Why strive?

Bas Haring, Voor een echt succesvol leven.

I thought Bas Haring was a philosopher, but it turns out he did Artificial Intelligence, and now he's a professor in Leiden, doing ‘public understanding of science’. I also thought Bas Haring was witty and not necessarily unpleasant to look at, and I'm fortunately still right about that.

This book For real successful living is about our ambitions, why they are what they are (and not something else), and why they are there in the first place. Why do we strive to be the best in something, the biggest, the strongest, the highest, the fastest? Well, if the winner of a race was the person who ran the 10K slowest, everyone would just stand still and there would be no winner. If you would get prestige by building a very small tower next to your house, no one would build a tower at all and everyone would have the same prestige.

Why would you need to compete in the first place, is another question, I suppose. But that's the question of natural selection and Darwinism and suchlike, which is obvious in the book when he talks about crabs and ducks and other animals. For those who subscribe to Intelligent Design, there may be no reason to compete in the first place? So stop annoying the rest of us?

The two main things to learn from this book:

• There's no point in saying something is better than something else. You always need to see it's better as what or for whom.


• Things that are good for the continuation of the species need not be good for the individual.

That is a crap summary. Just read the book. It's a good book for making you think.