The Book_ On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are - Alan Watts [51]
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. For it recognizes that the real goodness of human nature is its peculiar balance of love and selfishness, reason and passion, spirituality and sensuality, mysticism and materialism, in which the positive pole has always a slight edge over the negative. (Were it otherwise, and the two were equally balanced, life would come to a total stalemate and standstill.) Thus when the two poles, good and bad, forget their interdependence and try to obliterate each other, man becomes subhuman—the implacable crusader or the cold, sadistic thug. It is not for man to be either an angel or a devil, and the would-be angels should realize that, as their ambition succeeds, they evoke hordes of devils to keep the balance. This was the lesson of Prohibition, as of all other attempts to enforce purely angelic behavior, or to pluck out evil root and branch.
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.
For to "love your enemies" is to love them as enemies; it is not necessarily a clever device for winning them over to your own side. The lion lies down with the lamb in paradise, but not on earth—"paradise"
being the tacit, off-stage level where, behind the scenes, all conflicting parties recognize their interdependence, and, through this recognition, are able to keep their conflicts within bounds. This recognition is the absolutely essential chivalry which must set the limits within all warfare, with human and non-human enemies alike, for chivalry is the debonair spirit of the knight who "plays with his life" in the knowledge that even mortal combat is a game.
No one who has been hoaxed into the belief that he is nothing but his ego, or nothing but his individual organism, can be chivalrous, let alone a civilized, sensitive, and intelligent member of the cosmos.
But to be lived this way, the life-game has to be purged of self-contradictory rules. This, and not some kind of moral effort, is the way out of the hoax of separateness. Thus when a game sets the players an impossible and not simply difficult task, it comes quickly to the point where it is no longer worth playing. There is no way of observing a rule set in the form of a double-bind—that is, a two-part rule whose parts are mutually exclusive. No one can be compelled to behave freely or forced to act independently. Yet whole cultures and civilizations have befuddled themselves with this kind of nonsense, and, through failing to spot the self-contradiction, their members have been haunted all through their lives by the sense that individual existence is a problem and a predicament—a form of nature doomed to perpetual frustration. The sense of ego is at root a discomfort and a bore, and nothing shows it more clearly than such everyday phrases as: "I need to get away from myself" or "You should find something to take you out of yourself" or
"I read to forget myself." Get lost! Hence the fanaticisms and intoxications—religious, political, and sexual, the Nazis, the Klan, Hell's Angels, the Circus Maximus, the dreary fascination of the TV
screen, witch-burnings, Mickey Spillane and James Bond, pachinko parlors, alcoholic stupors, revivals, tabloid newspapers, and juvenile gangs—all of which, as things stand, are the necessary safety-valves and palliatives for human beings whose very existence is defined in self-contradictory and self-defeating terms.
Finally, the game