Equal opportunity, meritocracy, Horatio Alger, and the Olympics

The motto of the American rat race has always been the well known quip, "Whoever dies with the most toys wins."

And yet it has also always been known that the bitch goddess, Success, patroness of the mad competition, devours her worshippers, first basting most excellently the most devout and most victorious, as they thrust aside what matters in pursuit of what does not.

But if the prize is an illusion and they who live best are not among the racers why does it matter, and to whom, whether the conditions of entry are equal?

How can it matter whether that race is fair?

This very same competition, by the way, and the compulsion to emulation that drives it, though native to our species, are commonly blamed in pious popular propaganda on materialism, decadence, and insufficient religion.

There is an ancient tradition that life is like the Olympic games.

There are those who come to honor and applaud, those who come to compete, and those who come only to watch.

It is said the philosophers are among the latter.

But the analogy dissatisfies.

It's hard to imagine why they would attend, at all.

Not life.

But so absurd an event as that.