What Syria's humbling of China says about the importance of struggle

Last week's stunning defeat of the Chinese national soccer team by war-torn Syria in the 2018 World Cup qualifier may have set off a bout of jingoistic "football hooligan" street rage across the middle kingdom at being one-upped by a pathetic little rogue state - to include bloodthirsty demands for the removal of the Chinese team's coach - but in the midst of the jock fervor, it's easy to miss the far more significant symbolism of the 1-0 upset.

It's obvious from the outcome of the match that neither a vastly bigger pool of athletes to draw from nor national stability and prosperity helped a Chinese team that simply wasn't as hungry for victory as its Syrian counterpart. And why should it have? Syria is a society steeled by nearly six years of brutal civil war and violent sectarian extremism, whilst China has enjoyed a steady ascent to greater consumerist prosperity over the same period. It goes without saying which country is primed for grueling struggle of physical and psychological attrition - that is, which national crew was "bourgeois" with complacency and which was "revolutionary" in its zeal.

In a broader sense, Syria holds potentially critical lessons for China's own monumental transition from an industrial to a consumer society, which in a roughly overarching socioeconomic sense is basically a surrogate for the transition from dictatorship to democracy.

The strength of nations is forged through severe challenges and crises, no less than individual character is shaped and refined by personal trials and tribulations. And just as the hardest battle that any one of us individually must fight is that to master what lies within ourselves, so too are internal conflicts far more consequential than external ones in determining an entire people's destiny.

At a time when the free world seems increasingly paralyzed with division and self-doubt, even as so much of the unfree world still yearns for liberty, the common thread that ties all humanity together is the constant necessity of struggle itself. The worst fate for any person or nation is not failure or defeat but apathy and aimlessness which amount to a general moral surrender; suffering and strife with a perceived meaning, however flawed, are incomparably better than peace and plenty without its semblance, however authentic.

That being said, although none of us can be absolutely sure of the complete and ultimate truth of what we fight for and hold dearest for ourselves, let alone presume a position to judge the merits of those ideas and adversaries we find ourselves fighting against, we must cling to the hope that final victory is the reward for those who humble themselves enough to finally arrive at the fullness of understanding of themselves primarily and of others contingently.

As Syria has experienced in the last almost six years, war inevitably brings out the very worst in human nature; but it always has the silver lining of purging many of its participants of the illusions of self-sufficiency and self-reliance so much that a greater opportunity emerges for good to be extracted from evil than would otherwise be possible. To struggle is the essence of what it is to be human.