Posture

Given the Lisfrac fracture sustained playing my annual cricket match last year, I decided it might be more sensible just to umpire this year. This really wasn't much of a sacrifice for me; as I have explained before, much as I love to watch, I'm not sure I actually like playing cricket. Indeed I think I probably enjoyed umpiring more, although I think this is largely because it afforded me more control over the game than my sub-mediocre batting or bowling ever could. What became apparent throughout the course of the match though was that certain things common to all competitive sports will never fail to irritate the crap out of me and all of these things appear to manifest themselves in one particular player who has attended our match every year it's been played. He's not a bad person, I've been for a beer with him and he is perfectly affable, but once he gets on a cricket pitch, he really wants to win. And it really matters to him. Really. When he was run out last year, he stropped off round the world. Literally. In fairness, I don't think his decision to go travelling was entirely driven by being run out in a sub-Sunday league quality cricket match, but I think it helped. Anyway, my problem is that winning means so much to this guy that he spends and otherwise pleasant Saturday afternoon knock about in the park relentlessly sledging everyone in sight, badgering the umpire and time-wasting. It worked too: his side won in the gloom of a long summer dusk (although I think some of them even got sick of him criticising their bowling). 

So it's clear that I don't care as much as this guy about winning a cricket match, so why should it bother me? I guess it goes to the heart of one of my biggest beefs with the world in general: if you want to succeed, it pays to be a complete tool. By that I mean that the guides to success that encourage you to be single-minded, selfish and ruthless are right. All of those things will help you to be successful by a very limited meassure of success. Unfortunately, that particular very limited measure of success is the one that remains most popular in modern society; look at obituaries of 'great' people, and more often than not, they will find a way of saying 'he was a complete tool, but he made lots of money, so well done him'. I guess this is no surprise; people whose only motivation is money are likely to make more money than those who have other priorities, and equally they are likely to have less time to be nice to people. Of course the fact that that so much is made of the correlation between being a dick and making lots of money that many people think that the two are interdependent and therefore that they ought to be a dick if they are going to be successful. 

As the title of this blog suggests, I'm usually dealing with the temptations of the modern world and how I might avoid them (although less of that than perhaps I'd like - I need to be more solution oriented), however in this instance I have no problem resisting temptation. Not that I'm bragging about what a nice guy I am - I'm sure I can be as much of a dick as anyone else - but the impact of my actions on others concerns me. It is not unknown for me to wake up (admittedly usually when this coincides with a hangover) and worry about the consequences of something that I said or did several years ago. Granted, this is largely a symptom of the hangover shame spiral, but it is an affliction that I assume never affects those titans of industry who have brushed aside countless sensitive souls and bruiseable egos to get to where they are today. Perhaps I am wrong in this, perhaps they wake up every morning wracked with guilt over those they crushed on their way to the top. If so, why do they do it? Does the money and acclaim compensate for the waves of guilt and shame? It's possible, but it's also possible that it is the only compensation available for those with too little imagination to come up with an alternative. It's possible that these people even assume that the guilt is just a natural state of affairs, that all people feel like this all the time and that the world is a horrible place full of pain that deserves to be treated with disdain and exploited ruthlessly. 

Whether these people deal with their guilt through rationalisation or whether they don't feel guilt at all doesn't point to a particularly stable psychology, so why do we lionise them? If they weren't rich, they might well be considered worthy of psychological assessment, but because they are, they get to set an agenda based on their warped ideals. They have managed to create an orthodoxy.    where the only acceptable goal is winning, whether through the accumulation of more money than other people or by the accumulation of other arbitrary quantifiers, such as points. There is no defined end point at which you have won, you just keep accumulating more to continue winning. It is an ideology of present and immediate future only; if all your 'achievements' are in the past, then you have either passed on to deity status where you may sit atop your accumulation and pass judgement on the efforts of those still attempting to accumulate, or you have lost. Equally it is a wasteful and destructive ideal because there is no gain in genuine efficiency. The only efficiency considered of value to accumulators is one that creates a surplus that can be siphoned off and added to the pile of winnings. It is a cynical, miserable and destructive ideology, and it is the basis of almost all the world's current societies. And it is bizarrely alluring, because we all like to win. I get annoyed by the guy who has to win because he makes it harder for me to win, and I might not care that much, but I still want to win. It is this that I need saving from: from the desire to achieve something to the detriment of my fellow humans (for that is what winning is). I don't think it'd stop me being bothered by the guy who really wants to win, because for that to happen he has to stop caring about it too. We all do.