Yet this is not how I view man. I have immense belief in man's potential, and do not think mankind wicked by nature. What I do think is that man has been led from the path of virtue by a wicked system, a system designed to breed competition and greed. I have always despised competition; games such as chess are invariably toxic to my mood - one either loses and feels inadequate, or wins and feels guilty. This is precisely why arrogance is such an abhorrent trait. To say that one is great at something is a relative statement, implying the inferiority of one's coevals. Any truly virtuous person would never brandish such a statement to begin with. It is only the wicked who see competition as so important, and see the diminution of another's confidence as perfectly acceptable. This is also why the value of British understatement is, well, understated. There is something caring in the way one might wish to inflate another's confidence, whilst also feigning utter uninterest in one's own deficiencies.
All sports to me are disgusting. The idea of a team churns my stomach like some industrial vat. What I do enjoy are video games, particularly when there is no winner and no loser. To win or to lose is such a bizarre, yet brutal, notion. Absolutes are best avoided.
One idea I have always found odd is that of nationalism. The idea is that one must be proud of one's nation, for what reason we do not know, but pride we must nurture. First, I detest unjustified emotion - it is the most hollow parody of care imaginable. Secondly, as I mentioned earlier, praise is relative, and to bruit one's own abilities is to soil another's. There is to me something supercilious in this absolute desire to be the best, to win, to defeat others. This is a sadistic notion. In nationalism we see the sublimation of the malice in competition.
Furthermore, nationalism has no rational basis, as far as my senses can perceive. Comedy often reveals hidden inconsistencies in the absurdity of its comparisons - George Carlin said of nationalism that:
I could never understand ethnic or national pride. Because to me, pride should be reserved for something you achieve or attain on your own, not something that happens by accident of birth. Being Irish isn’t a skill, it’s a fucking genetic accident. You wouldn’t say “I’m proud to be 5’11”. I’m proud to have a predisposition for colon cancer.” So why the fuck would you be proud to be Irish, or proud to be Italian, or American or anything?
I think this is the key. National pride reduces the individual to a triviality. It is the abnegation of the responsibility we all bear - to be kind to others, and to be virtuous. 'Pride should be reserved for something you achieve or attain on your own.' Why am I to be proud of the sixty million others who happen to fall into some arbitrary, geographical boundaries? Pride should be something that is earned by the display of immense virtue, not by geographical proximity. This reduces achievement itself. There is something grudging and spiteful in nationalism. Think of the Olympics. 'This person won a gold medal!' 'They're not British. Not interested.' This kind of petty, spiteful idiocy is so entrenched that its deracination is probably impossible. More than this, to contradict its progression is considered tremendously infra dig.
That most sanguine of philosophers, Arthur Schopenhauer, wrote of nationalism that:
The cheapest form of pride however is national pride. For it betrays in the one thus afflicted the lack of individual qualities of which he could be proud, while he would not otherwise reach for what he shares with so many millions. He who possesses significant personal merits will rather recognise the defects of his own nation, as he has them constantly before his eyes, most clearly. But that poor beggar who has nothing in the world of which he can be proud, latches onto the last means of being proud, the nation to which he belongs. Thus he recovers and is now in gratitude ready to defend with hands and feet all errors and follies which are its own.
I think there is truth in this too. Then nationalism is a solace for those who do not wish to perfect the soul, who do not wish to improve humanity. It is a lazy path to contentment, vicariously sapping others' abilities. It is parasitical. The irony in nationalism is that it is the abjuration of responsibilities which would be a legitimate source for pride, which really would improve people's lives. To say one is proud that this country produced The Beatles is not as beneficial as to say one wishes to achieve something similar. In fact, to claim the achievements of The Beatles as one's own does precisely the converse - it eliminates the need to achieve this for oneself. I scarcely need to add that I find this negation in nationalism quite deleterious.
That was a fairly lengthy excursion into a fairly unrelated topic. I had not even considered nationalism as I sat down to write this, my mind being absorbed in more quotidian nonsense. However, what I intended to lament was perhaps more important, perhaps more lodged in the gullet of modern civilisation. It is that all can be reduced to greed. Invoke any single action anyone has ever taken, and now consider what personal motives they had. As an example, I am writing this blog with the vague hope it might improve my idiosyncratic writing style. Additionally, this is probably CV-fodder for the future. If this happened to be a blog with more than 2 readers per calendar month, I might also be accused of having commercial ambitions.
Perhaps some self-service is not wicked, but this is not the point I wish to make. The point I wish to make is that it is perfectly easy to look on the world and see only grim rapacity. This sphere becomes a stage for Plutus and his multifarious guises. All becomes hostile, and nobody cares for another. I do try to resist this conviction's reification in my mind, but I fear it to be true. Even love is a biological impulse, with self-service convolving round its entire being. Then, if this is true, what is the world but a desolate landscape of hostility? People care for others insofar as it might cause benefits to redound on themselves. You may notice this has engendered a kind of systemic paranoia in my mind. I cannot look without shivering despair on a world in which all emotion is expedient. Broadly speaking, all interaction you experience with others, dear reader, will fall under one of two gross categories. First, there are those who interact with you out of friendship or familial relation. These people gain some degree of satisfaction from the traits you offer. Second, there are those who are paid to care about you. This is altogether more invidious. Yet both are self-serving.
I do not know what I mean to conclude from all this. Self-serving must be tolerated if one is to remain sane in society. Yet when one marks its presence, it becomes impossible to regard the world as anything other than alien, atomic and strewn with malevolent robots who respect one only when one nourishes them.
'This is all very righteous, are you suggesting you are not greedy and self-serving?' I hear you snarl. Of course I do not suggest that I am free from mankind's horrific bonds, and this is what makes such truths doubly degrading. I, supposedly free, observe iniquity in my contemporaries and shudder as I realise those same iniquities are buried in my core too. Then I consider the immense reconfiguration everything would have to undergo to rectify this, and I am seized by dejection.
Some wanker is hammering on something upstairs, and I really do wish they would fuck in an offward direction. I will remember to exact my revenge in blog post form. Anyway, congratulations if you made it this far, I scarcely did.
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