The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. …
If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.

You’re right, school shootings are acts of destruction in the face of futility, maybe that’s the trigger. But competition is what makes them pull it. Bastian Bosse who comitted the school shooting in Emsdetten, Germany particularly mentioned this futility of life in his suicide note and the fact that he got bullied because he didn’t want adapt himself just to get accepted made him finally pull the trigger.

I also realized that life is futile some time ago and I guess what separates me from a school shooter is that I have hope and a few good friends who at least partly understand my point of view.

and it was nietzche that said that sisyphusian futility was the greatest secret of all, and that we must fill our lives up with trivialities and inanities to avoid the realisation

The problem is that once you have had this realisation there is no way back. Either you end up killing yourself or you begin to fight all that stupid bullshit that surrounds you. I prefer the secend option. Bastian Bosse on the other hand also stated that he woke up, but he didn`t know what to do, so he perpetrated a massacre intended as a wake-up call, but the people just don’t realize that something is wrong with this world.

i realised a long time ago that pushing a rock up a hill just to watch it roll back down again was futile, yet i was being programmed to behave that way.

thank god for competition where i could push my rock up the hill faster than the rest……just to stave off boredom until i could figure out what else to do in life other than push rocks up hills.

anarchistic tribes?

tribes, by thier nature and definition, set themselves up for competition and war.

read albert camus`s myth of sisyphus and his realisation that the only serious philosophical question was one of suicide, and then maybe you can understand that what those boys at columbine did was an act of self-destruction in the face of futility.

sorry, didn`t mean to be so deeply pedantic there, so i will say um, maybe they committed suicide……

and it was nietzche that said that sisyphusian futility was the greatest secret of all, and that we must fill our lives up with trivialities and inanities to avoid the realisation.

maybe that`s what actually drives consumerism, instead of some vast corporate conspiracy to enslave us all for the profit of a small cabal of illuminati.

i gotta lay off the starbucks after 10.00pm.

Assholeism is also caused by competition but mainly due to stupidity which results in arrogance and all the other characteristics of an asshole. Nobody is born as an asshole.

What if they just want to be who they really are? That’s the reason for school shootings.

That’s nonsensical - people wanting to be who they are causes school shootings?

And anyway, it’s not competition that causes people to act like assholes; it’s people BEING assholes that causes them to act that way.

Competition is what challenges people to become great. No competition equals no innovation, nor survival. It’s fucking genetics. Sometimes I think that people who fear competition do so because they know they don’t have a good product for sale!

Cooperation would people make even greater. Competition equals war and war causes victims. Innovation is bound to ideas, not competition and there will always be new ones and in all probability even better ones when they would be developed together. One big think tank isn’t less efficient than thounsands of competing ones since all thoughts are shared and not separated from each other. Ideas compete, that’s their nature and the dominant memes will take hold in the long run. However I don’t believe that it is in our nature to compete and it’s just too simple to blame genetics. It’s survival of the fittest, but why shouldn’t we create a lifestyle that allows everybody to survive. Instead of playing a game in which one gains what one’s opponent loses we should play a game in which everybody wins. But it seems humanity is lacking the intelligence to be capable of achieving this. You talk about people who fear competition, what if they have realized how stupid it is and just don’t want to sell themselves like a fucking product. What if they just want to be who they really are? That’s the reason for school shootings. Oppression breeds violence and as long as there is competition there will never be peace. We became blind followers of competitive capitalism and scarcely anybody bothers to create a more perfect system of living together on this planet. You just can’t advocate competition when you see what it is doing to us and our planet.

Explain this “greatness” and why people should strive for it?

Because otherwise, what point is there to doing anything, but to do it well - to live fully and to “be all you can be”?

We lived peacefully in anarchistic tribal communities for more than 30.000 years.

This is historically inaccurate. The history of the human race is littered with just about non-stop tribal warfare.

Explain this “greatness” and why people should strive for it?

http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2007/11/01/how-to-join-the-illuminati/
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2007/11/06/so-now-youre-a-superhero/

(PS. No more new usernames for you!)

We all got trained to compete and rank by birth in order to develop our win at all costs mentality; at the costs of those who lose. As you said, competition is so deep-seated in our culture that we don’t even realize it. We’re all products of our environment and school shootings are simply acts of desperation within a competitive oppressing system and those social outsiders couldn’t endure it any longer and just didn’t know what to do and how to rebel against it. Back in 1999 when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold commited the Columbine High School massacre I wondered why they had particularly hatred for athletes. Now I guess they knew exactly that competition is the reason why our world is so fucked up.

In reference to your post Stages of Modern Spiritual Growth v 1.0 which is one of my favorites I would say that school shooters are people who have reached stage one and just gave up. They realized that something is wrong and then they went into a totally stupid direction. Violence doesn’t change anything, they knew it, but they just didn’t know what to do. However they knew what they wanted, that’s why so many of them talked about anarchy. That’s what they were longing for, but their actions itself had nothing to do with anarchy at all. They perpetrated massacres intended as a wake-up call, but the people never get the message. When people hear the word anarchy they most likely think of school shooting scenarios. Essentially anarchy stands for cooperation, which is respectively was a characteristic of our species. We lived peacefully in anarchistic tribal communities for more than 30.000 years. People lived in harmony with nature, they cooperated instead of competing, but somehow our species managed a 180° turn and now mankind sleepwalks into the opposite direction with a plastic smile on its face.

if you could, who would you shoot?

Of course not, I have better fucking things to do with my time!

if you could, who would you shoot?