Playing The Game
Latter Day Buddhism
You have been hypnotized or conditioned by an educational processing - system arranged in grades or steps, supposedly leading to some ultimate Success.
All this might have been wonderful if, at every stage, you had been able to play it as a game, finding your work as fascinating as poker, chess, or fishing.
-- See: The Book, On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts, Vintage Books Edition, August 1989, Ch 3, page 80, paragraphs 3 and page 81, paragraph 1.
Involved as you may be in the conflicts and competitive games of practical life, you will never again be able to indulge in the illusion that the "offensive other" is all in the wrong, and could or should be wiped out. This will give you the priceless ability of being able to contain conflicts so that they do not get out of hand, of being willing to compromise and adapt, of playing, yes, but playing it cool. This is what is called "honor among thieves," for the really dangerous people are those who do not recognize that they are the thieves -- the unfortunates who play the role of the "good guys" with such blind zeal that they are unconscious of any indebtedness to the "bad guys" who support their status.
... the United States, is -- for lack of this sense -- utterly schizophrenic. It is a monstrous combination of uncompromising idealism and unscrupulous gangsterism, and thus devoid of the humor and humaneness which enables confessed rascals to sit down together and work out reasonable deals. No one can be moral -- that is, no one can harmonize contained conflicts -- without coming to a workable arrangement between the angel in himself and the devil in himself, between his rose above and his manure below. The two forces of tendencies are mutually interdependent, and the game is a working game just so long as the angel is winning, but does not win, and the devil is losing, but is never lost. (The game doesn't work in reverse, just as the ocean doesn't work with wave crests down and troughs up.)
In any foreseeable future there are going to be thousands and thousands of people who detest and abominate Negroes, communists, Russians, Chinese, Jews, Catholics, beatniks, homosexuals, and "dope-fiends." These hatreds are not going to be healed, but only inflamed, by insulting those who feel them. ... If we want justice for minorities and cooled wars with our natural enemies, whether human or nonhuman, we must first come to terms with the minority and the enemy in ourselves and in our own hearts, for the rascal is there as much as anywhere in the "external" world -- especially when you realize that the world outside your skin is as much yourself as the world inside.
Humor and self-righteousness are mutually exclusive. Humor is the twinkle in the eye of a just judge, who knows that he is also the felon in the dock.
If this is cynicism, it is at least loving cynicism -- an attitude and an atmosphere that cools off human conflicts more effectively than any amount of physical or moral violence.
It comes, then, to this: that to be "viable," livable, or merely practical, life must be lived as a game -- and the "must" here expresses a condition, not a commandment. It must be lived in the spirit of play rather than work, and the conflicts which it involves must be carried on in the realization that no species, or party to a game, can survive without its natural antagonists, its beloved enemies, its indispensable opponents.
-- See: The Book, On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts, Vintage Books Edition, August 1989, Ch 5, pages 132-135.
