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Is life a zero sum game?
in Philosophy
If one observes nature, there is brutality - for one animal to survive, another should die. We observe human societies - it is more or less the same, although we tend to be 'dignified' about our cruelty. In short, this world eliminates individuals and nations that aren't strong, smart, or rich - at least it reduces them to a mere nothingness, dehumanizes them. Nature seems to follow Spencer's law. It doesn't follow our idealism - equality, justice, and the rest.
Is life therefore a zero sum game where one man's loss is another man's gain? Perhaps, it is. Or the Buddha wouldn't have encouraged the path of liberation. He would have praised the world and asked people to enjoy it. None of this should discourage us, though. We must rejoice in our suffering, take it as a hint that a better world awaits us.
Is life therefore a zero sum game where one man's loss is another man's gain? Perhaps, it is. Or the Buddha wouldn't have encouraged the path of liberation. He would have praised the world and asked people to enjoy it. None of this should discourage us, though. We must rejoice in our suffering, take it as a hint that a better world awaits us.
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Yeah I think the Buddha would have praised the world of the senses if it lead to lasting happiness. But whatever we gain we will eventually lose. Either the thing we have will end or our life ends, one or the other.
"In short, this world eliminates individuals and nations that aren't strong, smart, or rich"
Yeah that's a partial insight. I try to not make a big deal over things that aren't important like position and status and find some level where I can meet with people. I have failings such as being schizo-effective disorder, but nobody cares about my success or failure. So I try to meet as a light hearted person who has joy in my dealings and good listening and sharing.
Then maybe anything is possible, but we're limited to our clinging, which limits our perception and action.
If one observes anything for enough time, one will find an absence. But its not just absence because there is form, aliveness.
The non duality of this gives an illusion like nature to reality.
But in the world of theories we can presuppose anything to justify anything else. The flaw is in the very perception itself.
But that's the whole point of the path isn't it?
I think you should see the movie, "Cloud Atlas".
As I think it adequately describes the expression and question you have.
In addition, there's an interesting TED talk by primatologist Frans de Waal that I think illustrates the existence of empathy and reciprocity — two of the foundational pillars of human morality — in other social species, suggesting a shared evolutionary origin to these aspects of our own psychological makeup and adding further corroboration to Peter Kropotkin's theory that cooperation and mutual aid are factors of evolution at least as important as competition (if not more so); as well as presents a serious challenge to social, political, economic, or philosophic ideas that revolve exclusively around the importance of competition and de-emphasize the efficacy of cooperation, particularly when discussing the supposed inherent selfishness and brutality of human nature.
Certainly we can find ample examples of things like selfishness and brutality throughout our history, and even in our present; but we can also find their opposites, and I think it's a mistake to focus on the negatives while excluding life's positive aspects and potentialities. Nature isn't idealistic, but I also don't think it's as inherently barbaric as people like Spencer make it out to be. In my opinion, seeing life as simply brutal and/or a zero sum game is like focusing on the cruelty of the Nazis without considering those who helped hide Jews at great cost to themselves, or focusing on slavery in the US without considering those who helped slaves escape to freedom on the Underground Railroad, or ignoring instances in life where everyone benefits when cooperating and striving for a common goal.
The Buddha himself never said that life was nothing but suffering, nor did he deny that things like happiness or joy exist. He also acknowledged the existence and skillfulness of things like compassion, generosity, harmlessness, loving-kindness, etc. that help make up the path to liberation. In some ways, awakening can be seen as a type of spiritual evolution that allows us to transcend the baser aspects of our evolutionary makeup while opening us up to our fullest potential, far beyond what people like Spencer seem to think is possible.
You've just described Samsara. But the universe out there has neither intelligence nor compassion. We humans do, although we often choose to ignore both. That makes all the difference.
Every religion has at its heart the insistance that we are not just animals operating on blind instinct where survival is everything. Intelligence gives us the ability to make a choice, and that is the fruit of the forbidden tree.
Intelligence and the choices it brings can result in destruction for everyone or salvation. That choice may be "The heck with survival, I'm taking a gun and blowing away the people I hate and then killing myself." But that ability to choose also lets the stranger step in front of someone about to get shot and sacrifice themselves out of courage and compassion.
So the world we live in isn't nearly as simple as conflict and cooperation for survival.
We're not animals. We come from animals, but we're not. We're not bound by some kind of animal law. We're not ruled by our survival instincts.
We have a choice about how we live our lives. It's that simple.
In the Foundation of Morality, Schopenhauer asks the question: How is it that a human being can so participate in the pain and danger of another that, forgetting his own self-protection, he moves spontaneously to the other’s rescue? How is it that what we think of as the first law of nature - self-protection - is suddenly dissolved and another law asserts itself spontaneously? Schopenhauer answers: this is the breakthrough of a metaphysical truth - that you and other are one, and that separateness is a secondary effect of the way our minds experience the world in the frame of time and space. At the metaphysical level, we are all manifestations of that consciousness and energy which is the consciousness and energy of life. This is Schopenhauer:
"The experience that dissolves the distinction between the I and the Not I … underlies the mystery of compassion, and stands, in fact, for the reality of which compassion is the prime expression. That experience, therefore, must be the metaphysical ground of ethics and consist simply in this: that one individual should recognise in another, himself in his own true being … Which is the recognition for which the basic formula is the standard Sanskrit expression, ‘Thou art that’, tat tvam asi."
In John Mathews
'Joseph Campbell and the Grail Myth'
in 'At the Table of the Grail',
Ed. John Mathews
It is only our ego born semantics that say that life's fluidity is actually cruel
for the very attachments it threatens.
Fluidity is the underlying truth of existence, for everything changes.
It is only a self fuelled dream that (in denial of this truth) says
that an ending of identity is anything more than change.