Every Type of Human Activity Has a Malignant Equivalent

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e of the existence of others and of their needs and demands. The criminal has no context - the businessman does.

Whenever a human activity, a human institution, or a human thought is refined, purified, reduced to its bare minimum - malignancy ensues. Leukaemia is characterized by the concentration of the bone marrow upon the production of only one category of blood cells (the white ones) while abandoning the production of others. Malignancy is reductionist: do one thing, do it best, do it more and most, compulsively pursue one course of action, one idea, never mind the costs. Actually, no costs can exist - because the very existence of a context is ignored. Costs are brought on by conflict and conflict entails the existence of at least two parties. The criminal, for instance, pays none because he does not include in his weltbild the Other. The dictator doesn't suffer because suffering is brought on by recognizing the other. The malignant forms are sui generis, they are dang am sich, they are categorical, they do not depend on the outside for their existence.

Put differently: the malignant forms are functional but meaningless.

Let us use an illustration to understand this dichotomy:

In France there is a man who made it his life's mission to spit the furthest a human has ever spat. This way he will make it into the Guinness Book of Records (GBR). After decades of training, he succeeded to spit to the longest distance a man has ever spat and was included in the GBR under miscellany.

The following can be said about this man with a high degree of certainty:
a. The Frenchman had a purposeful life in the sense that his life had a well-delineated, narrowly focused, and achievable target, which permeated his entire life and defined them.

b. He was a successful man in that he fulfilled his main ambition in life to the fullest. We can rephrase this sentence by saying that he functioned well.

c. He probably was a happy...