On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 5:08 AM, SS <cybers...@gmail.com> wrote: > The article looks at life like a single player game. Life can be a > single player game or a team game in which multiple players cooperate. > In India life is defined as a multiple player game in which your life is > played in family and society from the day you are born.
Life is NOT - never ever a single player optimization game for any living being. This is the law of nature. However the temptation of a selfish life befalls every creature. The stronger they are the harder they fall for it. The team spirit of ants was fabulously documented by Dr. E.O Wilson, the noted naturalist. In one of his examples, the riskiest duty in an ant hill - guarding supply lines always falls on the oldest ants. They embrace certain death in order to be of maximum use to the family. To be selfish cannot easily enter the conception of an ant because to believe so offers no advantages, only downsides. They can't survive without each other, and even then it's a tough life. Their precarious position in the food chain never allows them to forget the dangers of life. Even if a few stupid truants wander off from duty, they never last long on the outside and the contagion doesn't spread. On the other hand, larger animals like male elephants will occasionally wander off alone, fed up with having to put up with the nonsense of the herd. The kids are annoying, there are constant fights between the members, food is scarce and so on. So they succumb to temptation because they can. Nevertheless, this is only initially fun - it soon becomes a miserable existence. They finally return to the herd when they grow calmer and more accepting of the interconnectedness of their life with the rest of the herd for good and bad. Humans are different in that they never seem to learn, they go through cycles of this madness. The modern world clings to an illusion of freedom afforded by temporary surplus riches. Yet this is mass disillusionment where the price for the pursuit of freedom is a lot of traps. Financial traps, loneliness traps, incompatibility traps. Divorce rates are highest in the developed world - http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/People/Divorce-rate If you possess a burning desire to be free, how can you stay married? Life becomes a debt trap of college loans, mortgage and pension funds. All of these were more or less provided for by the ancient family - where the parents taught the children their skills, and housing and old age care was almost always taken for granted. But that doesn't mean the old days were perfect, it never has been. You had no choice of profession, or housing or quality of care. Now, the modern nuclear household people too have no choice but to abandon some new found freedoms and band together, to create the socialist nanny state. A state created in the image of the spurned joint family and village. If you belong in the nanny state you obviously can't do as you please. The violent debate in America since the civil war is merely this. The desire to enjoy the fruits of the nanny state and none of its costs. Yet, lawlessness, slaves, no taxation, and soon guns - one by one the freedoms fall because the alternative is unbearable. The land of the not-so-free then. The nanny state where it has evolved without as much trouble in places like Singapore, Scandinavia, Japan and S. Korea soon offers not only free education, healthcare, housing and retirement care but also child care services, emotional support through social workers, and even plays matchmaker by offering financial rewards to tie the knot. Yet loneliness plagues their citizens because the nanny state lacks the human contact of a family. So they nanny state still has a few evolutions left to complete its cloning of the joint family. Even though nanny state citizens have mostly become obedient servants of the carrot and stick it rankles in their heart that they have gone no further in net freedom. So this too will only last a while before another evolutionary cycle is prompted by frustration. Humans are experts at deluding themselves. At each stage in our evolution from stone age to the plastic age social order has changed to accommodate the insatiable need for freedom. However the desire for selfish freedom is a bottomless pit that can never be filled. Every new stage of freedom has spawned dissatisfaction and a new complaint. To desire selfish freedom is to deny the interconnectedness of life, and no one alive wins by betting against life. So freedom is not found on the outside, but on the inside. It is found in total acceptance of the reality that freedom as popularly sought is a lie. When liberation occurs from within, all need to innovate on one's social condition with a view to escape ends. This is what every serious inquiry into life since the dawn of man has revealed. We are lucky to live in age of plenty, where many of us spend years specializing in a profession. We should take the opportunity to learn to specialize in life; it is more rewarding than any profession. A selfish organism is the very definition of cancer.
