The ultimate perspective for humanity is best portrayed below. Just so we know our place and time in history, and before we even attempt to revise our most recent past, take a look at the chart. Just looking at earth's history alone, not the history of the universe, and compressing it into a 24 hour period - a manageable scale for us to grasp - our species did not show up until close to midnight. In fact, it was in just the last minute and seventeen seconds of the total 24 hours when our direct ancestors first emerged, just barely past the age of Neanderthals. Our life time so far is a minuscule sliver, a thin slice of the tip of a finger nail, narrower than a strand of hair, if the entire chart were the human body.
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Then someone or several folks put together a more ambitious scale - the history of the universe compressed into one calendar year of 365 days. Let's just visit December 31st.
"What happened on December 31 in 24 hours?
December 31, 12 a.m.: 40 million years ago: Dawn of the primates
Whatever we have heard about the history of mankind on Earth happened on December 31st of the cosmic calendar. This truly shows us the insignificance of our time spent here on Earth. The dinosaurs had roamed the Earth for 5 days, and we were still living in trees on the dawn of that final day. Humanity is quite literally a blip on this calendar, as everything that follows happened on the final day of the year. For more specificity, the time has been shown instead of the date.
14:24 hrs – Primitive Humans were born.
22:24 hrs – Stone tools were used by humans and fire was domesticated.
23:59 hrs and 48 seconds – The Pyramids were built by the Egyptians.
23:59 hrs and 54 seconds – Buddha was born and the Roman Empire was formed.
23:59 hrs and 55 seconds – Christ was born, which marked the beginning of the Roman calendar (0 AD).
23:59 hrs and 58 seconds – Christopher Columbus discovered America
23:59 hrs and 59 seconds – The world as we know it… "
That was the last second.
Today, we are talking about our time since the last Presidential election as having occurred only in the last 0.04 second.
There is a point here somewhere in a bit.
Simon Sinek, renowned motivational speaker is popular with both corporate and military organizations for his powerful presentation on business strategy and analyses of short and long term goals from the perspective of "Game Theory". He often talks about the finite and infinite games that are the two main components in game theory.
Rules in sports compel finite endings like after nine innings in baseball, or when one team scores more that the other after one or more complete extra innings for each. Competition in sports must end after a finite period.
However, in life, in business, in military conflicts, make note of the difference when rules are played one way or another.
Sinek talked about most recent events, relatively speaking. He often talked about why the U.S. finally got out of Vietnam, and the French before that, or why the Soviets suffered the same fate in Afghanistan that now the U.S. is finding itself in a deadly and costly conflict in over a decade and a half. The Soviets played the finite games of winning one battle after the next for control while the Afghans were fighting for their lives, fighting for their survival. Project that to all the conflicts in the last century and that has always been the disparity in the rules of the game.
Here are a few of my own take on the finite and the infinite rules.
The Nazi Party thought they played the long game with their goal for the Third Reich as lasting for a thousand years. They thought that the so called final solution was a permanent one but the Jewish population was fighting for their lives and their existence. A finite ambition losing to an infinite nature that is the survival of a people. Today, Israel is one tiny country surrounded by most other countries that want to extinguish it. The law of the will to survive and the sympathy of its allies that believe similarly is what is keeping it in place.
Alexander the Great cried when he ran out of kingdoms to conquer at age 33 or so. He had a short term ambition, like all conquerors before him and all dictators who followed, of winning a finite goal framed within just their individual lifetimes, while the people they subjugated or aimed to control were playing the long game of surviving for all the generations to follow.
Let's look at our never ending battle with termites, ants, roaches and mosquitoes, etc. Our aim individually is to win the finite goal of getting rid of them within the confines of and around our homes while these creatures play the infinite game of outlasting us. These species will still be around even if we successfully mismanage everything else and somehow cause our environments to be un-inhabitable because we play the finite game while they play the infinite game of survival. Termites, ants and roaches, even scorpions were here from the time of the dinosaurs and likely to inherit what is leftover if we mess it all up.
I assume all the readers have heard of Block Buster Video. At one time, for a few years, they were the only game in town on video rentals. They thought, even believed perhaps, that they were playing the long game, with a customer base that will remain infinitely loyal. Block Buster played the short game of making money on late returns, including charging for un-rewound tapes and for believing that they will have an infinite hold on the market. Until Netflix came around with their flat monthly rate, zero late fees, unlimited movies, based on a simple 2-DVD-at-a-time turn around. The rest is history. However, Netflix is playing a much longer game by using new technologies, such as when streaming came along. They also went into producing their own video content so as not to rely solely on Hollywood and third party producers and film makers. Their constant innovations and market reach are based on the infinite game of competing indefinitely.
If Amazon had not kept up by constantly innovating and improving their services they will have been outpaced by Walmart, Target and others who are not only fighting back, they are capitalizing on their brick and mortar facilities for quicker delivery. Competition is well played only when one aims for the long game, best if planned and executed for the infinite, always exploiting every opportunity. Failed shopping malls due mainly to online, free return, free shipping competition, are being looked at by Amazon - irony of all irony - for acquisition as fulfillment centers, making Amazon's equivalent of a local presence as ubiquitous as Walmart. And the competition continues.
Dictators, throughout history, have all failed because they played the short game of a mere lifetime - just their own. The Roman Empire lasted for a while because it planned for succession with a series of Caesars, and the practice of an earlier version of democracy. But like all empires it lasted for about ten generations.
Socialism, with many versions of it in the course of history, failed and will always fail because redistributing wealth is playing the finite game of satisfying the people for the short run as socialists try to win their support for the short-term gain for power. But a far larger failure is when people fail to see the glaring and inherent defect of socialism, but keep subscribing to it anyway.
Succession is what keeps the free market system going and the key that is always ignored is that succession goes to those willing to work harder than the next person or competitor and innovating to keep the lead.
It seems then that whether we like it or not, we are always presented with the finite or the infinite, when it comes to what rules we want to go by.
When someone finds out after checkout that the cashier failed to ring up one item but ignores to go back and pay for it is playing the short game. If that someone only sees the insignificance of the item as not hurting the grocery store, practically victimless, is playing the short game against the infinite landscape of morality, however seemingly trivial it is. Cheating on a test, shoplifting a piece of candy, one little infraction - if an individual allows one little thing and another and another to continue throughout one's life - the "victimless" offense in reality victimizes that individual in the end. One finite game, or so it seems, but then how is it being accounted for in the scheme of the human experience?
We can scour the entire landscape of morality through religion and philosophy and we may find answers as varied as every principle there is available. We can take a pick. Hinduism has dealt with it one way. The principle of karma is complicated but I found one simple explanation for the reader, with a quote below:
"A common theme to theories of karma is its principle of causality. One of the earliest association of karma to causality occurs in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad of Hinduism. For example, it states:
Now as a man is like this or like that,
according as he acts and according as he behaves, so will he be;
a man of good acts will become good, a man of bad acts, bad;
he becomes pure by pure deeds, bad by bad deeds;
And here they say that a person consists of desires,
and as is his desire, so is his will;
and as is his will, so is his deed;
and whatever deed he does, that he will reap."
— Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 7th Century
That is one view but note that in general every religion preaches in that manner. The reader chooses or elect not to choose (which is a choice in itself) but it is widely believed by all that choice has consequences.
So, where do the finite and the infinite rules apply in a human lifetime? A murderer executed after trial was punished within the confines of a finite time and that is the end of it.
Now, here is where Hinduism found its answer. Karma becomes the infinite enforcer in a world where re-birth, or just simply the idea of re-incarnation is applied. The reach of consequences goes beyond one's lifetime all the way to the next one and to the next, until one reaches Nirvana. In much of western religion, the consequence is enforced upon the afterlife immediately - destination: eternal hell or heaven based on a single lifetime. When we get down to it both preaches the same except that in one the individual gets one chance to get it right or wrong; the other allows the individual several, or perhaps an infinite period of re-births until he or she gets it right. The re-birth system for adherents to Hinduism allows, for example, for young children, even new born, another chance at a full life if they passed away early in their childhood. It only seems "fair" to the children who were never given a chance to live to be good or bad and be judged for the consequences of their choices throughout a fuller lifetime.
We, of course, do not know, we cannot know, and only by faith can we profess what we believe but where there is agreement is that doing what is good, allowing for righteousness to prevail in our lives are consistent with living for the infinite life versus the finite, far shorter existence. This is all to the reader to decide.
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