I am not interested in competing with anyone, I hope we all make it
We were raised to see each other as competition when human nature thrives best when we collaborate and this has been proven time and time again.
On New Year's Day, my roommate and I had a very beautiful and meaningful conversation about apathy plaguing our society and how scary and psychotic it feels to witness people completely shutting down for the sake of individualism when we both have grown more empathetic due to the downfall of the world at large.
“It is not a competition, it is a collaboration”, that is what some Canadian artist told my roommate a few years ago when she pointed out that Canadians are known to be nicer than Swiss people, and he replied that in Canada, people believe the other way round, to which my roommate responded “you won” and he fired back with the quote I cited at the beginning of this paragraph. This saying remained with her to this day because it struck something in her. He could have laughed it off and agreed Canadians are nicer, but he did not, his first reaction was to remind her that competing for kindness is pointless because we make ourselves better when we collaborate and by the way she was recalling that very day, I can tell you, this really shifted something in her and how she now views her work ethic and interactions with others.
Collaborators not competitors
Capitalism has driven us to see everything as a competition. “Capitalism breeds innovation” they say, therefore, you need to be the first one on the idea and if it means stabbing people in the back, so be it. Yet, as I hope you have figured by now, capitalism does not, in fact, breeds innovation; it steals already existing concepts and repackages it with a different, more modern branding. To be truly frank, I have struggled with the idea that everything has to be innovative, having to prove yourself constantly because your worth is linked to productivity, hasn’t been the healthiest. People are burning out, depressed and completely cut off of their social life. If anything, that innovation we have been berated with has just pushed us into more individualistic tendencies, which has led to more apathy amongst ourselves.
It is not surprising we have been sold that idea that everything has to be a competition, because when you compete with someone, you don’t perceive them as equal to you. In fact, you see people as a threat and whenever we see people as such, the first instinct is to eliminate that threat, hence the stabbing in the back. My roommate and I both work in the cultural sector and if you need to know something about that field is that institutions keep fighting each other for funds to survive, meaning innovations are seen as a prerequisite to land any position in that industry. In this capitalistic hellscape, sectors that are for the greater good of the people are always the first ones to see their funds being slashed. It is old as tale, and at this point, endemic to nations taking the fascistic route.
Everywhere, every time we are made to be wary of each other and I don’t know about you but having to be on my guard at all times because the ruling class managed to launch multiple culture wars so we hate on each other, has been hellishly exhausting. Being told with no god-damn reason that I should fear someone who happens to be less fortunate than me, has got under my skin since realising that all that ruse is manufactured to thwart any class solidarity amongst one another. The moment you understand, the establishment is scared of the power of the people, the clearer it becomes why we are constantly told to compete.
The ruling class loves to give this impression of competing with each other, yet, since they serve the same system, they will always unite to collaborate. Examples are the billionaires attending the Trump inauguration, and Elon Musk suddenly praising Jeff Bezos when they were made to be competing for space domination for years. Because if you have paid close attention those past few years, the US/Western oligarchy has never been this openly blatant. Billionaires and their corporations flocking in to donate to the Trump inauguration ceremony in hope to secure their oligarchic seats to sway even more politicians to benefit them as they impoverish the everyday people. The oligarchy working together to assure their massive wealth gain whilst destroying democracy and any ounce of credibility of upholding civility is why they have class solidarity.
The limits of capitalism
The class solidarity the ruling class has is something we must strive fiercely for! Because pitting against each other and competing with one another is not the way our specie works. Despite the propaganda we have been fed that capitalism is human nature, it is not. Destroying our planet with endless wars, exploitation, pillaging and apathy is the model that has been manufactured so the wealthy get to fuck us over as much as they want. Since the dawn of time, the human being has been all about collaboration, we have made this far on this planet because of collaboration, but we are running straight into a wall because of competition. The neoliberal capitalistic order needs chaos in order to survive, it needs (in)finite resources to give this impression it is working (because the resources it extracts for profit are finite, and we are already running out of them!). We have come to a moment in time where the system has reached a point of no return, where its legs are shaking on the brink of breaking.
We are all witnessing those legs breaking, the empire collapsing and when I say all, I mean all of us, from the ruling class to the working class people. Now more than ever the system has shown us it has reached its ultimate limit. The ruling class knows it, but instead of changing course in hope to save us all, they are doubling down on pushing past the limit imposed. They behave so because they believe themselves to be God-like people: this untouchable caste to whom nothing can happen because money is their shield and politics the playground they get to play in when they need protection. It became very apparent with the Luigi Mangione case. When he came into the picture and reminded the ruling class of being reachable and most importantly hated by the majority, it sent shockwaves to the wealthy that resulted in health insurance companies removing their CEO pictures and infos on their websites or job listings for private bodyguards for CEOs popping up left and right.
Media literacy, anyone?
From traditional media to digital mass media, we have not been encouraged to assess information critically and it shows. People consume the first news available to them at face value with no questioning, resulting in a real lack of understanding of reported issues. This is my call to ask for mandatory media literacy everywhere!
It reminds me of the mainstream media seeding narratives, so the people will hate on Luigi but the moment they realised it was not working, and it actually planted some seeds into raising class consciousness, Luigi completely disappeared from the news cycle. Apart from some accounts I follow on Instagram, I have not read nor seen anything regarding Luigi on mainstream news recently. And it is not a weird phenomenon, as a journalist myself who sat in newsrooms working for media outlets bought by billionaires, it is not a coincidence that Luigi is off the radar now. Same thing happened to Greta Thunberg, the moment, she started connecting the dots about climate change being a result of capitalism and capitalism breeding colonialism and exploitation, she got wiped off the media landscape because suddenly she was threatening the ruling class order. What impresses me is how the ruling class manages to coordinate to deplatform some and platform others. This is actually a proof of how well the ruling class collaborates to maintain the system benefitting them, because after all, without collaboration with one another, it is hard to push an agenda that goes your way.
I find it personally evil that the ruling class will always vilify for us, what they are using for themselves. This idea that only them get to live decently and not the majority of the people, is a psychopathic behaviour, and it is time to call a spade, a spade and admit that people with unhealthy amount of money and political power are not only losers but also sociopathic people. That God-like feeling makes them behave in ways that is truly incomprehensible to the normal brained human being.
Helping each other is our human nature
What the ruling class fears the most is for our compassion to be bigger than ourselves, because the more compassionate we are the more likely we are to unite and revolt against them. And if there is one thing we all agree on is that we outnumber the ruling class by a significant margin! Hence, the constant need to push for us to compete against each other at all times, being as productive as possible to make the competition greater and bigger, for that competition to end up benefitting the ruling class who will in their turn start collaborating with each other to create even more dissent amongst the working people and prevent any solidarity happening between us. What we actually need is to use that same capacity to collaborate and unite because they fear us more than anything else! Our rights and liberties are being restricted or stripped away because they need a way to keep us under control.
That control they exert onto us, we can take it back! We just have to be willing to do it and collaborate because as I keep repeating over and over again, we have more in common than the ruling class wants us to believe! It is not a left vs right thing, it is an up vs down situation that we need to take on fully. Just like Joshua P. Hill stated in his piece “It’s time for Class War in 2025”:
“We can and will continue to build the capacity to reach a world where no one has to choose between back-breaking work and homelessness, where no one has to choose between a lifetime of debt and life-saving medical care, where no one has to choose between their health and happiness and working a second job to afford groceries.”
I truly believe that we are capable of building together, too many recent examples have shown us all that we are better together, we keep us safe. One of them that has sincerely gave me hope in humanity is the mutual aids for the Los Angeles fires. People needed to rely on each other, all the help came from the ground, the US governement couldn’t even bother one bit, worse, the mainstream media tried once again to have us pity multimillionaires and billionaires as if they were the only victims of the climate catastrophe they actively helped create. Yes it is sad, they lost their homes yet they will be fine, many of them could flee to their second or third homes, others could pay for exorbitant hotel prices and so on and so forth. To be totally frank with you, I am at a stage where the celebrity class is not my major interest, unless a celebrity is actively protesting the system that allowed them to hoard so much money and gain proximity to influencial criminals in suits, I couldn’t care less about what the celebs are up to or how affected they are by a situation they have been willing participants.
My interest lies in the working people, the disenfranchised, the ones who have been told that hating their fellow working class people based on race, sexuality, gender or class is their way out of their misery. My interest lies in getting all those people together, to grow a compassion so strong, collaboration is the only logical route to adopt. I want us to put identity politics aside and realise that the moment we put class struggle at the forefront, all other struggles are involved, for everything is intertwined. Our identities are important and we should keep fighting for them but not in a way that creates more divisions. Each of our struggles should sow collaboration where even the people not affected by the struggle are fighting alongside you because their compassion surpasses everything! Compassion is a healthy feeling, it is a vital feeling because caring about other people’s suffering and misfortune is how you understand that people’s plights are linked to your own plights.
The ruling class can collaborate because they have compassion for each other, a compassion that lies in making sure the exploitation remains, but a compassion nonetheless. I want us, to have the same kind of compassion with each other, to unite forces and take down this hellscape of a system that is eating us alive. I want us to stop competing tirelessly with each other, I want us to stop killing ourselves to work for a competition that is not even benefitting us. The only competition I deem worthy is the one where we see which class between the ruling class and the working class can gather as many people to their cause to smash this neoliberal capitalistic apparatus. Because I know who will win and it won’t be the capitalists.
I truly wish for every single one of you everything I wish for myself and my wellbeing.
EVERYBODY SAY THANK YOU RUTH!!!!
Capitalism is the antithesis of life.