I Love Cancer. And Violence.
I loved having cancer. I mean, I wasn’t thrilled when I first heard the word, and I definitely remember crying with anger (while on the phone with gf lol) when I found out I had to do chemo, but I’m talking about something else here: the joy of the fight.
I’m not a giant. Like I’m 5'8, and I’m strong and fast but (clearly) no MMA fighter. And I prefer not to fight, physically, bec — and the movies don’t show this — it hurts, and people get hurt. But avoidance of a physical fight because of fear or a distaste for conflict — and I’m talking here about lessons I learned on the playground — invites more bullies.
And I was different, too dumb to know not to be too smart, girls seemed to like me, from a weird church family… An easy target. So I learned early on — okay, about halfway through my third or fourth schoolyard fight, so clearly a lesson you only learn the hard way — I learned that there was one feature of a fighter that made him or her wildly powerful: love of the moment.
You gain The Devil’s Smile, and your opponent loses all leverage.
Physical fights go down quick: but like a car accident, the mind records vivid details in slow motion, so that later, you learn the lessons (a handy evolutionary gift) of the conflict. If you spend those moments of a fight trying to get out of it, if you hate it, you lose your power, and your opponent can predict your every move (you’ll move away from conflict) and can torture you and harass you endlessly until you give up. This is what happened to the Americans in Vietnam.
But if, once the fight begins, you (somehow) can find joy in it, you love it, you become “game” for it, the dynamic changes. Now it’s ballet. Now it’s fun. Now: let’s do this. You gain The Devil’s Smile, and your opponent loses all leverage.
Because with the love of the fight comes — not a death wish — but an embrace of the conflict and an embrace of the moment. Isn’t it fascinating how much our new age culture tells people to remain in the moment, but avoids any discussion of how the samurai culture built itself on doing this while dancing with three foot razors?
Can you choose to love bad things?
Gameness: the thing that makes you see a fight that you have worked hard to prevent, realize it’s inevitable, and put on the mask of the Devil’s Smile, put your Bowie knife between your teeth and dive in with a wild scream of joy. If you’re gonna fight cancer or a burglar or world hunger or a dirty bathroom or a stack of unpaid bills, isn’t this how you should do it? Isn’t every other way needless self-torture? Can you choose to love bad things?
Our culture believes that the berserker’s joy of combat is the bad thing, is what creates conflict, is the source of disharmony in the world. It’s as if they believe the forest could survive without fire. But let’s analyze this for a moment.
If two people or groups of people both hate conflict or combat or they avoid it, does that prevent the conflict? Hardly so: The Great War is a story of literally MILLIONS writing poetry about hating a fight and then returning to the job of processing cannon fodder. If conflict avoidance or a distaste for blood reduced conflict, all divorces would go smoothly.
A mouse can can kill thousands, if those thousands all stampede from a room at the sight… Of a mouse.
No, two parties who both hate conflict are more likely to end up in the worst and nastiest conflicts, as they parry and stab one another hesitantly, resentfully — and isn’t resentment the hallmark of conflict avoidance? — both sides slowly hurting one another, slowly escalating, and blaming the other for the existence of conflict in the world.
So let’s look at a second scenario: one party hates conflict, and the other (at least while it’s going on) knows how to love it. Well, likely the lover wins. Because conflict avoidance makes small enemies MASSIVE. A handful of terrorists can bring down an empire if the Emperor is terrified of blood. A mouse can can kill thousands, if those thousands all stampede from a room at the sight… Of a mouse. So the lover of conflict wins easily and handily — or even just over time — if they are game for it, if they can embrace the joy of conflict of any kind, whether it be chess or nuclear chess.
But these scenarios are the lowest evolutionary forms of consciousness when it comes to dealing with conflict. In the first scenario, both parties are motivated by fear: fear of loss, pain, death, or even just a bruised ego. It doesn’t matter if the avoidance is of a boxing match or a video game, it’s still fear.
In the second scenario, one party is motivated by fear, but the other has found love, the love of the human experience of finding one’s limits with an opponent, with a partner in self-discovery. And as we’ve shown, in this scenario, most of the time, love — or the one who loves the experience — wins.
But what happens when two parties both love the fight?
But what happens if EVERYONE figures out how to love conflict? See: this is the peacenik’s nightmare. This is the source of violence in the world, according to those who fear conflict. This is what causes pain and suffering. But again, if that was the case, pacificist lesbians would never end their relationships with bitter divorces, and countries would never find themselves in wars they still can’t explain.
Greens and peaceniks conflate an avoidance of conflict with a love of peace, but these are not the same, and often the opposite. Everyone loves peace, especially the fighter who discovers that conflicts occur far less when you can switch on the love of a fight once it begins.
Greens also believe that everyone loving violence or conflict would make the world more violent, so contemplating the third option — two parties who take joy in conflict — never even occurs to them. They think of this as Apocalypse, all while they stand powerless to prevent apocalypse. But what happens when two parties both love the fight? What happens when they both are giddy with anticipation, when they both relish it?
If you the first way you describe a sexual experience is as one you “consented” to, you are not describing one that was amazing.
At first, you might assume the conflict will escalate and be over quickly, which is of course an advantage. It is the extending of conflict that causes the world so much unnecessary pain. But that’s not really what happens when both parties love the fight. Because when both parties love the fight, the entire situation is transformed. To understand this, let’s back up and look at our evolutionary history with sex.
Sex, in evolutionary terms, doesn’t really conform to our more highly developed notions of consent.
In fact, consent is a relatively new adaption, one that unfortunately is not yet universal. But let’s look at consent as an analogy. To begin, I hate that word. If non-consent is on one end of the spectrum, then the other end isn’t consent. People consent to all sorts of things they don’t like or regret. No, consent would lie in the middle. Consent is clearly the line between right and wrong, but it’s not the opposite of bad. If non-consent is evil, then consent is just “not evil.” If you the first way you describe a sexual experience is as one you “consented” to, you are not describing one that was amazing.
But if non-consent is evil (and it is), then what is truly good? Well, we already know the word for that, because we see it or use it in every story about the love we long for: embrace. A whole-hearted embrace is what we desire. Anticipation, longing and then connection.
What do you call a war where both sides love war? The Olympics.
For many animals, there is often no consent, often consent, and only sometimes an embrace. But for humans, we aim for all of our sexual encounters to be mutually embraced. If you only consented, you just had bad sex, or worse.
But look at how sex is transformed when both parties embrace. Before, sex was imbalanced conflict. With mutual embrace, sex becomes a playground of love and light and heat and Transformation. It is not even the same thing any more.
It is the same with every kind of conflict: when both parties embrace it, it is no longer what it was. Because when both parties embrace it, then both parties can set the rules, they share the joy and decide together how else to pursue it, they can play with parameters and outcomes. Because they are now drawn to something in it which they embrace, something they welcome, THAT something becomes the new goal. A mutual goal.
What do you call a war where both sides love war? The Olympics. When both parties love the fight, the fight becomes a game, and it becomes any game they choose. Suddenly they can choose any arena they like in which to relish this Experience: a courtroom, the stage, a battle of the bands to raise funds for charity, a battle of wits, or just your local gym.
No one has created more peace in human history than the United States Army War College.
Loving conflict or violence does not increase it — loving it transforms it. The Devils Smile is magic if both parties can wear it. The divorcing vegan pacifist lesbians can quickly resolve everything if they can agree to settle their issues with a game of hoops. And if they love that conflict, and wish to engage in it again, then they aren’t really fighting any more, are they? Because that second game of hoops is called a relationship.
The other error people make about those who love conflict (while it’s happening) is to believe that they walk around causing it. But a person who loves to box doesn’t cause domestic violence or street fights, and she chooses awesome places and people with which to express her love. Those who love the study of war don’t create more war, rather they are the ones whose inventions and insights — from guided weapons to diplomacy to secretly creating their enemy’s “peace movement” — have made war less common and less deadly every single century in human history. No one has created more peace in human history than the United States Army War College. Those who truly love peace love war — or at least they know how to love it when they must. Those who hate war, though, create more of it. Just ask Neville Chamberlain.
Thankfully — because of people who love war — most of us will not experience that kind of violence in our lives. For most of us, our conflict is with coworkers, with problems, with chemo, with our own impulses and tendencies, with our own egos. And how we feel about conflict in one area is often reflected in others. So why love cancer?
Well, you don’t have to, unless you have it. Or you want to end it. Because you will never make the tiniest dent in other people’s cancer unless you love studying it enough to do so every day and night for 20 years. That’s who ends war, hunger, disease, or any problems: those who love to study them, to understand them. Love transforms problems every day.
Because you will never make the tiniest dent in other people’s cancer unless you love studying it enough to do so every day and night for 20 years.
And if you have cancer, you are going to have to look at your eyebrows in your hand. You are going to have to clean up your own blood. You are going to have to arrange so many meds your morning regimen looks like a lab experiment. Who does it help if you hate every moment of that? Does it help you? Does it reduce cancer — anywhere? No. In fact, it STRENGTHENS it.
It makes it twice as powerful, just as your refusal to love a fistfight makes the schoolyard bully twice as large in your mind, makes the school clock, counting its way down to the next recess, your enemy, too. But if you love the fistfight, the bully runs away. And if the bully loves fistfighting, too, then your mutual embrace causes magic: the bully has disappeared! Now there are just two kids, wrestling and laughing. Or practicing their Kung Fu.
Cancer needs to be fought. But you fight it with Love. You put on that Devils Smile and you jump in like a Wild Romantic Beast. And the more areas of life you can learn love — like I did halfway through my third schoolyard fight — the more transformation can occur. If you can dive into filth with joy, your bathroom will always be quickly, magically cleaned. People who hate touching filth live in it, see it everywhere. It haunts them, tortures them. They need to love it more than anyone.
So I loved having cancer. I loved chemo. I love this conflict I have at work right now. I love the fight to the death I may one day experience if I am jumped in an alley. I love you if you decide to insult or attack me, and I love the back and forth. I love political debate. I love cleaning filthy bathrooms. I love romantic squabbles. I don’t love these things because I necessarily want more of them. I love them because loving them transforms my experience of them. I love them because the choice to love is all the power in the world. I love them because true love is ALWAYS a choice, always the measure of heart. I love them because love is the only way.
Written early in the morning, 11/25/15, over the course of an hour.
