Hello KYLady
Thanks for your comments about the percentages of winners, losers and non winners and on how does one define a winner you made in the previous post on this topic.
The percentages cited are somewhat arbitrary. The main point being made is there needs to be a large number in society who basically keep the society functioning as do ‘worker bees’ in a bee hive. If these people do their work then there also needs to be a group who do not follow the customary rules. These people thus give the society an edge, or a continual creative and growth momentum. Without this a society would stagnate and falter sooner or later.
Both the winners and the losers do this. They provide a society with a quality of creative growth. A good example of this in Australia is some what topical at the moment with the American example of the batman movie shootings. It involves a person called Martin Bryant who was in his early 20s at the time. In the mid 1990s he randomly shot and killed 35 people at a popular tourist resort with no motive. The government at the time used this to give Australian society a new direction on the issue of gun control. Laws were significantly tightened to make the purchase of guns more difficult. If Martin Bryant had not done what he did that would not have happened at least then. So this ‘loser’ (for want of a better word) had a significant impact on the direction of Australian society because he broke the rules and in one way forced the society to grow and develop in the way it did.
Things work out well in the end
In terms of psychological theory to achieve self actualization or psychological health, there is only a small group who do this - the winners. All the others don’t. The losers have tragic life scripts and the non winners achieve only banal lives. Neither of these in terms of psychological theory are the optimum state of psychological health and thus they could then be called neurotic states.
Is the group more important than the individual or the individual more important than the group?
The same kind of situation applies for the winner and the non winner. The winner can only avoid the life of a banal existence and self actualize if the non winners do their job and remain banal. The non winners suffer for the sake of the group and the winners show how the individual can benefit as they do.
Tony – this is a very interesting way of looking at the world and I like how you’ve illustrated it here for us. From now on, I will be happier with my life knowing that if I can’t have things my way, at least I’m doing my part to help the winners in our society avoid the banal existence most of us endure. But…if I don’t know what I want in life, regardless of how rich and famous I become, it means I can’t be a winner. Maybe we plodding-along types enjoy our banal existence so much that we live too much in the here and now and don’t spend enough time dreaming of the future.
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