Ben
Ben Old School computer nerd

Winners Are Losers - I'm left feeling tired and flat

Winners Are Losers - I'm left feeling tired and flat

Was that click bait?

Why would I write such a potentially combative title for this article?

Well, I think I understand what’s going on for me there. There’s a parallel to how I frame my political views.

In that case, I’ve spent most of the last 25 years seeing targets on the foreheads of the politically conservative amongst us. When asked why, I’d say something along the lines of “it’s just so easy when I used to be conservative in my early 20s”

There was an arc of living and learning that led to this thinking, documented in Green Crash (write to me for a copy - there are real people referred to who might not appreciate me making this public)

Let me tie together:

I hope to explain why I’m no fun to ‘play against’ and why I always let the Wookie Win


Functional Programming

I’ll start with an early attempt at functional poetry or mine, which echos many contemplations of existence and mortality.

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Begin
  If (Life = Temporary) and (NothingToFear)
  Then WhyAreYouCryingAllOverYourBeer()
else
  While Not Dead
    Do
      (TakeGoodCareOfYourselves)&&(WhoTakesCareOfTheBirdsOfTheAir)
    End While
  End if
End #0

From a certain perspective, our deeper minds have a habit pattern from the womb.

  • That feels good. I’ll seek more of that - Craving
  • That feels bad. I’ll push that away - Aversion

This is hardly an original take on the mind or existence. You’ll see such references in several spiritual traditions.

This idea is my central part of my simplistic summary from Goenke Vipassana training. Though it might be foolhardy to try and write a summary, I would summarise as follows:

At the root of our human formation is a survival instinct that expresses itself as our emotional base. This emotional base is drawn to ‘pleasant feelings’ and pushed away from ‘unpleasant feelings’. The Feelings are thoughts experienced on the body. By observing our Feelings on the Body we can experience the Wisdom of Impermanence - the feelings will come and go. This happens spontaneously.

To live this wisdom would be to be in a near permanent flow state where we would recognise our survival instincts as the source of much suffering. The release from suffering might be acceptance of our impermanence. For me, the practices around this are difficult to bring into the Daylight World as we are conditioned to treat Death as a Taboo subject. The Modern and Post modern world views often make a laughing stock of Traditions that may allow us some freedom of the Anxiety that is growing from our Survival Instincts.

Richard Dorkins

Yes, I’m going to take a pot shot at Dawkin-ism. Not because I think he is stupid or evil. However, the 4 Horsemen of the Atheist Apocalypse (now 3. or 2 Horsemen if you cancel Sam Harris(which sounds like a terrible idea to me)) had a substantial impact on my relationships.

I’ve seen this arise as what I’d call a ‘look of constipation’ on the face of friends or the less familiar with whom of spoken of my experience of Belief

Dr Stokoe - “An unconscious belief is experienced as a Fact. An awful lot of fundamentalism arises from beliefs that are taken to be facts. And facts and the sense of certainty are very comforting”

Upon my path from Modern to Postmodern world views, my Catholic influences faded to an agnostic view. The kind of programming that happens to a child inside the church is powerful stuff. I’m hoping to have many conversations inspired by role of Religion in Statecraft in Dune. I look forward to Denise Villeneuve’s take on the story.

For much of this time (I think of this as age 33 to late early 50s), I found the opinions of Atheists down right horrible. They’d sometimes resemble the horrible ways we behaved as children, kicking ad-hominem sand in each others faces.

I’d see the Need to Win and argument as uppermost of the part of the Atheist clubbing I’d receive for Believing as I do (or Did.)

Sometime in the last 10 years, my Belief system became Object as in - I could look at it from a Witness perspective. I’ll still fall into the dictum of my Beliefs if I let my Awareness drop into Daylight Thinking.

My Biases remain, despite the work of Danny Kahneman et al. I hope to let them drop away more over time.

It took John Vervaeke to highlight a key part of the etymology of the word Belief - Believed - Beloved

Beloved ideas take on the likeness of Gollum’s hand reaching for the One Ring - the comfort of Invisibility and endless life.

My belief system contains a decent chunk of Scientism, for want of a better term. Ask my school friends about my nerdy disposition. I recall having read a Newsweek article on CFCs and the ozone layer. I spoke up about in class (year 5 or 6, as this happened in the Marist Junior School). A nearby student derided me with “YOU think you’re Scientific!”

Yes, I certainly did then. If you’d told me in my 20s that my computing career and scientism mindset might be partially influenced by a repressed Anxiety, I would have given you that Constipated look.

Did you just read that and wince a bit? Apologies. I am not judging your Belief systems - and that’s not because of some shiny part of my character. It’s more a case of… I don’t ‘trust’ my own belief system. To what extent that shapes my world, I cannot know about your Subjectivity. As tempting as it might be, we can’t read each other’s minds.

Enter the Steel Person

I heard Eric Weinstein propose the idea of finding the best form of an opponents arguement and essaying on a perspective which is essentially the opposite of your own.

There’s a much larger topic here on Difficult Conversations that needs a post of it’s own.

Is Steelmaning unfamiliar to you? There’s a decent BBC program on this topic.

I’ve tried a number of practices around this idea, which I’ll expand in The Sound of Changing Opinion. One of my more successful practices has been to open up to the Michael Shermer Show.

In the past, I would described myself as skeptical of Skepticism. Where I hope I’m going is - seeing value in Skepticism and being able to take the Role of Other in that best form of the arguement way.

I’m happy to say that I recently listened to a lengthy interview with Richard Dawkins. I did so with a relatively open mind (IMO). Towards the end of the interview, I heard some ‘open-ness’ in Dawkins that I’d never noticed before (it was essentially saying there are interior parts of Us that are un-knowable)

So, did Richard chill out a bit or was it me?

Well, I’m inclined to say - it was me. Taking responsibility for my Belief’s and Biases seems like a decent starting point allowing impermanence to open me up.

Was it the case that I’d want to win arguements with Skeptics and Atheists in the past? Yes, I think so. And consider the kind of labelling or grouping/categorising I did in the previous sentence.

Well, that Categorisation bit of myself is ingrained by life conditioning. It will not pass away easily. I recognise it in my Language Brain and yet, it can be Truly said:


As I notice how deeply I rabbit-holed these points, let me try and return to Subject.

“I did once want to win at the game of life. I won some things for a while. I became bored and stopped being so motivated, even though the old habits came back at times where I let my Awareness wander.

“I have no wish to Beat you at Anything. The Game is Rigged. The only way not to Lose is to Not to Play (paraphrasing Marla Daniel’s from The Wire )

I’d like to tell you about the moment that my perspective on my Belief system started to change. It’s another pop-culture reference.


That’s what happened to me. I realised that my Beliefs were largely Chosen.

It’s possible that yours are too - but there is no way for me to know that.

If being an Alpha Predator on this planet is all there is, I don’t want to play.

Feel free to Win. I will let you Win. I won’t even try. It’s more like this for me now. In Beating You I am Beating Myself. In playing the Game with you, I’m forgetting what makes us One and what we have in common.

Wanna know why I don’t care about professional sport? Isn’t it obvious yet?

The rest of this essay becomes easy

  1. Growth Fetish - the book I referred to played a major role in a consciousness shift for me. It’s very easy to summarise. Infinite Growth on a limited resource base is a fairy story with a terrible ending. (request a copy of Green Crash for details, or check this brilliant essay from Doomberg )

  2. When Sapiens was published, I was away travelling. There are plenty of great readers amongst my friends. Ian and Suzanne gave me their copy. I read most if it in a hostel in Frieberg. Sapiens won out over the other Homo-erectus’ species because we are far better Cooperators. This cooperation is often as horrifying as War and the current Culture of Division. I barely want to play the Cooperation game any more, as so much of it is tangled up in ‘winning’. Good luck Elon and Jeff. I will happily go with Tolkien’s Gift of Men

  3. Game Theory - nuff said already. Do you get it yet? My Subjectivity is being trained to recognise Impermanence as Wisdom. See the next paragraph for the linkage to….

  4. The Maximum Power Principle (MPP) as both an ecological and social principle. The ecological understanding is linked with Systems science and the early days of Ecology as a discipline. A Species will maximise it’s Energy Conversion rate (power as a rate of energy conversion) or be out-competed and become extinct.

For a long time now, I’ve seen the behaviour of folks in the workplace as a anthropomorphic display of MPP. We are apes at certain scales.

How often do you see Us (Sapiens) as behaving exactly like this?

(this is short and might make you laugh… at Ourselves)


The Patriarchy

I feel the need to speak to this topic. For me, it’s a case of social MPP. There’s plenty of Post Modernism that might agree, that much if not all of our Social Construct is some kind of power game.

“Guilty” I would say on the Dock, were I on trial for being part of a Patriarchal Hierarchy.

Giving up as much Power as I can and losing interest in Winning is the only response I have so far - before Impermanence takes me out of The Game. I am grateful for that. I wouldn’t choose a human nature that is so drawn to power.

Lucky Day

In summary… I don’t think I’ll ever be a Gamer. Sure, I’ve been addicted to Adrenaline. I’ve felt conflicted by younger folks feeling the need for a $3000 graphics card when the have other debts. I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve sometimes thought of Gamers as Losers. I apologise. I know that was unkind. It’s a way to some of that juice that our MPP places in us.

Calling somebody a Winner or Loser is often much harsher than Discernment.

I’ve found myself in a place where Mining Magnates and Politicians that speak only of Growth (as a way to get re-elected) are people who Tom Waits’ Dad described as:

Now when I was a boy
My daddy sat me on his knee
And he told me
He told me many things
And he said sone
There’s a lot of things in this world
—You’re gonna have no use for—-
And when you get blue
And you’ve lost all your dreams
There’s nothin’ like a campfire
And a can of beans

That’s right. I’ve got No Use For Winning. Sorry, but it’ll be a boring chess game.

If you’ve seen anything like what I’ve seen, you would know that Luck plays a significant role in our lives.

We were born in the 20th and 21st century. Some parts of that experience might be Lucky.

In fact, we are leaves in the stream more than Edmund Burke’s for good men to do nothing heros.

We might have a sense of Meaning and might need to Win a few rounds before we get bored.

For me, I sense that anything good or meaningful that happened to me was a kind of happy accident.

And no, I’m not concerned that in certain ways Nihilism kind of resembles Impermanence.

Maybe a peaceful consciousness is much more Subtractive than a post modern world’s obsession with Appearances and Power will allow. Fortunately, that condition is Impermanent.

Have a Lucky Day.

If you read till the very end, thank you. You might be interested in this.