What has a boxer got to do with economics?
Muhammad Ali just died aged 74. He won the heavyweight championship for boxing for three times. He made a lot of money for the boxing industry and the world media. He gave the world enjoyment of his skills and talents, although he and his fellow craftmen and women have had to suffer for their art.
He called himself the greatest. He knew his game and he predicted the outcome. Wouldn't he be entitled to say what he knew without being labeled as boastful. He got to where he was by being himself and on top of that lots of hard work and coaching from his teachers, and be willing to listen to them. He had humbled himself to be taught.
But to the rest of the world, he only wanted us to know that we were not like him. He stood at the apex of his sport, and he bashed everybody down. He had something to show the world what made him different from the rest. It would be incredible that armchair critics knew exactly how he thought in order to be who he had proven himself to be. The only thing that armchair critics could say must be some innocuous remarks which reflected their limited view of life as a non-greatest.
The greatest practitioner of his art is a person who is driven by an inner demon to perfect his art in spite of his own personal imperfection. He sees imperfection in himself, in others and in the world around him. He pushes himself on his lonely journey on the stony road of labour and hope to the summit which no one has any idea what that may be. He stops when his energies fail him and where he has stopped people applaud him for what he has achieved even if that may be the highest point in the world. He has got to the realm of existence where others have no been to before.
To be the greatest is the greatest that anyone can imagine for himself. He has the right to declare that to himself and to the world. The only danger for him is not that he will not push himself further but others will be jealous and will want to stop him from continuing to proclaim himself. The many forms of empowerment that people exert today are nothing but self-proclaimations, and many are high ideals. But to be able to physically demonstrate and establish that superiority of one's own physical and mental prowess and exert it cannot be a wrong or a boast. It is a truth spoken ahead of occurrence.
Muhammad Ali was the greatest, and probably is.
7 comments:
1. He made a living using his fists and carved his brand using his mouth but it was his shuffling feet more than his left hook which had kept him from being floored until age and disease caught up with his momentum of success in the calculus of life where everything will tend to zero as if carrying the message that life is made of constantly drawing from a fixed balance until emptied of the last reserves in the final throes.
So too with development economics. The potential well may be full in the beginning but if not tapped wisely it will soon be exhausted beyond which any further extraction will deplete the last reserves unless replenished with new stock from better ideas and harder work. Problems cannot be solved using only the same sources of their creation.
2. Seduced by his success, his advisors and funders let him down. Otherwise they would have warned him away not to taunt his opponents in the ring to hit him in the head which he did in order to raise the emotional frenzy of the crowd who themselves had a psycho-pathological wish to overcome their own limitations by seeing in him the alpha-male delimiter embodied in that primal blood sport.
The head contains a jelly brain encased in a hard-shell skull. Harsh hits on the head transmits uninvited vibrations onto the brain, disrupting its cellular operations, breaking their dopamine transmitter pathways which control neuro-muscular mechanisms, causing cellular death and inviting Parkinson's disease.
In projecting himself as a champion of anti-racial civil rights and a gutsy if physical inspiration of the downtrodden, he paid the ultimate price encapsulated outcome of pained gain.
3. He was fearless. In fact, Finley had teased out the Essential Laws of Fearless embodied as:
'Real success is a creative state of being that comes with living in conscious relationship with an intelligence that never fears because it never fails to achieve its ends - in spite of changing conditions - and that because success born of anything less than hard work comes with the fear of losing what was never rightfully gained in the first place.'
But now that he is gone, would his leaving behind a transient memory by millions be any acceptable consolation for a life gained but by pain in a ring no different from the blood-letting,life-snuffing yonder days of the roman gladiatorial sacrificial pit?
His very factor of success - those dancing feet - became exactly the same factor of failure later when he gained weight and became sluggish so that the thrilla of manila with frazier was a fight that felt like death. To no credit of the audience worldwide, it was.
He might have lived longer if only he had instead gone into middleweight wrestling whose practitioners can easily give hollywood actors a run for their money. Wrestling is a match where everyone pretends - from the wrestlers to the referee to the managers to the crowd to the tv commentators and viewers.
4. Success in life comes from 'doing the right thing in the right way the first right time'. Addendum..'even if what it achieves is less if not nothing of what was originally desired'.
One posits the real success in anything is just The Lesson, lived.
Compassion polishes the journey. If we can be kind to animals and birds, we should also ask whether fish have feelings. In the process of doing so, we return to our origins, to wit posing to ourselves the painful thought that we die the moment we live by consuming other living things, whether these be animal or vegetable. In the limits, even if we live on just seeds, we start to die - for the process of growth is just a manifestation of our dependency on other living and non-living things for the brief if not trivial lifespans we have.
If this doesn't bring humility into our respective equations of life, what does?
5. If all men are brothers, we should not exult his example bought with his life but instead grief the world's system of living champions ending in dead ones.
Life is mostly trivial, and therefore its greatest art is the art of pretending it's not.
However, there seems to be a silver lining. A nebular sensation that there is Something out there Who responds with a compassion we can associate with from our respective Lessons, lived - if we painstakingly nurture some humility....
That out of the way, and in keeping with the somewhat misguided thrust of this blog thread, i am Number Four (https://is.gd/K2j5pi). Not just here. But certainly the world, maybe the solar system, not discounting the Universe.
So much for self-rah-rahing, eh?
But self is an illusion. So too the rah-rahing we have been seeing lately. Has anyone ever seen more bumptious buffaloes in any political landscape? End the disease of stupidity, the parkinson's disease of the local population.
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On the topic of minimum wage:
https://is.gd/Dbvy97
latest result of which is: businesses so affected chop one out of three workers; it's not just the minimum wage but also the statutory contributions like epf and socso; they just let off those who have been underperforming but employed in the past out of some employer compassion.
As with life, politics and economics are also about compassion but only the non-stupidifying versions. No?
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