The Left Hemisphere Loves Competition

It's not a good thing

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.

He thought all the world’s ills could be remedied through reason . . . especially his own. He embraced total, uncompromising solutions. He had a profound lack of self-awareness: a real prick, but apparently unaware of it. He considered himself a pacifist but was filled with anger. He “considered any excuse,” said his student T.S. Eliot, “good enough for homicide.” This especially applied to anyone who rejected his opinions.

Rationality was his god and his body was a stranger. Other than his penis and its incessant search for women, he was rationality disembodied, the like of which may not have been seen since Descartes. He couldn’t work simple mechanical devices or make his own tea (which, for a Brit, would be like an American not knowing how to start a car).

His autobiography, penned near the end, drips with despair: “There is darkness without, and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, no vastness anywhere, only triviality for a moment, and then nothing.”

No thanksgiving there, just the hollow clang of a life spent shouting into the void.

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That day by the Cam was a tell, a glimpse of the chasm between two souls.

Russell reveled in the competitive fray. It’s not surprising. The left hemisphere of our brains is inherently competitive, and Bertie’s left hemisphere dominated his life: schizophrenic-like disembodiment, extreme rationality, dogmatism, anger, lust, and blindness to its limitations.

Wittgenstein was repulsed by the fray. It’s not surprising. The right hemisphere of his brain seemed to have ruled his life. He walked a path of humility, service, and ruthless honesty—all things valued by the right hemisphere.

The lesson?

Don’t be like Bertie. Be like Ludwig.

And maybe start by questioning the modern world’s love of competition.

Only in an age dominated by the left hemisphere could competition be seen as more than a necessary evil.

Survival might demand a degree of competition, just as it demands a bit of self-interest. But competition’s core is subjugation, the antithesis of love, which is supposed to be the thread that binds us. To call competition good is to drink the modern Kool-Aid.

Wittgenstein felt this in his fiber that afternoon at the River Cam. We all need a bit more of that fiber.