From space, it must all look the same.
Beasts, human beasts compete and some lose and some win. Seems to be. No matter the system, democracy, theocracy, tribal, socialist, no system, you see the same thing.
So this is how it is. For many of us it is good. For many of us it is okay. For some it is awful. It goes.
I don’t know what to do about it. And righteousness is silly. Pet the fur as it goes by?
1 comment:
From a Western mindset, that may seem to be the case, but I can assure you that our extraterrestrial observers would not be so poisoned by this prejudice.
Indeed, if they turned their attention to eastern cultures, they would find the much more productive "victors without vanquished" mindset, particularly in Japan where "winners and losers both have their place and are expected to coexist, the losers retaining a large measure of respect." (from Deborah Tannen's THE ARGUMENT CULTURE, p 220).
Simply because a given person, species, culture, belief system, economic system becomes dominant for a time does not mean that the others are without value, and will not rise to dominance at another more appropriate time.
And simply because a person, etc. disappears altogether does not mean it was vanquished (look at the Neandertals -- they lived for hundreds of thousands of years and simply died out on their own).
Even Darwin's "survival of the fittest" -- often used as a biological justification for cruelty and oppression -- is now more commonly viewed as "survival of the luckiest."
And what does "fittest" mean, anyway? It means, "most suited to a given circumstance", a definition quite far from the Übermensch connotation often assigned to it.
Take, for example, Darwin's own black and peppered moths which he observed to replace the white ones in early industrial London. Were white moths inherently "weaker"? Of course not. They were only "less fit" for the new soot-covered environment in which they found themselves.
You say you "don't know what to do about it."
For the beasts, perhaps nothing need be done.
But for us, perhaps we can stop carrying on about the virtues of victory and show a little appreciation for the vanquished.
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