A Zero Sum Game (religion, purpose, nature, society)
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Game and economic theory says a "zero-sum game" describes a situation in which each participant's gain (or loss) must be balanced by other people's equal but opposite gain or loss.
Do you believe that for you to gain - someone else has to lose?
Unfair question.
To gain what?
I'd say, indeed, as everything is ONE and nature does not tolerate emptiness, what is added to one is subtracted from another.
But then again, no one really owns anything physical, it is impossible. So balance does not really change much. In the great schema of things.
On the spiritual plane, one's gain is usually one's harm. That's why religions tech you to abandon all earthly cravings and desires. Well, part of the reason at least.
Some of it matter of perspective. Oh, he has expensive (......) and I can't have it. Truth is, he has nothing. Alll things are borrowed by human from nature to be returned to it after the physical body death. Term is so minuscule that it really affect nothing.
Depends on what facet you view life through, and what situation you're talking about.
It's far less zero-sum, in my view, than many think it is.
Even when it's technically zero-sum the implications aren't always what they seem.
For example, Sanders had a policy position that tuition at public colleges / universities should be free. On the one hand, where does all that $$ come from ... on the other, one can find plenty of places that huge sums of money are being thrown down a useless hole, and so could be redirected to better purposes. And so many other countries have implemented tuition free higher education successfully that it's clearly a failure of imagination, will, or both that we don't it. Especially when you consider that we already do that K-12. There is enough money sitting in tax shelters in the Cayman Islands to pay for college tuition several times over.
The other argument -- Hillary's argument until Bernie pushed her left -- was that if you just give people a free education, they "have no skin in the game". Well that would be true if you were giving everyone who attends college tuition-free, a diploma. But you're not. The "skin in the game" is that they still have to earn the diploma by doing the coursework. The idea is to remove barriers to receiving an education, not to remove requirements for graduating. But it is these kinds of facile deflections that work, somehow, because people don't, ya know, think critically -- when they think at all. Or ... they are thinking about maintaining their special status of being college-worthy and not diluting it by it being every citizen's right. Which is just another elitist demand for continued hegemony and status, not a valid argument that it can't be done.
So in summation, yes, some aspects of life are a zero sum game, but that seldom is a practical limitation for constructing a fairer, more civil, more empathetic society that provides opportunity for all.
A time proven method of driving your self crazy and inviting a lot of suffering into your life is to go around giving credence to what "experts say. Simply live your own life. No one knows more about it than you do. If you feel it's the way you described, that will be your self created reality.
I believe there's enough resources in the world so everyone can and should 'win'. But there's also enough individual/societal greed + selfishness that prevent s it from happening.
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