A headlong rush toward mass extinction
The most obvious, plentiful, commonplace, and deeply rooted expression of the Child’s shadow code “opposite,” in its projections-replications’ violated psyche, is competition. The purpose of competition is to eliminate competition – to eliminate itself. The same ultimate objective of opposite. The essence of its illogic, its insanity. A thing that strives of necessity toward its own extinction is inherently, by definition, illogical. It is illogic. And its pervasive, pernicious influence with the Child replicons’ psyche is evident in this illusory world’s headlong rush toward mass extinction.
Competition is so deeply seated in the brain that only a supernatural force can dislodge it: the limbic system at the top of the body’s spine and at the base of the brain. Fight-or-flight instinct that links primitive emotions to beasts. Fear, rage, hatred: the mindless animal drive to kill. The lust, the craving, for death. The part that hasn’t evolved while the “civilizing” brain above it has evolved.
The grand distraction
What is competition if not a contest between natural adversaries, competitors for the essentials of life – food, clothing, shelter, mates – to establish who’s faster, stronger, and more gifted at survival in a competitive environment? What are games of competition if not re-enactments of the real thing, with consequences that are psychological if not lethal: the illusion of “winning?” The shadow code’s ultimate trump card over attempts to restore sanity with the prospect of cooperation in shared purpose, of peace and harmony. To express fulfillment from wills fitting together instead of locking horns in incompatibility.
Who better to personify the trump card of “winning” than an apparition named Trump whose mind is so thoroughly captive to its opposite, to competition, that it can’t conceive of not “winning”? Who personifies the sainted Vince Lombardi’s credo: “winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” As if losing in fact or in theory were impossible. Opposite coded to destroy itself makes a certainty of losing, the truth not of Lombardi’s credo but its opposite. The truth of competition seated in the reptilian brain is that losing is the only thing.
And what is it when it’s ornamented with the shining allurements of winning – acceptance, belonging, achievement, competence, wholeness, specialness, exoneration, vindication, worth – but a grand distraction? An entertainment designed to keep the Child’s self-projections, its viral replications, from understanding their situation: wayward bodies frightened, vulnerable, disoriented, abandoned to their own devices in a precarious environment of isolated, separated objects. From exposing the deception and recovering sanity.
The triumphant cry of the loser
What is more “normal” than competition among self-interests for “supremacy” and at the same time abnormal – motivation that condemns its practitioners to the tragedy of the commons? It’s not enough that skills are honed in competitive games if the same skills are then used to pursue unfettered self-interest until no self is left standing, for that is its object. “Losing is everything and the only thing” can’t be the credo of an entire species or an individual if its outcome is where the shadow code comes from: impossibility. The impossibility of nothingness and the nothingness of impossibility. The delusion of losing that crowns itself with a triumphant cry: “I won!”
Yet this is what is manifest on a planet whose inhabitants are driving themselves to extinction. John Kenneth Galbraith’s classic description of capitalism: “A stomach that digests itself.” An impossibility, inherently unstable. The “gift” of the Child’s mistaken identity, its opposite, gift-wrapped in harmless “competition.”
Fill the Colosseum with fools and let the games begin!