempts to destroy the opposing party. It is very much like business people who with one part of the heart love, praise, and preserve the “competitive system of free enterprise” but with the other, long for and do everything possible to defeat all competition to make themselves the monopolistic leaders. They act this way because none of them are striving to define the good and then allow it to struggle with competing definitions. Instead, they know they have no value. They are value prostitutes. The struggle, however, gives them values and the illusion that they are valuable. They want to draw others, and as many as possible, into the competitive system of voting, for example, because by taking sides, voters validate the existence of the party and the value of political leaders.

So, there we have it. “Democracy” sustains itself today in countries such as the United States less and less by genuine freedom and diversity and more and more by unauthentic, false, and destructive competitive values. You can start anywhere in the system and find the same situation. The values voters pursue in their economic lives are increasingly competitive-more money for their work, not because more money is good but because it is what everyone wants and besides money can purchase the fantastic devices, toys and travel, that divert them so they can remain unconscious of their value vacuity. Voters can take either of two actions: they can strive to reflect their competitive values in their choices of candidates (they then are said to vote “the issues”) or they can become “political” and back one party and candidate, not because they value it, but because it is their side.

Those who composed the American Constitution sought deliberately to forestall political parties. The Federalists intended that citizens would vote in a way that best reflected the values they found in life. Congress would then sift through and combine them so that ultimately honest, concrete standards would prevail in government. The catastrophic rise of political parties reversed this. New political theories accompanied their rise and proclaimed that people needed party organizations to reflect their values in government. Parties created the political system that made voting and elections a game. Parties did not find real issues among the people. They fabricated them to survive competitively. People voted not because they had interests and values but because it was their civic duty to vote and the duty forced them to choose one party over another. The choice of one party over the other let them make “value judgments” that reflected, not their lives, but the artificial, competitive, partisan struggle. According to the Federalist Papers, factionalism is one of the worst conditions that can invade a democracy. This is so not because not because factionalism is itself bad but, since it arises from competitiveness, it diverts and confuses voters’ minds so they can vote against their own values.

The desire for success is not itself bad. It becomes bad only when what you are seeking to accomplish is bad. If you are unable or unwilling to judge whether what you seek is bad or good, then it is most likely to be bad. Success in business is good only when the goal of business is good. Success at politics is good only as long as what politicians are doing is good. Politicians are like everyone else. When what they are doing is fundamentally bad, while to continue doing it, they must believe it is good, then they will discover ways to maintain the delusion that it is good. In the past the opposition of others had sustained and energized their delusion. The hope for victory and the danger of defeat in an election made the action feel exciting and valuable. Successful politicians find it necessary to invent opponents foreign and domestic not so much to deceive others but to deceive themselves.

It is incredible that the science of politics could have itself become so decadent in recent times as to rest its theoretical basis on competitiveness. Students of politics have largely taken as their field what they call “power relations.” These are nothing but the relations that exist in competitive games where the content of the game or the nature of its goal is not important to you. They come to appear important to you only because you are playing it. The level of intellectual discourse declined so precipitously that at one point students of international politics conducted their investigations by means of playing games: “Pretend you three people are ‘Nation A’ and you four are ‘Nation B,’ and that such and such are the values you are struggling for.” “Struggle for them against each other and you will understand power relationships, the essence of international politics.” Learned academics praised political leaders who were devoid of principle and driven by a lust for power and position. They hold up as models those who were willing to represent and fight for whatever values the game set up. They openly declared that such political leaders were superior to those who followed principles. Thus, political science made human pathology the center of thought and the highest political value. It promoted social disease while pretending it was advocating healthy politics.

Competitiveness kills. It kills emotions. It kills individuals. Now it is killing democracy. Those political scientists who could help prevent the tragedy are only contributing to its denouement.

Chapter 8;

SEXUAL PERVERSIONS;

Competitiveness infects the sexual relationship in two different ways: in the gaming that involves sexual polarities and in its consequences. The first and most well-known of sexual games is the struggle to capture a partner whose attractiveness appears to reflect a genuine choice while in reality the choice is clearly not the person’s but society’s. Individuals may believe their personal choice is involved in the old cliche: “A man chases a woman until she catches him.” However, the sexual value they espouse may not be theirs and may not be human but the product of a social “game” and of its rules.

Once women were expected to “catch” a man. This was because everyone assumed she “needed” him, as he “needed” her. No one ever proved that this need exits. They only assumed it. In fact, women could always escape the “marriage game” either by dropping out of games or by finding a different game to play. When they did so, they found that their “needs” changed.

Women were encouraged to believe that they not only “needed” a man but a specific kind of man. This need, like that for a man in general, was generated by the social game: where that game made wealth rare and highly valued, she was attracted to wealth. Where it valued power, to power. Where it valued charm and handsomeness, to charm and handsomeness. Competitiveness constructed and then imposed values of both kinds: the value of having a man and the valuable kind of man to have. To work, of course, none of this could be conscious. You had to feel the need to be real and personal.

The same was true of men. With their very perceptions guided by the social patterns embedded in language and compelled by social forms, they, too, saw the other sex as opposite and so entered into competitive relationships. For both man and woman, scarcity and competition, manifested and exaggerated in special events such as dances and dates, made a member of the opposite sex inordinately valuable. Since it was hard to arrange a “date,” dating became valuable. Both men and women sought qualities in their partners not because they, but the group they lived in, found them pleasing. Men lusted after women with large breasts because having such a woman would impress the social group. It also would inflate the egos the social group created. The attention of the men for a “well-endowed” woman produced envy from other women and the envy enhanced the value of the breasts still more. None of this is a repudiation of the existence of either a biological element in the attraction between men and women or a symbolic meaning attached to the attractiveness of certain body parts. The point is to illustrate how competitiveness generates pathological excesses.

Most of us think we outgrow these competitive and adolescent sexual relationships. We even think that society in general is growing beyond them as sexual “liberation” movements advance. However, while the false values become more subtle, they remain no less falsified despite individual and social adulthood. All-too-often you learn the group’s sexual values and then gradually make them yours by letting them define you. In the beginning you accept the values of others because of conscious competitiveness, but the acceptance congeals and continues even when the active competitiveness ends. The game induces the boy to value the girl. However, in the playing of the game, the boy “discovers” his “masculinity” and the girl her “femininity.” The boy takes on an identification with “maleness.” While it could be desirable for he and she both to behave on the basis of certain roles for the sake of organized production and reproduction in society, they lose themselves when they identify themselves with the roles the play. To become a man or a woman in contemporary society is to lose yourself. You might gain adult status, but lacking maturity, you lose everything.

Living from the new adult identity, you pursue values you think are yours. They must be yours since they belong to no one else. Everyone around you disagrees with them. Other men love different women, only you love this one. In doing so, however, you may only be reflecting the outcome of a competitive experience of five, ten, or even twenty years ago. Sure, you withstand the power of the competitive group you now live with, but you have not escaped the influence of the earlier one. Sure, you put aside childish fantasies of the absolute glory and bliss of sweeping the princess off to your fabulous castle, but the false value competitiveness has implanted in you by the fantasy remains.

Continuation of old competitive values is, however, only one aspect of the permanent harm that competitiveness can do to your sexual life. Having learned that you are man and she is woman and having fought for her and won her, the two of you enter a competitive struggle with each other. The office, the kitchen, the bedroomall become a battleground usually of gentle, but nonetheless of intense, conflict and occasionally invisibly horrible destructive acts. Each partner tries to absorb, to conquer and overcome, the other. The invisibility of the power struggle both to the participants and to everyone around them only makes it worse. It is possible for two people who are engaged in a power struggle to the death to be unaware of any conflict between them because they fight the competitive struggle on different fields of combat. One field is traditionally assigned to the woman and the other to the man. This estrangement, too, is well-known, but those engaged in the battle usually ignore it and so it does not seem to matter to them, They are too absorbed in their own worlds to notice. Nevertheless, it is the centerpiece of the explanation of the great fascination the sexes have for each other: they are playing different games so at one moment they feel an intimate closeness and the next, they find an immense abyss between them. Relationships of this sort do not continue without tension, and tension is ambivalence. Where ambivalence is lacking, competitive interest will lapse.

The stereotypical masculine way of “absorbing” in love is either to rule over or to work for the other person. His experience of power is material independence. He expresses his “caring” by working and maintaining the order of the family. Where he may rule by issuing orders, she may rule through empathy. In the most patriarchal of societies, he may enunciate every major decision in the family, yet she may fully participate in the rule without every having to contradict his wishes since she guides him in developing these wishes. He may even think he is in control while she knows she is in control. Since control means something different to each of them, both of them can feel entirely satisfied with his or her success in the competitive relationship.

It is not that the husband alone has the illusion of control when he is in truth his wife’s puppet. And it is not that he really is in charge and his affectionate treatment of her is a mere indulgence to her that gives her the illusion of how dependent he is upon her. Both are in control or, better, neither is. The experience each has of being in control stems from the good feelings produced in the interaction, but these good feelings arise not because both have achieved what they know as good. No, they arise instead out of success in the competitive relationship and the illusion that what has been achieved must be good because they fought for it.

The highest example of this is in the sexual dimension of the relationship is the sexual act itself. It is an act where each partner tries to graft the other’s body onto his or her own. In this act, the man makes the woman a part of his own flesh, and she makes him a part of hers. The two bodies seek to become one and appear to have achieved their goal. The two are excited by each other where each is not a full and united self. The more they see the other as simultaneously a mirror of themselves because each is human and a complete opposite the more they become excited. Their excitation arises because of the prospect that physical unity will achieve the inner unity of each of them. Anything that contributes to the polarization within the human bond contributes to the anticipation. The two sides have been chosen. Let the game begin. “I can absorb; I will absorb.” “See me touch her, take possession of her.” “See him want me; how completely I must possess his heart!” “We are blending, becoming one.” “Oh, the pleasure!” “But now it’s over.” “There he is outside me again.” “There she is outside me.” “But we are too tired to care.” Making love had been a battle; orgasm, the victory. Both won. Once it is over, each lost. But tomorrow’s another day, another chance to enter the field of combat. Lust, like hope, is eternally reborn.

Competitiveness in sexual relations generates sexual “perversions.” Perversions are in essence no different from the normal games people play. While they are the product of attempts to end the old competitive game, they succeed only in transforming the competitiveness from one plane, one dimension, to another.

Under specific circumstances, sexual competitiveness must either cease or transform itself into a new shape. Those circumstances occur whenever either complete success or failure is assured. What “normal” people consider sexual “perversions” are actually the continuation of the perversity of heterosexual and “normal” sexuality in different forms. When some of these forms, such as rape and sadomasochism, make the perversity manifest, society condemns them. Others, such as homosexuality, continue the same perversity but also continue concealing itself from those who take part in it. Anything “wrong” in homosexuality is always first wrong in heterosexuality. What is wrong in heterosexuality is shown openly in homosexuality, but the heterosexuals see this wrong only in homosexuals and not in themselves.

The root of the perversity is competitiveness. Competitiveness can sustained itself only where there is a chance of both success and failure. As long as these dual chances remain, you will continue to play the old game. Your excitement will convince you that the game’s goals are yours. However, when one of these two outcomes becomes unlikely, then you stop identifying with the game values. Then they become external to you. You lose interest in the game. If you still stick to the game’s values, it is only with your head, not your heart. You may think you should still take an interest in them and may, in fact, consider yourself psychologically disturbed when you cannot get excited about what had excited you in the past.

All of what we call sexual “perversions” arise in you not only from the disillusion with “normal” sex that is due to achieving either complete success or complete failure. They also, and more significantly, arise from greater clarity in your understanding. You now see sex for what it is: a competitive power struggle. You can either resign from the field of battle or become more realistic.

Homosexuality is a condition where you see heterosexual relationships as a competitive struggle and, therefore, see through them. Success or failure lie somewhere in your life. Once you either were extremely popularity sexually, for example, or faced extreme rejection. In either case, you may lose interest in the competitive game. Homosexual novelists and playwrights commonly manifest their particularly deep insights into the heterosexual game. Imagine, for instance, Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” where marriage is nothing but a continuing battle. Look at the novels of someone like Ernest Hemingway and other writers dominated by desire to avoid male-female society and retreat to the simplicity of the masculine hunting and warring community. When normal sex is competitive, highly sensitive people inevitably experience not only the antagonistic atmosphere that repels them but also the artificiality of the high value placed on sexual relationships because of competitiveness.

The perceptive sensitivity of many gay people that lets them see, although usually in an inarticulate way the falsity of heterosexual loves and marriages does not save them from their own illusions. For example, just because heterosexuality happens to involve perverse and competitive motives does not mean that it must be so. The gay insight often fails to go beneath the surface to the depths and so assumes that what exists in appearance is all that exists. The genuine values lost by virtue of competitiveness in heterosexuality may be regained through personal transformation.

The second problem with the homosexual orientation is that everything you escape in the heterosexual relationship returns in homosexual relationships. Ironically, men who repress and so become unconscious of their homosexual orientation may run to competitive sports to avoid competitive sex; they may even admit that the feel more comfortable with “the guys” on the team or in hunt. They avoid the normal, superficial, competitive tension between the sexes but then reproduce it to create the illusion of value in being with the gang. The hunt or the game are competitive, but the competition is of a sort or on a field that these men can understand. The hunt or the sport might challenge their status and prowess while the sexual game challenges their very Being. By the emotional power women wield over them, the heterosexual game calls into question the very essence of what these men think they are-their very identity as masculine and powerful creatures. In the heterosexual game, they not only risk losing what they are or want to be but also having that replaced by what they reject as their opposite.

Finally, everything in the heterosexual game reappears only slightly transformed in the homosexual game once homosexuality emerges from the closet and develops its own community. Then again you find the whole range of sexual types within the gay group. You see extreme masculinity, exaggerated femininity, and everything in between-and, therefore, also the false values. Few sexual arenas are more competitive than a “gay bar.” The masculine gay male experiences, in the end, the same tense fear of the feminine homosexual male that the more heterosexual male experiences for the feminine heterosexual female. And the same reaction of escape may occur. The feminine gay male may seek the company of heterosexual women. The masculine gay male may see the company of heterosexual males in sport and hunting.

Normal heterosexuality is a sexual perversion. Gay people often sense that and so escape it. Their mistakes, however, are not only to reject heterosexuality but also later reproduce in homosexual relationships the diseased normal heterosexuality. The visible manifestations of the perversion-sadomasochism and rape, for example-exist in both. These perversions arise when an individual sees through the mask heterosexuality or homosexuality both wear and witnesses the competitive power struggle they really are. Such a person need take only a very, very small step from values produced by the struggle for success and power to reach the state of finding value in the experience of power itself. Rape is the transitional phase.

It is intriguing that the level of rape increases as sexual promiscuity increases. You would think that easy access to sex would relieve the pressure on the sexually hungry so they would not have to seek satisfaction in this terrible crime. One faulty explanation for this is that when we have easy access to each other’s bodies and openly discuss sexual relations, our attention is constantly on sex. On the contrary, rape increases not because everybody’s thinking about sex, but because they find they can gain an intense value experience in sex only if it is the outcome of a struggle. Where sex is easy to come by, the experience of value in it diminishes. It is then that some men go so far as to pay prostitutes or ask their own wives to resist their advances. In the nineteenth century, teaching women to hate sex and resist it or at least to pretend to do so achieved the same result.

Moreover, both men and women are responsible for stimulating the rapes that victimize women. Women want to believe that they do not promote rape. The suggestion that they who are most victimized by it have anything to do with inducing it understandably angers them. Most rapists, and more “normal” men than want to admit it, believe that women invite rape either by gesture, clothing, or walking through deserted, woodsy, areas at night.

Actually, the cause of rape cannot be explained solely by the state or behavior of either the specific man or specific woman involved in the violence. The established, prevailing and normal relationship between men and women causes rape. This “normal” but unhealthy sexual struggle involves power, absorption, and domination. However, we are unconscious of these, and most of us think we are attracted not to them but only to the sensual and sexual pleasures involved in sexual behavior. Yet in the competitive relationship you use an intense power struggle, a tension between false polarities crated by the game, to make the activities intensely pleasurable. This struggle can be real or imaginary, but it must be there.

The power struggle can remain invisible to men and women, however, only as long as they are fighting on different levels: “outer” or physical control as opposed to “inner” or emotional control. Even when men and women are aware that they are fighting, they may still not know that they are fighting on different planes. Thus, the deadly seriousness of the game may escape them. Women who act gently, dress to be attractive, and want others to notice them may have no inkling that in presenting themselves in a provocative and challenging way they are exercising power over men. They may see their goals as only to get men to pay attention to them or to begin a romance, flirtation, or love affair. They may even delude themselves into thinking they dress that way only because it pleases themselves. The potential rapist may feel the power as a challenge that he must respond to with the kind of power he has and understands, physical force. Both involve themselves in a power-competitive relationship and both are mirrors of society as a whole in this. However, since power means something different to each of them, they may fail to comprehend how each contributes to keeping the game going.

Men in “normal” society may be taught to express their power over women by wanting to take and compel. Men may be taught to express their power over men by wanting to be so desirable that men will take them. For men, however, taking has a physical meaning while for women it has an emotional meaning. He wants to possess and dominate to prove his victory; she wants to command attraction to prove her victory.

Sadomasochism is closely related to rape except that in it the emphasis shifts from the orgasmic pleasure of victory to the intensity of the excitement in the foreplay. When normal sex is easy, excitement and interest in it dissipate. When you begin to realize that simple sex is no longer a challenge, when, indeed, it has become repetitive and boring even if it still is mildly pleasurable, then you want to find out how to make it exciting and interesting again. Since the essential meaning of this “normal” sex is as a competitive power struggle, only an increase in the resistance of either side to sex will produce more intensity and a higher value experience. When resistance rooted in social role breaks down, the game can be sustained only by finding a cruder ground. Where women are freed from having to protect their femininity and virginity and men no longer fight to preserve their masculine identity, they then must find something else to fight over to make the game worth playing. The battlefield turns to the body. All bodies resist pain. You cannot help cringing from it. Producing physical pain in another is a way of expressing power over them and so experiencing intense value. Alternately, by making yourself so important to another that they wish to hurt you, you experience another kind of power.

“Normal” sexuality is always sadistic. Overt sadism threatens only to rip the cover of respectability off it. The very desire to experience power over others is to punish them, and punishment is the essence of sadism. The latent sadism becomes manifest only when the absence of resistance makes the other forms of torment ineffective. Masochism may be said to be the “feminine” form of sadism. Sadism may be considered the “masculine” form of masochism. All of us have, of course, both “masculine” and “feminine” dimensions. Obviously, therefore, both men and women can be either sadists or masochists. Physical sadomasochism may manifest itself more in gay and lesbian relationships than those of the heterosexual variety because there is less of an on-going social role polarity in them to provide the grounds for competitiveness. Of course, gay men can divide themselves between masculine and feminine, but, because they remain biologically men, they can too easily see the difference as a sham. Moreover, many gay men reject femininity in other men no less than in women. For there to be excitement and thrill in competitive sex, there must be polar differences. Only these provide opposite sides that can be conquered and dominated. Each side must resist being made a part of the other and meet resistance from the other. However, if both are already the same-both are men or are united and one-then the resistance to absorption by the other must be based on something else. That something else often is the giving and receiving of physical pain.

The automatic or spontaneous resistance of one body to the pain others inflict upon it generates for both the illusion of value in what they are doing and who they are. One’s resistance to the other makes the relationship feel exciting and worthwhile. The pain they produce together does not simply prepare them for a pleasure outside the pain. The pain is the pleasure. The pain is the excitement. The pain is the value. The rapist may find it necessary to rape to make his sexual orgasm a peak experience. The sadist discovers that the orgasm is nothing compared to the pleasure in the power of pain.

Masochists are slightly, but only slightly harder to understand. Like sadists, they derive pleasure from the excitement, the intensity, the significance of the situation. Exactly because it is physically painful, it becomes dramatic and important. Masochists themselves might find it incredible that they could be seeking a competitive victory through degradation, humiliation, and debasement. The willingness to endure pain creates the illusion of importance in the relationship. They do not endure pain for a good outside the pain. Instead, the good arises in the pain. The competitive victory of masochists consists in that, like women in “normal” heterosexual relations, they have proven themselves so attractive as to force another person to focus his attention on them.

The person who is sadistic is also masochistic. Since all of us are masculine and feminine, we may enjoy being treated brutally by another though our bodies react against it. Later we may enjoy treating someone else sadistically. Masochists may become sadistic either in what they exact from those who want to degrade them physically-as in a heterosexual relationship-or they may actually become physically sadistic toward them, thus temporarily reversing “roles.”

To conclude, then, normal sex is perverse and sadistic as long as it is competitive. Its competitiveness leads some people to reject “normal” sex but also to create perverse and competitive sex in forms other than “normal.” The concept of “Killer Competitiveness” can finally make some sense of the perversions of both “normal” and “abnormal” forms of sexuality.

;

Chapter 9;

CRIME ;

AND ;

CRIMINALITY;

You cannot understand, much less deal with, crime unless you see though the “forbidden fruit” fallacy. Obviously, we create the category called crime only because we set up laws. Laws are nothing but definitions of what we say is good or bad. You create good laws when you know what is good; you create bad laws when you set up a definition before you attain adequate knowledge of the good. Thus, it is one thing for law to recognize your control over a piece of land you value because you work it to provide yourself with food and shelter. It is another, however, for law to set up “private property” as an abstract right regardless of how you use it.

“Property” is a term related to the French “propre,” and it refers to “self” and “own.” Property is what is attached to you so closely that it is you. However, private property consists in an additional relationship and involves your right to deprive others of access to what is attached to you. This right arises not because the land is “proper” to you but because the law empowers you to do it. Private property is property established not to recognize your connection to it but merely your legal power to deprive others of it. You assume that you deprive them because you are defending something that has value to you. You also assume that the law protects you from others because those who formulated it believed that they value it and would take it if they could. These assumptions are often only illusions produced by competitiveness. The land may have become valuable to you only because you think others want it, and they want it only because they think you value it.

The point relates to the old distinction in economics between use-value and market-value. Use-value refers to the human satisfaction that you can draw from the land. Market-value refers at least partly to what others are willing to pay to get the land whether their willingness is due to its human value to anybody or not. Market-value may rest not upon use-value but entirely upon the belief that others desire an object.

The moment you post the “private” or “keep-out” sign on a piece of land, that land leaps in market-value because the sign represents an expression of value. But the value of the land to you when you post the sign can be based wholly upon the ideological belief that others are insatiably greedy so that they are barely waiting to seize whatever you have whenever they can get away with it. The desire of others to seize things at every opportunity may be based on a similar ideology that arises from a mere expression of value, whether that expression is by posting a sign or setting a price. Reason persuades itself that no one would forbid you access to anything were it valueless. Therefore, when others forbid you access, you take it as proof that the thing is valuable.

Centuries old folk sayings confirm this competitive theory of value. “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.” “Forbidden fruit always tastes sweeter.” Adam and Eve took God’s injunction that they must refrain from eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil to mean there was some reason to want to eat of that tree. In fact, they would get something exceptional when they ate it. This is exactly why Eve was so vulnerable to what the serpent whispered in her ear. He said the only reason God forbad them was that to eat it would make them the equal of God. Eve did not know the apples were good. She and Adam were not even hungry. The apples became good because they were forbidden.

Capitalism, as it has developed in the West, is the absolute antithesis of the Judaic-Christian tradition. So are other political and psychological theories that reflect competitiveness as the basis of value. Capitalism is anti-Christian because it is based on market-value rather than on use-value. It replaces knowledge of the good or “god” with illusion. Illusion of good is the definition of evil. The doctrine that private property must be protected at all costs is not so much an attempt to defend something known to be valuable as to maintain the illusions wrought by competitiveness that in getting and having property, you will think you are gaining what is humanly valuable.

Freud’s basic error, and the error of most modern psychology as well as of revolutionary politics, was that God forbad access to the tree of knowledge of good and evil for the reason the serpent suggested. In Freud’s terms, the Father, or the herd leader in the primitive society, used his power to deprive and castrate the young men to keep them from access to the women who belonged to him as his private property. Consequently, Freudianism can justify both physical revolution against the Father and political revolution against the State. However, the reverse assumption is as possible assuming the validity of Freud’s dubious historical facts. The primal father forbad access to this children not to preserve the best for himself as his private property but to protect them from something bad. The social rule “no sex before marriage” may reflect tyrannical control by a society bent on preserving the rigidity of its forms. However, there may be something good in it both for the social group and for the young individuals who have impulses toward sexual relations.

The Biblical tradition is deliberately ambiguous. The fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil may or may not be good. There is reason to believe that this knowledge really is good and at least equal reason that it is not. Logic as well as the experience of living outside the garden relying on our human knowledge of good and evil justify both conclusions. Knowledge of good and bad has been a mixed blessing.

The competitive theory is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you assume that all law is an attempt to deprive the weak masses in society of good things so the powerful can keep them, then those who achieve power have no compunctions about getting as much as they can for themselves. In truth, they may want these things only because they think others want them since they are fighting for them and not because they know them to be valuable. Others, in turn, fight for them only because they are trying to deprive those who have them of them. The upshot of this is that no one, because their “knowledge” arises from the deceptive competitive definition, interests themselves in figuring out what is good for themselves or others. What was once only a theory about human political and economic behavior becomes a reality once this theory is mistaken for the truth. Moreover, it produces not only illusions of value for those involved in it but also constant conflict, crime, murder, punishment, executions.

The basis of law finally becomes not justice or any knowledge of what is good but power. Those who have the greatest power in the community are able to define law, but they are unable to reflect even their own interests and well-being in the definition. It is the existence of competitiveness, power, and success that perform the act of definition. In this way, law loses all human basis and becomes mechanical, inhuman, and destructive.

The forbidden fruit fallacy consists in the belief that when a good is forbidden to you, it tastes better only to you. In truth, the fruit tastes better not only to those who are forbidden it but also to those who do the forbidding. This is extremely important because it reveals that the cause of the crime of theft, for example, resides not only within the thief but also within the owner of the private property. Or, better still, it reveals the source of crime as residing in the competitive system itself. False wants are created by false definitions of good that are made both by protecting and stealing private property. It is in this sense that injustice is always the only cause of crime. The injustice, however, is not that those who have goods they do not need refuse to share them with those who need them. Instead, it is that both groups are implicated in developing a want for “goods” that are not really “good.” This is why crime will end only with not material but spiritual reform and reform where people at least try to set up value on the foundation of experience and not on the foundation of competitiveness.

The irony, of course, is the more that crimes are uncovered and criminals are punished, the more non-criminal citizens feel that what the criminals sought was valuable. The more they think it is valuable, the more they defend it with laws. The more they defend it, the more it appears attractive to thieves. The more it appears attractive to them, the more they steal. The more they steal, the more valuable it appears to its owners. The more protected, the more theft; the more laws and courts, the higher the crime rate. It is exactly where police and courts are the most efficient that the crime rate keeps growing. The best way to increase the number of rapes is to pass stronger laws against rape. The best way, as we all know, to increase pornography is to legislate against it. The best way to get teenagers into a theater is to forbid them entrance because the film is morally objectionable. All this is so because the young assume the protection is there because the content is so significant. The final irony is that, although this need not be the case, it has become true. Through forbidding it to their children, the adults themselves have come to experience what they otherwise would see as meaningless as extremely significant and interesting.

All crime arises from a massive delusion. The delusion is not that of the criminal alone or even primarily. The delusion is a value-delusion-a delusion in how we all identify what is good. That deluding way is competitive. Competitiveness is the true thief, the true rapist, the true embezzler, the true killer, and the only true criminal.

;

Chapter 10;

WAR;

To believe in the possibility of a definitive end of war may be madness, but to expect its inevitable continuation certainly is madness. One of the most massive illusions foisted upon the many peoples of the earth is that what causes wars are either evil nations and leaders or an endless desire for more of the goods we all want. Nothing could be farther from the truth and yet nothing is a more convenient lie designed to put public scruples about violence to sleep and to silence criticism of national leaders.

Both theories you use to account for the inevitability of war shift the burden for its threat and presence onto the shoulders of others. These theories make possible an extremely moralistic stance on war, inordinate anger in war, and unwillingness to show any restraint in the devices used to punish or destroy the enemy. They are the same two vices, which in different ways blame others for violence, that allow a citizenry to accept complacently and advocate vociferously the unspeakable horror of inflicting “capital punishment” upon their fellow citizens. It makes little difference whether you regard the whole enemy nation as evil or only its leaders. Anyone who fights you in the war you have to oppose as an agent of the evil leaders even if they are not evil in themselves. Those willing to support the causes of evil leaders may not be corrupt, but, if not, then they are allowing corrupt leaders to delude or hypnotize them.

Most of those involved in the fight against Hitler in World War II conceived of the battle in two ways: either the German nation was corrupt (Germans were “authoritarian,” brutal, and nationalistic) or the “Big Lie” propaganda machine of the Nazi Party as well as the charisma of Hitler himself deluded the people. Evidence could be found to support both positions. On the one hand, German history and family relationships gave evidence of the authoritarian cast to the German “national type.” On the other, Hitler’s fantastic and dramatic speeches and rallies, carefully constructed to impress, awe, and overwhelm the spectators, supported the deception theory.

The approach used to justify the fight against Japan was similar and even easier to implement. An evil people and its leaders combined to sneak in on and viciously attack America’s Pearl Harbor. Oriental racial characteristics allowed the American government to be far more malicious in caricaturing Japanese both at home and in the combat zone. German immigrants had been integrated into American society. As long as their American descendants kept quiet during the war, they avoided any large-scale and legal persecution. However, the government forced Japanese-Americans, physically more distinct, into concentration camps. The government portrayed Japanese as weasels and rats sneaking an attack. Posters particularly emphasized Japanese small stature and drew front teeth outward into a more rat-like appearance. American fought the war in the Far East not against a nation of human beings but a sub-human species. There could be no alternative to unconditional surrender. Not only are rats not allowed to win, they are not allowed to negotiate on equal terms. You do not even fight a true war with rats. You seek only to exterminate them as quickly and as easily as possible-even through thermo-nuclear radiation.

In the Vietnam War, the popular press-particularly in and because of television-could not avoid presenting the enemy more realistically. Pictures sent direct from the battlefield into people’s homes humanized the face of the enemy. Thus, it slowed and even reversed the century-old process of seeing in the enemy an evil race and a decadent and evil nation. In World War II, by contrast, Americans had held the whole Japanese and German people blamable for the evil deeds being done. The Japanese and German governments, after all, could not fight their wars without soldiers who cooperated. They could not set up a war machine without the voluntary cooperation of industries and workers. Nothing could move unless families, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, supported the war effort. The alien political-economic culture was itself to blame. All were implicated. None were innocent. However, after that war and because of the new media of communication, no longer could governments compel ordinary citizens in one country to believe that those against whom they were fighting were monsters. These governments could no longer sustain the national will to fight in later wars largely because of this. The only alternative for leaders dead set on conducting wars was to make sure they were short and to keep television cameras and reporters out of the war zones.

What the whole American nation was forced to experience in the Vietnam War was what only combat soldiers had to face before. Moreover, unlike the soldiers caught up in the heat of combat, it faced it in the quiet of its collective living room. The first reaction was what you would expect from normal human beings. Soldiers who really talk with enemy prisoners or meet “enemy” citizens in conventional settings or even in love relationships are always forced to realize that they were dealing with no monster. Even the reasons enemy citizens gave for cooperating in the war effort of “insane” leaders were not so different from their own. Open-minded soldiers under these circumstances eventually can become conscious of their own responsibility and guilt.

The reverse happened too. Committed to fight, soldiers, once they begin to see the human side of their opponents, have to build greater and stronger shields to defend their minds from the facts. The facts are damaging to their own self image and that of their nation. To prove the enemy’s inferiority, they have to degrade the best of their opponents. They become brutal to captives, the way the Nazi prison guards had to become in concentration camps, to prove, by degrading the inmates, their own superiority and goodness. Soldiers have to develop special names for the enemy to avoid having to recognize themselves and humanity in them. They are not human. They are “Krauts,” “Japs.” They are labeled with the most dehumanizing epithet of all, “Gooks.” They did all this for the same reason as groups of citizens refer to other groups of citizens within a nation as “freaks,” “pigs,” “hippies,” “wops,” “queers,” etc.-to keep from having to see them as human and to justify the fight against them.

One final alternative reveals itself. Instead of developing negative emotions of hatred and distance through using physical and verbal degradation, soldiers can defend themselves from themselves by avoiding emotions altogether. Instead of using emotion-laden terms to refer to the enemy, the more “professional” soldiers and statesmen avoid even mild words such as “Communist.” They replace them with as unemotional a language as possible. The most unemotional of languages is mathematics but the next is abbreviation. Vietnamese people with socialist philosophical positions become “Vietcong” and “Vietcong” become “V.C.” Thus, reports go forth that the “body count today is 351 V.C.’s.” The army becomes a machine; the soldier a mechanic.

During the Vietnam War, the same principles operated at home among non-combatants. Some think the war bi-polarized the whole American nation. In fact, it tri-polarized it. On the one hand, the enemy became human to a vast number of citizens as a result of direct and vivid television reports depicting the suffering of Vietnamese women and children. On the other hand, may good citizens only strengthened their hostility both toward the “pajama-clad” enemy and toward the “real” enemy, the “Communist” suppliers from China and the Soviet Union. Since the enemy in newspaper and television accounts appeared human and their suffering evoked compassion and sympathy, those consequently struggling against their own consciences to sustain the “patriotic” war effort turned their hostility against both the media and those opposed to continuing the war effort. They saw both as traitors.

This much is familiar and widely accepted. The events in, and media presentation of, the Vietnam conflict brought the war home. The domestic unity required if a nation is to bear any strong military effort dissipated. However, what is less familiar is the existence of the smallest, yet strongest of the three elements in the tri-polarity: the group insulating itself from emotions of either hate or guilt by isolating itself from emotions entirely. This group typically is composed mostly of the diplomatic and military elite who provide the broad basis out of which war decisions are made. However, outside of government a strong core of intellectuals and business leaders whose names are usually unknown except to small government and academic circles support them. These are the high level theorists of international politics who occasionally surface as government advisors or political campaign speech-writers or else, still more rarely, reach the higher posts in government as heads of the State Department.

We know now that at the highest levels, governments around the world make military decisions, not to punish bad enemies, protect good friends, seize valuable resources, or control strategic areas, but to respond to worries over how potential enemies will interpret decisions to fight or not to fight. In other words, the United States government decided to begin a war in Vietnam not because American leaders believed they could bring democracy to the area, not because of vital oil and rubber reserves there, nor because of the important strategic location of the peninsula relative to trade routes, but only because if they did not undertake the war, other nations throughout the world would begin to suspect the American will was weak. This would encourage them to act aggressively and expand militarily, economically, or politically until they caused a major world-wide confrontation and probably world war. This is the primary consideration national leaders use when deciding to go to war. It is one that governments rarely reveal because of its amorality and mechanicalness. Few nations fight for what they think is good or bad. They fight to maintain “prestige.” Only after they decide to make war do they seek to marshal public opinion to back it. Then they begin to expose the presence of “evil” enemies, good friends, and principles of “freedom.” During the permanent state of war that has held the world in thrall since World War II and shows no sign of ending even though ideological differences are ending and one of the two great powers has collapsed, they had to constantly evoke these feelings and principles to maintain public energy. All leaders hold the arrogant, arbitrary notion that they cannot motivate “the common people” to fight, to do what leaders believe “must” be done to maintain national prestige, if they are honest about their real motives.

Now the truth comes out about the real cause of war today. Both on an international political level and on a personal level, the source of all war is competitiveness. The clearest evidence of this is the perspective of statesmen throughout the world. The international “system” to them is a game where nations struggle against each other on all levels. All cooperation is only ultimately to promote their own advantage. The values fought for are not established by any human judgment of what is good or bad but by the rules of the mechanical game. What you fight for is not what you want but for what others think you want. Therefore, if the United States has given the impression even without intending to or if the belief has arisen without its contributing to it in any way that it highly values the twelve mile territorial waters limits around all nations’ borders, then the United States must stand up and fight for them even if its leaders really prefer the two hundred mile ocean boundary. Just because others consider Kuwait part of the American sphere of influence, America must fight to preserve Kuwait’s independence whether it cares or not to continue protecting the monarchy. A nation in the “international system,” as diplomats understand and serve it, must not only to refrain from fighting for goods it believes in but also to fight against values it has. Where it values democracy, it must fight for autocracy. Every human value must yield to the values mechanically defined by the rules of the game. The only acceptable reason for going to war is to intimidate and so discourage potential aggressors.

Unfortunately, even those who are less conscious of or reject the actual reason for going to war and believe it either is or should only be to eliminate evil fail to transcend competitive motives. A unique characteristic of competitive motives is that they can appear non-competitive. Thus, those who support wars for motives that do not seem to be created by the system or the game but by their own desires-to acquire oil from conquered territories or to free peoples oppressed by tyranny, for example-are actually caught up in the fog of competitive motivation. They use the war to prove that these and other things are valuable. If you fight for economic gain, your fighting makes economic gain valuable to you. If you fight for your system of democratic government, it is to convince yourself of its value. You hate your opponents not because they are bad but because they remind you of the essential lie you are living. Successful socialist countries make us aware of how much we suffer from the upheavals of “Capitalist” business cycles. We hate them for reminding us of a more cooperative, less wrenching, and less menacing system. They remind us of good conditions we want to believe we have but know deep down that we do not. The destruction of the socialist regimes is a way of killing the reminder of how bad off we are. It is the death of our own conscience.

The same applies to those who may oppose all wars but shift the burden of their hatred from the shoulders of foreign to “domestic enemies in high places.” They place the burden of blame on their own nations’ deluded or decadent leaders who choose to fight and spill the innocent blood of youths to achieve glory, financial, or political gain for themselves. It does not matter that there may be some truth in this position. There is some in the one they oppose as well. That the facts give some credence to a position does not prove that competitiveness is not its actual source. What matters is whether you are using those facts to justify a position that originates in competitiveness. You oppose the Party in power. To rationalize your opposition you develop strong arguments against their policies. You did not, however, defend those arguments because you knew them to be right. They became right to you because you defended them. Anti-war activists play the competitive game no less than pro-war people. You may or may not fight a war, you may or may not continued it, you may or may win it. All this makes very little difference since always and everywhere the competitiveness goes on strengthened by each move. From international to national to personal competitiveness, values are established by no human agency but only by the constant game. War will end only if competitiveness vanishes.

It is all-to-easy to make simply-minded distinctions between greedy business people and politicians, on the one hand, and “statesmen-soldiers,” on the other. It is all-too-easy to consider the first two inferior and disgusting but the third noble. Yet what differentiates the one from the other are only the dimensions of the game they are playing. People caught up in business are engaged in the economic game. They allow themselves to be absorbed in and taken over by the competition for goods and money that surrounds them. These competitive goals become “good” to them because they are the defined goals of the game: to play the money game you must identify the good with your money. Politicians play the game of gaining control of an office where they can pass laws for the material or ideological benefit of themselves or for others who are their “constituents.” They fight as hard as they do not because they have an image of the good but to maintain the illusion through the fighting that what they are fighting for is good and so also that they themselves are good. Finally, statesmen-soldiers play the intentional game of power.

All of them seek what looks like “self-preservation.” One believes you need money to live. Another thinks you have to face the “realities” of political life to “make it.” And the third insists that a nation must be “strong” to survive. However, the self each seeks to preserve is at best a distorted, one-sided notion of Self that the rules of the game have artfully constructed. For the statesmen, the ultimate value is the survival of the government and constitution. To politicians, it is the survival of their positions. To the worker-businessmen, it is the survival of their wealth. Competitiveness abstracts these elements from the whole human good and distorts them in the process. The physical survival of the nation is made the highest value in international competition because nations are defined as the “players” in the international system. It is an illusion to believe that nations first exist and only then enter international relations. In truth, it is only by entering into international competition as a player that a group becomes a nation-state. Once it even conceives of itself as such, then all international rules defining what is good for a nation-state suddenly are its own.

This is the clearest conclusion you can draw from the experience of the people of the United States. Before they gave up their belief in their “isolation” and were drawn into international relationships at a high level, they had developed inner values and pursued them. These “inner” values might have been confused and dangerous because they were based on domestic competitiveness. However, suddenly, entering the world struggle because of the two great wars of the twentieth century, America became just like every other nation-state, with massive military establishments, an authoritarian government, and a secret police. Diplomats and international intellectuals cooperated in encouraging this change by calling on Americans to “face the realities” of the world they lived in. Others, still caught up in the money or political game, despaired, but the change was accomplished. International competitiveness arrived for America. Values whose falsity formerly was clear now became the new truths.

Like the competitiveness of business and politics, the competitiveness of statesmanship offers two kinds of rewards. It satisfies the statesmen’s minds that they are facing the realities of life as it satisfies the minds of business executives and politicians that they are. This allows them all to wrap themselves in a cloak of noble superiority where the only value judgment higher than the rules of the game is the size of the stakes. Those who are playing only with money are inferior to those who are playing with the destiny of cities and states. Those who are playing with the destiny of cities, states, and governments only are inferior to those whose stake is the “survival” of the entire nation, if not the entire world.

The most ambitious competitors turn to statesmanship and world politics. This is just another way of saying that you will always find those who are hungriest for power at the highest levels in government and in international politics. The most power-hungry are precisely those who hunger most to prove to the vacuity that is themselves that the empty goal they seek is genuinely good.

The other satisfaction is more subjective and less analytical. Statesman-soldiers not only think what they are doing is valuable but also they get personal pleasure in doing it. They alone understand the exquisite pleasure of a victory in international politics. They alone understand how satisfying it is to enter negotiations and wars with other nations and force them to back down. They alone can appreciate the agony of having to back down themselves and why, therefore, in forcing another nation to do so, both leaders cooperate in making the retreat look as gentle as possible.

Again, the universality of the disease of competitiveness reveals itself. Ordinary citizens, business executives, politicians, may see the destructive competitiveness in the statesmen but fail to see it in themselves. They may complain that the international diplomat is “playing fast and easy” with the lives of others but, in principle, they, too, are playing with the lives of the people who surround them. An international system of competitive attitudes and statesmen who lead nations to international conflict and war, is the unavoidable result of competitive attitudes amongst the people of a nation in their day to day lives. Let us be very clear: it is not the outer form of social organization that produce the destruction but the inner depth. Whether a people consider their form of government capitalistic-competitive or communistic makes no difference. Competitiveness can exist in both and to equal degrees. Indeed, those who consciously consider themselves competitive are less dangerously so than those who consider themselves non-competitive. The ideology of non-competitiveness covers the fearful truth of ultimate competitiveness. The so-called “socialist” countries of the world, for example, are not less competitive than the United States but more so-in personal ambition, in the struggle for political office, in international strife, and, finally and most important, in their religious celebration of competitiveness called sport.

Ultimately, differences in levels of intensity in competitiveness are wiped out. Once competitiveness takes hold, it reduces everyone involved in it to the same, the most degraded, level. If one side is willing to go to war to avoid “losing,” then the other side will be convinced it must as well. If one side plays dirty tricks and employs assassination to get into public office, then the other side eventually will. Where one side cheats on its income tax, then the other will. Step by step, everyone in the competitive system is drawn downward while pretending that each step is a leg up and is absolutely necessary for survival and absolutely the last step that they will take. Competitiveness unleashed is the monster consuming the earth.

PART III;

GAMES AND GOD;

But since I have been among men, this is what matters least to me: to see that this one lacks an eye and that one an ear and a third a leg, while there are others who have lost their tongues or their noses or their heads. I see, and have seen, what is worse….for there are human beings who lack everything except one thing of which they have too much-human beings who are nothing but a big eye or a big mouth or a big belly or anything at all that is big. Inverse cripples I call them.

And when I came out of my solitude and crossed over this bridge for the first time, I did not trust my eyes and looked and looked again, and said at last, “An ear! An ear as big as a man!” I looked still more closely-and indeed, underneath the ear something was moving, something pitifully small and wretched and thin. And, no doubt of it, the tremendous ear was attached to a small, thin stem-but this stem was a human being! If one used a magnifying glass one could even recognize a tiny envious face; also, that a bloated little soul was dangling from the stem. The people, however, said that this huge ear was not only a human being, but a great one, a genius. But I never believed the people when they spoke of great men; and I maintained my belief that it was an inverse cripple who had too little of all things and too much of one thing.

….Truly, my friends, I walk among men as among the fragments and limbs of men. What is terrible for my eyes is that I find man in ruins and scattered over a battlefield or butcher-field. And when my eyes flee from the present to the past, they always find the same: Fragments and limbs and dreadful accidents-but no human beings.

Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra

;

Chapter 11;

SPORTS AND GAMES;

We arrive finally at the climax of this study. The principles have been formulated, the negative aspects of competitiveness assessed, and the bases laid for a critical investigation of sport. To reiterate what we must not overlook at this point, the evils of competitiveness reside not in the natural inevitable, competitive situation but in the unnatural, artful, entirely avoidable competitive attitude. They are not in the mere presence of rules and judgments external to you about your performance but in you own desire for such judgment and for developing yourself so you can measure up to those rules. What we should condemn is not the existence of games but of gaming, not the physical behavior but the psychological motivation.

A few decades ago America amazed certain articulate Europeans. They noticed that the United States reflected a culture that treated politics as game and took sports seriously. Who would win the “world series” in baseball appeared more important to Americans than who would represent them in Congress. Many forces could have brought about such an amazing situation. Some alleged that the American people cared little about politics because they were satisfied with their laws and government. Others said Americans still held in their minds the image that their government did or could influence their lives in only very limited ways so it was unimportant who ruled. They still believed that their system was one of “laissez-faire.” Finally, and least flattering of all, a few entertained the charge that Americans lacked any serious involvement in government because of simple laziness and inability to grasp the subtle issues of national and international life.

But the amazed Europeans went further. They noticed not only a lack of concern about government but also that whatever concern Americans had about government was sporting. Americans treated sports as matters of life and death and politics as interesting only as a game. To regard politics as a game may, in fact, be the only way a diverse society can be both democratic and orderly. If people took their government more seriously and thought elections really made a difference, then victors in elections would begin enacting laws helping themselves and so hurting the losers, and that would rip the society apart.

At any rate, the need for moderation in democratic politics is a likely reason for the invention in countries like the United States of a new theoretical tool for understanding political processes. American intellectuals made competition the core of social thought and theory. During the late 1950’s and early 1960’s in social, psychological, and political analysis, for example, a theoretical innovation flooded social, psychological, and political analysis. Theorists called it “game theory.” They began to look at life more and more as if it were a series of games. They conceived of all politics-not just the American variety-as games. The stakes in the games might differ. They might be vital (European politics) or insignificant (old-style American politics) but theorists believed they could analyze all human existence as nothing but a game. It was a game played on different levels of social life, from the intra- and inter-personal to the international.

Game theory had two appeals. First, it touched the natural affinities of American analysts. Games themselves were for fun and not to be taken seriously, but social scientists who used them as theoretical models could seriously enjoy the fun they brought to analysis. Second, game theory had the feel of reflecting the value of liberty while also being scientifically objective. American political scientists could hardly conceive of passing judgment on the values of others because that would require the authoritarian act of setting up their own values as the basis of judgment and would violate principles of scientific “objectivity.” Game theory seemed to resolve the old dilemma of how to examine human life without letting your basic value judgments influence the discussion. If you use a theoretical tool that emphasizes not the content of decisions and actions or even the persons making them but instead the form of decision-making, its struggles and processes, then you could pass judgments on the nature and quality of society objectively. You could accomplish this by looking on society as a game with rules and evaluating how well the players played. This made the game itself the standard of evaluation.

In this way a startling reversal occurred. Games, originally devised to imitate life, but always self-conscious of their artificiality, were accepted as the essence of the structure of life. The imitator took center stage and the genuine was shunted off to the wings of irrelevance. This also gradually encouraged and legitimized the actual emergence in reality of leaders who saw themselves as role-players and actors in a game rather than real human beings struggling with life. Theorists imagined the world as a series of games because games are, first, more interesting and emotionally fascinating than serious politics and, second, easier to deal with intellectually. Theorists fell under the illusion that they could easily explain the mysteries of life by forcing it into the model of games. What produced this illusion was the sense that games are understandable and familiar. To grasp why this happened and the devastating results that ensued, we must underscore something about the essential nature of power.

We invent games exactly to eliminate the most, and perhaps the only, essential problem of human life: the decision concerning good and bad. The games you play automatically set the values you strive to live up to. Games can be useful teaching devices provided that whoever devises the games understands human values and makes sure that the goals and rules of the game reflect them. Unfortunately, in childhood we need to learn how to do things before we can understand why doing them is valuable. Children learn to dress themselves before they learn the value of clothing. They learn how to throw a stick in some cultures before they learn that stick-throwing is preparation to defend themselves with spears in war in later life. Only at the latter date will they have gained the capacity to decide whether they should use their skills or not. However, even before children learn skills, they must have the will to do so. When they mature, their knowledge of the good the skill is to serve directs their will, but, as children, they do not yet have this knowledge. Adults they trust can inspire them to accept training under their direction. When children are alone, the arbitrary goals and values of the games they play inspire their wills.

Whoever would guide children to the knowledge and service of the good must be in control of the games children play. These games will determine later abilities, and the range of abilities will determine the range of their freedom and choice. Above all, however, we must save children from their spontaneous tendency to attribute true value to game goals and rules. Children can develop skills by trusting the arbitrary values of the games that direct and encourage their development. They lack, however, the capacity to determine the validity of these values. Hence, adults must also determine whether the skills appropriate to them are worth developing and how far they should go in perfecting them.

Two forces in modern civilization operate both to prevent responsible adults from guiding children and to keep adults themselves in a childish condition. One of these is the machine-like organization of modern life; the other is the notion of freedom and democracy. Although these two are at heart different, they have been forced into an unholy union. The fruit of this union has been the exaggeration of the worst elements of both and the suppression of the best. Concepts of freedom and democracy encourage all to make their own value judgments, but the interdependent, technologically complex system of production requires that we all subordinate ourselves in work and consumption patterns to the corporate body. Modern production can continue only where there is complete coordination among workers and consumers. Consequently, the social mechanism can allow “freedom” only outside of work, during play or “leisure.” There you may claim nearly absolute freedom. No one has the right to tell you what to enjoy during your “free” time, and you tolerate any fun-seeking in others. It is not so hard for us to “tolerate” it in the modern world because we do not take leisure to be important. You accept and demand in others rigid control in work but claim nearly absolute freedom in leisure. You assume that leisure choices are unimportant without realizing that what they allow and encourage you to pursue as leisure will inevitably affect the kind of work you must do since what you produce in work is more and more determined by what others consume in their leisure.

This makes the situation of children untenable. Adults see them as “playing,” as irresponsible, as having “fun.” They see the lives of children as perpetual leisure, at least outside of school. This attitude prevails although child’s play is, to children, very serious emotionally and a practical preparation for what they face in the future. But play we say is the realm of freedom. Therefore, parents hold themselves back from judgment and intervention. We should allow children to do whatever they find to be fun as long as it does not harm anyone physically. The pursuit of “happiness” is, after all a guaranteed right of the individual.

Since children, however, will have fun playing any game they can be drawn into and become skillful at, that they are enjoying it does not necessarily mean that to play was their decision. They will play whatever games that advertising can entice them to play. When parents surrender the responsibility of determining what games children play, other, usually more malignant forces, step in to replace them. The new force that makes this decision is massive, and operates increasingly on a world scale. It is the power that not only directs the amusements of children but also largely determines the quality of their lives as adults.

Most disturbing is not only that parents have voluntarily renounced the responsibility for controlling their children’s games but also have actually lost the capacity to guide their children to the human good even if they chose to do so. Parents today themselves remain children and continue to allow themselves to be guided as children rather than develop their own judgment. Like children, adults in leisure are guided by what is “fun.” Like children, they will find whatever game they can be drawn into to be fun. They will not pause to determine the impact the game is having on their state of being nor to decide whether the activities the game rules require them to perform are valuable, stupid, or downright destructive. Instead, they will just hit the ball and try to get it into the hole with one stroke. In work, too, they become children. There they do not decide for themselves what is good to produce but follow the dictates of “the organization” or “the economy.” Of course, they aspire to the impossible dream, the truly miraculous: a job that is actually fun. Even in this aspiration the standard they follow is childish fun and escapism.

This infantalization of adults means that when they do intervene in the games their children play-and they always have the power to do so-it is only to make them worse and further undermine their children’s futures. You need only imagine the thousands of lives parents destroy when they either order their children to play Little League Football or seduce them to it with emotional support and praise.

So what is it that is in control of the lives of children and adults alike? Who does create the games we all play? The answer is no one. The source of control is gaming itself. Adults playing the money game introduce children to football. Owners of national football teams do not judge the play to be humanly worthwhile because it promotes the development of the participants. They promote the game mostly for money and sometimes because they themselves have fun playing or watching. The toy industry sells toys not because it knows them to be valuable but for profit. In this way, one group who play the “serious” game called business control another group who are playing the “unserious” game called leisure, and those playing the “unserious” game control the “serious” game players by spending the money that rules them.

Fantastic as it might sound, games themselves are in control of us. The tyrant reigns at every level of society and at every age. Children learn very early the horrible, open secret: there is no human good. There is only the flight from fear of the abyss that takes the form of games. The blinders are suddenly torn from the eyes of children: advertisers want only your money and could care less about your happiness. Your only recourse is either to “beat them at their own game” and make more money than they do or to “reject the system” and do what makes you feel good. However, you, like everyone else, know that, in reality, there is no good. Whether you make money or have fun, you are driven, desperately trying to play harder and harder so that the abyss of meaninglessness does not engulf you.

Chapter 12;

BOYS, GIRLS AND;

THE RAPE OF THE MIND;

Games play a vital role in the education of children. The kinds of games they are taught, told, or allowed to play will direct their future and adult lives. Children’s games are at the heart of their nurturing. Schools may try to guide children without the use of games, but that will mean children will be learning to do what they do not understand and they will not themselves value the process. Conversely, they will value and desire to emulate their parents and idols but will not know how. In the first case they lack knowledge of and value for the ends; in the second, they lack knowledge of the means.

Games, however, give children an independent sense of meaning, a sense that they know why they are doing what they are doing. The most effective grade school teachers allow games into the learning process. These need not be group games or even performed in public, but they will make the learning proceed more easily. Games give children the means of achieving purposes they understand. The rules of the game must make demands that they can respond to. The rules and goals must not require them to perform tasks that are either too easy or too hard.

This requirement creates a serious problem in any organized mental and physical education program: schools expect all children to live up to rules of competitiveness that are, at best, formulated for the average. They are too hard for some and too easy for others, and it is almost impossible to avoid implying that children who are above or below the norm are either better or worse than the others. When those above or below the norm are separated to play games appropriate to their level of ability, a class system emerges and grows.

Presenting children with all kinds of games, both in the classroom and in the playground, looks like an extremely effective way of recruiting talent for the perpetuation of adult social roles and functions. It seems like a good idea to provide games that some children cannot win and others cannot lose so you can push children in alternative directions on the basis of either their superior abilities or their superior wills. This indeed does serve the interests of the social structure, but does it really advance and preserve human life? Nowhere is this question more vital than in the games we distribute between boys and girls.

It would be hard to overemphasize that children develop less by “conditioning” or “role-playing” than by gaming. The trick is to get children to play the games you want them to play, the game that most touches off a spontaneous and natural response in them and seduces them to patterns of behavior they identify with and so become the basis of their own “identities.” Once you achieve this, then their growth will take on normal patterns except where there is something naturally in the boy-child that disinclines him to “boy” games and something in the girl-child that disinclines her to “girl-games.”

The games, of course, are so important not because they develop opposite physical or social skills but mostly because they develop psychological tendencies. They can, for example, draw out the desire for and development of emotional sensitivities at the expense of interest in physical activity and vice versa. Every game is an assault upon the independence of the human psyche. The healthy human psyche is an integral whole, but each game draws out pieces of it and puts them into conflict with the rest. The game keeps the whole psyche from resisting and frustrating the destruction of its balance and integrity that it achieves by getting players to overdevelop one or two of these pieces.

Some unbalancing in any growth process is inevitable because the development of the whole has to proceed a piece at a time. Games rape the souls of children only when children pursue them without the control of adults of integrity and as ends in and of themselves. Mature adults must moderate and control the competitiveness of children. Unfortunately, however, most often today adults only reinforce the competitiveness and encourage children to go all out in whatever game they are playing. This happens because for a variety of reasons adults themselves are immature and retarded so they themselves have an inordinate love for children’s games played professionally on television.

As a result of this kind of upbringing, our normal adults are grotesque models of human beings. As different sports draw out different physical capabilities and produce monstrosities of over-developed body parts-an arm, a leg, the whole surface muscularity as opposed to the internal organs, physical as opposed to spiritual development-so, too, does all competitiveness unleashed lead to grotesqueness of the psyche. As competitive specialization in academic and professional disciplines leads to distorted minds, so does gaming anywhere produce disturbed psyches.

For this reason, there is a clear parallel between the outlaw and the genius.

Some children can play no games. However, there are at least three very different and contrary reasons why they cannot. One is simply that they lack physical or mental abilities. Ironically, another is that they have the excess of capability that makes the games boring to them. And, above all, a few find an inner resistance in the soul against violation of its integrity. These children have a strong automatic resistance to the violation of themselves that games require. They can let themselves get lost in games only with extreme difficulty and recover from them with inner anguish. The worst part of this is that it happens to them at an age when they can neither understand the significance of their resistance nor defend themselves against the assaults of those adults who demand that they perform. They may even appear backward or stupid and be grouped with the geniuses and the mentally retarded. They develop a sense of “being different” that can handicap them and lead them into what normal adults call “crime,” “suicide,” or “insanity.” They are unable to cope with the normal world normally. This inability can always be a sign of either perfection or flaw. It might sound healthy and free for adults to throw all their children together into the same horrible gaming situation and let the individual children stratify themselves into layers of victory and failure, but the cost in human terms to both society and individual is immense.

It has, in the past several decades, become a matter of popular concern that sexual differentiation in childhood roles forces men and women to become sexual monstrosities. The super-masculine man and the super-feminine woman have become tragically laughable. Criticism of how children are brought up regularly uses the faulty theory that children are conditioned to become “men” and “women” by having “sexual models” to emulate in their parents or other adults. It claims that this conditioning has brought about the enslavement of the individual to social forms. It used to keep women in the home and men out of it. Because the argument arises from an erroneous understanding of how children become such sexual parodies, its conclusions are both mistaken and dangerous. The most striking error is that we force children into roles. Instead, they move into the roles not so much by models but by the games they themselves love to play. The destructive force is not social forms or roles but competitiveness.

By the time children go to school, most boys and girls have been playing largely different games for years. It is not even so important what they play with. The girls may play with dolls and the boys may play with guns. Even when they are doing the same thing, however, they are doing it in different ways and under the guidance of different rules. A boy and girl may work side by side on a math problem, but what is driving each of them to complete it can be inner motives that are opposite. It is not, of course, that male and female motives are inherently or “genetically” different, but an already long participation in different games has already established a difference between them. Both may learn math, but each may become different in the very process of learning it. This is not to deny the chance there may be genetic and physiological differences that incline children to different games. Instead, it is to argue that such differences by themselves do not determine psychological motives.

To become a man or to become a woman has always involved an act of power against the integrity of the human psyche. In the past, however, two conditions made that power benevolent and non-violent. The first was that it served human purposes of reproduction and of sustaining the population in early societies. The second and more important was that it was only a stage of development ultimately to be transcended. Through marriage, two people entered a union from their partially human identities. They fulfilled the roles of the union physically in the creation of a child. Beyond this, however, the love generated toward each other and toward their children eventually compelled each of them to transcend their sexual identities and to become a full human person. When persons became whole, became themselves, they overcame all games. The games were only convenient tools to produce that outcome.

Two errors have afflicted recent rebellions against sexually oppressive systems. The first was on the part of those who concluded that we should liberate ourselves from the confines of restrictive social, marital, and legal roles and liberate ourselves for individual physical or emotional pleasure. Their mistake was to fail to see that the real problem was not the institutions but a faulty sense of good. They accepted a growing popular notion that personal good in a sexual relationship was the immediate sense of goodness and pleasure that stemmed from its gaming nature. This meant that any “liberation” movement that sought to replace the old role-oriented biases of sexual relationships with such a pleasure principle would fail to free individuals from the oppressiveness of rules, roles, and gaming that made them so pleasantly exciting. They correctly saw that marriage as an end in and of itself was meaningless. Instead of progressing to find mature meaning through it, however, they led to a regression to the childhood standard of “fun” or “pleasure.”

The second error affected those of the more radical liberation movement that perceived the falsity of accepting the sexual roles and the games they implied. They thought that they could free individuals from oppression by not leading children into stereotypical sexual roles. This is unlikely to work because the distinctions in the roles girls and boys take on in the games they play can be entirely invisible. We can make children do the same things but cannot guarantee any essential similarity in their motives for doing them. What most produces distant polarities between the sexes is not that men and women do different things but do them for opposite motives.

Even were it possible to eliminate socially-produced sexual differences by making most boys and girls compete in the same way, it would be an illusion to assume that, by virtue of their similarity, they had become equal and free. Removing the polarity when the polarity produced the greater part of the intensity of relations between the sexes means that something else will have to take over. The assumption was that, liberated from polarized social roles, children will choose to act spontaneously and according to their nature. However, nothing could be farther from the truth. By ending the deep sexual role polarities in games, all that will happen is that the games will become more superficial and more, not less, liable to social as opposed to human and personal control.

Thus, in earlier times as men and women became adults, they at least had the help of each other, mutually committed in marriage, to struggle with their personal false identities through each other to discover and develop the genuine self. With the elimination of the personal love relationship where the polarities come together for mutual self-exploration, however, society controls all remaining games. Moreover, even when you recognize that something is missing, you will have neither the ability nor the will to find out what it is. You will understand only either fun and leisure or work and boredom. Under the pleasure-principle theory of individual liberty, you will choose to pursue the pleasure generated only by playing competitive games and the social reward gained by achievements in competitive games. You will play physical, mental, and psychological games, but you will not be able to overcome these social and individual game values and motives and so move beyond to human values.

Only after it deals with the need to conquer games themselves in business, school, and all of society, will any movement for women’s or men’s liberation be anything but a new means of mutual self-deception, human decay, and new enslavements. The release of men and women from sexual roles in the game of love will force them into the still more constricting roles and rules of social games where the power of love is lacking. It would not be so bad if, when they were children, mature humans took control of the games they played. First, they made sure children avoided losing themselves in competitiveness, and they stopped the competitive game values from manipulating them. Second, they guaranteed that the games were developmental so they drew out the humanity of children step by step. However, when liberation means only negation-the denial of sex game roles-then it frees girls and boys from the games of sex only for a future of games and roles established not humanly by awake leaders but mechanically by the institutions of gaming themselves. Even “love” and “marriage” will no longer be able to perform their ancient function of conquering social and mechanical roles. Only when we equip people with the ability to escape competitiveness will human freedom exist.

;

Chapter 13;

SPORT AND RELIGION;

Competitiveness is the religion of human decay and sport is its symbolic-mythical-ceremonial celebration. Competitiveness is the inversion of all direct experience of God. It is the ultimate cry of despair over the death of god and the ultimate joyful shout of gladness that the death occurred.

The most massive and universal sporting events in history are the Olympic Games. They were renown in the ancient world and are even more significant for the whole earth today when we finally have a universal civilization. The evolution of these Games can, therefore, prove educational. However much dispute there may be over professionalism in ancient Olympic athletes, their rewards for victory, and the extent of corruption, no one disputes that in the beginning the Olympics were a religious celebration. The Greeks introduced them to honor Zeus and the other gods of Olympus. It is equally clear that, over the centuries, the ancient games themselves changed from celebrating the divine to creating it. The victorious athlete, originally a servant of the gods, became proof of their favor and blessing first to himself and then later to the city sponsoring him.

The subtle change in the Games was a movement from reflecting the goodness of the person and city to proving that goodness. The distance between these two alternatives looks slight but is psychologically immense. An individual or a nation in the first case begins in a condition where it brims with confidence in its own value and goodness. Abundance and energy overflows into athletics. In the second case, people are afflicted with deep self-doubt and strive to conquer or at least conceal from themselves the insecurity of that doubt by means of victory and success: “Were the gods not with us we would not have succeeded.” They take success in the Games to prove the value of the city first to foreigners and then to themselves.

Paradoxically, then, the more godless a nation becomes the more it needs competitiveness to construct a god. Human beings cannot live without believing what they are doing is good. They need not believe that every specific aspect of their behavior is absolutely good but at least that it is relatively good while the whole of their lives is ultimately involved in good. Some may delve no more deeply into the question of the good than the level of food. For them, food is the deepest they go and is, consequently, their “ultimate” good. For others, this ultimate might be “knowledge” or “an invisible force,” but some ultimate exists in everyone’s life. Where you experience the slightest doubt of your “ultimate good,” your whole life will be shaken. You then have two alternatives. First, you can allow the doubts to deconstruct that unifying good. Thus, the disintegrating “ultimate good” collapses. Then you can find another and so “be born again.” And, second, you can enter competitiveness with that good as a stake and so use the game to maintain the pretense that the doubt is not there.

Initially, you need the drive for success to prove the existence of god. In the end, you make success your god. Since success can create gods, you begin to see that it must be superior to any god it can prove or make. In this way, success becomes the god, the creator of all other gods, the god of gods.

How is success attained? Only through greater and greater power. If power is the necessary means to achieve success, if power creates success and success creates god, then power is the final and true god.

Like the ancient Greeks, every nation begins by worshipping gods and goodness. Once it defines a god or goodness, it will eventually doubt the deified definition. It then will need proof to maintain the god. That proof is success. Psychologically, individuals and nations first move from experiencing a god to glorying in success. Then they move from glorifying in success to deifying power. Greece leads inevitably to Persia and Alexander and to both Republican and Imperial Rome. The bridge from one to the other is competitiveness expressed at its highest level in the one thing Greece, the Persian Empire, Rome, and we moderns have in common, games and especially the Olympic Games.

It is not insignificant that the destruction of the ancient Olympic Games occurred because of Christianity. When Christian emperors ascended to Rome’s imperial throne, they abolished them. Whatever the surface political and social reasons for this, the deeper reason was that competitive games are antithetical to Christianity. Openly or implicitly, the Christian leaders recognized that genuine religion had so deteriorated in ancient Rome that the state had been reduced to using gladiators and the circus to prove its superiority to religious challenges.

Sport is ultimately anti-Christian. It is anti-Christian precisely because it arises from the need to create a god where faith in god is faltering. The god the power and success of games creates is not a god that you can see, understand, or know in any way. It is a god of the spirit. It is known spiritually, and that is why it is so dangerously a threat to any true religion. It is always an essentially false god. It is false because it is based on the deceptive fogging of consciousness that is the core function of competitiveness. It is the creation of a “feeling” of value without knowledge of value.

Christianity claimed to “know” God. It found, therefore, that games were both unnecessary and destructive. This was partly because they cast up images of false gods but, more, because even when they led people to “true god” they did it in a deceptive way that falsified even the truth.

Games were never wholly obliterated, of course, but lost their vital importance and attractiveness for centuries, exactly until Christianity itself was shaken in the nineteenth century European world. It is not an accident that nations revived the Olympic Games during the last decade of that century. And it is not strange to see which nations renewed them. It was those nations where, as Nietzsche proclaimed, the Christian god was dead. The Olympic Games were designed to resurrect a new, potentially demonic, universal god.

Sport represents the conquest by material, mechanical, and social necessity of human freedom. In religious terms, sport represents “the world,” glorifies it, and makes it godly. Sports stem from practical pursuits and from an attempt to deify them. All sport, for example, gets connected with the military and police. In particular, it is an attempt to celebrate the nobility of these functions. The Greek Olympics sought to show personal superiority in war-like tasks, and enormous resentment arose when leaders allowed non-aristocratic, non-military, participants to compete. So, too, the modern Olympic Games, based on the principle of “amateurism,” fought hard to keep the games a preserve of a leisure class, wealthy enough to support training programs and the time to practice.

During the Christian era that ended in the nineteenth century, games apparently continued, jousts and knightly tournaments. The children of the nobility played with balls and horses when they were adolescents and adults. These activities occasionally entertained peasants, but peasants could not participate in them. Of course, in the modern era everyone-children, youths, and, more than ever, adults-participates either actively or passively. Such mass participation comes about, naturally, only when all the functions of a given society are ostensibly or actually open to all people. This is so, for example, when not only can everyone be an elite soldier but when everyone is liable to being drafted.

It is not so important, however, to show the connections between sport and individual and social life in detail but in principle. We make mundane activity into a game to glorify and even deify its value exactly when and because we doubt its value. The sport glorifies athletes, their success and powers. It reinforces the basic lesson, the basic lie. This lie is that what is important in life is not what you do but your strength of will and ability in doing it. In this way, sport celebrates the triad of human disaster: power, success, and identity. Because of this, you can see someone playing a game you had never even imagined before-trying to stand on one toe and turn, for example-and even if you thought the activity itself was stupid, absurd, and even evil, you could lose yourself in praising and admiring the skill and success of the toe-twitchers to such an extent that you forgot about the stupidity of what they are doing.

Competitiveness is the universal pander. It is always a religion since it “re-links” the person with “god.” It is always an inversion of true religion, however, because the god it links you back with is always of its own making. Whatever that god looks like it is in reality only one of the many masks concealing the truth that the single love, the single religion, the single “god” of sport and competitiveness is the demonic god of power.

;

Chapter 14;

THE PHALLIC FUNCTION ;

OF SPORT;

We have seen that when sport is a religion, it is always a false religion. It becomes a religion only when and where belief in, and direct experience of, a god or “good” is tottering. We must now explore how the specific game performs a function for the individual person identical to religious ceremonies.

The primary justification for religious ceremony is that it jolts people out of the rut of reality they “get stuck” in. Day-to-day “reality” is an artificial construct established only for the sake of convenience and regularity. It is never genuine. Nevertheless, it is all-too-easy for any of us to take the conventional and normal for the true. We do need to “face reality,” but even more do we need to face the unreality of reality. We must live in reality but not from it. Our behavior needs to be realistic but our motive must be rooted beneath and beyond reality.

The house you live in is real. As real, it has many flaws. The front steps are cracked, the painted walls are pitted, the cellar is messy. To live well in this home, you must see it as it really is. Even more, however, you must understand why it exists and how it came to be. Only then can you keep it in good repair so that it serves life. The same holds true with your life itself and all its patterns. They were all created for general and specific reasons and the creating required certain skills. You must never forget why you became a physician and the skills that made you a physician. It is only by remembering these that you can remain a good physician. Religion has no purpose other than to link you back to your deepest and most secret roots.

Reality, however, surrounds you. It may contain enormous variety, but still it is the same. It is all artificially created. Wherever you go in day-to-day living, nowhere do you actually sink beneath the artificial surface. Religious ceremonies achieve the breakthrough by taking you into special places, recounting secret or “un-real” stories, and wafting your senses with unusual sights, sounds, smells, and movements. The most perfect religious ceremonies either engage all your knowing capacities (as many senses as possible, intense feelings, and thought) or they put all those capacities to sleep. If you undertake the ceremony seriously and allow it to complete its function, it will enable you to penetrate the shell of created reality and reach its origins as well as yours. The more closely the religion and its ceremonies near perfection, the more deeply and absolutely will you be cast into your origins. Nevertheless, all religious ceremonies cast the participants into their either relative or absolute origins.

Any of us may have our own, private religion and ceremony. Where it is different in essence from that of others, through it we or they can reach only relative, not ultimate, origin. Every personal religion that leads you to your ultimate origin will be the same in essence as every other personal religion. Since there is, in the end, only one human being, however different we are in “reality,” there is ultimately only one religious ceremony. Thus, although organized religions always have both an individual as well as a social function (they simultaneously take both the person and society to deeper origins) ultimately there is no contraction between these functions. Society and individual come from the same place. Of course, depending on the greatness of the differences between people and nations, the form of the religious ceremony will vary. Nevertheless, at a deep enough level all of them converge. The fear churches show when faced with heterodoxy within or foreign religions from without is, therefore, the measure of how false their own religion is and how far it is failing to lead human beings to their ultimate depths. Rather, the honest church and individual will welcome contact with different forms since both know that such contact is one of the few ways that any religion can maintain its purity and check if it has fallen into error.

Today it is unnecessary to prove that sports are a religious experience. This is already widely recognized and reported. The principle task here is to explain where this religious experience comes from and why it exists. Still, some brief observations on the nature of the religious experience of sport are in order.

One of the easiest ways to get a sense of the religious experience in sports is merely to walk into one of the many stadiums belonging to major professional or college football teams scattered across the nation. You will be unable avoid observing that the circular form, filled with excited fans, is a temple. From the field, usually below ground level, the view around and above gives you the strange impression that you are suspended between heaven and earth. The physical surroundings, let along the psychic energy of excited fans, provides the unavoidable inner feeling that whatever happens here is important, interesting, and vital. Sport contains all the superficial religious ceremonial elements: special times set apart from daily activities, special places, special vestments, and special behavior. The feeling cannot but be special. Priest-coaches and referees, temple-prostitute players, and true-believing fans make up all the elements of religion. But why are they here? What are they really celebrating?

For an answer, let us delve into a theory of how the love of sport originates in young children, especially in boys. Borrowing from Freud for the formulation-although not for the meaning-of the explanation, we will conclude that sports are a religious celebration of a “phallic fixation.” Freud’s ideas of libidinal organization are well known. Here we are interested in his claim that the sexual energy of children changes direction as they grow. Freud suggests that babies initially organize their energy toward the good of being fed and derive high pleasure when this feeding occurs. It is oral pleasure and begins at the oral phase of libidinal organization. Then later, Freud continues, children organize and direct their energy toward controlling their bowels and that gives them pleasure. This is the “anal stage” of libidinal organization. The problem is that oral and anal organization produce energy in tension. Children immediately experience the threat of losing part of the original oral pleasure unless they control their bowels. Their parents demand this kind of control. There is both physical and social pleasure involved in the control and release as there are physical and social aspects to oral pleasure. The phallic problem is there is a stage of libidinal development that is unique. For boys especially in certain cultures, its physical focus is their own penis before they have gained full sexual use of it. In both boys and girls this stage is different from all others because it focusses energy on part of your own body and not yet its connection with the world. For Freud, it is a stage, therefore, of “latent” or sleeping sexuality before “genital organization” when children become adults and derive physical pleasure from genital contact with each other.

The problem is that the phallic stage involves a fixation not upon pleasure but upon power. Children shift, after the anal stage at the close of the “oedipal” phase and with the rise of the introjected mother/father “super-ego,” to a struggle to achieve the power and status of the adult parents they identify with. The phallic fixation occurs when the child refuses to surrender this stage of interest in power. During the phallic stage and, therefore, during the period of fixation on it, the child is filled with ambivalence toward power. On the one hand, children are irresistibly attracted to the development of their own independent adult powers, but, on the other, they are repelled by independent power because it is a challenge to their parents.

Sport is one of the ways that children learn to handle the ambivalence they feel towards power. In sport, children, on the one hand, challenge their parents by saying, “I am like you and I am replacing you since I am powerful,” and, on the other, placate their “parents” by showing that the power they claim is “just pretend.” That their children play sports may or may not please their actual parents, and children may or may not be playing them consciously to please their actual parents. Sports function in relation to the symbolic “parents,” power and potency. Children are simultaneously claiming power and renouncing it. Thus, they preserve and displace both sides of the ambivalence.

There are two kinds of power: passive and active. Both take part in the drama of sport. There are, on the one hand, those who actively play and identify themselves with the players and, on the other, those who are passive and do not play and do not think of themselves as players but are interested in the players. There are fans of the sport and fans of the players. Those who love to be players or watch them play while feeling the same kind of identification with the game’s goals as the players they watch are those who represent an interest in active power. By contrast, those who have an interest in sports and players because they want to gain possession of the players are those who show an involvement in passive power. The latter want to attract the players to them and so gain the power. They want to manipulate the players so to get what power the players have and have no interest in developing the playing skills themselves unless they think that will attract and bind the players to them. The skills of passive power are mostly social and emotional. The skills of active power are mostly physical and logical. Successful leadership involves a marriage of the active and passive skills in one person. As Freud might put it, the marriage of the mother and father.

When people who are biological adults continue their adolescent interest in games and sports, these for them are no longer developmental processes or methods of attaining real powerfulness. Instead, they become religious ceremonies that celebrate the god of power above them. Thus, conditions where adults pay massive attention to sport and other games is a national catastrophe of the highest order. Then sports are services that show that the core motive of the individual and the group has become the desire for success and power. That alone is bad enough. Worse, these “religions” are decaying religions where the public focuses on the ceremonies themselves. Ceremonies are only to remind and relink the individual and the group to their depths so they can return to everyday life refreshed and renewed.

For adults, regular, repetitive, compulsive attendance at ceremonies are pathological symptoms. The disease that afflicts the individual or the group under these circumstances is that they are no longer even striving for real achievement in real life. They have become slaves, submissive to reality and are using the religious ceremonies of sport, not to inspire life, but to attain an emotional lift and the illusion of power. Professional players are temple prostitutes. They “stand for” (literally, “pro-stituare” is Latin for “to stand for”) the power of those who are powerless, but they themselves are only the appearance of power, not its reality. They are victims of the same organized and vitiating reality as everybody else. They have only “play” or “pretend” power.

The religious ceremony of sport is an illusion factory. It searches for heroes who, whether they win or lose, exercise and embody power. Successful athletes are double victims. They are victims of the victims as well as victim to the powers that organize the games. Players are victims of the real power of the system that dominates all of us, but they are also victims of the fans who use them to represent or “stand for” their failure to achieve power. In performing on the prostitute’s bed of the arena they are dominated by the fans who identify with them. Outside the arena they are dominated by the emotional power of those who want to possess them.

The clearest example of the problem is the super-tough male athlete who is a victim of the power of the super-soft female fan. She personalizes the sport. Winning and playing tough do not interest her. In sports or other games such as the game of “business” she appears to submit to the man but plays her game of stooping to conquer where opposite rules prevail. She feels out the tough player to discover the smallest crack of emotional weakness. This emotional vulnerability is always a reflection of an element where he is inwardly weak and undeveloped in being. There she finds the place where her strength can get inner power over him. The toughest is the most vulnerable. She emotionally penetrates through the tough shell to the mush inside. The frightening giant becomes a frightened lamb in her hands, vulnerable to being crushed and yet expected to be grateful for her silken embrace masked as an act of kind love.

Fans not only celebrate the god of power but also hide their own lack of real power in life. It is exactly in the complex and interdependent society where no one is independently powerful and all are only part of, and submissive to, an organization that sports and especially increasingly violent sports-football, hockey, gladiator sports-prevail as the most popular.

The more the real world prevents individuals from gaining individual power, the more sports must religiously celebrate the illusion of power. Professional and semi-professional athletes know how the fans hunger for powers they lack and often, therefore, have contempt for them in their weakness. The fans secretly know of the actual weakness of the athletes and have contempt for them as well. In such sports the two sides marry each other in a hidden mutual contempt. Everybody knows everybody else is weak and dependent but retains the fleeting illusion of their own strength. The great illusion factory of sports preserves the lie. The very athlete who is twists and bends at the whim of a coach and of a woman friend may feel the ecstasy of power and independence in winning a game. They may feel the power of the person they control writhing under them. Athletes may love and flatter their women friends but run from them without exactly knowing why to the safety of the team and its locker room where they take comfort in the mutual illusion of power and success among the adolescent-adult boys.

The other lie is, of course, that coaches and women friends of star male athletes are in control. Even if they dominate the athletes, they are not. Other organizations rule over them or the same organization rules over them in a different way. If so, they may participate in different religious ceremonies to celebrate the illusion of their kind of power. For instance, the game of football her lover plays may not at all interest a woman friend. What might interest her, however, is the kind of emotional games that romantic novels or television soap operas that celebrate “passive” power embody. Soap operas with their intense emotional involvement create the illusion of having a valuable and intense life to soap opera fans when reality presents them with a life of only emptiness and boredom. Professionalism in athletics and professionalism in acting-professionalism anywhere in fact-has fallen so low that it is identified with getting paid and doing it for the money rather than doing it because it is meaningful and a vocation. You get paid because you service others in their false religion.

No one attends religious ceremonies as regularly or as compulsively and with absolute conviction as the believers who resist consciousness of their own disbelief. So, too, no one more compulsively attends the religious celebrations of the god every civilization turns to as it decays, the god of success and power, than those who are both most distant from that god and most shaken in their belief. Indeed, it is exactly when the “power-god” of competitiveness withdraws from the reality of their lives that the worshipers of that god multiply. The social and individual god of power cannot be universal. Fewer and fewer individuals can be independent and powerful. All, of course, can strive, and some may even make it to the “top” positions in the civilized organization. They do so only to find themselves the most controlled of all. Seized by the god of power, there is no longer any moderate, middle-ground choice to be had. You either fight for real power, which escapes you the harder you fight for it and the more successful you seem to be at attaining it so that your effort and your brutality toward others becomes unbridled, or else you die to the power god of your ego, revalue the value of power you had absorbed unconsciously, and adopt a consciously chosen god of your own.

PART IV;

COMPETITIVENESS COLLAPSES;

Do you think that I came to give peace upon the earth? No, I tell you, but division. For henceforth in one house five will be divided, three against two, and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against his father; mother against daughter and daughter against mother….

Luke 12:51

Jesus said to him, “Thou shalt love the lord thy god with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like it. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.”

Matthew 22:37

;

Chapter 15;

THE REBEL;

Competitiveness is simultaneously a completely personal and yet completely social condition. It transcends division between the social and the individual. It neither starts nor ends in either the individual or the society but rather in the human. Children may indeed fall under the control of the competitive social situation they are born into. However, the competitive facet of society does not come wholly from outside them. Individual personalities do not force groups to become competitive. There is something beyond both society and individual, and competitiveness derives ultimately from it. At best, society and the individual may cultivate it and bring it into culture. This is why combating competitiveness is so hard a task. You want to fight its social forms or individual expression, but if you do so, you will fail.

Human freedom makes the disease called competitiveness possible. It also makes possible a cure. So, a brief exploration of freedom may serve to illustrate the dimensions of the struggle against competitiveness.

We often speak of freedom as if it were an external condition or achievement. We commonly take the expression “I am free” to refer to the absence of outer barriers to our movements. Confusion in both the notion and reality of freedom arises because they also have an altogether different meaning. It is one that identifies freedom as an inner state. No matter what the outer conditions are, you still can be free. Your prison is not a prison unless you yield to it.

Both meanings can be both convincing and emotionally stirring. “A man is not free while his stomach is empty,” reflects the importance of outer conditions to the reality of freedom. “The free man remains a free man even under the sentence of death,” illustrates the internal. The inevitable conclusion must be that each position is both right and wrong. Each is flawed since it is partial and founded upon an abstract starting point in the investigation of human existence. Freedom is a condition of concrete human life prior to the division into individual and society or inner and outer. Freedom unites elements that conventional and superficial minds find both inside and outside the person.

The two notions of freedom are not only different but also may lead to contradiction. For example, an end to “external” discipline may be a condition essential to freedom while the growth of “internal” discipline may be equally vital to it. To be a disciple in the external sense is to be the servant to a Master-a person or a scientific discipline-while to be a disciple in the inner sense does not produce any kind of servitude.

The issue is not, moreover, over a person’s willingness to be a servant. Willing servants are no less slaves than unwilling ones once they have accepted their servitude. Physical, intellectual, or emotional surrender to a Master is no more a liberated condition that involuntary surrender. Indeed, involuntary servants may be more not less free because they are still conscious of the contradiction of wanting to leave but feeling forced to stay while the voluntary servants’ single-mindedness makes their lack of freedom complete.

Competition marks the decline and fall of one form of slavery. Competitiveness signalizes the resurrection of another. Periodically, throughout the ages human life has struggled against servitude. The struggle has led us to do battle against nature, other groups, and our group. The struggle in the name of liberty has inspired countless generations separated by eons of time. However, the struggles in different times have been fundamentally different though the methods used in them and the processes endured were similar. Ancient struggles for liberty mostly involved one small group of tyrants fighting against another while the mass of human beings remained enslaved regardless of the outcome of the conflict. The ancient Greek struggle for freedom was only for citizens and not for slaves, metics, foreigners, and barbarians. The struggle climaxing in Magna Charta in the Anglo-Saxon tradition was between a group of nobles and a king. Not only was there no idea of spreading liberty to all members of society but the prospect would have horrified and repelled both parties.

Even at Runnymede, however, the struggle for freedom was humanly genuine. It is only that in the beginning the unleashing of the struggle does not increase freedom but decreases it. Once the nobility throw off hierarchical control over them and their outer servitude is reduced, the problem arises as to who or what will rule in its place. Before, the answer was clear. The king ruled. His servants believed nature or nature’s god destined him to rule. Often, even if he was untalented, he strived to become and sometimes even succeeded in becoming a good ruler since he as well believed in his divine origin or commission. Now, however, freed from both belief in, and actual submission to, a hierarchy, the liberated group faces the question, “Who decides?” There are only two alternatives: to return to some sort of hierarchy or to allow open competition. Usually, of course, both occur partially. The more aggressive the revolution against authority, the more violent the later return to it under a different label.

Moderate revolutions allow for more moderate returns to hierarchy, and, therefore, set up instead the unfree condition called “free competition.” All want to get their own way. However, both humility (an important element likely to be lacking in the more violent revolutions) and practicality indicate they will get greater security, if not better decisions, if they accept a system of controlled struggle, a parliament, for example. Where there are no grounds for determining what is a good decision other than success itself (both the king, or earthly superior power, and god or standards above the person and group are dead), however, every time you yield to others against your notion of the good, you experience not humility but humiliation.

This is exactly how the movement for human freedom develops. It starts in a rebellion against outer servitude, goes on to set up inner servitude, and ends in a new kind of outer servitude. The inner servitude, the necessary transitional phase that allows for the production of the new outer slavery, emerges because of competitiveness. Bereft of transcendent standards of power and the good, success is the only mutually acceptable standard. You do not and cannot struggle for the truly good. You can only fight to win. Whenever the struggle is for success, its absolute, ultimate, inevitable outcome is a system of power enforced upon human beings from the outside. The less conscious is the experience of being controlled and the more it looks like what everyone “freely” wants, the more complete is the slavery.

The same happened in more recent times when the issue was not longer aristocrat against king but bourgeois tradespeople against aristocracy. The successes of the bourgeoisie in the struggle for freedom first brought plutocracy to society. In the end, however, it generated the movement of the many, the “demos,” against the plutocrats. But always and everywhere the same pattern: the drive for freedom, the need for competition to preserve outer freedom under conditions of disagreement, and then the movement to competitiveness. Competitiveness is the destruction of inner freedom since under it you surrender control of your destiny to the outer principle of success according to the rules of the game. You make the outer inner. Finally, when competitiveness has been enthroned as king, there follows situations where either the successful try to set up a tyranny or the public demands one. People move against competition when it finally leads to the paralysis or terrifying chaos constant competitiveness produces.

The greatest fallacy that afflicts both our minds and our emotions is that the best people or the best positions always win in open competition. This is true only while all the competitors continue to strive for the good. When they begin to strive only to succeed, then the winner is nearly always the worst, and it is only accident that will then catapult a superior human being into a position of superiority. The same holds for ideas. Only while the people engaged in competition formulate their ideas motivated by a love of truth will the best ideas emerge to the top in the competition of their discourse. If their motive is victory, then not the best but the worst ideas will win.

When the group consciously or unconsciously aims at competitive success, only those who are ultimately corrupt and decadent as human beings will win. Those not pathologically driven to victory as the highest goal will freely drop out of the competition or be forced out by refusal to violent their principles. Driven by internal competitiveness, people act not in freedom but under compulsion. The result cannot be outer freedom but only outer compulsion. The same holds true with ideas. Ideas presented with success as their primary motive will appeal to baseness rather that to truth. They will appeal to honor and patriotism first, then to greed, and finally to the lust for power for its own sake and will end in rape and sadism.

Unless we conquer competitiveness, a state of perpetual tyranny and perpetual revolution will dominate the history of humanity. The tyranny will always lead to rebelliousness, the rebelliousness to rebellion, the rebellion to competition, and the competition-detached from any other principle-to competitiveness. The competitiveness will constitute an inner slavery and will produce new tyrant to be later rebelled against. The ultimate question we face again is how to defeat competitiveness itself. Competing against it will end it no more than does the successful rebellion against tyranny end tyranny.

The solution to competitiveness and the attainment of genuine freedom depend upon achieving the transformation of both dimensions of human life-the inner and the outer. The starting point of the transition, however, must be the discovery and annihilation of inner competitiveness as the basis of your outer behavior. Seeing how much it operates in you is the first, hardest, but also the most decisive step in ending it. However, the end involves outer action and the creation of a ground for action different from competitiveness. With both, you can achieve freedom and aid human race in the genuine transformation to freedom.

;

Chapter 16;

DEATH AND RESURRECTION;

Competitiveness is a killer disease. Paradoxically, we experience it as an antidote, a state of glowing health and well-being. By contrast, we experience the medicine we actually need to cure us of the disease of competitiveness as unpleasant and even painful. Of course, we always welcome whatever alleviates our pain, yet the comforting numbness of the painkiller in this case makes a cure impossible. Ironically, we “choose” to remain sick because it feels healthier and more pleasant.

Disease is always disintegration, and death is the final disintegration of the body into its constituent parts. Similarly, illness and death of the psyche or self are also forms of, or tendencies to, disintegration. If the body is not whole, it does not actually exist. This means not that only the body that has all its physical parts-hands, eyes, ears, etc.-is a human body but instead that to make the body humanly alive all bodily principles must be there. “Principles” refer to nutrition for the cells, exchange of substances and wastes, muscular control-balancing qualities that spread themselves throughout the physical body. So, too, it is not the self that lacks certain artistic or mental talents that is dying or dead but the self that is divided in essence-not the self that cannot function in a specific way or place but the self that has difficulty everywhere and can function nowhere.

It is one thing for a self to be unable to write a poem or even write at all; it is quite another for the self to be unable to be present as self in any activity. The same cells may be there as separate and individual, piled up in a heap. However, if they do not constitute an integrated whole, no matter how intimately they are joined they are not a body. Thus, a person sitting in a room in New York and longing to be in California is really present nowhere. The divided presence is not a fully human presence, not the presence of yourself. You may think about California beaches from your New York room and yet exist. Indeed, the ability to consider such “elsewhere’s” is uniquely human. However, if you long to be there and are unhappy with your room, you are divided. No one self dwells there but at least two. You cannot in truth call yourself a unity, a “me,” a self. You choose to be in New York but you also choose to be in California. Unreconciled by some higher principle, these two choices reveal the presence of at least two selves in one body. This “self” is either disintegrating or, more likely, has never achieved integration.

All life faces the same problem: how to become. Each form of life faces the same issue: how to become itself. The seed is a tree. Its life is to exist as a tree. Human infants are seeds planted in a rich physical and social universe. Their lifelong challenge is to become what they are. However, as the Biblical passage shows, unless this seed “dies” it cannot become the field of wheat it longs to be. Humans participate in the ultimate act of creation by being able to bring forth or realize themselves. Unlike the rest of nature, we need to know our destiny in order to make it. Our problem of becoming what we are is not only the struggle against a hostile environment that “seeks” to prevent our growth. Instead, it is how to understand and create the nature we long to grow to. The direction of our growth reveals itself to us only in the flow of daily existence. Indeed, pleasures and pains we find there are the only guideposts we can rely on to tell us whether we are making mistakes. The kind of thought and theory we have available today, based on discursive logic and sensuous evidence, allows us to deal better than other animals with the environment. It is ill-prepared, however, to let us find our direction in that environment.

Modern knowledge is peculiarly utilitarian. It is more than effective in giving us the means to survive. However, it is incompetent for revealing what aspects of us should survive and why we should survive at all. In fact the specifically modern form of knowledge distracts us always away from human toward utilitarian purpose. It is simple today for you to form a concept of yourself, but all your self-concepts reflect your position in the physical and social environment. “I am a man!” Not these words you utter but the basic conceptualizations behind them define and delimit yourself and keep you from judging your life by the standard of the quality of your on-going experience. Worse than that, the self-concept displaces the self so your conscious experiences become relative not to your self but to your definition. “Feminine” impulses are threatening to you and so are painful. Your drive to survive induces you to avoid or deny them. However, they may represent your true self against your faulty self-concept. The unpleasantness of “feminine” impulses to you convinces you that they are not you but a “disease.” Usually, you just fight the symptoms, which are the pains of the “disease,” because you find you cannot really conquer the impulses themselves since they genuinely represent you.

Avoiding such pains only drives them deeper and transforms them. You do not really conquer even the pain but merely displace it. It re-emerges no longer as fear of “femininity.” You have successfully denied “femininity.” Yet now vague depression and a sense of meaninglessness plagues your daily life as a man. The new pain is actually not a disease but an impulse toward health to overcome your diseased self-concept and the life it leads and to return to your self. Even at this deep level, the depression and meaninglessness you see as diseases are actually the Self assaulting the self-concept you mistake for the Self. Not only are you divided into “masculine” and “feminine” elements and, therefore, you are a disintegrated and non-existent self, but you deny one element. In psychological terms, you “repress it.”

Competitiveness allows you to manage this most fundamental pain and others like it. The deepest inner voices that call you to health-guilt, boredom, despair, depression, meaninglessness-you put to sleep by the deliberately falsified values of competitiveness. Competitiveness offers proof to your intellect that you can do no other than you are (you have to survive in the “jungle”). Competitiveness proves to you feelings that you are doing what is right (by following the rules of the game, you gain the reward of pleasure).

The conquest of competitiveness is the hidden key to your return to your self. Without competitiveness, the mental and emotional grounds of the illusion that you exist fall away. This falling away is the experience of death. You find that you are dead and have been so for years, that you have never been alive. Competitiveness makes you feel alive when you are not. Unfortunately, the moment you break through into death, the whole civilization organizes to “protect” itself and you from what it sees as the insane infection of unhappiness, despair, schizophrenia. Schizophrenia, which, in reality, is nothing but the helpless recognition of having a broken or divided head and heart (a self in disintegration), most modern psychologists consider a disease for both the individual and the society. It is something to isolate and quarantine and treat before it spreads. Psychology, rather than being a force of liberation, “serves” humanity with gentle kindness by binding the chains of consciousness and illusion still tighter in its loving attempts to “cure” schizophrenics.

Civilized humanity turns increasingly away from authentic human existence at the very moment when it is about to achieve through its technology the material basis for that existence. Primitive human beings are more developed in essence; civilized humanity is more developed in personality. Civilization develops the “persona,” the mask, the self-concept; primitiveness develops the essential, the direct experience of existence. To be human, we must achieve both simultaneously. Civilized gain must not be at the expense of human loss.

We lose our essential humanity, our essential self and cannot return to it because we cannot believe in a transcendent good. The primitives lose because transcendent good is all they believe in. The transcendent good is a good existing on a plane of reality that at first is invisible. Through ceremony and myth, primitives touch that plane and then go on to capture and kill it by giving it doctrinal definitions. Modern humanity emerges when people discover how absurdly limiting the doctrine is. Modern humanity manufactures life out of a conscious, and immanent notion of good. By doing so, we make good a contradiction. To save ourselves from the pain of the contradiction, we ignore one side of it. At best we indulge one side at a time and are, therefore, never wholly alive.

You will start to overcome competitiveness only when you can say “I don’t know who or what I am, but the life I’ve been leading is not mine.” However, you will can say that only when you can affirm there is a self and a guide to it, a God, beyond this confused self, one you can find and one you can become, however lacking you are in understanding it now. If you follow the judgment against yourself that rises from “within”-the sweeping negative experiences of boredom and emptiness-you can put your shattered soul together.

;

Chapter 17;

MEANING, THE ABYSS, AND COMPETITIVENESS;

This chapter closes the three-book cycle that began with Meaning and Creativity, passed through The Abyss Absolute, and concludes with Killer Competitiveness. The cycle began with the claim to the presence of an absence in life. It is an absence that is conscious at best only as the experience of meaninglessness. There is reason to believe that more and more of us are experiencing this condition whatever we may call it-this vague yet often piercingly sharp sensation. If unchecked, the disease of meaninglessness occasionally leads to complete paralysis and a condition of autism or schizophrenia, but more often it leads to the opposite, to constant, incessant activity rather than passivity. What is hard about understanding this kind of problem is that its symptoms are not only diverse in the extreme but sometimes absolutely contradictory. Yet the polarity of symptoms should not be surprising since the same happens in physical disease where opposites such as fever and chills regularly go together. Similarly, the most serious of psychological illnesses betray contradictory symptoms such as mania combined with depression.

The conclusion in the first book was that the disease that lurks behind the experience of meaninglessness is a lack of creativity in life, or, more precisely, the absence or abandonment of a creative way of living. A creative life is one where you live from your own knowledge of the good and seek to bring that good into your world. You have access to an inner dimension and create both your personality as well as things in the world around you from that depth dimension. Meaninglessness itself is not really the disease but only the deep symptom of disease. The disease is the departure of your humanity, your Self, from your life.

Paradoxically the condition of meaninglessness is a sign of both disease and health. It signifies that something is wrong, but simultaneously that something could be right. The specific circumstances when meaninglessness emerges show the direction you need to go if you are to heal yourself. Meaninglessness is a judgment against you life that comes from your depths. It is a sign that you are awakening to your depths. Where you have lost yourself in your life, you will experience bitter meaninglessness.

The second volume in this series dealt with the Absolute Abyss. It illustrated what accounted for a protracted and continuing failure to achieve creativity in life. Attainment of a meaningful existence absolutely depends on your ability to face the meaninglessness of your current existence. You avoid doing this, however, because any confrontation with meaninglessness is painful, a negation or an abyss. In it, you feel not only your life but your very ego denied. Personal and social forces combine, in a way that is more complete and universal in our era than in the past, to sanction and even to encourage you to turn away from the abyss. We all associate pain with disease. Of course, it is always a sign of disease, but now more than ever we see the pain as the disease rather than as a valuable message that could show us the way to health. Prevalent social attitudes have encouraged this tendency by an individualism that teaches us to guide our life decisions by the goal of avoiding pain.

You need to stand up to this individual and social pressure. Only by facing the abyss, its emptiness and pain, will it be possible for you to recognize that you generate the pain when you falsely identify with a lying definition of yourself. You may think you serve your true self by avoiding suffering, but it is only through facing the abyss of pain that you can gain access to your depths, your Self, your judgment of true and false, good and evil.

Finally, this third and closing volume of the cycle completes the circle. It is natural to believe that you would know it if you were living against yourself. The repeated act of putting your hand into the fire would hurt and the pain would show the error of your ways. The human soul could not remain silent when being self-mutilated no more than the human body. However, there are many times when your body cries out, but you misunderstand the significance of that cry. So, too, the violation of yourself does produce a screaming soul, but your understanding of this pain and of its origin is faulty. So, empty and lost to yourself, you falsely think that the discomfort is only hunger for food, houses, and toys. In fighting for these the pain persists and you blame nature or those people who are resisting you in your quest to fulfil your desires.

Two points should become clear. It is possible to live not only without understanding how much you hurt yourself by denying yourself day by day but also not knowing that you are striking out at others because of your pain you are giving yourself. When the Self is oppressed, the self becomes an oppressor. When the Self is destroyed, the self becomes a destroyer. One of the primary goals of these volumes is to illustrate, however vaguely, the unity between inner and outer. It is not that the inner state causes the outer state. In fact, in actions the reverse is equally true-the outer environment affects the inner Self. Instead, you must surrender the very attempt to understand reality by identifying cause and effect relations if you are to understand existence at all. The outer does not “cause” the inner and the inner does not “cause” the outer. The contradiction between them resolves itself when you can see how the two are united in, and derived from, a single higher principle. An excessively intellectualized and, therefore, inexact verbal statement of this resolution is that damage coming to you from society or others arises only because of their loss to themselves of an understanding of what is good for them, and damage going from you to them results from a similar confusion on your part. Were there no confusion, there would be no damage. While the damage is not good, at least it exposes contradictions and contradictions reveal error somewhere. Every injury felt is, therefore, an opportunity for mutual growth as long as you regard the injury not as evil but only as a sign of evil.

Killer Competitiveness agrees that the primary explanation for original failure to understand that the pain of daily life is the absence of creativity and, therefore, of meaning. It also insists, however, that the current barriers preventing you from ever overcoming your initial mistake is competitiveness. The essence of competitiveness is that it replaces your direct understanding of the good with a mechanical and artificial external definition. Consequently, when you experience pain in your living, you will think that it arises because of your inability to fulfill the rules of the game you are playing or, if you are a constant winner at that game, because you are playing the wrong game and must find another. Practically everyone, however, is in a state between winning and losing whatever game they have devoted their lives to. Competitiveness continues primarily because nearly everyone will be better than one person and worse than another. Therefore, the illusion that your pain is not that of deep meaninglessness but only a superficial lack of success can persist. The losers and your own losses as well as the winners and your own victories together keep prodding you forward into an every greater loss of yourself in the game.

The game is not a game. The game is deadly serious in its effect upon human life. Games will, by erecting the pretense that they are harmless, unimportant, and innocent conceal the devastation that they do.

Because of competitiveness, when you recognize that something is missing from your life, you will not understand what it is and, in fact, not realize that you do not understand. Competitiveness gives you both the mental and emotional proof you need that you know what is lacking. It mentally defines the bad as losing, as not getting, having, making, as not achieving the good life, the car, the cycle, the love. It emotionally creates bad feelings of depression when you fail to achieve these. Similarly, competitiveness defines the good as winning or gaining these and gives you a momentary good feeling when you get them. In this way, you are completely convinced that you understand why your life is painful. Even the known pain of regular failure is better than falling into the Abyss and into the fear of not knowing. When physicians give patients the name for a disease and explain it a little, though they may be wrong and have actually not yet done anything to treat the disease, patients may feel better. At least you have a definition of what you suffer from. It relieves you of the tension of the unknown. So, too, what enables you to avoid encountering the absolute negation of the Abyss, is a definition of good and bad, a definition of what is wrong with you, even if you in no way understand the reality of the disease.

Only when competitiveness ends can you recognize the existence of the disease as it is. Only then will the Abyss that is your life open before you. Only when you meet the Abyss will you find on its farther shore your own depths and your own deep understanding of good and bad. Only when you accomplish this can you live creatively-making and re-making not only things in the world but also your personality. Only then will you be in charge so you can refuse to allow others to oppress you and can refrain from oppressing them in return since, for the first time, you will understand human oppression. Until then, you will remain an outer barbarian to nature and others and increasingly wallow in the muck of interior meaninglessness.

The vicious guard dog who keeps you from the entrance to the path through the Abyss and from the Abyss to meaningful life is competitiveness. When competitiveness ends for you and, in fact, each time one of its forms ends, the Abyss of emptiness opens before you, your life, your very self, is a vacuum. “I can’t play the game anymore.” “I’m too old.” “What am I to do?” “Nothing really matters any more.” “I’ve been such a fool!” The depression, the pain, and beneath the pain, simply nothing. In the midst of nothing and the surrender or death of self-concept, direct contact with existence returns. You finally begin to value from Self and not from self-concept. Your recreate yourself from that experience and transform the world by following a life founded upon true, human values.

The oldest virtues-faith, hope, and love-are, of course, essential aids if you are to grow to your Self and cross the Abyss to meaning. Each gives you access to a depth beyond yourself. Faith and hope do this because they give you the confidence there is a transcendent good, a Self beyond self. However, the greatest of the virtues has always been love because love is your only link with the content of your Self when you have lost touch with it. Yet not even these great virtues have any but destructive power as long as the fog of competitiveness that turns all values into their opposite bewilders you. The very virtues become new opportunities for deceit and tyranny as long as they are directed toward success as defined by the rules of the inner and outer games. Faith becomes faith in future objects. Hope becomes the hope of success. Love becomes the love of achievement, of victory in the gaining of the game’s goal. Faith, hope, and love, but only when competitiveness ends, will lead you through the Abyss absolute to the Byss absolute and beyond to creative, meaningful, and renewing existence.

This trilogy is finally a work about death. It is a modern day book of the dead. Death comes, so the poem goes, in two ways: with a bang or with a whimper. Both our interest in the scientific “big bang” theory that began and ends the world and the artistic whimper of tears and fears and the pain of life are only physical and emotional proof that we are already dead. Competitiveness not only keeps us in the deadly condition but induces us to believe we zombies are actually alive. Competitiveness is the lying call to death that makes death sound like life. Only when the liar collapses and the lie perishes will new life be born.