Achilles willingly left Greece, knowing he would die in Troy, so that he could be known as the greatest warrior in history. Alexander the Great supposedly broke down and cried when he felt he had nobody left to overcome. Julius Caesar in turn, after subduing all of Gaul, wept at the feet of Alexander's statue some 200 years later, lamenting that at the age of 38, he had accomplished nothing compared to Alexander. And there are plenty of such examples in non-Western societies where the losers didn't just get a silver medal; but were killed. This story is as old as humanity itself and just as ubiquitous. I think the fashionable, progressive approach to blaming society is wrong in this case. Seeking greatness over peaceful mediocrity may simply be a character 'flaw' in mankind. As such, failure has become one of our signature moves.
People like this are usually driven by something missing within. Alexander understood this when he met Diogenes, and went to conquer the earth rather than deal with that.
There’s a reason pride is a sin in the Christian tradition. There’s a lesson to be reflect upon in the story of Alexander and Caesar... Ceasar’s conquest of Gaul was complete and epic. He slaughtered and enslaved a statistically significant proportion of the human race. He became rich beyond comprehension and built a legacy admired millennia later. Yet he died stabbed in the back by his friend, still unsatisfied.
Was this kind of behaviour you mention common for the regular people at the time ? My guess is no, at the time, most people we're born into their role, big dreams had little role to play, and competition was on a much smaller scale, so it was easier to be good at something. And it didn't matter as much anyway, because the end result was decided by the gods/fate anyway, not you.
And all those charesteristics describe the hunter-gatherer era, the era that supposedly shaped human psychology.
But if you look at what happens today, western society is organized around the exact opposites of those things. So it would be weird if we didn't raise questions about that.
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Alexander wept when he heard Anaxarchus discourse about an infinite number of worlds, and when his friends inquired what ailed him, "Is it not worthy of tears," he said, "that, when the number of worlds is infinite, we have not yet become lords of a single one?"
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As to Caesar, Plutarch relates the story of being assigned governor of Iberia at the age of 35. He and his assistants set out to reach the capitol of Iberia. One night, during their journey, they stop in the mountains and make a camp fire. To entertain them, the musician sings a song about Alexander, at which point Caesar begins to cry. His men ask him, why do you cry, my lord? And he answers, how can I ever match a man who did so much, so young, when I myself are already grown so old?
