Category: psychology

The Politics of Human Sacrifice

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It might sound ridiculous to suggest that the history of human sacrifices involved politics, but to my mind, everything from human sacrifices to modern political theory boils down to the blame game. The United States has a long, documented history of national, state and local office holders blaming someone else for their failures. Inept leaders of other countries blame other countries for their failings, and some of them even seek to blame factions within their own country to explain away their failures, so no one holds them accountable. This version of the blame game often leads to the genocidal slaughter of their fellow countrymen, which often leads to civil unrest, civil wars, and wars with another country. Modern politics, and human nature, is such that politicians often take all the glory for everything good that happens during their reign, and they blame someone else, anyone else, for anything bad that happens, as a desperate means to shift blame and maintain power. If a group of people, a culture, or a society doesn’t know other countries exist, to whom do their leaders shift blame when situations turn desperate and dire: the gods. 

“The gods are angry,” Chief Emmitt says in his State of the Tribe Address. “I mean look at our year-over-year yields in corn and soybean, they pale in comparison to 2022. The Dore family, over here, have sacrificed more than their share of prized goats, and the Stanislavs tried all the rain dances they have in their arsenal to appease the gods, and they’re just not working this time for whatever reason. We’re not sure if we’re doing our rain dances correctly, but we have nothing to compare it to.

“The point is we’re trying,” the Chief  continued. “We’re all trying as hard as we can to bring rain. Our administration has tried as hard as could to do something, anything we can think of, but nine out of ten of our best and brightest economists are now saying that without citizen sacrifice some of their beloved family members all of our efforts will prove fruitless. No one wants to do this, but we need to look within ourselves and call on our friends and family to join together to help their fellow man through these dire times.

“To appease the gods, we all need to be more like our friend and neighbor, Barney Ruffalo. Stand up Barney! Barney told me, the other day, that he knows how much the gods have sacrificed to give the Ruffalo family the precious gift of life. He knows that the gods have blessed him with four beautiful daughters, and he has agreed to share his wealth with us by awarding our tribe his beloved Audra for appeasement. Barney told me, just the other day, that the gods have given him so much that he feels it’s time for him to give back. Please join me in giving Barney a huge round of applause.” 

We can dismiss such notions, and ways of life as primitive, but they were still human, and humans have a whole lot of human nature in them. Human nature does not necessarily equal intelligence, of course, and we can debate whether the primitive things primitive man believed define how primitive they were, but they still displayed a level of intelligence greater than the other animals. They learned how to create fire, how to use tools, and they employed some mathematical principles and science to build homes, cities, and pyramids. They eventually developed complex forms of communication, and some of them engaged in various forms of art. They also developed various complex forms of trade and historically beneficial trade routes. We can also guess that even though we regard many of their practices as brutal, they displayed acts of sympathy, empathy, and some acts of kindness with their fellow countrymen and tribe members to elevate them intellectually and emotionally in the animal kingdom. No matter how many arguments we put forth in their favor, however, we can’t ignore the fact that they insisted that human sacrifices would help them improve crop yields. Why? The people were starving and desperate, and my guess is their leader needed a scapegoat. 

Group thought and historical traditions passed down from ancestors often inhibits rational thinking, but we have to believe that there were some thinkers in these cultures who considered the whole practice wrong, ill-conceived, and illogical. Those people were probably considered troublesome ninnies for focusing too much on the bottom line. 

“I know we’ve all arrived at this notion that sacrifices are mandatory, but if they are, shouldn’t we see some blanking results?” this ninny probably said after their initial sacrifices didn’t pay off. “We’re sacrificing our children, for what? Rain? I don’t see rain, do you? And why women? It just seems so arbitrary that we select our most beautiful young, virgin women for these sacrifices. Does Chief Emmitt select them because they’re more fertile and bountiful, with the hope that that will translate into greater soil fertility and more bountiful and consistent yields of high quality? Or, is it just sexier to sacrifice our young, beautiful people? Is it about soil fertility and consistent yields or is it more about the show?” 

Did they try sacrificing males in the beginning, and the gods replied was that those were just a bunch of fellas. “If you truly want ample soil fertility, through rain, to produce a better harvest, you’re going to have to fork over that gorgeous, little girl trying to hide behind her daddy. She would be a prized possession worthy of me.”

There were probably some, because there are always some in every culture, who enjoyed the inherent violence involved in throwing virgins into active volcanos. They probably wouldn’t talk about it in polite company, because how do you bring that up casually, but there was a secret part of them that found it kind of fun. There were probably others who considered the whole event, and the theater involved, a little exciting. We have to guess that these ceremonies were well-attended. I mean how often does one see a woman thrown into an active volcano? It was probably the antecedent to must-see-TV. Being the humans they were, we can also guess that some complained about their seats. “I was there, but I ended up behind that Monroe kid, and his over-sized melon, so I couldn’t see squat.” At that point in their history, they accepted the fact that sacrifices needed to happen, so why shouldn’t they be there to enjoy the show. 

“Hey, the Andersons are going aren’t they?” Mike Phillips said, during a disagreement with his non-compliant wife, “and they’re pretty smart people, right? Well, they’re basically convinced that it’s mandatory for the future success of our people. So, whaddya say we get the good lawn chairs out.” 

Were those who threw the virgins into volcanoes considered specialists in their field, or were they nothing more than anonymous and replaceable executioners? If it was the former, what kind of qualifications did the chief and his council seek for their specialists? Did the chief and his special advisers conduct numerous interviews and review resumes, or did they have tryouts? If Clark couldn’t hit lava with a ninety-pound woman, because he didn’t have the upper body strength, did they turn to Tommy, because not only did Tommy have the strength, but during tryouts he proved that he didn’t mind all the crying and screaming on the way up the mountain? If Tommy secured the position, how long could he do it? Even the coldest, darkest SOB eventually develops a conscience. They were primitive, but they were still humans with human nature in them. Did Tommy have an experience that sat on his soul? Did he still have nightmares about the time he was commissioned to throw a thirteen-year-old into a volcano after she developed such a cute relationship with his little brother? Did those constant images play on his mind so often that the nightmares led to a level of insomnia that played on his otherwise fragile mind until he was eventually fired? At some point, the Chief and his council knew that Tommy was no longer up to the job, but they were faced with the question, how do you replace such a sadistic person to carry this out?  

Why active volcanoes? I realize that they thought the volcano reached into a deeper part of the earth, but why did it have to be active? If the practice of human sacrifice was to fulfill a need, why didn’t they just shoot the virgin in the heart, or slit her throat? Some argue that while there is archeological evidence to suggest that human sacrifices happened, there is no evidence of the practice of throwing virgins in volcanoes. Proponents state that there is some documented evidence of third-party hearsay provided to explorers and missionaries, but opponents are skeptical, stating that the primary sources likely embellished the nature of the sacrifice to entertain these new faces.

Regardless the method of human sacrifice, the archeological evidence suggests that most human sacrifices were quite theatrical. If they needed human sacrifices to appease the gods, why were they so theatrical? Any time modern man performs a religious service, they do so with some theater, or if you don’t care for the word theater or theatrical, how about ceremonial? Any time a human attempts to praise God or address Him in some sort of ritual, they feel the need to be ceremonial. Did primitive man perform theatrical rituals of this nature in the beginning, or did they amp up the theatrical nature of their human sacrifices over time, and did they do so to create a show that  entertained the people? Did the Chief and his advisers think that they needed more theater to etch “the show” into the minds of future voters, so they would remember the Chief’s efforts come election time? (There probably weren’t elections, but every leader faces some level of scrutiny from their people and they must always be wary of uprisings.) How did they progress to all future shows involving players wearing spooky and theatrical masks and war paint, and when did they decide to add musical enhancements to their production, to add an aura to the ceremony and complete the sensorial elements of current and future productions?

As with all leaders, Chief Emmitt’s reign was tumultuous and it remained precariously balanced on a fault line between factions seeking to unseat him. That also explains why the Chief, and his advisers, commissioned their laborers to create an ornate chair from which he would oversee the events. They needed to enforce, or reinforce, the Chief’s leadership mystique, and the memorable methods he used to try to solve their problems? No matter how great “the show” was, however, the Chief could not silence those factions vying for his throne. They continued to sow discontent among the citizenry.

“I know the gods sacrificed their lives to give us life, but why does Chief Emmitt always pick our Eastside daughters for sacrifice? Is it because we Eastside farmers traditionally produce lower yields? I mean, those Westside guys have natural advantages, living next to the basin and all. It just seems a little unfair, is all I’m saying.” 

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“There had to be a first,” George Carlin wrote on the act of sacrificing humans. Human sacrifice was a traditional ritual that, in some cultures, dated back hundreds to thousands of years, but as with everything else, there had to be a first. There had to be a first leader, and a cadre of advisers, who persuaded their people that sacrificing prized livestock was no longer cutting it. How does that leader convince his group that, for the betterment of their society, mothers and fathers were going to have to step up and start sacrificing their children? How does a leader convince his people that sacrificing children is the next logical step?

My bet is Chief Emmitt had some smarmy policy adviser step up to reveal the harsh truth of the situation to him, “The people are against you, and our internal polling suggests that you’re going to lose your throne in the next election. To prevent that, we have to face some facts here. The whole bread and circuses campaign we devised has run its course, because the proverbial bread just isn’t there any more. Our people are starving, and no amount of entertainment will resolve their hunger. There’s obviously nothing we can do to make it rain, but I’ve devised a strategy we can employ to silence them until the next election, and hear me out before you poo poo it. We could try throwing our people into active volcanoes? We can start by throwing our more obnoxious people in, like that Murray kid, but we’ll evntually have to work our way up to our more precious people, people that everyone likes, such as women, young, fertile, and virgin women. It’s not a true sacrifice if you’re not sacrificing, right? We can tell them that by doing so, we’ll be appeasing the gods, so they’ll finally make it rain.” 

“What if it doesn’t work?” the Chief probably asked. “What if it doesn’t rain? The people will say I killed innocent children for no reason.” 

“That’s kind of the beauty of this,” Smarmy Adviser replied. “There’s no such thing as ‘it didn’t work’. If we throw a virgin into the volcano, and that doesn’t bring the rain, we can say that that means the gods aren’t satisfied yet, and yet is the key word. We will need to expound on yet, by saying yet means that we’re making strides, but the gods aren’t satisfied yet. It’s obvious to us now that they’re not satisfied with just one virgin. The gods are obviously calling for a second virgin, or a third, and we will probably have to keep throwing virgins into volcanos until the gods are happy, and they make it rain. You are, in essence, blaming the gods without doing it directly. The people will say, “Chief Emmitt is trying, but the gods obvious aren’t satisfied yet.

“And if we do it right, our administration will get all the credit when it does rain,” Smarmy Adviser continues, “They’ll say that thanks to Chief Emmitt’s patient policies we now know that one virgin a quarter doesn’t satisfy the gods. We now know that the gods require four virgins a quarter. All hail Chief Emmitt!”  

If Chief Emmitt finally achieves what his smarmy adviser suggests for his tribe, and it rains, and he’s the hero, the next question his award-winning economists will ask is what then? Is there an amount of rain the villagers and tribesmen consider adequate? More is always more, in the minds of most voters, as long as it doesn’t flood. And if it does flood, they’ll know that they probably sacrificed too many virgins, and they’ll cut back accordingly next quarter.

“It will involve a systematic approach,” Smarmy Adviser will say regarding the question of flooding, “and we might need to monkey around with it to hit a sweet spot for our base. We might eventually need to create some kind of human sacrifice to corn yield ratio over time.”

If they achieve the desired results, what then? If more is always more, wouldn’t some factions call for five sacrifices in the following quarter? If four produced the desired yield, what would five arrive? If Chief Emmitt, and his advisers, try to quell such talk, does that provide candidate Lloyd a campaign issue in their next debate? 

“Chief Emmitt employed the ‘hard times call for strong measures’ campaign, and I think we can all agree that he achieved what he set out to do,” candidate Lloyd opens, attempting to attract Emmitt voters without insulting them for voting Emmitt in the prior election. “I can do better. Let’s look at the PowerPoint presentation I put together. As you can see here, Chief Emmitt produced a quality yield for us in quarter four with four human sacrifices a quarter. Chief Emmitt achieved quarterly results that no one can balk at, but now, now, he calls for an end to all human sacrifices? An end? Why would you propose that Chief? Those policies worked. Human sacrifices worked. Look at the numbers. He wants to change policies, just when times are good? Shane, you farm what 84 acres? You cannot be happy to hear that.

“Now, let’s look at my prospective map, which consists of a projected eight sacrifices a quarter, and …” candidate Lloyd says flipping the page. “Take a look at those projected yields. Phillip, I know you’re the type of guy who always wants to do better. You believe in the more is more principle, wouldn’t you love to add a little something, something in your kid’s stockings at the end of the year? By my projections, not only will we be able to satisfy our needs, until we’re all fat and happy, but we’ll be able to begin exporting our excess crops to neighboring tribes. If you elect me, we will implement policies that will lead us into a bartering era with the hunting tribe with our excess crops. I think we can land enough buffalo and deer carcasses in 2024 to put meat on our tables three to four times a week. And I’m not just talking about putting meat on my table as your chief. I’m talking about all of us eating meat three to four times a week.

“Chief Emmitt is a great leader, and he knows how to make the gods happy. I would never question the results he achieved in 2022. I’m just asking you to ask yourself a question, as you look around at your neighbors, and as you look within your own home, do you think we can do better? I think you can, I think we can, and I think I can lead us into a level of prosperity we’ve never experienced before. Vote Lloyd for chieftain at our next fireside chat, and I promise you that if you’re willing and able to throw a couple more of your daughters into volcanoes, we’ll see a 2024 that we never dreamed possible.”    

If there had to be a first leader who enacted such desperately violent policies, there also had to be a first time a leader gave this whole sacrificing-for-better-harvests ruse up for what it was, in their transfer of power discussions with the incoming chief.

Chief Emmitt did just that with Chief-Elect Lloyd, “Just so you know, this whole human sacrifice for rain thing, was a ruse. I know it, and you know it. We developed it to maintain power over the people and focus their attention on themselves and their relationship to the gods, so that they wouldn’t blame our administration for things that we honestly couldn’t control. You can’t make it rain, I can’t make it rain, and even the rain dancers cannot make it rain. Our people are so irrational at times. Perhaps it’s our fault for convincing them that we were all-powerful, I don’t know, but they believed it. They blamed us for a lack of rain. Then, when it finally rained, they gave us all the credit for it. Your little campaign to increase human sacrifices per quarter, to produce more rain, won the election for you, congratulations and all that, but you basically took our ruse and advanced it. I just want you to know, and I hope you know it already, that if you sacrifice eight women a quarter, as you said in your campaign, you’re basically propagating our sham, and if you come for my daughters, I’ll expose you as the shyster that you are.”

My Advice, Don’t Follow my Advice

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“Try to find someone nice!” is the advice I give young uns. They won’t listen, and we know they won’t, because we know we didn’t. We had to get over our attraction to the naughty first. The naughty are just more fun and fascinating, and they’re mean. No matter how hard “they” try to redefine funny, mean is just funny, when it’s not directed at us of course. Their violations of social protocols and etiquette, aren’t just funny they’re relatively informative, in the sense that their exaggerations of the opposite teach us a lot about ourselves. Nice comes in very low on our mate-o-meter when we’re young. Nice usually comes after all the bad boys and girls beat us down.

“I don’t want to play games,” we scream, they scream, and we all scream for ice cream. “I hate the games people play, and I try to avoid drama.” Then why did you date them? We dated them, because even though they were jackballs to everyone else, they were actually pretty nice to us, for a time and in small doses, and that made us feel special. We also enjoyed the vicarious attachments people made with us when we were around the mean and naughty. After dating those who made us laugh so hard that we cried, and cried so hard we laughed, we eventually decided to go out with someone who did nothing more than say something nice to us while we were watching TV with them, someone who appeared to enjoy cleaning the living room with us, and preparing a barbecue for a family reunion. We found ourselves opting for the stability and sanity of the nice. Some might call that boring, and that’s fine with us after everything we’ve been through. My advice is to date the tumultuous types for all of the excitement and fun they bring, but make sure to break things off before you start hearing substantial calls for commitment.

Save Your Money, Man, Save Your Money   

Those wild, good times cost money too, and the good times never last as long as we think. It’s Oh-So-Good right now, and we have no reason to believe it won’t last.

Someone pays us, and we don’t deserve it. We earn it! We earn it every day, and in every way. We work as hard as we play, but there will come a day when that will fade away, and things will happen. Things always happen, that’s the thing about things. They slap us from so many different directions that some of them aren’t even listed on Google Maps. What happened?

Save your money man. Save for that day. “Save 10% of every paycheck,” they say. Others suggest we save the equivalent of three-months of our salary. Both those figures are low, far too low for me, but I’m a saver. Most people can’t, or won’t, save, and living the spartan lifestyle in the present just seems like a waste of life. Carpe diem, seize the day, and save until the end of the year. When we do the latter, and it’s “all good”, we blow it all. 10% and three-months salary is a decent compromise for them. “It’s just money,” they say, “and I would rather live a life of fun and adventure than have a nest egg. Plus, isn’t money the root of all evil?” It is, if you have it. When we don’t, we see it as the necessity it is, and we learn the definition of penniless powerlessness. We’ll also learn what it feels like to depend on others for everything, and dependency can be humiliating. It almost makes us feel like a child all over again. My advice, do everything you can now, when times are good, to avoid slipping into that spiral.    

We should’ve and could’ve spotted the spiral before it started to swirl. We know that now, and we see the pivot points now that could’ve changed it? If we had the foresight, we never would’ve gone left instead of right or right instead of left, at that crossroad.

Think about where we would be right now if we had some foresight? If I only applied for that job/promotion that I didn’t think I was qualified for, but I probably was. I mean look who ended up getting it. If I had older siblings, better parents, and I made more friends, or dated more often just think what I could be now. And college, college! If I paid more attention in college, my life would be oh-so different. We can’t stop thinking about how that person, equally qualified, landed our dream job or promotion, because they threw a relatively worthless degree in basket weaving at the “theys”. The best explanation I’ve heard for why this happens is that attaining that sheepskin displays perseverance.

Experience teaches us two things, college degrees don’t mean as much as we thought they did, and it’s better to have one than not. But, and there’s always a butt, how many of us would probably be in almost-the-exact-same-space we’re in right now, if we attained the golden ticket? How different are the lives of the college graduates in our peer group? Generally speaking, they got a job, and we got a job. Even with all that, there’s a super-secret part of us that thinks if we just paid more attention in Mr. Crippen’s Astronomy class, we could all be astrophysicists by now. It’s possible, of course, but it’s more likely that if our academic accomplishments landed us a job on the Starship Enterprise, we’d probably end up a red shirt sent to investigate the spiky colorful plants that shoot out deadly spores.

The Bonkers

Avoid “The Bonkers” if you can. Our parents introduced us to the Bonkers multiple times. The Bonkers were our parents’ friends, which pretty much means our parents were bonkers too, as opposites don’t always attract. Some of the times, people make friends because they share a worldview, and some of the times it’s happenstance, but commonalities often weave their way into friendships. The Bonkers have ideas about how the world works, and their ideas are always nuanced approaches that are subjective to their worldview, fascinating, and wrong. If my parents were bonkers-free, they would’ve stepped up on The Bonkers at some point and said, “Hold on, that, right there, is just insane. I know you’re not willing to die on that hill, but if the Chinese are correct in saying that every adult leaves a mark on a child, I don’t want that influencing my child.”  

The primary characteristic The Bonkers share is resentment. They have an explanation for why they didn’t achieve in the shadow of their boogeymen. They were the child who didn’t get enough attention, who became an adult that was cheated out of the system for a reason so bizarre they feel compelled to repeat that reality-shattering explanation at every outing. In reality, they didn’t have the talent, ingenuity, wherewithal or perseverance to make the big bucks, and they spent their lives characterizing, and re-characterizing, those who do. I met their boogeymen more than once, and I knew some of them. When I unmasked them, I learned they weren’t the boogeymen of The Bonkers’ resentful narratives. They didn’t have near the money, power, or influence detailed in The Bonkers’ tales, and they didn’t make calculated moves to hold the little guy down. They were just as insecure, normal, and common as the people telling their tales. To move these findings from slightly funny to hilarious, I learned that most boogeymen have their own boogeymen. 

One of the best little tidbits I’ve ever heard came from a total wreck of a person. She said, “You raise a child to a certain point, and no one knows  where that ends, but at another point you learn to stop raising them and start guiding them.”

Another friend of mine dropped this nugget, “The number one rule to parenting is to spend time with your children and be there for them. The best element of my dad’s inept parenting was that he always made time for me. He made so many missteps and unforgettable mistakes, but he was always there for me. You’re going to make mistakes with your kid, we all do, but if you spend time with them, it will edit and delete some, if not all, of your mistakes.” Time, in other words, heals all wounds. 

How much time do we have for them? How much time do we have in general? Most narcissists are so into “me time” that they should’ve entered that data into their reproduction algorithm before going down that hole. Is it more narcissistic to require more “me time” or more time? We don’t even know the definition of narcissism, but we’re all narcissists and none of us are. “Yeah, you’re talking about that other guy.” 

I’m a storyteller, and I tell stories the way others play chess. I appreciate the fact that readers want a streamlined point of focus, but I cannot help considering the other side. When someone provides me a story from their day, I immediately think about the other side. (For those who want friends in life, don’t do this. People don’t like this. They want you to side with them in their story.) Learned, intellectual types suggest that it’s impossible for us to be objective, this is what learned, intellectual types call hyperbole. Of course total objectivity is difficult to difficult to achieve, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to achieve it. Some don’t, and when I hear their stories, I can’t help but think about this situation from the other person’s perspective.  

When we tell our story, it’s filled with faults and variables. We’ve all had primrose paths and well-marked minefields on the map of our crossroads, and most of us chose the well-marked, yet uncharted minefields. When we detail for our children the ramifications and consequences of our actions, we conclude with, “But I know you’re not going to listen to me, because I didn’t listen to my dad. Your best scenario is to experience everything yourself, then remember what I said here today. If you learn to couple your experiences with my advice, as I did with my dad’s, you might turn out halfway decent.” He listens to me now, at this age. That will change, of course, but our job is not to build the structure, it’s to create a foundation from which they build.

There’s Always Someone Better 

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“No matter how good you think you are there’s always going to be someone better. There’s always going to be someone tougher, smarter, faster, and better than you are. No matter what you do in life, there will always be someone, somewhere who’s better.” –Jack T. O’Connor

“What then?” Thomas Sowell.

The Tom Cruise movie messed us up in a lot of ways. The Cruise character was “the best there ever was” in just about every picture he starred in, and the hair and the confident, gleaming smile led us to believe it was probably true. We got the sense that all these Tom Cruise characters had to do was throw their hat in the ring, and they’d be better than the 99% of us who try and cry about it later. The conflict of his movies usually involves him trying to beat the one insolent fella who claims, usually with a snarl and belligerent attitude, that he is just as good as the chosen one. Tom Cruise beats him with that smile and without one of his hairs moving into an improper position. Mingled in Cruise’s tangible superiorities, are relatable intangibles that make us think we, too, could do whatever he’s doing without even trying. We then walk out of the theater thinking if we’re not going to be the best at something, why do it?

I had a tumultuous relationship Tom Cruise movies for many years, until I decided to just sit back and enjoy them for what they are. They’re all enjoyable, action-packed, and fun, but the inherent prodigy, “chosen one” themes have always bothered me. I prefer to think that he who works harder receives the reward. We all know that life doesn’t always work out that way. We’ve all met someone who doesn’t even have to try very hard to beat us, and the only thing we can do is stew in their shadow. It’s always difficult to come to terms with that, and it’s even more difficult to come to the conclusion that we’re not one of them. We’ve all heard the line, hard work has it’s own rewards, but when we have to work so hard to achieve what almost comes natural to others, the reward is almost bittersweet. The question the unnaturals should ask soon after they realize that they’re not a prodigy, a golden child, or the best there ever was, is what then? What are we going to do about it?

“Well, if I can’t be the best at it why do it?” is that annoying answer that keeps coming back at us when he hear the Tom Cruise movie say it, either implicitly or explicitly. If we follow this line of thought, and we leave a profession, craft, or past time that has a prodigy we’ll never outdo, we’ll run into another blessed with more talent and/or experience in the next.

We don’t want to work hard. We don’t want to work so hard that we leave blood, sweat, and tears on the cutting room floor to get it. We might do it, but that’s not what we want to do. We want to be blessed by God with such natural talent that others envy us. It’s why we love Tom Cruise movies, and superheroes. We see this when our kids try to pull the proverbial sword from the stone, and we remember how frustrating it was to learn that we were never going to be prodigy. No one marvels at hard work. No one wants to see a Dirk Nowitzki work out or Freddie Freeman take batting practice. No one cares about the little things they do to be the best, and we don’t care how hard they try. We want to be the finished product. We want natural speed, the ability to hit a baseball a mile without any coaching or practice. It’s humbling to learn that we’re just like everyone else, and that if we want it bad enough we’ll have to put in the same 10,000 hours as everyone else. We don’t want to make the humiliating and embarrassing mistakes we almost have to make to learn. We want to be the prodigies who can beat our opponent with one hand tied behind our back. We don’t mind trying to get better today, but we better be the “the best there ever was” tomorrow. To paraphrase The Who song, “You better, you better, you best.”

There’s something inherent in the human experience that prevents us from ever conceding that it will never be us. Even after our prime working years are over, and our days of athletic conquest have long-since passed, we think about how it could’ve been if we did a little of this and a little of that. Humbling experiences did lead us to put in our 10,000 hours on some pursuit, and we did incrementally improve our lot, but we kept running into prodigies who didn’t even have to put in a tenth of the blood, sweat, and tears we did. We admire natural ability as much as we loathe it, and the back and forth  is probably how we developed a love/hate relationship with prototypical Tom Cruise movie.

The Unnatural

I was a short, skinny kid with little-to-no muscular definition in 8th grade. With those physical detriments, I never dominated on the field, but I was quick. I wasn’t fast, as most kids could beat me in the 50 yard dash. In the space of ten yards, however, I had no peers. When harnessed, this talent proved surprisingly effective in soccer, until I met the doofus. I was the second shortest kid in my grade and the skinniest by about 20lbs. The doofus was one of the .0001% of the population who was actually shorter and scrawnier than I was. I was rarely confident, and never over-confident on the field, until I saw that this kid was going to be my toe-to-toe competition for the day. I thought I was going to have a glorious day.

I don’t remember how many times that kid ended up beating me, but let’s just say that it was an embarrassingly high number. Let’s say it was seven times. If it was seven times, it was seven times in a row. This kid wasn’t quicker than me, and his knowledge of the granular techniques of soccer was something, but it wasn’t everything. Yet, this kid always seemed to make the perfect move against me, and his ability to beat me exposed all of my comparable deficits. The reason this kid sticks in my head, all these decades later, is that he proved, over and over, what it meant to simply want it more.

This kid beat me down so thoroughly for that first half that I was sure my coach would be subbing me out. I learned this would not be the case when he said, “I will not be subbing you out.”

The implicit message was that I was going to have to find a way to adjust if I didn’t want to roast in the humiliation of total and unqualified personal defeat. It was a given, by the second half, that I had no chance against this scrawny, little nerd in toe-toe combat, so I just had to factor that into my game. I began running down the sidelines with him. I gave up some precious real estate on the field by doing so, but I followed him, waiting for him to mess up, and I planned to capitalize on any tiny slip-ups he made. He made very few no slip-ups, but my new strategy caused him to run out of real estate most of the time. He tried to kick the ball through me, and it usually bounced off me out of bounds for a throw-in or corner kick. I began nullifying this kid’s superiority, almost by accident.

The final story wasn’t a Rocky or Rudy story in which the lesser finds a glorious way to bring down his personal, miniature-sized Goliath. He continued to steal the ball from me and fake me out in all the humiliating ways he did in the first half, but I nullified him as a force on his team, until our toe-to-toe competition was basically a wash. He nullified me as well as I nullified him, which was a moral victory for me after my disastrous first-half. Even though he scored the only three goals for his team in the first half, he wouldn’t score again, and my team won the game. There was no glory waiting for me on the sidelines, after the game, as this kid continued to dominate me throughout the game, but he didn’t score again. I found a way to look my teammates in the eye when the game was over.

It’s nearly impossible, in any walk of life, to avoid comparing yourself to others to gauge for how we’re doing, and I’m a far better philosopher than practitioner in this regard, but I say don’t get mad, get better. We’re all going to run into brick walls in life, called “the best”, no matter what we do, and the first thing we have to grapple with is the fact that we’re not the best, and we probably will never be. Once we’re done knowing that, and kicking the wall, we need to figure out how to get better. Don’t get mad, get better.

My miniature Goliath and I had a lot to work through. We were both too small and too skinny. If he got tossed around as much as I did, he had an understandable excuse for never wanting to play another sport again. He, obviously, asked himself the “How do I get better?” and he probably didn’t find the answer or an answer, but he had answers every time the ball was between us.

There are always going to be people who are better, and I think one of the reasons we scream and writhe around on the ground is that we expected to be better at this by now. We expected that we would begin our lives as a prodigy, golden child by now. We haven’t done the work necessary to get better, but something should’ve come along by now. This kid isn’t bigger or better, but he beats me every time. It just seems unfair that some are better at sports than we are, and it is when we encounter a prodigy who was born with certain attributes we can’t possibly overcome, but most of the times toe-to-toe competitions are won by those who want it so bad that they’re willing to do whatever they have to to win.

Bret and Greg

Bret Maher was “the best we ever saw” in training class. We all knew his type, and we all know that they flourish in training classes. He was the type who everyone watches. If we were going one-on-one with him, in our soccer days, no one paid attention to us, his opponent, or credited us with a stop. They either deemed the confrontation a Bret success or a Bret failure. Bret was that guy who had all the answers in training class. When he didn’t, it led to witty banter with the instructor. If he was right, that was “just Bret” the most annoying two words in the English language for those of us who attended the two-week training seminar. Yet, when we finally made it out onto the floor, and he experienced the daily grind of the work, Bret was indifferent to bored, and he quickly found employment elsewhere. Either he found out he couldn’t be the best there ever was, or he didn’t think it mattered to everyone else that he was. Whatever the case, the job bored him, and he decided to take his talents elsewhere.

At his funeral, one of his best friends gave a thunderous tribute to a man named Greg Gunderson, “If he decided to become an astrophysicist on Monday, he’d probably be one of the best astrophysicists in the country by Thursday. If you think that’s a gross exaggeration, all I can tell you is you didn’t know Greg.”

“From the minute I met him, I just knew he wouldn’t be the type to live to sixty.” another friend said in a more casual moment, outside the funeral proceeding. “It’s hard to describe, but when he died, it wasn’t really sad. I tried to be sad, because I was so close to him, and I thought he was a real sweetheart, but if you got to know him as well as I did, you knew how unhappy he really was. So, when he died, it was almost like what took so long?”

The prodigious, young Greg Gunderson managed to match his athletic achievements with academic achievements, who proved to be just as successful as an adult, ended up drinking himself to death. How could someone to whom so much was given, seek the comfort of the bottle so often that he killed himself? Some of his friends alluded to the idea that it had something to do with the divorce, but other friends, those who claimed to know him best, said Greg and his wife both realized he just wasn’t cut out for marriage, and his serial philandering proved it. His wife wasn’t even bitter about it in the end, because she had dealt with it for so long. Greg didn’t appear mired in misery about it either. The two seemed to just accept his failure as something he either wouldn’t or couldn’t change, and their divorce, and the subsequent handling of child visitation, was surprisingly congenial. His closest friends were always quick to rule the divorce out on those grounds, so why then?

“Greg Gunderson was just a miserable person,” one of his friends said, “who couldn’t find anything that made him happy.”

“From the minute you met Greg, you just knew he wouldn’t be the type to live to sixty.” another friend said. “It’s hard to describe, but when he died, it wasn’t really sad. I tried to be sad, because I was so close to him, and I thought he was a sweetheart, but if you got to know him as well as I did, you knew how unhappy he really was. So, when he died, it was almost like what took so long?”

None of Greg’s really good friends addressed the questions we had, such as how could a golden child, prodigy with such a gregarious personality be so unhappy? I didn’t know Greg as well as these guys did, but I did get the sense that beneath the personality was an unhappy person. The one comprehensive answer I arrived at is that the human being is such a complex animal with different needs and wants that it’s almost impossible to develop a rule of thumb when it comes to trying to understand another fully. Some of us are a soup who want and/or need limited ingredients, some of us are a stew that call for a couple more ingredients, and others are a mishmash of gumbo or jambalaya wants and needs. There are no mandatory ingredients to a gumbo or jambalaya, but we know something is missing, we just can’t put our finger on what.

Greg’s friends said he didn’t talk about it much, and my guess is he didn’t think about it enough to source the hole in his soul. He just medicated his mysterious misery, and anyone who has ever tried to  medicate their misery knows that it works, in the short-term. It can make us funny, fun, and laughable, until the next morning when we realize we’re worse, and the situation we tried to medicate is worse, because we put it off for another day.

No one could put their finger on what was missing in the delicate balance of ingredients of Greg Gunderson’s internal jambalaya. My guess is it called for a greater sense of satisfaction. We have to know some misery to ultimately know happiness, and we have to know the abject misery of failure to receive some satisfaction for our eventual successes. Greg Gunderson tripped up in life, but those momentary lapses were made on the path to accomplishments. He never, that I know of, knew the type of abject failure that causes one to want to quit with the notion that if I can’t be the best at something why do it? We have to know failure to know success, and if all Greg ever knew was success in his formative years, he probably didn’t experience much satisfaction from it. He probably expected it.

“All he ever knew was success,” his best friend said at his funeral. “He was a star athlete in high school, graduated college with honors, and he was always one of the best employees in his field.”

When they say all he ever knew was success, however, it seems like a bifurcation of the word knew. Prodigies, like Greg, know success at all levels, but do they know it like we do? Satisfaction, we could say, in lieu of Greg Gunderson, is reserved for those of us who work so hard for something that we leave blood, sweat and tears on the cutting room floor trying to get it. When we finally accomplish our goal, we know glory intimately, because we worked so hard to get there.