What Losing Everything Can Teach Us About Meaning
"Ten Attitudes", Algonkins, Jesuits, and Enemies
Before we start, my brother Cory Zillig is coming out with a book. If you have the slightest interest in what it means to be warrior in any domain of your life, this book is for you. A bit of his bio from his website where you can order his book: “Cory’s twenty years’ experience as a SEAL, thirteen at SEAL Team SIX, taught him that the right attitudes are critical to realizing dreams and achieving success.” I cannot recommend it enough.
Second, some wisdom from Thoreau: “Better a monosyllabic life than a ragged and muttered one; let its report be short and round like a rifle, so that it may hear its own echo in the surrounding silence.”
On to today’s piece…
The war against losing—Our world is built on a few axioms. One is “Losing is unfair,” which is an attempt to mold competitive animals into an equitable and utopian vision, never mind the sports, war, gambling, and entrepreneurship which continues regardless. Another is “No one is allowed to lose.” This presumes losing could, ironically, be beaten out of our instinctual scripts. Yet another is “Losing is a fiction—everyone is a winner in the end” which robs losing of its epic profit. As a result of these axioms, life can lose its luster.
On the other hand, an axiom of the primeval world was this: do not lose.
It was not a gentle philosophy, for we were made for ungentle times. The Comanches—men, women, and children—could march from sun down to sun up beneath hail the size of baseballs in times of need, the flatness of the Llano Estacado mocking them in its lack of tree and cave for cover. The Bedouins would spend lifetimes slow walking through thousands of miles of sand dunes with a few skins of water and dried dates. The Yiwara of the Gibson Desert stalked Emu for hours. Often they would end with no more to show for their lost calories than a bit of lizard meat to split among an entire family. Losing to ice, dehydration, and famine was a reality.
Now, this did not mean we could not lose. Far from it.
In 1642, the ubiquitous Jesuits were with the Iroquois when they captured a few Algonkins. The Iroquois did not like them very much. A Jesuit observer wrote what he saw: “One of the prisoners not showing any sign of pain at the height of his torments and agonies, the Iroquois, infuriated to see his constancy… asked why he was not screaming: he responded, I am doing what you would not do, if you were treated with the same fury with which you treat me: the iron and the fire that you apply to my body would make you scream out loud and cry like children, and I do not flinch. To these words the tigers throw themselves on the half-burned victim; they skin his testicles, and throw sand that is all red and burning with fire onto his bloody skull; they rush him to the bottom of the scaffold, and drag him around the huts.”
The real purpose of losing—When I started studying our shared lineage years ago, I wondered why captives throughout the pre-state world rarely tried to escape. If a man does not want to have his testicles skinned, I feel like I can get behind this. But as it turns out, their own people would not accept them back if they escaped, testicles or no testicles. They were as likely to be a laughingstock as they were to be exiled in disgrace. Now why might this be?
Because you can lose, yes, and your enemy will break your body as a means to test your soul, but you must never lose yourself. The human condition reveals itself in an elegant and elemental reality. When calories, knives, tribes, flesh, and breath have been taken away from us—by man or by nature—we are still able to utter a single and savage word until the end: No.
To escape—or so much as groan—would be a sin not only against yourself, but your tribe. You would be seen as unserious. They knew in their marrow there was an exact line at which “Better luck next time” no longer came into play. They worked backwards from the worst their enemy could do to them and took the task of training for life seriously. With this seriousness, existence took on a different texture. It became meaningful.
An enemy anchors us—The individual with an enemy is anchored. I have seen what happens to men and women with an enemy: their skin takes on a bronze-like hue; their eyes brighten and harden; their shoulders unclench; their restless legs are stilled; contemplation replaces rumination.
An enemy teaches us what we are inside. Not “Know thyself” in an academic sense, but in building a meaningful identity for hard times. Maybe as one whose every action signals, “I will never quit.” Or “I will give the shirt off my back to someone else.” Or “I do not need fuck you money because I have a fuck you soul.”
An enemy is what brought countless tribes together for millennia. It led to the Bedouin saying, “Me against my brother; me and my brother against my cousin; me, my brother, and my cousin against the world.”
An enemy makes every moment rich with failure—and with a challenge: can I show myself, my allies, and my enemies, just how beautifully and savagely I can suffer?
Without an enemy, we find an anti-Algonkin mentality. It is possible for the individual in civilization to become unanchored, usually in one of three ways. One, they may blame their parents, their country, or their God, and find the latest Cause to lose themselves in. Two, they blame everyone and sink into nihilism. Or three, and this is the most painful to witness in its innocent nobility, they blame themselves and self-destruct. In either outcome they lose themselves.
The progressiveness of civilization becomes the perfect inversion of primeval meaning.
The void speaks—Thus the absence of an enemy has more to teach us about the human condition than an enemy ever did. Is this why the damage done to the soul in civilization is often worse than the damage done to the body in pre-civilization? Is this why the progressive elements of civilization liberating us from winning and losing set the stage for the greatest loss of all—the loss of meaning?
One way forward (among many)—One way to fill the void is with torture. But that would be a bit hasty. Those who work power lines, hustle about emergency rooms, wrap themselves in deep-sea diving suits, fast-rope out of helicopters, stalk in the woods, work in a hospice—all those who choose to live life as if every task were an act of consequence—they understand this primeval axiom in their bones.
For those who have never felt it, the truth is our enemies have not vanished. They have simply changed forms. Deadly hail is now a misleading narrative by a crooked journalist or politician; waterless deserts are now unhappy and aspiring two bit tyrants at the helm of social media companies; an ice age is now an education system designed to murder the human capacity for critical thinking; a tomahawk is now apathy and a spear is now meaninglessness—these are enemies redefined.
And they are far greater enemies in that we were not built for them, nor the void they crawled out of.
It is therefore a good fight.
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“Fuck you soul” — hell yeah, Sam.
Sam, this connects perfectly with "On the Madness of Comparing Ourselves to Others". It's like a natural continuation: a lack of imagination keeps us from preparing for things we can't even envision and our need for an enemy to define ourselves... it all ties together so well.