by Ben Atlas on 06.27.2010.6:11pm · 1 comment
A healthy part of the spring cleaning is to get rid of all the vertical relationships in your life.
- I don’t ask anyone to follow me on the social networks but I wouldn’t follow anyone who is not following me back. I am interested in the horizontal interaction only not the vertical worship.
- People who have a daddy problem or a mammy problem and seek the vertical transference should stay the heck away. Seek equality.
- The religious obsessions along the vertical axis should be shunned, especially people fixated on hierarchies. Same goes for the gods.
- People who generally define spiritually or knowledge in terms of ups and downs.
- People who have the vertical inferiority complex born of sports analogies and visualize winners and losers.
Seek the horizontal metaphors and people who speak to you not at you.
P.S. The vast number of people I know never changed their ideas for the past 10-20-30 years. They don’t read books containing the new ideas (they don’t read period). All they do is consume information that supports the nonsense they decided to accept 10-20-30 years ago. And so they will go from the virtually dead to the dead for real.
I always thought that the American football is such a great metaphor for life, every time you move you get whacked. But then, like in all American games, there is a fractured rhythm with the frequent results. But as David Brooks points out, the Soccer is even a better, a truer metaphor. Long, tedious, exhausting stretches with the goals that are more luck than the effort or the skill:
“…the rest of the world follows a sport that rewards resilience and neuroticism. Soccer is a sport perfectly designed to reinforce a tragic view of the universe, because basically it is a long series of frustrations leading up to near certain heartbreak.
The author Nick Hornby once had the brains to turn around while at an Arsenal match to watch the faces of the fans instead of the game. He observed that over the course of 15 minutes, the fans reflected frustration, rage, bitterness, despair, false hopes and discouragement. That’s because the players are perpetually pushing the ball forward, and it often looks like something is about to happen, but in reality it almost never does.”
And then this apt observation that equally applies to the “stars”off the grassy fields:
“Soccer is a sport that rewards neurotic creativity. Many of the greatest players have been marginally insane. They see a situation unfold before them and they respond in unpredictable ways, not straightforward ones. Their neurons are just a bit off. I guess you could say that about some of their fans, too.”
On the subject of reinventing the wheel. The Differential Gear in automobiles solves the fundamental problem of two adjacent wheels traveling at a different speed. Alas there is no device that would allow two parallel individuals or two parallel nations move smoothly together. Inevitably there is a mechanical, or worse, the emotional friction. Take a look at the 1930s video explaining the principles of the gear. ►►►read more
