ON METABOLIC WHOLENESS

Rhodesian society was largely and almost completely a society of metabolic wholeness, where what was inside of you was replicated by what was outside of you. This meant there was a seamlessness to the way people related to each other. I state that rather than competition, there was a seamless orchestration of duties and tasks. Metabolic competition occurred only in the roughest edges of the society, for instance it had some frequency in boys’ boarding schools and in the military. In general, however, we were brought up to take on a predefined social role and not to compete. This explains why I tend to view so much of metabolic competition as being extremely vulgar, because it seems to detract greatly from an individual’s capacity to take on a social role in a smooth and graceful manner. To my mind, one has either a social role or one has competition, but not both. (Certainly I do not understand the means by which one might have both.)

The lack of metabolic wholeness, on the other hand, where individuals are denied a seamless relationship to their society (or the attainment of a broader sense of fit), produces a state of craven graspingness and half-personhood. People may try to create an illusion of wholeness by grasping and competing at a hormonal level, but this certainly does not produce a seamless fit with the society at large. The whole state cannot be attained because the macro level of society and its organization has become decoupled from the micro level – that of the person himself. This decoupling produces an exacerbation of pointless competitiveness, as people try pointless routes to make themselves whole.

Or they may give up and decide that it is the human lot never to attain any semblance of wholeness. Perhaps only after they die? in any case there remains a yearning, which perhaps leads to the fantasy of a heaven that completes one’s being after one has passed away.