A Sword Cutting Daisies
In The Catastrophe of Success, Tennessee Williams says he’d been sharpened by failure and hardship and hard living before he found success with The Glass Menagerie. Then, success came. With it came room service in New York City and fans and a “spiritual dislocation” that almost destroyed him.
What saved him was the pain and recovery of an eye operation, he said. Time with gauze over his eye forced him to reconnect with his true friends and realize he needed to escape his success. He went to Mexico and found difficulty and struggle again and wrote A Streetcar Named Desire.
He needed the struggle.
In the essay, he says, “But once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle you are equipped with the basic means of salvation. Once you know this is true, that the heart of man, his body and his brain, are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict (the struggle of creation) and that with the conflict removed, the man is a sword cutting daisies, that not privation but luxury is the wolf at the door and that the fangs of this wolf are all the little vanities and conceits and laxities that Success is heir to — -why, then with this knowledge you are at least in a position of knowing where danger lies.”
If you’ve read A Spy’s Guide To Strategy, you know conflict is central to strategy and life. Conflict (a Zero-Sum Game) comes before Success (the Positive-Sum Endgame). In the conflict, we win something or create something through struggle. What we win or create, we share with others in our success. And to win the conflict, we team with others (friends, family members and allies) in a Positive-Sum alliance. It looks like this:
But most people don’t want life to look like this.
Most people don’t want there to be competition or conflict or struggle or “zero-sum games.”
When you search for “zero-sum” on Twitter, you’ll find it’s most often used as “X isn’t a zero-sum game” or “[The other side] is acting like it’s a zero-sum game. It’s not.”
It’s rare to find people talking about conflict the way it should be talked about. It’s rare to find people who say there are two sides on some things, and only side can win. It’s rare to find people who say there will be a struggle. It’s rare to even find people who say conflict must exist. Almost no one goes as far as Tennessee Williams does. Almost no one says we’re made for struggle.
But we know it’s true. We know the best people have had the hardest lives. The best people have done the most difficult things. The best people have struggled.
And we know the worst people haven’t struggled. We know the worst people have always been given everything. The worst people have had it easy. We see their lives, and we know it’s dangerous to be like them. We know it’s dangerous to have success without struggle.
We know swords are forged in heat and sharpened on hard things.
And we don’t want to face the hard things. We don’t want the struggle that will knock off the rust and sharpen our edge.
But we need it.
If we avoid the struggle, we become a sword cutting daisies.
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For more, see A Spy’s Guide To Thinking.
