Winners and Losers

"One of the silliest preoccupations of man is that it makes some kind of sense to divide whole categories of people up into one winner and a whole bunch of losers or also-rans. What poor sick compulsive first infected us all with that virus? And how?"

--Spider Robinson, whose Callahan's Place novels should be required reading for human beings

Like so many grand experiments aimed at equality, the notion of not keeping score comes out of good, even beautiful intentions. People have an innate need to have their specialness recognized, and all too often, for both children and adults, it isn't. We see this. And we try to fix it.

But of course in doing so we create other problems that are so much worse. People so full of artificial self-esteem that there's no room for thoughts of others. People who, confronted with failure for the first time in their lives, fall completely to pieces. Children not allowed to engage their imaginations for fear they might be (gasp) hurt.

Adults are hypocrites: every child knows it. Case in point: abolishing scores in children's games and awarding medals for just showing up, all the while living in and perpetuating a culture that values success above all else--and furthermore, insists on a very narrow and rigid definition of "success". 

Kids are not stupid. Institute a rule that either everyone gets Valentine's cards or no one does, and they'll know anyway which ones are real and which ones are forced. Adults may not be keeping score, but you can bet the kids are. They have to: they take their cues not from what grown ups say, but rather from what they do.

The American Declaration of Independence states that "all men are created equal". This is true, in a sense, and patently ridiculous in another. One woman can build a house from the ground up; one man is a piano virtuoso, and so on and so forth.  Not equal at all. Which isn't to say all don't deserve equality of opportunity.

That's what's lacking, and tiny measures like not keeping score in a kid's soccer game aren't going to change that. Maybe if we stopped keeping score in adult games...

Is that even possible? Not without a whole lot of paradigm shifts. We'd have to get rid of money, first off...and then, even more critically, make sure that whatever replaces it doesn't just assume what we assume are money's most important functions: to divide the rich from the poor, first off, and then...to keep the poor impoverished by any means necessary.

I visualize a system by which people would earn credit for good deeds, and lose credit for bad ones. Everyone would receive a guaranteed annual income,  enough to maintain a roof over your head and keep your belly from your backbone; further enrichment would come from enriching others.  The level of enrichment would be up to those others. 

I see in Reddit's karma system and things like Kickstarter and Indiegogo the seeds of this idea starting to take root. Assuming we can keep society patched together for a few more generations -- by no means a safe assumption to make -- we may eventually arrive at a place where the contributions of all are valued. 

There are, of course, serious problems with such a system, the chief one being the hivemind that tends to value conformity and punish dissent. THAT, to me, is a critical, perhaps fatal flaw in our nature. It's not so much that we empower the strong and impoverish the weak: it's that we act as a kind of unthinking mob far too often, enforcing whatever values we deem acceptable. Right now we, as a society, grant those who are monetarily wealthy all the power. There are other kinds of power, though, as the richest tend to discover hanging from their lamp posts shortly after they push inequality too far.

There are other, less violent, sources of immense power. Love is a huge one, and it's the one I've dedicated my life to embodying as best I can. Which isn't very well, yet. I'm working on it. My polyamory springs from the ironclad belief that limits on love are artificial and unnecessary. Every now and again I'm richly rewarded when I see someone recognize in my love for them that they are loveable. There is nothing so gratifying as seeing others succeed because I've shown them what a success they already are. 

Without spending too much time on this, it's imperative that people understand that my love for others does not lessen my love for them one bit. So far, at least, people seem to get that...which does me a world of good.

I said many years ago

that "we're all special, but none of us are any more special than anyone else." Both parts of that statement are highly offensive to a great many people, because they contradict this world's highest guiding principle: that I am special and you are not. We've created Gods in our own image...Gods of "love" whose "love" is all too human, riddled with judgement, expectation, and  (yes) damnation. The chief function of our Gods is to separate, not unite: to divide us into eternally chosen and eternally hellbound. This religious mindset turns up in anything substituting for a religion: political and philosophical thought, and even things as mindless as music and sports preferences. This is why it's important not to reject the thought of an "enemy" out of hand simply because it comes from an "enemy".  We are all one: in that respect, our enemies are us. 

I'm working towards a world where the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Who's with me?