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One way to win is to stop “playing.”
You can still be in the game, and technically, the regulations allow you to stall, filibuster, or use the rules to maintain possession (of the ball) with immunity.
However, winning on a technicality is uninspiring. In the sense of fairness, it is always an asterisk of legality rather than achievement. A loophole of bureaucratic cleverness seldom inspires, which reduces victory until we bleed away what it means to have a hero.
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When you are victorious against all odds and naysayers, you’re persistent.
When your stubbornness hinders you, leading to failure, you are obstinate,
Success determines whether it is self-destructive or self-confidence.
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Our hubris in assuming that sentience sets us apart has allowed other intelligences—animal, artificial, and mechanical—to harness our relentless tinkering for their own survival.
Humans serve as agents of artificial evolution, yet we remain impulsive enough to ignore the risk of creating our own demise.
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Survival of the fittest cannot be calculated in advance; it is only recognized as "fit" in hindsight.
Naturally, we can forecast some adaptable traits will be indispensable; however, the secondary cascades illuminate unforeseen weak traits as more evolutionarily beneficial.
For instance, domestication (quasi-parasitic, sacrificial survival) underscores the folly of peak physical prowess or sexual natural selection. By stripping survival instinct in favor of subservience, devolution may land some species on Mars, greatly expanding their survival odds.
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The more you do, the more balls you drop. We often lose our keys when we move to a new city or forget to tend our relationships when starting a business venture. Our focus is on the new, and the common suffers.
Considered mathematically, the more you do, the more losses and chaos you will suffer as you stir the pot, but you will also encounter more luck and become adept in turmoil.
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Progress is laudable and, by its nature, unstable. However, focusing on some social advancements undermines the founding cause of why progress is possible: that progress must be sustainable, or it is merely an immature, immanent disaster.
For instance, once a path to financial security, college education has become fiscally irresponsible and ideologically constraining. Its promised utility misaligns with post-graduation reality. Many graduates are left to return to academia or enter parasitic economic prognostics (enter the realm of speculative finance) rather than contributing productively.
Consider the broader repercussions: Education’s increasingly self-referential logic continually draws on external resources to expand its crusades. The contradiction of taking tax money to condemn the government and citizenry while simultaneously raging against colonialism and capitalism risks the stability of its foundation. When progress overextends its base, instability follows: a correction or a crash ensues.
This is reminiscent of a plant or tree whose attention is on gaining light until it topples, ripping its roots out of the ground.
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Is philosophical learning an antiquated folly? Imagine Walter Benjamin or Einstein as Don Quixote, insanely living a noble lie in a brutal world.
Consider the outcomes: Benjamin, a notoriously eclectic reader and philosopher, committed suicide fleeing the Third Reich. Einstein’s learning aided him in escaping by making him valuable to the Allies.
The key difference (for this supposition) is the practical use of Einstein’s mind rather than his philosophical considerations. Practical conversion (utility) may save you in the short-term to continue your musing, while primarily convoluted aesthetic or theological discourse tends to create a tragically celebrated martyr.
However, practical considerations make for a blunt human, and all grand creative endeavors and ideals stem from the philosophical “what if” instead of the sensible “what now.” The folly is to cling to the grand imagining (dream) rather than supplement reality with it. Yet, the fantastic becomes its own inverted form of survival, and it is infinitely more appealing to fight dragons than to design rockets.
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Typically, the winner is determined by (1) might (overwhelming scale), (2) surprise (unexpected violence or betrayal), or (3) weak point leverage (fulcrums or flexibility).
Given the goal of a revolution, you will not have the numbers to win, so the revolutionary must use (2) surprise and/or (3) weak points. This is called terrorism or guerilla warfare.
To attempt a pacifist rebellion is to protest from inside your moral strictures: we can only beg for concessions and policy tuning from a violent state. Further, in our clamoring, disruptive asking, we are verifying the state’s power to give and our subordinate status.
If you protest but do not dare, you lose perpetually.
from Ward Churchill, Pacifism as Pathology
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A breakup stings sharply when young, yet we lack the decades of ingrained patterns that shape older adults.
For youth, each trauma is magnified because it is an intense encounter in a limited set of experiences. Without a broader perspective to gauge importance or offer insight, a singular event can derail someone.
But, let’s not confuse a lot of experience with a breadth of experience: many older people have numerous similar experiences that form a rut, a singular perspective. When encountering adversity or trauma, it is not a broad perspective that offers wisdom and reprieve, but instead a the ingrained, embodied repetition of decades offers habitual bodily monotony that appears as resilience.
This is something youth do not have: the tedium of repetition as a survival mechanism.
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Crossing a line makes it immediately clear where the line was, but up until then it can seem vaguely established. The action clarifies.
This prompts two critical responses. Firstly, do you rectify your breach and learn from it? This involves recognition and acceptance that a misstep was made but goes beyond apology into responsibility.
Secondly, can the lesson transcend specific domains? If viewed as a learning opportunity, a singular failure can catalyze broad improvements or realignments.
The difficulty with focusing on learning by analyzing mistakes is that it emphasizes not failing, which thwarts risk-taking and becomes less about nurturing resilience and fortitude than maintaining brittle pride. Instead, oscillate your focus: lessons learned should limit repetitive errors, provide predictive models, and bolster forward momentum.
