The Playful State is the Powerful State Roman Numeral Two Colon Redux (Patreon)

It’s true of mental states but also true of nation states. A playful country builds up deep and wide reserves of human capital and soft power that help it “win” even at “serious” competition.

Examples abound. Playful Athens stood up to military-über-alles Sparta. The playful United States was able to defeat the dour USSR, even though the Soviets literally invented space travel. North Korea is easily the most serious country in the entire world and yet it literally can’t even feed itself. That’s deeply weird if you think about it for more than ten seconds. It’s like being a sour, straight-laced workaholic who makes no dough (or not enough to survive independently).

Starting late in the 15th century, playful Europe ran roughshod over the older, wiser, conservative, sclerotic civilizations of the rest of the world. Where other cultures respected and even worshipped their ancestors, the Europeans were all about innovation and experimentation. They didn’t start out with a technical advantage, but their exploration of mental and physical space put them on a self-reinforcing path of forward development. I could be wrong about Tahiti, though: apparently, the Tahitian way of life was literally paradise on Earth until European contact warped it.

For good reasons, nobody likes to talk about the things Europe did right — because they did so much wrong. Thinking about brutality, the tragedy, the enormity of it all could crush any compassionate human being who dwelt on it too long. But it’s important to not sit around being triggered forever. Not because collapsing into catatonic grief or exploding in apoplectic rage would be the wrong thing to do, but because doing so would not help.

Case in point. Japan, the only victim of nuclear attack, doesn’t curl up in a corner crying about what were clearly war crimes, even though she could (and some people, wrong people, would say she should); there are nuclear power stations; atomic isn’t “the A word”. The weight of the past can be too much to bear. That bag is best put down and left behind. The TER spent nursing grudges, although justified, must be put to better use. Endless cycles of retribution burn the future to avenge the past. Living well is the best revenge.

A more sobering point to realize is that, whatever conflict may exist between groups, however defined (whether by family, clan, sect, nation, continent, planet, galaxy, cluster or whatever), the most destructive conflicts are always within the group. "Internecine" is the keyword here. The true enemy, the greatest enemy, is always within, always an insider. As the saying goes, we have met the enemy, and he is us. Man is a wolf unto man. This is no mere poetic metaphor. Statistics bear it out. The "civiler" the war, the higher the bodycount.

Looked at this way, the Romans didn’t defeat the Gauls: the Gauls defeated themselves first, and the Romans simply showed up to finish the job. The Goths did not defeat the Romans: the Romans defeated themselves first. The Europeans didn’t conquer the rest of the world: the rest of the world had weakened itself to the point that a foreign power could roll in. The Europeans then turned around and defeated themselves quite handily in two “world” wars.

We rise because of what we do right, and fall because of what we do wrong. Not in any moral sense, but purely based on the objective facts of strategy and tactics. Don’t blame the Japanese language, blame your methods.

Moving on to happier topics — this is about being playful, after all.

Americans often get made fun of for being lazy and stupid. Blogger, linguist and cultural commentator The Korean has pointed out how Kobe Bryant was praised for practicing his free throw shot over and over again yet schools and parents get criticized for assigning math drills.

But maybe, just maybe, to their credit and in their own way, Americans remain resistant to tiger parenting because they’re unconsciously trying to protect the playful state (mental and otherwise) — as if to say, it’s not enough to get the job done, it has to be fun as well. It’s not enough to win, you have to enjoy the game, because enjoyment of life is the deeper, longer, truer, more meaningful victory.

And maybe, just maybe, America is right (*gasp*, there’s three words you never see strung together outside of Fox News [lol]) on this one. Few things are sadder than meeting or interacting with a smart, successful, humorless, incurious person. And I’m not gonna name names, because I don’t want no drama (screw it, I’ll name names of you ask nicely), but these people exist and continue to be manufactured at scale with some regularity.

For every kid whose life would have been undoubtedly improved by stricter, more intensive, more involved parenting, there seem to be plenty who hate themselves, their lives and their parents because of being helicoptered and hectored into becoming socio-academic achievement drones.

It’s not all black and white, though. Tiger parenting is founded on hope and the belief in practice, improvement and self-determination; that’s my jam. Hippie parenting, on the other hand, tends to be rooted in fatalism and characterized by a neglect that is not always benign. We definitely want to separate babies from all the cultural bathwater.

If I weren’t a childless manchild, and had babies of my own who weren’t cats, and had to choose between tiger and hippie parenting, I’d grow orange fur with black stripes in a heartbeat. But life choices don’t have to be globally binary like that, only locally so (there’s an AJATT article about using binary fission to make choices).

So what’s the right answer? I don’t know. But here’s a suggestion. Don’t make glowering, towering, righteous New Year’s resolutions, just screw around instead. Run some experiments. See how they turn out. Be playful and curious. Dynamic, not static. Suppressing playfulness and curiosity is like living and working with most of your brain turned permanently off; I know you’re already smart, but nobody’s too smart to benefit from even more smarts.