Adriaen van de Velde: Dogs (17th century)

" … they will insist that they represent the real spirit of the laws …"

We speak of the Republican'ts and the Democans as if our society's essential divide lay in mere political labels. It likely lies much deeper than that, as deep as belief and perspective might lie. On one side, we have a cadre who, try though they might (they don’t really try at all), still firmly believe they inhabit a zero-sum world. Conversely, we have those who understand it needn't necessarily be so characterized. It can be a zero-sum world if we insist that it must be, for the world, indeed, our universe, seems poised to be responsive to whatever belief we bring when considering its nature. When it comes to universes, it's not believe-it-when-we-see-it, but we see what we believe—it cooperatively becomes whatever we believe. The eyes we bring to the inquiry make all the difference. Of course, we're always blind to the eyes we cannot bring to an investigation. The Republican'ts, like the Southern Confederates a century and three-quarters before, experienced a zero-sum world of their own projection, where one person's loss was necessarily another's gain. They seriously entertained the notion that force alone could secure their future. They held hostage the means for securing their fortune, believing they could hold justice at bay indefinitely, infinitely.

The zero-sum people see a dog-eat-dog world, where every newborn puppy's destiny must be to either master the skill of puppy killing, or they will undoubtedly be killed and eaten by another puppy. Classifying friends and enemies becomes their primary occupation. Every enemy must be held in deep suspicion on the conviction that they're as dedicated to doing us in as we must necessarily be to doing them in, for should they win, it would be the end of our world. These puppies grow up to be Dog Eaters, self-righteous cannibals bred on killing and consuming their own species' flesh. Dog Eating seems to be the ultimate zero-sum game. Your loss is always my gain, and your gain is my loss. This explains why the combatants take their responsibilities so damned seriously. There can be no mere difference of perspective or opinion. Every blesséd difference must be perceived as a probable mortal threat. To Dog Eaters, freedom demands eternal vigilance and guarantees no second chances.

That sort of freedom seems egregiously free of what one might believe freedom owes us. Constrained by eternal enemies, freedom shrivels into mere buzzwords. When Christians insist upon gun ownership as an essential exercise of freedom, we can be confident that they've finally managed to dumb themselves down to become their own most threatening enemy. As dogs, we might properly insist on characterizing dogs as our primary enemy. We might not have noticed when we were introduced to ourselves, but we met our chief enemy at that moment, and he was our self. We also met our chief ally at that moment, but only if we could see beyond the conviction that we're a dog embedded within a dog-eat-dog world.

Cooperation produces more benefits than competition. Always. This is more than conjecture or hopeful intention; it is another inexorable way of the world. Of course, this statement is pure heresy to the DogEaters, who perceive a necessity to compete. They think of cooperation as a trap, as "communism," "socialism," and "Democrat crap." Had they never considered the downside associated with losing a competition? Or the waste? The destruction? Had they, perhaps, always been a member of a protected class for whom the inexorable laws of competition are in permanent suspension? Once you become a billionaire, downsides cease to matter. One becomes free to believe in any odd evil fantasy, such as that tax cuts inevitably produce prosperity or that subsistence subsidies seem to be the primary underminer of society: that, and other puppies, of course.

We possess oodles of evidence that we compete to enrich the few and impoverish the rest. We eat dogs not to keep us safe but to satisfy a perverted palate. Those who cannot believe this is not a dog-eat-dog universe seem to be in ascendance. They will shortly play out their deluded fantasy to an increasingly disgusted audience. We will all get a fresh chance to see the stark raving difference between hateful theory and practice, as innocents are rounded up to be treated worse than threatening dogs. And prosperity will once again elude many of us, not because it was impossible to achieve in this wealthiest nation in history, but because a few deluded individuals who never understood the difference between power and force came to lord over us. If they treat us like dogs, it will just be because that's how they perceive everybody, friends as well as actual enemies. They perceive everyone as poised to eat their puppy, so they might understandably seem a tad defensive. That they act solely upon their own hyperactive and self-destructive imagination notwithstanding, they will insist that they represent the real spirit of the laws they continually violate the letter of.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #NextWorld, #PureSchmaltz