The Thrill of Competition Might be Vitamins for the Left Hemisphere of Your Brains
And in this modern age, you never need to nourish your left hemisphere
Three nerds went down to the River Cam. North Whitehead was in a rowing race. His dad, Alfred Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein watched.
It was a “passionate afternoon,” said Russell, who got really worked up and continued to be pissed into the afternoon because North had lost.
Wittgenstein, though, was another story. He was disgusted by the competitive uproar, like he’d just been forced to watch a Harvey Weinstein biopic and needed to scrub his soul with lye.
Russell tried to sell him on the “necessity” of competition, but Wittgenstein wasn’t buying. He flung the idea out the window, declaring the whole afternoon so vile it made life itself questionable.
This, over a rowing race. I can’t imagine how he’d fare at a Glasgow soccer riot or an NFL game and its face-painted fans.
Such was the man’s wiring. Wittgenstein bravely faced the horrors of World War I as an Austrian soldier, then shortly thereafter jettisoned his inherited wealth, convinced that money clouded clarity of thought. He later penned Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a book hailed as the pinnacle of 20th-century philosophy.
Most people would’ve ridden that wave to fame, but not Ludwig.
He turned his back and taught kids in Austria’s rural backwaters, chasing the simplicity Tolstoy preached. Later, he’d work as a hospital porter, live like a hermit, and dodge the spotlight. Even when Cambridge handed him a gilded chair, he bolted after two years, retreating to Ireland to scribble a rebuttal to his own Tractatus. The result, Philosophical Investigations, came out after he died. His last words? “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.” Gratitude, pure and unadorned.
Then there’s Russell. “Bertie.” The man who stood on that riverbank, thrilled by the clash of wills, took a different road. After co-authoring Principia Mathematica, a tome that tried to nail the flowing water of truth to the wall with logic, he didn’t retreat to quiet contemplation.
No, Bertie grabbed the megaphone and never let go. For over half a century, he preached to the masses, a secular Jonathan Edwards with a pipe,spreading his intellectual evangelism, telling the world what to think about everything—atoms, ethics, war, peace, even the proper way to pick a cigar or wear lipstick. You name it, he opined on it. And if facts didn’t fit his opinion, facts had to be omitted and the resulting gaps completed in a manner to fit his conclusions.
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Eric Scheske
