Winning before making. This is survival.
Making before beauty. This is perpetuation.
Beauty before virtue. This is leadership.
Virtue before truth. This is realism.
Here's someone who went through life, learn that all the effort he's invested into the imageries of society, was all but wasted because those imageries had no substance, decide to double down on investing creating said imagery for other people to consume. I've never thought it possible - he's learnt a view of life, he wrote in four lines, that sounds like this taoist poem[1], backwards:
Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is kindness.
When kindness is lost, there is justice.
When justice is lost, there is ritual.
Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty,
the beginning of confusion.
Knowledge of the future is only a
flowery trapping of the Tao.
It is the beginning of folly.
Therefore the truly great man dwells on what is real
and not what is on the surface,
On the fruit and not the flower,
Therefore accept the one and reject the other.
Where taoists aim to achieve tranquility, this author aims to achieve disturbance. He couldn't have been more correct in his formula.
To make your creations endure,
so they don’t go away when you stop
believing in them, you may need to do beautiful,
vicious, and false things.
This is the kind of attitude that leads to a person thinking if he could convince everyone he did a good job, then he did a good job, rather than focusing on doing a good job and letting people figure it out. He spends so much effort on appearance, he neglects the truth.
His sense of value is from the attention society gives him before he is 40, and when that attention runs out, from the money society gives him after 40:
you have enough value that society does culture to you
You might conclude from this that if you seek meaning, you will also make money. This is exactly wrong. You have to make meaning games, which is exactly the opposite sort of activity.
He thinks because there's no permanence in this world, nothing is of meaning, and therefore he should invest in creating and consuming imageries, because only then will society gives him value:
You’ve seen too many business cycles, too many political cycles, too many cultural cycles, too many saints and sinners trading places, to believe that this time a source of meaning will endure.
But he doesn't realise, it's because everything is transient, everything is always transforming from one to another, everything is of value. He doesn't realise, economic booms and recession are two sides of the same coin - one creates the other. He doesn't realise for every winner, there is a loser. For every saint, there's a sinner[2]. He doesn't realise, it's all the same thing, changing into one and then another. This is the universe, making itself, and everything is part of that process. And that, is truth.
His sense of value is from the attention society gives him before he is 40, and when that attention runs out, from the money society gives him after 40:
you have enough value that society does culture to you
You might conclude from this that if you seek meaning, you will also make money. This is exactly wrong. You have to make meaning games, which is exactly the opposite sort of activity.
He thinks because there's no permanence in this world, nothing is of meaning, and therefore he should invest in creating and consuming imageries, because only then will society gives him value:
You’ve seen too many business cycles, too many political cycles, too many cultural cycles, too many saints and sinners trading places, to believe that this time a source of meaning will endure.
But he doesn't realise, it's because everything is transient, everything is always transforming from one to another, everything is of value. He doesn't realise, economic booms and recession are two sides of the same coin - one creates the other. He doesn't realise for every winner, there is a loser. For every saint, there's a sinner[2]. He doesn't realise, it's all the same thing, changing into one and then another. This is the universe, making itself, and everything is part of that process. And that, is truth.
[1] http://www.wussu.com/laotzu/laotzu38.html
[2] If there were only saints, would there be saints?