You Get What You Deserve

Winners take credit for their success, losers take responsibility for their failure…

In a previous article, I posted a video from the North Korean media that showcased their national teams triumph in the World Cup. Behold the monstrous propaganda of the notorious prison nation in full swing.

Uncanny, diabolical, wrong — yet effective, isn’t it? Ignoring good and evil for a moment, one may call it astounding, if not ingenious. I mean, people get what they deserve. We all know this, sharing the thought amongst ourselves when criticizing the problematic aspects of our society, from the criminal and the delinquent, to the dysfunctional, to the unsustainable, to the corrupt and callous. It’s every rational person’s mantra, every critic’s calling card, every reformist’s carrot on the stick and every revolutionary’s call to arms: people must be held responsible for their choices — they must be held accountable for their actions.

The Beautiful Game Was Won Ruthlessly

Take the Germans, for example, who just won the World Cup. They thrashed Brazil 7-1 in the semi- finals to get to the final, and people around the world were going, There they go, the fucking Germans, ruthless as ever — cold, clinical, efficient, machine-like!

Why were people saying these things?

Because the Germans have earned these titles over the years, through a combination of superb engineering (mechanical and efficient), reserved emotionality (cold and clinical), and dubious modern history (ruthless).

Beautiful Is Victory

You may think that all the above are just stereotypes, and you may be right. They’re just (as in fair) stereotypes. Because stereotypes come from somewhere, they have an origin, a trunk from which they grow. People think, do and act in certain ways, for which they get judged, appraised or regarded in a manner that befits their actions. The Germans won the World Cup because they deserved it, and they won the impressions because they played the best football of all, and they were donned with a few classic adjectives along the way, some of them ‘good,’ some of them ‘bad,’ because they earned them over the decades. Eight appearances in World Cup finals (more than any other team in the history of the tournament) and a cool, simple, outstanding style of play, which has made its mark over the decades in typical Mannschaft fashion, played their part.

The Germans got what they deserved, because — good and evil aside — everyone does.

Ugly Is Defeat (If One Remains Defeated)

So did the North Koreans whose choices over the past fifty years has led them to complete subjugation. Their actions (or lack thereof) have resulted in them being incarcerated for life. Their fate is a most disturbing one, not fit for flippant jokes, but then again, this is not a matter of good vs evil, or moralism in the general sense. This is a matter of results. You get what you deserve, because you, and you alone, are responsible for your actions, and your actions are what creates reality. Just as winners take credit for their success, losers take responsibility for their failure. Only then can their failure be corrected and reversed.

When people realize this — that we all get what we deserve — that if we want something other than what we have, we need to change ourselves so that we will deserve (and bring about) something different — then we’ll make headway.

Look Back In Anger Management

Let’s explore a few status quos by looking back at history to shed light on factors that have precipitated the stereotypes of our day and age.

The Germans, for example. For a long time they were not liked by the world at large because of their Nazi past. Unfair or not, this prejudice was justified because nothing speaks like outcome. Say what you will about this and that anti-Nazi German who didn’t support the Nazis, who may have even resisted Hitler actively, but the fact remains: Germany, on the whole, ended up with Hitler as its driver.

It’s a fact the Germans have to own.

They also have to own the fact that their past was their creation. It was borne out of their actions — or lack thereof — for which they were, and still are, accountable. Hitler rose to power because many of his compatriots, for whatever reason, responded to his maniacal call for redemption through a) defiance of the West, b) military conquest, and c) the persecution and genocide of the Jewish people. That, and the fact that the German anti-Nazis failed time and time again to push Hitler and his thugs back when they had the chance, led to a Nazi regime along with the stereotypes it left them, long after the end of the war.

(The Germans own their past, in fact, they do it so well, they’re flourishing in spite of it.)

The appeasers in Europe and the UK, on the other hand, got war for breakfast and a Nazi boot up their ass because they failed to stand up to the Nazi threats. They, too, got what they deserved, because their actions and choices amounted to ignoring the problem until it was too late.

In short, they all got what they deserved.
 Similarly, in general terms (to open up the conversation):

• The Americans are stuck with a bunch of corporations, plus the Fed, despite the fact that the Founding Fathers’ War for Independence was waged in protest against central banking and imperial corporate interest. Americans are stuck with these institutions because Americans have a fetish for corporate prestige. At the same time, they’re stuck with a bunch of ideologues from both the left and the right who dictate policy on the federal and state levels, because Americans are suckers for idealism.
• The Iranians ended up with the Ayatollahs and their minions in their attempts to be shielded from the clutches of Satan, the likes of which they saw everywhere beyond their borders. To do this they turned to their faith, which a few hardliners sold to them as the ultimate redemption.
• The indigenous tribes of the world were exterminated because they clung to belief systems that had failed time and time again to take into account the materialist and scientific aspects of the world. The Europeans could have treated them more humanely, true, but, at the end of the day, it was like a boulder rolling down a hillside. The rocks in the way got bumped and displaced while the twigs and snails got crushed.
• 
The Russians overthrew the Soviet regime to later embrace Putin, a crypto-dictator of Soviet pedigree, because what mattered to them most was Russian orthodoxy and power. Democracy had a hard time growing roots in Mother Russia because it was never part of its cultural paradigm and history.
• The countries in Southern Europe got stuck with states that malfunction at will, plus those huge bills to pay, which everyone and their grandfather knows about by now, because their collective culture is based on principles that fail to reform when reform is necessary. When push comes to shove, they trip over their own laces and fall in a water puddle, where they drown.
• The British are regarded by the world at large as stuck-up colonialists who think they’re better than everyone. The fact that hordes of Brits Abroad go apeshit bonkers when on vacation, as if nothing is sacred, does little to alleviate the stereotype. When Brits get treated like shit in a tourist country, they feel insulted, and rightly so, but they’re partially to blame for it.
• When the British treat other people like shit in turn, these ‘others’ also feel insulted, but they, too, are partially to blame for it, for reasons each group has merited, some of which are listed above. You give what you get, but you also get what you give.

The same applies to individuals, regardless of nation or culture. What you give is what you get, and vice versa, in a complex continuum of effect and counter-effect, point and counterpoint. People are driven by their actions and impulses, not to mention their reactions to the surrounding environment.

Let’s go back in time for a moment. Remember those classmates of yours who always wanted someone to take care of them — someone to show off to, or bounce off of? Well, these relationship-driven individuals ended up married with kids at the age of twenty-something, living predictable, pre-scripted lives. Meanwhile, those among us who cherished their personal liberty above all, yielding to no one but their need to break free from everyone and everything, ended up roaming the world, looking for meaning in a meaningless world, wondering what the point to life was.

Like I said, after a while, everyone gets what they deserve. For better or worse…

Outcomes Speak Louder Than Anything Else

The mechanisms behind the process are simple. People either invite events upon them, allowing them to shape their lives directly, or fail to push them away when it matters most. Everything we do, think or feel, amounts to something specific, to each our own and all together, putting ourselves in such and such a position, whatever it may be — accountability, remember? — the dynamics of which determine our lives down the line.

Love it or hate it, this holds true for the North Koreans too, who, despite their tragic plight — or precisely because of it — have to be identified as a monumental failure. As a people and a nation, they somehow ended up trapped inside a monstrous utopia, ruled by omnipotent politicians and generals who reign supreme by pulling strings, controlling the mass media and generating national football teams that beat the crap out of their opponents without ever meeting them.

I See You

Why do I harp on about the North Koreans in such a callous manner? Because they reveal something about our way of life, which we are loathe to consider. I mean, have you ever thought of the possibility that maybe, just maybe, there’s a bunch of people out there who, like us, are watching us go about our lives from behind their screens? That they’re commenting on what makes, breaks, or otherwise defines our day — from whatever we choose to celebrate or mourn, to the goals we deem worth pursuing and the ideals we aspire to — do you think there’s people out there,
watching us, monitoring us, all the while discussing between
 themselves how our world is a blatant fabrication, a complex simulacrum fed to us via an array of channels and streams they, or people they know, directly control? Do you think there’s a chance that someone out there smiles with us, or frowns at us, ho-humming and tut-tutting us, poor little retards that we are, wondering when, oh, when will we wake up, if ever, and see what’s going on?

Or maybe, just maybe, they’re not very preoccupied with us at all, these observers of ours  Maybe they don’t care, taking a peek at us here and there, like we do with the North Koreans, engaging themselves in lighthearted or heated debate amongst themselves about this, that and the other, before returning to their lives, unperturbed and guilt-free, content with the knowledge that no matter how sad or disturbing the spectacle on their screens is, it’s not worth losing sleep over. Would you lose sleep over a sea of puppets?

Perhaps the world is all puppets, puppet masters, accountability, oblivion, lack of awareness of one’s surrounding environment, delusion…

Everyone gets what they deserve

and

People are responsible for their actions and choices

and

It’s fun to control the board game in real life.

See What I’m Saying?

Somebody once claimed that the world rested on the shell of a giant turtle. Her comment raised eyebrows. The skeptics asked this woman what the giant turtle rested on, and she replied nonchalantly: It’s turtles all the way down.

Similarly, it’s observers and puppet masters all the way up, all the way up to places most people haven’t even imagined.

Be careful when you read this, friend, and pay attention dear / To that which has enveloped you in all the passing years / Be careful who you judge, advise, pity, or burn / You never know who’s watching you in turn.

From your people-watching Spin Doctor,

Eyes open, mind sharp.