Part 3: Play the Right Games

Many good games - Games are necessary. If there was no better or worse, nothing would be worth doing. There would be no value, and thus no meaning. But not all games are equally good.

The internal critic’s MO - Select a single, arbitrary domain of comparison (e.g. fame, power), treat it as the only relevant one. Then contrast you unfavorably with someone truly stellar in that domain (was harder in small rural communities). Maybe even use the unbridgeable gap as evidence for the fundamental injustice of life, most effectively undermining all motivation.

Fighting nihilism - “There will always be people better than you” is like saying, “in a million years, who’s going to know the difference?” The right response isn’t meaninglessness, it’s “any idiot can choose a timeframe where nothing matters.” Talking oneself into irrelevance isn’t a profound critique of Being, it’s a cheap trick of the rational mind.

Religion vs ethics

Ethics is the study of right and wrong. Older and deeper, though, is religion - the study of good and evil, the archetypes of right and wrong. Religion addresses the domain of ultimate value.

The Bible: Old and New

The Bible is, for better or worse, the foundational document of Western civilization. It is a library of many books, each authored by many people. It’s a truly emergent document - a selected, sequenced and finally coherent story written by no one and everyone over millennia. The Bible has been thrown up, out of the deep, by the collective human imagination - itself a product of unimaginable forces operating over an unfathomable timespan. Its study can reveal what we believe and how we do and should act that can be discovered in almost no other way.

When ancient societies wandered carelessly down the wrong path, they ended up enslaved, miserable, or obliterated. Was that reasonable, fair, just? The Old Testament authors, realists, assumed that the Creator of Being, a Force of Nature, knew what He was doing, that He was all-powerful, and that His dictates should be carefully followed. When things fell apart, they blamed themselves, treating God’ goodness as axiomatic, and taking responsibility for their own failure. It is insanely responsible, the exact opposite of criticizing Being.

The essence of the New Testament is the attempt of the Spirit of Mankind to transform the understanding of OT ethics of the child (admirable self-control and mastery) into the fully articulated, positive vision of the true individual: the fundamental desire to set the world right. It is the leap from the cessation of sin to sin’s opposite: good itself.

Faith

→ You take a risk, and decide that you will treat the Old Testament God, with all His terrible and oft-arbitrary-seeming power, as if He could also be the New Testament God. You decide to act as if existence might be justified by its goodness - if only you behaved properly. That declaration of existential faith allows you to overcome nihilism, resentment, and arrogance.

→ Faith is the realization that life’s tragic irrationalities must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being. Dare set your sights on the unachievable and sacrifice everything (even your life). You have, literally, nothing better to do.

Your aim matters

→ We wouldn’t act unless the present was eternally lacking, the future eternally better.

→ Ancient Hindu idea: the world, as perceived, is maya - appearance or illusion. Your eyes are tools to help get what you want. The price for that specific, focused direction, is blindness to everything else - blinded by your desires. What you aim at determines what you see. What if the world revealed whatever goodness it contains in precise proportion to your desire for the best?

→ You decide to aim at a better life, not not at the cost of worsening someone else’s, but in a manner that will also make the life of your family better, and your friends, and the strangers who surround them. You even start to wish your enemies well, hard as that is.

Where to start

→ Thinking is awesomely powerful, but when existence reveals itself as existentially intolerable, thinking collapses on itself. In the depths, there is something greater - noticing, not thinking.

→ Start by not thinking - or more accurately, but less trenchantly, by refusing to subjugate your faith to your current rationality and its narrowness of view. Then pay attention, and notice something that bothers you, which you could fix, that you would fix. Be less concerned with the actions of others, because you have plenty to do yourself.

→ All people serve their ambition. In that matter, there are no atheists. There are only people who know, and don’t know, what God they serve. Set your ambitions, even if you are uncertain about what they should be. The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power. Status you can lose, but character allows you to prevail against adversity, and never leaves you.