Why are you pretending you’re not fighting?
I love the ancient world.
There was little pretense. Those guys were realer.
The sheer difficulty of life didn’t allow for wishy-washy things.
Blood, war, disease and ravaging poverty stripped everyone’s conscience down to bare bones. People stared at their problems, their joys, and their world with un-utopian, unvarnished eyes.
They saw the truth of reality.
They saw the reality of life as a never-ending war.
But this modern world is clothed up too much.
Modern civilization works well with pretense.
This one is ruled from behind a façade, and by illusions, assumptions and outright deception. But it works regardless.
It works to fool us into believing peace is a real and present thing. Or that it is even attainable.
That’s why we pretend that we are not on a bloody battlefield. Or if we accept this, we pretend that we are white-flag-waving neutrals – like medics and journalists.
We are the worst of liars.
Because we lie to ourselves.
Life is war.
Life is war.
All of us are fighters.
There are no spectators in this game, no observers of conflict.
We are blood-drenched soldiers, killing and dying for the game of the field.
What we are doing is battling for scarce resources and amassing as much war advantage and leverage as we can.
Everyone wants what everyone else wants. And these things are scarce, so little to go around.
So we have to fight.
This mad scramble is going on whether we like it or not.
So what do we do now?
It calls for each of us to be on both the offensive and the defensive.
To be ready to attack life with tact and fierceness. To smile in its face, and then punch its eyes out the sockets.
To also brace ourselves for its blows, to cushion its merciless jabs. To understand that we can’t always win no matter how hard we try but that there’s a victory in every fight if we make for it.
To live our time in this gameplay, until we are put back in the box.
To play our time the best way we can.