Lifemanship: Stephen Potter

What does Lifemanship mean? Easy question to pose, difficult to answer in a phrase. A way of life pervading each thought and conditioning our every action? Yes, but something much more, even though it only exists, as pervasive, intermittently. "How to live"—yes, but the phrase is too negative. In one of the unpublished notebooks of Rilke there is a phrase that might be our text, "...if you're not one up (Bitzleisch) you're...one down (Rotzleisch)."
How to be one up—how to make the other person feel that something has gone wrong, however slightly. The Lifeman is never caddish, but how simply and certainly often he of she can make the other person feel a cad, and over prolonged periods.