3.4 KiB
Fight Culture
Fight culture is the harmful, mostly western mindset of seeing any endeavor as a fight against something. Even such causes as aiming for establishment of peace are seen as fighting the people who are against peace, which is funny but also sad. Fight culture keeps, just by the constant repetition of the word fight (and similar ones such as combat, win etc.), a subconscious validation of violence as justified and necessary means for achieving any goal. Fight culture is to a great degree the culture of capitalist society (of course not exclusively), the environment of extreme competition and hostility. It fuels war mentality, hostility, fear culture (everyone is your enemy!), constant unrest leading to mental health deterioration, obsession with various kinds of protections against everything etc. Fight is a mechanism of the jungle, something a civilized society tries to distance itself from -- sustaining the mechanisms of the jungle means we are only implementing cosmetic changes. It is laughable but also tragic, our society is now one big fight: for "human rights", education, for respect and dignity, against illnesses, criminality, global warming, unemployment, inflation, unproductivity, traffic jams, hunger and poverty etc. Language reflects our inner mindset: we say we "fight" our shortcomings or "defend" ourselves in a discussion, as if starting a discussion was not an invitation to collaboratively search for truth but rather a personal attack. Instead of collaboration and unity we perceive only war and hostility -- if someone is "on our side" then only temporarily, for strategic or tactical reasons of self benefit in this huge conflict. Perhaps soon it won't even sound so odd to say you are fighting the road when traveling from point A to point B or that you are fighting water when you're swimming and then fighting the Sun when you lie on the beach.
We, of course, see fight culture as highly undesirable for a good society as that needs to be based on peace, love and collaboration, not competition. For this reasons we never say we "fight" anything (or even "win", we rather achieve goals), we rather aim for goals, look for solutions, educate and sometimes reject, avoid, refuse and oppose bad concepts (e.g. fight culture itself).
Capitalist often say that "life is a fight". We say life is what you make it, and if for your life is a fight, it merely says you desire fight. We do not.
How to stop engaging in fight culture? Adopt defeatism. That frees you, accepting loss makes you no longer constrained to unethical behavior justified by the necessity to win, the capitalist argument "you have to do X or else you lose" suddenly stops being valid and you are free to behave morally, you no longer have to engage in a lot of bullshit. Capitalist culture is extremely hostile to defeatism because it knows that's the way out of it, a defeatist individual no longer works for capitalism, therefore capitalist propaganda spreads hatred of defeatism, and in extreme situations (e.g. war) makes it officially a crime! That's how you know it's the correct thing to do.