We are all in competition

We are all in competition

It's the one thing that is central

We are all in competition
It's not so bad in the promised land

That old Gang of Four song ("Call Me Up"—I'm dating myself there rather severely) has been in my head lately. It's true. Every living thing feeds on the death of other living things, one way or the other, directly or indirectly. Resources are limited, always, and the race is to the swift, the best-adaped, the determined. Losing equals extermination.

It does not matter what system of organization we come up with to blunt the effects of constant competition, politically or otherwise. No matter what, a few get much, the rest fight over what's left. It's not just the human world; it's the nature of nature, too. Tooth, claw, blood. It's life.

It rattles in the back of my head constantly: "Hurry up. If you want to survive, you'll hurry up."

My depression puts this question to all that, though: Do I want to survive? Why? What's the purpose?

I think of this now in reading about a French documentary that staged a game show, called "Game of Death," which replicated the setup of Stanley Milgram's famous 1963 Yale study of authority and obedience. Sure enough, same results: Ordinary people have no problem obeying orders to torture to the point of death.

Which reminds me, again, of a favorite moment from Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters. Max von Sydow, a tormented artist in a May/December romance with Babara Hershey, is sharing what he watched on TV while she was gone: a panel discussion of the Holocaust. "The question is not, 'Why did it happen?'" says von Sydow. "The question is, given human nature, why doesn't it happen more often?"

That's how you get child soldiers willing to gang rape girls in the Congo, hack off the limbs of other children in Sierra Leone and Liberia, burn people alive in Angola; how you get government policies that result in the deaths of millions of people, a la Mao's China; how ordinary Russians become slavedrivers at Kolyma and other gulags (with millions more dead to their credit). On and on and on and on.

We just left a century in which—not counting war casualties, which easily topped 100 million on their own—governments murdered more than 100 million people. In "peacetime." And what are governments made up of but ordinary people following the dictates of their leaders, no matter how insane?

Which leaves me with another song lyric, this from 16 Horsepower's "Black Soul Choir":

Every man is evil
Every man a liar
Unashamed with a wicked tongue
Sing in the black soul choir