There is no problem. Human ability, intelligence and drive is a bell curve. We can't all be on the better side of the bell curve.
No amount of wealth redistribution will change nature.
Or let's all do the race to the bottom so we are all equally miserable.
For so long as you manifest yourself in
human or animal form, you must eat at the expense of other life and
accept the limitations of your particular organism, which fire will still
burn and wherein danger will still secrete adrenalin. The morality that
goes with this understanding is, above all, the frank recognition of your
dependence upon enemies, underlings, out-groups, and, indeed, upon all
other forms of life whatsoever. Involved as you may be in the conflicts
and competitive games of practical life, you will never again be able to
indulge in the illusion that the "offensive other" is all in the wrong, and
could or should be wiped out. This will give you the priceless ability of
being able to contain conflicts so that they do not get out-of-hand, of
being willing to compromise and adapt, of playing, yes, but playing it
cool. This is what is called "honor among thieves," for the really
dangerous people are those who do not recognize that they are thieves—
the unfortunates who play the role of the "good guys" with such blind
zeal that they are unconscious of any indebtedness to the "bad guys"
who support their status. To paraphrase the Gospel, "Love your
competitors, and pray for those who undercut your prices." You would
be nowhere at all without them.
The political and personal morality of the West, especially in the
United States, is—for lack of this sense—utterly schizophrenic. It is a
monstrous combination of uncompromising idealism and unscrupulous
gangsterism, and thus devoid of the humor and humaneness which
enables confessed rascals to sit down together and work out reasonable
deals. No one can be moral—that is, no one can harmonize contained
conflicts—without coming to a working arrangement between the angel
in himself and the devil in himself, between his rose above and his
manure below. The two forces or tendencies are mutually
interdependent, and the game is a working game just so long as the
angel is winning, but does not win, and the devil is losing, but is never
lost. (The game doesn't work in reverse, just as the ocean doesn't work
with wave-crests down and troughs up.)
It is most important that this be understood by those concerned with
civil rights, international peace, and the restraint of nuclear weapons.
These are most undoubtedly causes to be backed with full vigor, but
never in a spirit which fails to honor the opposition, or which regards it
as entirely evil or insane. It is not without reason that the formal rules of
boxing, judo, fencing, and even dueling require that the combatants
salute each other before the engagement. In any foreseeable future there
are going to be thousands and thousands of people who detest and
abominate Negroes, communists, Russians, Chinese, Jews, Catholics,
beatniks, homosexuals, and "dope-fiends." These hatreds are not going
to be healed, but only inflamed, by insulting those who feel them, and
the abusive labels with which we plaster them—squares, fascists,
rightists, know-nothings—may well become the proud badges and
symbols around which they will rally and consolidate themselves. Nor
will it do to confront the opposition in public with polite and nonviolent
sit-ins and demonstrations, while boosting our collective ego by
insulting them in private. If we want justice for minorities and cooled
wars with our natural enemies, whether human or non-human, we must
first come to terms with the minority and the enemy in ourselves and in
our own hearts, for the rascal is there as much as anywhere in the
"external" world—-especially when you realize that the world outside
your skin is as much yourself as the world inside. For want of this
awareness, no one can be more belligerent than a pacifist on the
rampage, or more militantly nationalistic than an anti-imperialist.
You may, indeed, argue that this is asking too much. You may resort
to the old alibi that the task of "changing human nature" is too arduous
and too slow, and that what we need is immediate and massive action.
Obviously, it takes discipline to make any radical change in one's own
behavior patterns, and psychotherapy can drag on for years and years.
But this is not my suggestion. Does it really take any considerable time
or effort just to understand that you depend on enemies and outsiders to
define yourself, and that without some opposition you would be lost? To
see this is to acquire, almost instantly, the virtue of humor, and humor
and self-righteousness are mutually exclusive. Humor is the twinkle in
the eye of a just judge, who knows that he is also the felon in the dock.
How could he be sitting there in stately judgment, being addressed as
"Your Honor" or "Mi Lud," without those poor bastards being dragged
before him day after day? It does not undermine his work and his
function to recognize this. He plays the role of judge all the better for
realizing that on the next turn of the Wheel of Fortune he may be the
accused, and that if all the truth were known, he would be standing
there now.
If this is cynicism, it is at least loving cynicism—an attitude and an
atmosphere that cools off human conflicts more effectively than any
amount of physical or moral violence. For it recognizes that the real
goodness of human nature is its peculiar balance of love and selfishness,
reason and passion, spirituality and sensuality, mysticism and
materialism, in which the positive pole has always a slight edge over the
negative. (Were it otherwise, and the two were equally balanced, life
would come to a total stalemate and standstill.) Thus when the two
poles, good and bad, forget their interdependence and try to obliterate
each other, man becomes subhuman—the implacable crusader or the
cold, sadistic thug. It is not for man to be either an angel or a devil, and
the would-be angels should realize that, as their ambition succeeds, they
evoke hordes of devils to keep the balance. This was the lesson of
Prohibition, as of all other attempts to enforce purely angelic behavior,
or to pluck out evil root and branch.
It comes, then, to this: that to be "viable," livable, or merely
practical, life must be lived as a game—and the "must" here expresses a
condition, not a commandment. It must be lived in the spirit of play
rather than work, and the conflicts which it involves must be carried on
in the realization that no species, or party to a game, can survive without
its natural antagonists, its beloved enemies, its indispensable opponents.
For to "love your enemies" is to love them as enemies; it is not
necessarily a clever device for winning them over to your own side. The
lion lies down with the lamb in paradise, but not on earth—"paradise"
being the tacit, off-stage level where, behind the scenes, all conflicting
parties recognize their interdependence, and, through this recognition,
are able to keep their conflicts within bounds. This recognition is the
absolutely essential chivalry which must set the limits within all
warfare, with human and non-human enemies alike, for chivalry is the
debonair spirit of the knight who "plays with his life" in the knowledge
that even mortal combat is a game.
No one who has been hoaxed into the belief that he is nothing but his
ego, or nothing but his individual organism, can be chivalrous, let alone
a civilized, sensitive, and intelligent member of the cosmos.
But to be lived this way, the life-game has to be purged of selfcontradictory
rules. This, and not some kind of moral effort, is the way
out of the hoax of separateness. Thus when a game sets the players an
impossible and not simply difficult task, it comes quickly to the point
where it is no longer worth playing. There is no way of observing a rule
set in the form of a double-bind—that is, a two-part rule whose parts are
mutually exclusive. No one can be compelled to behave freely or forced
to act independently. Yet whole cultures and civilizations have
befuddled themselves with this kind of nonsense, and, through failing to
spot the self-contradiction, their members have been haunted all through
their lives by the sense that individual existence is a problem and a
predicament—a form of nature doomed to perpetual frustration. The
sense of ego is at root a discomfort and a bore, and nothing shows it
more clearly than such everyday phrases as: "I need to get away from
myself" or "You should find something to take you out of yourself" or
"I read to forget myself." Get lost! Hence the fanaticisms and
intoxications—religious, political, and sexual, the Nazis, the Klan,
Hell's Angels, the Circus Maximus, the dreary fascination of the TV
screen, witch-burnings, Mickey Spillane and James Bond, pachinko
parlors, alcoholic stupors, revivals, tabloid newspapers, and juvenile
gangs—all of which, as things stand, are the necessary safety-valves and
palliatives for human beings whose very existence is defined in selfcontradictory
and self-defeating terms.
Finally, the game of life as Western man has been "playing" it for the
past century needs less emphasis on practicality, results, progress, and
aggression. This is why I am discussing vision, and keeping off the
subject of justifying the vision in terms of its practical applications and
consequences. Whatever may be true for the Chinese and the Hindus, it
is timely for us to recognize that the future is an ever-retreating mirage,
and to switch our immense energy and technical skill to contemplation
instead of action. However much we may now disagree with Aristotle's
logic and his metaphors, he must still be respected for reminding us that
the goal of action is always contemplation—knowing and being rather
than seeking and becoming.
As it is, we are merely bolting our lives—gulping down undigested
experiences as fast as we can stuff them in—because awareness of our
own existence is so superficial and so narrow that nothing seems to us
more boring than simple being. If I ask you what you did, saw, heard,
smelled, touched, and tasted yesterday, I am likely to get nothing more
than the thin, sketchy outline of the few things that you noticed, and of
those only what you thought worth remembering. Is it surprising that an
existence so experienced seems so empty and bare that its hunger for an
infinite future is insatiable? But suppose you could answer, "It would
take me forever to tell you, and I am much too interested in what's
happening now." How is it possible that a being with such sensitive
jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and
such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as
anything less than a god? And, when you consider that this incalculably
subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of
its environment—from the minutest electrical designs to the whole
company of the galaxies—how is it conceivable that this incarnation of
all eternity can be bored with being?
-Alan Watts, The Book, 1966
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60551.The_Book_on_the_Taboo_Against_Knowing_Who_You_Are
http://www.holybooks.com/wp-content...against-knowing-who-you-are-by-Alan-Watts.pdf
