Sake White

A commenter at Bookworm Room forwards the proposal that instead of focusing on the black and white mindset of winning and losing, we should focus on the international cooperation engendered by the goal of “making sure everyone wins”.

I thought my reply was interesting enough to post here.

Many Americans regarded the French as traitors because they opposed the American invasion of Iraq

I had some internet arguments over this subject during 2002-3. I viewed the French as traitors not because I expected them to uphold American interests over French ones, but because the French themselves betrayed their own nation in WWII. Not only the Petain government and the ones that gave Petain power but also the Paris mob that cheered Petain’s refusal to fight and the Nazi occupation. Afterwards, when Nazi Germany betrayed Russia and the Allies started fighting back, including the British that were evacuated at Dunkirk with no thanks to the French Army, then and only then did the French start thinking about fighting back fully. There were still a bunch of collaborators though, who were punished by French “patriots” after the war. Surely there were some French patriots, but what good were they when Petain came into power? No good at all. It took American efforts to galvanize resistance and success. Much as it is still true in Iraq and Afghanistan to this day. The French cannot themselves. Their first instinct is to retreat and to cooperate and to negotiate the use of their nation as a weapon against America and Britain. They cannot avoid it, anymore than Americans can avoid loving the Marine and martial traditions.

No amount of argument can change the nature of the French national character. Sarko is given well wishes precisely because we know how hard it is to be what he is and to do what he promises to do, in France and Paris. America is still generous enough to give the benefit of the doubt to the French, even when the one they admire is only the French leader and not the French people as a whole.

If Americans could see the demographics of who voted for Sarko, then perhaps they can differentiate the Hollywood French from the Fly Over Country French, but currently that info is hard to get and not well known.

Did we have a right to demand that they join us in a war that we now regret starting?

The French have a right to demand, not us, that the French government provide as much battle experience as is necessary in order to suppress the internal revolts going on in paris and the other locations in France. Without the battle experience and knowledge they could have acquired in France, suppressing internal revolt of the Muslim serf class will be much harder. It already has been much harder.

The only people who don’t want their nation’s or their allies’ nation to acquire battle experience are parasites and agent provocateurs. Primarily anyways. Such folks are not French patriots, at the least.

the Americans are so competitive that they insist that the terrorists must be beaten. Americans don’t perceive terrorism as a problem to be solved; they see it as a contest to be won.

Of course Americans believe in the winner takes all scenario. After all, as people here may well know, I illustrated the difference between Leftist belief in what “winning” is and what Jacksonian Americans believe winning is.

The Jacksonian/classical liberal/patriot/etc group of allies see us winning and them losing, losing horribly and with great humiliation, as a Good Thing. The Left sees such things as horribly degrading corrosive to good will, international good will that is.

It is a philosophical difference. If more people studied the philosophical differences, they wouldn’t be surprised at all these differences between Europe and America. Nor would they even have to talk about it.

This is a childish and dangerous approach to a difficult policy problem. -Op

Regulars of the Bookworm Room may find it surprising that I would agree with this statement. It is a childish and dangerous approach to a difficult policy problem. Why? Because only danger creates glory, greatness, excellence, and strength of character. You think sitting around where it is safe creates heroes and men or women of indomitable will and strength? No way. They would beg the collar of slavery to be put around them, so long as it saves them from pain and danger. Civilization naturally makes men and women weak. It is unavoidable, really. Just as desperate circumstances create a Hirsi Ali, so does the lap of luxury create a Paris Hilton. You understand the analogy, I hope. I would expect nothing less from the regulars of Bookworm Room.

I also agree that it is indeed very childish. Because a child naturally gravitates towards truth and away from false promises and lies. A child also looks toward protection, security, and love rather than wealth, toys, and power. Cooperative hunting is one thing. It provides food to the hungry children and martial skills that protect your women and extended family. Cooperative looting, as seen in everything the UN touches, is quite another thing. Cooperative genocide and extermination of a people, is also something that is very very far from being childish or what a child seeks.

So you see now why I agree that placing a strict adherence on winning and losing is indeed very childish. For a child represents our best potential for a better future. He and she would wish for all that would create a better world. Loving parents, safe circumstances, and productive things to do and learn. All such things are shattered by international cooperation. All. Such. Things. Have no doubt on that score.

The child knows something the adult tries hard not to think about. The child knows intimately that winning and losing, in the world that we live in, has always been about life and death in the end. If you lose, what do you lose except your ability to survive and take care of your loved ones? Is that something valuable to fight for? The Left says no. We say yes. As simple as that.

Children are without the societal preconceptions and indoctrinations that adults have lived their entire lives with. Children know the truths I have spelled out instinctually, for nature gave us instincts to survive, not just intelligence. We are not masters over nature, we are simply her greatest creations. Yet even the greatest greations do not have the power of their creators, whether that creator be god or a natural (random) process.

Children are vulnerable, naive, and undisciplined not because they lack the truths, no they are the way they are because against cooperative sex for food propagated by international cooperation, the children are defenseless. Such is the way of the jungle.

The Left prefers eugenics and remaking human nature over into their own image. I can’t quite say I support them in this. They try, though. They try very hard with their indoctrination centers and attempts at eliminating the breeding ability of undesirables. Rather than work with children to maximize their chances of survival and to teach them how to harness their instincts and inherited traits, the Left teaches the children that they must not be children. The Left teaches people that they must be automatons and cogs in the grandest and greatest machine humanity has ever created. They call this machine cooperation and equal sharing in a community.

I do not believe in their philosophical premises nor do I believe in the morality of their methods.-Ymar

UPDATE: Here are some more comments in the dialogue. I will also include a link to the actual discussion, although it is a very lengthy one that most people will have neither the interest nor the time for.

1. Ophiuchus, on November 12th, 2007 at 12:19 pm Said:

   First off, I’d like to ding Bookworm for some logical errors, most egregiously the non-sequitur that a de-emphasis on winning and losing eliminates training in the social skills related to competition. They’re still playing sports — they’re just not going for the jugular anymore. I would think that an emphasis on how you play the game would be MORE conducive to teaching people how to handle competitive success and failure.

   On a more important point, I might as well play the contrarian here. I think that our hostess and some of my peers here have missed an important historical and cultural development. Let’s start by thinking in terms of “social connectedness”. This is the degree to which people in a culture interact with other people — not just members of their own group but people from other cultures as well. Now, if we examine the cultures of the New Guinea highlands, we see very low social connectedness. The people in one valley have almost zero interaction with anybody else. At the opposite extreme will be citizens in a large cosmopolitan city such as New York, London, or Paris. These people interact with gobs of other people in all sorts of complicated ways. So they have a very high value of social connectedness.

   Next, let’s look at the historical relationship between competitiveness and social connectedness. That relationship is complex, but a general trend is readily observable: overall competitiveness diminishes as social connectedness increases. In the extremes, the phenomenon is easily recognized. The highland tribes of New Guinea were in a state of perpetual low-level warfare until the mid-twentieth century, when they came under the control of the lowland government. By contrast, dwellers of big cities are, in relative terms, extremely cooperative with each other. They have to be — a big city doesn’t work if too many people push and shove to get ahead of each other. Indeed, if you want to take this all the way back to early hominine history, when all hominines were hunter-gatherers, you instantly recognize a strong gender-differentiation: males didn’t need as much social intelligence as females. But civilization imposed constraints on the exercise of the natural male instincts to use violence to resolve disputes. Modern sports are one of the training mechanisms by which we seek to rein in destructive male impulses.

   Now, I realize that this is a broad and vague trend, not an iron rule. I can think of a million exceptions. But I can also think of a billion supporting items. Above all, it makes perfect sense — people crowded together in an ever more crowded and interconnected world face an increasing need for cooperation.

   Indeed, this comes very close to the central problem facing Americans in their relationship with the rest of the world. The American approach is drenched in competitive instincts. You’re either with us or against us. The furious American reaction against 9/11 wasn’t so much about the tragedy as it was about the resentment of having the bad guys score a point against us — which meant that we had to go and score ten points against them.

   Competitiveness has some merits. It also has some problems. But the big idea I’m pushing is that, where-ever the proper balance may lie between competitiveness and cooperation, that balance is steadily shifting away from competitiveness and toward cooperation.

1. ymarsakar, on November 12th, 2007 at 2:25 pm Said:

   First off, I’d like to ding Bookworm for some logical errors, most egregiously the non-sequitur that a de-emphasis on winning and losing eliminates training in the social skills related to competition.

   That is because Op believes that winning or losing is a social function that has something to do with both sides winning or both sides losing. Chris White over at Neo-Neocon proved one of my contentions concerning Leftist philosophical beliefs.

   The Left does actually believe, amongst its majority members if not all members, that force does not create any progress. If you must use force, you must temper it with international solidarity, agreements, negotiations, and law. (amongst other things of an international and haggling character)

   Since winning or losing depends almost solely on the social skills required to talk to another person and come out thinking they both won a good deal, this then means that you can de-emphasize winning and still emphasize social skills. Because to the Left, social skills mean cooperation and the end of meaningless war and violence while winning implies that someone loses. So long as people lose and others win, in their view, violence will continue to grow unchecked. The violence will disrupt social networks as well: valuable social networks, even.

   I worry less about self esteem and more about survival skills.-Danny

   As a simple example of what I am refering to, consider that survival implicitly demands that someone lives and someone else dies. In the Leftist world, Danny, their idea of international sanction and writ is designed to ensure that everyone wins. It is designed to ensure that everyone survives: even the dictators and the malcontents, Danny.

   overall competitiveness diminishes as social connectedness increases.-Op

   As Op’s statement here proves, I don’t even need to read what he wrote to understand the basic philosophical framework that is at work here. I didn’t when I stated my basic position, except for Op’s beginning. Follow the logic if you don’t believe me. If social connectedness increases while at the same time overall competitiveness decreases, then this means there will come a time in which both parties win, instead of competing to make the other lose.

   This, reflected in the need for international sanction, is why social skills and a de-emphasis on competition is so important to many members of the Left.

   War is simply both sides losing, without providing any social advantage or social connectivity, in this philosophy. They, in a sense, see no long term prosperity or benefit from war, because they don’t see war as cooperative hunting. They also see war as being mutually exclusive of social networking or cooperation, thus why war can never be “cooperative” anything, let alone cooperative hunting.

   people crowded together in an ever more crowded and interconnected world face an increasing need for cooperation.-Op

   If Book and Danny, or others, are hearing the two letters “UN” in their heads, then I assure them that they are not alone.

   To differentiate the basic philosophy spoken of here with the philosophy I advocate, I will simply recall for the audience’s benefit the charity event Bookworm posted about recently.

   Valour IT, or rather Valor IT in non British spelling, is the name. (The French/British looks more chivalrous and archaic though: something the military values) The four branches of the US military uses intense competition and the drive to win over all others, even their buddies (especially their buddies), to achieve indomitable teamwork via military necessity in wartime and peacetime.

   War is not important to civilian life, except that without an understand of war, any understanding of war, things in civilian life tend to get warped. Even now we have the dread nature of the scientific method to deal with. A million exceptions with a “billion” justifications is a huge and monstrous edifice to deal with, to any human, genius or not. Deductive logic saves us the effort by allowing us to look at human actions totally unrelated to the subject at hand, seemingly, and construct an accurate statement of truth from those seemingly disparate elements.

   This is why I recommended that people look at Valour IT for why having cooperation does not necessarily mean that competition must be absent. It is not part of human nature. Human nature, the best in it, arises only in warfare, Book. You know this. But even for the ones that are skeptical, simply consider the nature of cooperation. Why do people cooperate? People cooperate because it is one of the best survival methods found in nature, whom we revolved from one way or another. Then consider why nature favors survival. Why would nature favor one species over the other: dictate that some go extinct but others live on and survive, or even thrive? Because nature promotes competition. Competition is the law of the jungle that decides whether you are worthy of advancing to the next level in the food chain. It determines whether you have done your best, everything in your power or your species’ power, to grow and become stronger. Nature admires strength, be assured of that. And so we, children of nature or gods or whatever you believe in, admire strength as well or should.

   Such a philosophy is incompatible with the Leftist belief that ultimate cooperation can only come from a result of lessening violence, hostility, aggression, and competition. I’m sorry; it just is. I can do nothing about it.

   I’ll leave the talk about parasites not needing a vigorous host to other times and places.-Ymar

2. Ophiuchus, on November 12th, 2007 at 3:17 pm Said:

   First, I’d like to point out that deconstructing the political message of cartoons is, well, just plain silly. Do you really think that the people who created these started off with a plan to foist conservative values on an unsuspecting public? Or do you think they simply wanted to make the most entertaining product they could? Given the amount of money required to build such a movie, and the high risks of an expensive failure, do you really think that anybody in those studios was able to indulge their political preferences?

   Second, I want to make a fine point about the nature of competitiveness. I agree that its motivating power is enormous, and I further agree that it does a great job of diverting young male energies in productive directions. I like competitiveness. Some of my best friends are competitive. Gee, even *I* am competitive. I take a competitive person out to lunch every year on National Competitiveness Appreciation Day.

   These things said, I will also remind everyone that there are costs associated with competitiveness. Businesses suffer when staff members competing for promotion engage in ugly politicking and anti-cooperative behavior that undermines the team. On this point, we’re in the middle of an interesting cultural experiment. Women are slowing moving up the corporate ladder, and as they do so, they are bringing a more cooperative and less competitive outlook to the teams they lead. They’re still competitive, mind you, just not as bloodthirstily competitive as some corporate males. As they do so, businesses are learning to take a more finely tuned approach to competition versus cooperation inside the corporation — to their benefit.

   Second, let me point out that competitive urges do indeed impel the individual to excel — but what happens to that individual when he reaches the top of his abilities, as he inevitably must? I am reminded of one of my favorite posters: a picture of french fries in their little baggie with the caption “Not everybody grows up to be an astronaut.” A lot of males go through a mid-life crisis sometime in their forties or fifties when they realize that they won’t end up as King of the Hill.

   So let’s not put competitiveness up on a pedestal. Like lust, it impels us to do things that are beneficial to ourselves and others. But, like lust, it can be terribly destructive if not carefully circumscribed.

That should provide you the context for the discussion without going into the entire lengthy thread.