How to Win in an Unfair World

Success is too long to understand

The world is unfair and oppressive and when you’re young you may feel it’s your moral duty to be a rebel. But the problem with rebelling against the world is that the world is not a thing, the system is not a system. There is no grand conspiracy or controlling hand, no Illuminati and even no ruling class — there are just relationships and groups of people in activity, like a lot of ant hills spread out over a desert, and between them, empty space.

‘Society is an emergent entity’ Ayodeji Awosika, Real Help

As with all natural things, human institutions and societies were never designed and they are not controlled; they’ve evolved on the basis of natural selection. Thousands of millions of interdependancies. Certain conditions in nature created incentives for humans to act in a certain way. Over time, institutions formed, technologies were invented, communities became nation states, industries became corporations, different institutions required and molded certain types of people.

‘And many variables came together to create the world we live in today. All of this just sort of happened.’ Ayodeji Awosika

The complexity and natural origins of our society is vital to understand to enable us to work and grow within it and develop a healthy and realistic mindset — to be happier in this world.

‘The biggest obstacle to clarity is focusing on how things should work as opposed to how they do work.’ Ayodeji Awosika

Moving Past the Rebel

I used to put the Romantic Rebel on a pedestal, try to dress like one and act like one. The person who rejects greed, ambition, money and the fight for dominance (these things I figured, were the root cause of all human suffering, so why not just stop them in yourself?) I read a lot, smoked a lot, talked a lot, had ambitions which I wouldn’t admit to myself, developed a weird sort of inferiority-superiority complex which made me very shy, alternately proud and ashamed.

I remember seeing on South Park a moment that blew my tiny bohemian mind — there was a war raging over something and for a second there was a pause as a folk singer with a guitar slid into the frame and started singing an anti-war protest song - before promptly getting shot in the head and the battle resuming.

I recognized that a lot of my attitude and actions were like that — totally unsuited to the reality of the situation.

It wasn’t until life taught me that my attitude was putting me on a losing streak — when I split up with my 6-years girlfriend after uni, friends drifted away after their own things, I realized me dream of being a musician wasn’t likely to happen — when I realized that the world wasn’t going to give me anything if I didn’t work for it and ask for it — then I knew I had to change certain assumptions.

The main one was thinking in these big negative abstractions — the world is unfair, money is the root of evil, ambition is the cause of oppression — these can be true in certain situations, but life just doesn’t work like that, its a hive of activity, more fragmented than a Picasso portrait, open to a thousand interpretations at any one time, a naturally evolving emergent entity.

And if you fight your own evolution, you will select yourself out of existence.

The other problem with fighting against society — despite it making you essentially insane, is that you will lose and lose and lose. This is guaranteed since your enemy doesn’t actually exist so you can’t possibly win.

It’s worse than banging your head against a brick wall, its like banging your head against every brick wall your come across in the belief that Brick Walls are your enemy.

The problem with losing is that this too is an emergent quality — if you lose one fight, you’re more likely to lose the next, and the next. If you keep having the same sort of fight and keep losing or getting nowhere, your self-esteem slumps, your shoulders slump, your head drops and you’ll be noticeable to other people as someone who is vulnerable to losing— in the dominance hierarchy in which you live, you will emerge as an easy opponent, a loser.

Again, not by design, but by the accumulation of small interactions and decisions.

The human eye can’t see evolution happen because the time frame is too long, and our success or failure is similar. Future You will not be predicted by taking your view of yourself and predicting from that. It will accumulate from the actions you do every day, which will change all your views and build who you are, where you are and what opportunities are available to you.

This is the God’s eye view that has always alluded humans and persuaded many to think that there is a knowledge beyond out comprehension.

Again, its evolution.

What emerges is the produce of your habitual actions.

So, How to Win

• Let go of abstract thoughts as a way of understanding society and yourself. The media loves these as they are like tags or labels which help them drive an audience to their products — but they misrepresent the reality of both society and people. (So maybe switch off a lot of media)
• Don’t beat your head against injustice and don’t console yourself or excuse yourself with injustice
• Instead, work on time management, — the daily routines that become habituated and accumulate over time into a new emergent property
• Focus on process not products, systems not goals. Forget about the cover of your novel and think about doing a decent 45 minutes of writing everyday.
• Don’t aim at fame, money or greatness — these come to to people who are well placed in the social-evolutionary scale , they should thank their forebears— this might be you or it might not be you — either way, focusing on the outcome it isn’t going to help you.
• Seek to move out of your comfort zone in controlled ways, to grow and not be too confined by self-perceptions
• Know whats important to you and don’t be swayed by others —write them down — let others have their moments of glory without giving up your too-slow-to-see progress on the things that matter in your life
• Get on the move — Intelligence is the not the ability to preconceive who you are or what the world is — its the ability to make smart moves on the move. Kindness is the not the capacity for caring about large groups of people in the abstract — its the ability to be kind to people around you as you go about your day.
• You are constantly passing through interactions that are strengthening or weakening you — your worldview may be disposing you to accept weakness and loss. If so, it needs to be examined or your good intentions will create bad results.

A Better World

The real hope for the world is that more and more people can understand reality as it and can self actualize, becoming happier, more confident and more able to make smart and caring decisions on the move— this will set in process tendencies which will accumulate to make better humans, and the more of these we have, the more these tendencies will be reinforced and selected in our environment, the better and fairer will be the institutions which these people need to make, the better the ‘world’ emerging.