A rigged game.
You can't help coming to that somewhat cynical conclusion. Human Beings are always looking to better themselves, they always want to "one up" the next guy. So much of our human activity seems to be a game of status, resources, wealth. It's a fundamental thing.
If you play the game, you want to play to win the game. Seems no one really wants to play fair, that's for the suckers, it's too risky, I mean, no one wants to lose. So there is all that rigging and cheating going on. Look around, it happens in just about every realm. Human Beings can be so petty, so prone to cheating. We are the clever, cheating monkeys.
If you decide you don't want to play the game, or don't care about winning, you often end up on the short end of the stick; lacking in status, resources, wealth. It may be a sadly defeatist, somewhat foolishly noble position, but it's also a very precarious position to be in.
There are the movers and shakers and then there are those who are being moved and shaken. How to maintain a certain integrity in the whole process? Play a different game? March to a different drummer?
Yesterday morning we were on a bike path, riding through parts of our town where we never venture. We passed an iron-cast statue of Mahatma Gandhi. Hah! So incongruous. A statue of a skinny Hindu in simple robes. A simple noble man preaching nonviolent disobedience, we put that scrawny noble being up for all to admire, put him up on a shiny, seemingly indestructible pedestal.
Here in the belly of the beast: the needing, wanting, grasping consumer culture, cheating our way to Nirvana, we want to pretend that Gandhi is our hero, but really no one wants to be that man: too simple, too thin, too poor, too honest, too vulnerable, too idealistic, too dead.
We are so addicted to hustling each other, we can't help but hustle and lie and cheat ourselves too. We like to whisper lies to each other, whisper lies to ourselves. W.C. Fields once told us: "You can't cheat an Honest Man." The honest ones are few are far between. Seems the only honest ones are dead and cast in iron.