What is the game? As in ‘The Game’? In this melting pot world of ours, we have created some nonsense; trying to make sense of it all is an absolute nightmare of a task at times.

To me the criteria that govern life are simple and yet this world makes the most peculiar demands of us in return for its very meagre offerings. I cannot help but conclude this age we find ourselves in and the true nature of life are estranged from one another.

Have you ever watched the world in action? The frantic rushing from place to place, state to state and the continual pursuit of adrenalin hits? Have you ever observed who the winners in this game are?

In England last week a man was released from prison, put there for assaulting his own daughter, “He killed a man he didn’t know, seriously wounded a woman and a police officer, and assaulted a little girl. But well-wishers wanted to grant him the sentimentalising gestures normally reserved for the victims of crime and accidents.” (The Independent) An individual convicted of domestic violence, assaulting his partners, children and no doubt, though not convicted, many others who have crossed his path; he worked as a nightclub bouncer and was addicted to steroids.

“Roid rage is a term given to people who act in very aggressive or hostile manner after taking large doses, usually on a regular basis, of anabolic steroids, sometimes nicknamed as roids. In recent times, several prominent murders and brutal attacks have been linked to roid rage, which might suggest a person is less responsible for committing a crime. This is not always an adequate defence given that people who take anabolic steroids tend to do so willingly.”(wiseGEEK.com)

The man became the focus of just about all the media attention in the UK and then graduates into a Robin Hood-esque folk hero for a section of the population who believe that he showed the police he wasn’t to be ‘messed with’ and showed his former girlfriend he wasn’t to be ‘messed with’ by shooting her and murdering her boyfriend. Like other flawed characters he progressed to taking his own life only after disrupting and destroying the lives of others. He became the subject of conversation and speculation and his rambling rhetorical letters are still being examined carefully for clues to his motives. I cannot help but wonder if the works of some great teacher were engaged with so thoroughly by an entire population what the result might be; workers in their break discussing just what Plato or Einstein or some other visionary were driving at.

There was nothing virtuous or worthwhile about this character, he strove for nothing admirable and sought only to prosecute is own selfish ends which were viewed through a drug addled sense of increasing paranoia. And this is the game I am intrigued by; because wanton violence, destruction, hatred and venomous bile is an attention grabber while anything that seeks to propagate ascendance within human nature, anything that seeks to refine is ignored, diminished and dismissed. In the game, where fame, celebrity and recognition have become a holy trinity, did he hit the jackpot?

The rule of law is subjugated by anarchy and violence; terrorists and assassins morph comfortably into party officials and activists. Reason, truth and justice become collateral damage to fear, vanity and self indulgence. I don’t expect answers but simply make these observations and wonder what kind of future we all face if the human race follows its current path. Small wonder that our young people grow up confused and bewildered.

Fundamentally all great teachers, the wise and the illumined have spread a similar message. Historically the human race has chosen to ignore this except when it feels cornered, threatened or exposed. As the influential French philosopher August Comte explained, “In the modern world, thanks to the discoveries of science, it would no longer be possible for anyone intelligent or robust to believe in God. Faith would henceforth be limited to the uneducated, the fanatical, women, children and those in the final months of incurable diseases.”

I love science, I love the emancipations its discoveries have brought but I also find myself continually perplexed by this dysfunctional family I am part of. A family whose educated elite propagate such views as belief in an intelligent motivating influence in the Universe as the domain of “the uneducated, the fanatical, women, children and those in the final months of incurable diseases.” Increasingly eccentric behaviour leaves me wondering about the architects of ‘The Game’; indeed John Nash who was such a pivotal driving influence on modern Western thinking was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. His theories informed much of the intellectual landscape of the world we currently find ourselves part of, yet their point of origin is fatally flawed.

Perhaps we will wake up. Perhaps we are already instrumental in our own demise. I view episodes such as this and am left discomfited. The apparent mass psychosis that blinds people to the obvious – that they are not the centre of the Universe and all that happens in life is not personal to them – seems to have sunk its talons into the windpipe of mass sensibility causing the fresh air of reason to hiss out like a ruptured life vest. Without the buoyancy of that life vest we will surely drown in an ocean of self inflicted wounds.

image: mingthein