And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
-That Shakespeare guy, from Henry the V
One of the things I keep digging my heels into lately is this idea of good/bad that comes from the American political cultural binary which increasingly governs our world. Yesterday’s massive Obamacare dismantle failure might be the first time in a long time that the GoP and their supporters noticed that maybe it’s not all good or bad, but we still live in a society that is governed by the binary.
There is the other half of that, too. Win/lose. This is one of the things that we see super-clearly in March every year because of the NCAA basketball tourney. One game. You win or you lose. Right now Xavier is playing way ahead of expectations, an 11 seed (out of 16– by bracket of 4, because NCAA math is crazy) still alive in the final 8 (where it should be 1 vs. 2 in each bracket if we believe in seeding). To be defeated by such a team is shameful for a “better” team.
But that’s because we understand struggle as a win/lose. This is the enemy of the game designer and the academic who teaches with game theory, but in reality it should be the enemy of all of us. That’s not how human life works. We don’t simply win or lose in every situation. Pretending that we do creates a culture where students think anything less than an A is failure, that if we don’t get exactly what we want that we fell short, that we must be constantly in competition with everyone around us.
This causes us to face two serious problems as a society:
- We either have to crush other people and behave in selfish, damaging ways so that we can be the “winners” and preserve our sense of being “superior” or we have to live a life of disappointment because we don’t always win.
- We measure the value of the things we do based on risk vs. odds of victory
And that means that we don’t take the risks we should, don’t feel the sense of growth that would ultimately make us better people.
But it means something else, too. If you glance up at the title of this post, it invokes a cliche that I’ve had used on me in one form or another numerous times in my life. I’ve had people tell me I have to “choose the hill to die on” or ask me if this “is the hill you want to die on.”
This cliche, of course, comes from a war analogy, perhaps a reference to the battle of Hamburger Hill in Vietnam or even to the Battle of the Bulge. The idea is that one must take a piece of land then be willing to die there to try to preserve it. It’s fatalistic. Will one desire a position so much as to die on that hill?
That idea flies in the face of how life works, though it is a perfect explanation of the foolishness of war. The way the cliche is enacted is to discourage a person from trying to take up what could be a losing prospect. Why die on that hill, right? But… that’s exactly what we need to do.
We need to feel like we COULD die on a hill and it would be okay. We need to feel the passion that we would run into a battle that it would be difficult to win. We need to do things we understand when we start could be failures.
Because if we keep doing what is safe, nothing will ever change. The status quo that leaves so many people cold comes from the fact that people are afraid to risk what they have for the chance of making a change. We’re afraid to leave our comfort zones. I say we because I know I suffer from this, too. For years and years I didn’t share these sorts of thoughts with anyone because once time when I did I got blasted hard by people who had the ability at that time to end my academic career.
Academia is the hill I’d die on, by the way. And I’ve taken so many arrows I probably look like that giant from the end of the siege on Winterfell. But you know what? I’m not dead. Each arrow was a lesson. Sometimes not for me. Sometimes for the person pulling the string. But usually for me. I won’t lie about that. I got where I am by failing and standing back up.
But if I were to live a life in constant fear of “losing,” I’d let the dominant narrative bury my story, and my desires, and the things that I care about.
So stop worrying about dying, but siege the fucking hill, okay? If someone knocks you down, yell over to me. I’ll come pick you up.