March 30th, 2007

My friend Rena makes regular shoutouts to me from her blog. I read her blog pretty regularly too, for its own merits, but also to give me some perspective. In some ways each complements the other's writing since she normally has a less jaded and grumpy outlook on life than I do. She sees good in things where I am a little filtered into seeing the bad—or at least the contemplative side of things. Not exactly light and dark, good and bad, just ... complementary. I sort of imagine conversations like this:

Brian: Oh brother, look at that glass! It's half-empty!
Rena: Wow, that's a nice-looking glass! I love that pattern.
Brian: Ugh, and it's lemonade! People need to figure out what kind of psychological deviants they must be to actually enjoy drinking lemonade!
Rena: Mmm ... lemonade! And there's still half a glass of it left! Do you want some?

She recently wrote about the behaviour she observed in some young girls, where a domineering girl asserted her pecking order over the other girls—one little girl in particular (see her journal entry: 03.27.2007 "Bully With a Blue Ribbon In Her Hair"). It echoes something in a book that I just happen to be re-reading right now: Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.

In it, Quinn describes two broad classes of people: Givers and Takers. Now, I don't want to paint Rena's observed group in strokes too broad, but it really looks like the Alpha Dog (the Big Taker) really stuck it to a Giver in the crowd. I mean, you know how they say "there's always one in every crowd"? Well, the truth of the matter is a little different: The whole crowd are Takers and there might be one or two Givers sprinkled here and there. You can tell the Givers easily from the Takers amongst children because they are constantly ducking to avoid the flying crap, both physical and verbal.

And, I suppose, that's sort of the way the population breaks out. A large group of Generic Takers, a few Alpha Takers, and a few Givers:

Givers and Takers

But the point I wanted to make is that I noticed something: The proportion of Takers who are successful people in this world appears to be roughly the same proportion of Takers who are unsuccessful. That is, the number of Takers whose wheels come off of their asshole vans balances the number of Takers who are successful because their Takerish natures.

And, I'll tell you something else I've noticed: Being a Giver means seldom winning a single battle, but inexplicably winning the war. I can't explain it, but though Givers beat their heads and hearts to a pulp trying to keep their value systems intact while getting trampled by the masses running over their backs, they always seem to end up at the head of the tables that really count. Or, more generally, being an asshole may change what your life looks like (and you might think it looks better from that camp) but it doesn't make it any better.

OK, so miss Blue Ribbon Bully may have learned that if she shouts and tosses her hair she may end up leading the troops some day (winning the rat race just proves you are a rat) ... and the other girl may feel like shit and "develop an eating disorder" but someday she might just look up and suddenly, honestly realise: "Wait a minute ... I don't know how, but I won the race by not even being in it!"

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