Strength of the World is the title of a song by Avenged Sevenfold, and obviously a cool chorus phrase like this must be part of some deeply spiritual piece of quality music that comments on society and the struggle of mankind against our own oppressions. That would be nice, and it would be entirely appropriate and tie in nicely to what I'm trying to achieve. Unfortunately, the lyrics (as I've eventually found out, thanks to songmeanings.net) have absolute nothing to do with the message I'm trying to get across by running any form of social commentary whatsoever on a blog, and in fact they're pretty much what Taken would be if anyone bothered to turn it into a song. Which would be pretty shaiß, if you haven't yet guessed.
I'm a big fan of the Middle Ages, not partly because of the whole medieval-military vaab, but also because of the lifestyle that people had back then. There was only one word to describe it, really: simple. Well, simpler certainly compared to the lifestyle today. And that was because you knew where you were in society because society hadn't even fully figured itself out yet. You knew what you had to do to succeed, and, more importantly, you knew what you needed to do to fail. This of course differed by class, as the peasantry would have to worry about failing to throw out the poop every day, while the knights and lords would have to worry about failing to uphold the Code of Chivalry (someone else did the poop-throwing for them). Now, for those of you who were brought up in the past decade or so (because we're talking 500 hundred years ago) and who haven't bothered to have it drummed into your skulls in the meantime, it went something like this:
ye shalt treate with great reverence the elderly, ye family, and those who art wiser and older than ye.
ye shalt be a good sportsman in alle games ye partayke inn, including tournaments of knightlye skills wyth reale weaponns.
ye shalt treat with kinde wordes and a pious dispossition those who art lacking in materiel possessions, and be generus if ye art acting as a hoste to guests of alle and aneye creed.
ye shalt seeke revenge if ye art insulted.
ye shalt seeke revenge if ye sister is insulted.
and the gist was pretty much the same from there onwards (ie RESPECT, bitches, but never mind that for now). This wasn't compulsory, in fact
In today's world, we're not nearly as excited by the prospect of being a nice guy. But that's not altogether the problem, because, like I said, not every knight in shining armour was a knight in shining armour. And that's cool, really, from a society point of view. But now, there's just a horrid culture of 1-upmanship which does nobody any favours. It's the culture of material wealth that's bigger than your neighbour's but it's also the culture of measuring your success on completely the wrong scale. I'm not saying material goods aren't necessarily success, but just people use completely the wrong ideas to measure even that.
For example, I've been part of a couple of teams which have competed on a pretty high level, ahem nationally and all sorts of others. However, because we're from a certain school, geographical location or whatever, doing well at whatever discipline it happens to be is just made infinitely more difficult by the people who aren't good at it but are nonetheless put in charge and have to organize timetabling, scoring, etc. And it's not just me saying I'm good here, in fact I usually do mediocre-ly because I'm bad at handling pressure, but the point is that usually people in the team I'm in tend to do well (such as #winning), and more of us should obviously be doing the same, but we're just not experienced enough to be overridingly dominant enough to do well + them screwing us over. But it's very counter-productive, because what seems like a "her her this makes us look good ho ho" idea actually ends up screwing over whatever people end up progressing to the next stage of the competition, ie Worlds in kite-surfing or bog-snorkelling or suchlike, which is why the country maintains its pretty damn average standard in non-mainstream international youth competition disciplines, sports and otherwise.
This is all a product of the fact that we've lost sight of what's important in life. I don't know what is important in life, but I know that making people feel as though you've been a positive influence on them is a nice thing to aspire to. And conversely for the negative. But it's about the way you deal with people, I guess.
Humanity at this stage has come far from the Middle Ages, in that we're more complicated as a society. We've also honed our skills: we're now completely badass at screwing each other over in all kinds of ways, which isn't doing the global thingy whatnot togetherness mentality any favours at all.
Is this the strength of the world? Weakness, more like.
