Economics involves the distribution and use of scarce resources. Now, using up scarce resources so that they don’t materialise into anything more is a waste. We see this all the time, even amongst professional athletes. This concept of using up resources is clear from the simple fact that if we do not use up oxygen effectively we die. Similarly, in Martial Arts Training, if we do not allocate our energies effectively the outcomes will be less than impressive, even if we are trying hard and engaging in intensive work.
It is often thought that to get anywhere in professional Martial arts that you have to cheat and ingratiate yourself with key figures within the industry in order to gain privileges. From there, you are obliged to use up all your energies and resources for short term capital returns, in the form, say a title belt or money. Along the way you get a certain amount of physical abilities, tools of the trade. However, what is the point of all this if you are left impoverished, that is, injured and worm out, by the end of a short career?
In a sense, the organisation you are working for as a professional is like a shop. You are encouraged to spend, waste even, all your resources in the superstore. You are then rewarded with all sorts of membership deals, services, and reward schemes. In another sense, you become an advertising board, or a franchise shop. In yet another sense, you are given the opportunity to surpass yourself as something bigger and better. Depending on how you look at it, all of this is true. The important thing to remember, is that you will naturally want a return on your investment, that is, something better than you started out with rather than being conned into something with hidden long term liabilities. You might say “Well, in this fast paced world we have to just grab any opportunity we can”. Maybe, but it can at least be helpful to have your eyes open.
The thing to do is to use your energies and forces in such a way that you capitalise on the returns. For example, if you work hard what you get back should be more valuable than the time and effort you gave up. Training in such a technical manner as many people now do, you give up all your time and energy and the result is purely technical knowledge. The consequence of such superficial knowledge is often increased laziness and decreased personal initiative, which is a cost. In other words, you may gain some technical knowledge but you undermine the source of your own wealth – initiative, inquisitiveness, discovery, etc.
There is an eternal battle raging between the rich and the poor. The rich are said to keep the poor down, and the poor are envious of the rich. However, the rich don’t always stay rich for long if they hoard up all their resources. This is why you must keep giving away your skills, so that each time your practice is as if for the first time. That is, you must rid yourself of old habits and evolve ceaselessly. In this way, think of yourself as an entrepreneur who is ceaselessly investing his capital into new enterprises which, although you might not know what future developments may bring, end up surpassing the previous ones, even if you lose a couple of investments here and there. It is the daring effort to do this and never give up that is the true wealth.
If for example, you eat too much food and don’t use the resources it gives you, you will grow fat and lazy. Similarly, if you don’t develop your skills but instead live off the existing capital, without expanding your enterprise, you may well end up losing what you have worked for. In the same way, the rich who do not provide much need goods services to the relatively poor will find themselves in trouble. In this way, you should seek to give to the poor, or if you like those in need of your expertise, all that you have acquired. The poor then benefit from the rich and eventually become the rich who help the poor, instead of the rich simply exploiting the poor and the poor remaining helpless as is often the case. Then each individual will be like a nation passing through the industrial period into the new horizons of the future. In other words, weak people may suffer for a time but end up better off if they unite under the right conditions.
People get rich, generally speaking, by working hard and finding a service to provide in the market. Yes people get lucky, inherit money, etc., but generally speaking this is how it works. The mistake they often make is to lose motivation in this as they get more comfortable and lose their edge. The result is that they become lazy, flabby, and unenthusiastic, lose their zest for life, their impetus, and then can no longer enjoy the process of becoming enriched. This benefits no one. All they can then do is sit on their material wealth and squander it on amusements rather than developments, even though that does not bring them the happiness they had as captains of industry, or a leader. In other words, they rested on their laurels and became inwardly poor as a consequence of hoarding wealth. as you can see what happens on the large scale is true for the individual, both on the physical and mental level.
On the other hand, Many people who have never had to work hard or use their initiative to surpass themselves have remained poor and idle all their lives. They were too comfortable, preferring instead to remain idle, self satisfied and comfortable. This is what most people want, time to amuse themselves with pleasures a material gain. The problem is that this way of life kills their spirit and enthusiasm and they settle for mediocrity. And it has such a grip on people that it drives out all memory of anything more inspiring and noble.
What I am proposing is that you use all the motivation and determination to enrich yourself to reach a high ideal. You use all the means available to the capitalist to enrich yourself inwardly according to a glorious ideal, rather than just money a title, or comfortable arrangements. In this way you make the method of the capitalist the goal of your behaviour to reach the ideal of the communist. Symbolically speaking, you become the serpent eating its own tail, by uniting two polar opposites2. The two philosophies are not mutually exclusive according to this perspective.
Instead of the goal being some title and then stagnating after you’ve got it, aim for the stars and beyond using the means of determination, perseverance, and willpower3. These know no limits so there is no need to be ‘realistic’, so long as you are inspired and enlivened constantly. In this way it doesn’t matter if the ideal is unrealistic because the consequence it has on the human psyche has the effect of bringing about greater harmony than simply going with what’s immediately viable. In this way you make your training and development the priority and place the ‘goods and services’ you produce, such as skills and abilities, at the service of this inexhaustible ideal. Unless the ideal is beyond reach it will be realised and progress will stop. And to be inspiring enough humans, I would argue, need a goal which allows them to transcend themselves.
Once you have adopted this attitude, you are then free to become a communist in the true sense of looking out for others, providing for them, and treating everyone as part of a brotherhood. Even those who get in your way force you to develop and evolve, opening your eyes to new challenges4. Your enemies are often your true friends. The capitalist within you gets richer, and you pass on your abilities and skills to others, via the goods and service you continually turn over. Because old ideas are thrown on the scrapheap and you are obliged to evolve with the times, and you are continually required to work and surpass yourself, using your old products as fertiliser and manure for your new fields of production3. So you even also become an environmentalist in your mental life.
As you can see, for me at least, their is no irreconcilable differences between capitalism and communism. They are simple a duality within a unified whole, two polar opposites working for the same cause5, and the more you develop one aspect the more corresponding demand this places on the opposite aspect. It all depends on the perspective you view the whole from.
If you are concerned only with one thing, say, capitalism, then you will probably not look any higher to see how, further up the hierarchy, it springs from the same source as communism. To me this is obvious but it seems most people would rather be at each others throats. Just seeing how upset everyone gets about it says it all. Consider that the more skills and abilities you develop within your capitalist enterprise, the greater the demand there is for a corresponding spirit of communism to share your ideas. Otherwise you’ll just hoard the goods and never get them onto the market and contribute to evolution. And the greater the supply of your work in spirit of community, the greater will be the demand for your products, because others will be enriched, if only by your attitude.
And so, when you are a true capitalist, you are at the same time required to become a communist. If you have a great abundance of wealth and never share it, you just end up despised by others. It is only natural, because you will inspire envy and act as a model of selfishness. You then have to watch your back constantly, because of this. This becomes quite draining and saps you of enthusiasm and will power over time, in other words the source of your wealth. This is why so many fighters lose their edge, because they get so puffed up and look to dominate others, that they lose all perspective. Their own arrogance turns them as weak and vulnerable as someone who has never trained a day in their life. When people accumulate too much, they are often as unhappy as the ones who possess nothing. And if no one likes you or wants anything to do with you, you are obliged to hide away as a recluse because their is no demand for you. Therefore the capitalist mentality by itself is often very counterproductive, even if it appears to be the way to go for a short time.
Or, you might just become so bored and disgusted with yourself, because trampling all over others to get to the top of the pile tends to have a corrosive effect on character and self worth. So it is then that you are required to become a communist, in mentality, by offering a service to others of some kind, if only to selfishly save your own skin. Then you are not depriving anyone of anything, you simply convert the resources at your disposal to the service of others. It then doesn’t matter what people think of you, so long as you stay true to this cause and continue in your work, you are saved and invigorated daily. Why not extend this attitude across your whole life? Leave the others to their whining and boasting.
The best way is the middle ground, where you develop both your capitalistic tendencies and your communist side equally. Inside us there is an inner capitalist who creates wealth, symbolically speaking. This is achieved by working on your skills and abilities, often single mindedly without the community having much of a say. You have then satisfied your selfish tendencies rather than supressing them. The inner communist then distributes these goods to the community. They are often transmitted indirectly, through your motivated attitude and enthusiasm that you bring to the table in the occupation of your choosing, which may otherwise be dull and uninspiring. In this way you will be enriching your own otherwise mediocre day to day life even if nobody is receptive to you “goods” or products.
The capitalist within will want to hoard everything for itself, but don’t listen, the communist side should be in charge of distribution. On the other hand, the communist side will want to distribute before the goods have been made competitive. In other words, the inner communist will be so eager to share that it will want goods on the market which don’t benefit anyone and therefore don’t make anyone’s lives any better. So the inner capitalist must not listen to the inner communist as far as innovation and drive are concerned. In other words our drives and ambitions serve the communist ideal so that they are not purely selfish, but should never be killed off. The communist side leads the capitalist side and directs it. It is like a person riding a horse, they should never be led by the horse but must dominate and handle it, so that they can travel great distances.
On the smaller scale using in the example of martial arts practice, it is not the move that is important but the energy transmitted through it. In other words, if the drive and ambition to produce a powerful attack are there, and the senses supporting this are educated by hard work and knowledge, then the outcome will be a vigorous and lively technique. This is why I don’t personally care about form or technique, a person could never have practiced any form or martial arts and still have adopted the right attitude and I would congratulate them as a true fighter. If an inventor wants to bring an innovative product to the market, he needs inspiration and learning, drive and educated work, to bring it to fruition. The very next day he needs to do the same if he wants to continue evolving, otherwise his wealth, that is his inspiration and drive will dry up, even if yesterday he changed the world. We mustn’t be stifled by the past, but instead should make sure out present conditions are conducive to the future progress we want.
It is absolutely normal to want to posses power, knowledge, wealth, and all the rest of it, it is just the primitive instinctive side that often needs educating to better serve the wider sphere of life. In the true sense, we shouldn’t think of communism and capitalism as two opposing notions. For me this is absolutely clear. For example, I spend half the day working and serving others, and then the other half I spend developing myself and my capabilities so that I can continue to help and apply myself to the benefit of others. I don’t really concern myself with my own little ideas about what I would rather do, this is just the best way to demand the most from my efforts whilst supplying the best of myself, as far as I’m concerned. If I wanted to give without possessing anything then that would be of no use to anyone.
References
1 The High Ideal https://harmanater.com/2020/07/26/the-high-ideal/
2 Signs and Symbols in Martial arts part 2 https://harmanater.com/2020/06/06/signs-and-symbols-part-2-pedagogy-and-the-art-of-war/
3 Will Power https://harmanater.com/2020/05/10/will-power/
4 Self defence without Violence https://harmanater.com/2020/06/14/self-defence-without-violence/
5 Fight in Chaos, Live in Harmony https://harmanater.com/2020/07/12/fight-chaos-live-in-harmony/