The Curse of Competitiveness and The Seed of a New Generation
“I have always believed that a nation is accountable for its traitors as well as for its heroes. But likewise, civilization, the white man civilization, in particular, are as responsible for their perversions as for their successes.”
Albert Camus, in his speech on The Human Crisis.
What I am saying here is no different than what Camus tried to say on the end of World War 2. Simply trimmed for today’s audience. And the fact that we find the same phenomenon observed in military theatres and political spheres amongst biological organisms. Camus implies that just as we try to hold people responsible for their actions, people are equally responsible for the ideas they propagate. Talking about success automatically chains the speaker to the responsibility of explaining the sacrifices they had had to make to reach that success. Often, a person will back out if they know the cost of success. This cost requires a person to accept the inferiority of the ‘other’. This other is any person who are chasing the same goals as them. This is what we call competition, or how I like to describe it, the repressed homicidal emotion. It would be far more original to kill people outright than to compete with them. Because competition implies that you have to transfer aggression into everyday activities. These activities all become poisoned by the constant urge to outdo the other person, whoever a person thinks is their rival at the moment. It destroys the natural senses of a person and triggers a constant defensive mechanism that becomes a filter over all of their emotions. This filter never allows the light of the soul to pass to the material world, especially their professional lives. This is why people in the competitive, materialist, corporate culture appear dead to people who are still not a part of it. This poison also creates the necessity for corruption. Because fairness is too weak of a policy for people already considering their fellow humans their enemies. Corporate competitiveness imposes that survival is dependent upon their competitive nature. Yet, like fairness, survival too is a weak concept, in fact invocation of fairness and survival are invitations to immoral behavior. Thus, humanity has chosen a system that demands amoral and inhumane behaviors and promotes it as virtue. The normalization of this system happened through European Colonialism, and Europeans continue to colonize the minds of others globally. Everyone who becomes antagonistic to this ideology are portrayed as weak and unintelligent. A trick befitting of a civilization that has crafted most of its history out of thin air.
Likewise, the colonized corporate feels that those who do not integrate are unintelligent. As time rolls on, a person who has spent a life of corporate enslavement always end up with immense self-loathing. This is where a large group of the unintelligent and imbecilic become the hopes of a new generation. Because the only way to design a future civilization is to learn to accept yourself. Every corporate sellout can never justify their actions and thus can never justify to their own conscience. Thus the biggest element of a true civilization is a Pure Conscience. We can see this example given many times by the one we know as Jesus or Isa. Consider the statements below in respective succession:
Matthew 5:5: God blesses those who are humble, for they will inherit the whole earth.
Matthew 6: 9,10: Pray: Our Father in heaven, may your name be kept holy. May your Kingdom come soon. May your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.
Matthew 25:34: Then the King will say to those on His right hand, ‘Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.
The Book of Matthews as we can see is a political commentary on how the “weird” and “unintelligent” are the only people capable of creating a future. In the title artwork, the small square protruding out of the egg represents that small minority that refused to integrate, the one the bible calls “the blessed”. Thus, denoting them as unintelligent is a mistake however. Because they have a very clear logic:
“we do not want to participate in an unfair and corrupt system that will drive us into self-loathing.”
Participating in such a system is encouraging it to grow and changing the moral values of civilization. Essentially changing value and Function of Truth. I discuss the function in a separate writing. Whereas the whole egg has become unfertile, the fertile square rules over the complexities by sheer simplicity. By making their lives minimalist, they opt for a collapse of the system they are leaving behind. Such a movement can recreate civilization and the moment this key square leaves the grid, the whole system collapses because it is still dependent on the people of simplicity.
So what is the Crisis that Camus is hinting at? It is the inherent competitiveness of man where a person is unwilling to take a loss and accept their inferiority. Thus, they rely on corruption. Corruption of rules, guidelines and even human history. Now, we can condense the whole issue by saying it is a problem of the human ego or “I”. We will choose to not take that route and explain why competitiveness can arise in people who fundamentally think no better of themselves than their fellow humans. It has to do with the value of opinion. People who are incapable of articulating want themselves to be heard instead of accepting their position. We move forward with the idea that the opinions of such people matter, whereas such a precept is dangerous if not applied in moderation. Competitiveness is a survival mechanism to institute oneself in the social hierarchy to impose opinion. This imposed opinion is a form of political bullying that the bully become so preoccupied in, that he forgets that being on top has other duties, other than bullying those beneath him. And psychologically, a bully is incapable of thinking abstractly. Which is a mental disorder often caused by hormonal imbalance. Sometimes loosely called “psychopathy”, a term that is devoid of any true connotation. These mentally deranged individuals become the epitome of White Man Civilization, exactly because it demands such bullying and amoral tactics for a person to become respectable. Thus Camus’ Human Crisis is the inarticulate romanticization of mentally deranged individuals and not normal ones. Many people have tried portraying this exact issue in their artwork that we fail to cherish the completely normal individuals who keep the society running.
Thus our crisis up until this point has been the failure to romanticize farming, ranching, herding of sheep, cleaning of sewage and milking of cows. The miner, the ticket checkers, the nurses, the baristas. The entire crisis has been our fascination with the exotic. Again, we can say this is a result of the ego, but what is the ego a result of? Indiscriminate fascination with a fleeting life. Now, I will not advocate religion where it has been a primary tool for many “psychopaths”, but we improve what we romanticize. And we must improve the simple things, we must live constantly with a clear conscience and work towards finding our identity. Irrespective of nationalism or ideologies. Our crisis has been that others have decided for us, our ancestral calling.
Realizing the crisis is not enough to redesign. The seed of the new generation can only come to fruition when we learn moderation as well. We do not become fanatics in romanticizing the normal things, because the psychopath has a place in society too, albeit he may have been born wrong. A psychopath like all other deranged people deserve a position befitting his condition. It is moderation to accept that every person is different and every weird is a different kind of weird. The Seed will grow into a plant by the will to bridge gaps and the will accept the weird, but the weird to be known as the weird and to be kept in that bubble. Because that weird will one day become another seed, and the transition to the next generation should be a peaceful one rather a violent one. The goal is exactly that, that we know the meek and we give them what they deserve and transition away from this life without reacting violently to change. And often change is not what we want, not what we imagine.