(5). the binds that tie
Most days, I feel like a mad prophet, screaming and slobbering. I walk the emptied streets of a numbed empire, stepping on people’s feet. Getting into arguments. A font of discomfort and confusion, most of all for myself.
It’s not that I know any better than anyone else, or I have some special insights that other people haven’t yet unlocked. I just can’t stop feeling moral outrage.
We live in a godless society.
This is the essay that I have worked through the most, have tried to sort through to come to the central point of my silly little life. I think it is important for every person who claims to feel, claims to love, and claims to be attuned to reality to remind themselves what the stakes are, and what it means to labor, love, and live within in a society which has structurally sanctified evil, worships meaninglessness, and has conditioned people to fear each other and what they’re capable of.
Godlessness, emptiness, begins with a simple reduction, one that I see over and over and over again in media, from my friends, from my family. This is just the way people are. This is how the world is. People are selfish and lazy because they are animals, and animals are selfish and lazy. It is in our nature to be so. The final result of this is the belief that human life is malignantly useless, to use Thomas Ligotti’s term.
This conclusion is one of the fruits of continuous rationalization, it is a poison, and I cannot abide it.
Many people get wrapped up in godlessness and guilt, because they have experiences and they reflect on them, and they can’t quite make sense of it. Why be good? Why act kindly and ethically toward one another? There are, of course, rational reasons why good and kind actions are a good idea. They encourage group cohesion, they build trust, they make it more likely for you to receive kindnesses in turn, they create stability. But why are those things good? It’s a spiral, and the bottom of that spiral is nothing, nothing, nothing.
Confronted with that void, a great meaninglessness descends over a life. Unmoored from a moral compass, a foundational belief, everything can harm you, everything presents a potential danger.
And with this comes the great alienation, an overwhelming desire to capsule the self off from the world, to only go from small hidden room to small hidden room. To create families, but families that belong to us, are properties that we must protect, continuations of ourselves. At the time I wrote this, at the time I revised it, and at the time I published it, the children of our great godless empire continue to be sacrificed, mercilessly killed over and over again by alienated people. And all we do, over and over and over again, is throw our hands up—there is simply nothing we can do. People are people, and this is what they will do, and there is nothing we can do about it. We walk around, bathed in the blood of the innocent, and we repeat those words as if they could ever mean anything.
That is godlessness. In moments of despair, we believe that there is not another way.
Instead, let us assert that good and evil exist. These are material forms that manifest in the struggle for our collective soul. We are in a battle against evil, against the void, against nihilism, and you better fucking pick up your standard and march forward, or sorry, you’re on evil’s side.
When I deliver my standard Marxist ramblings to people, they often think I’m just joking around. When I describe our current reality as a struggle between the people who labor, and the people who capitalize and exploit that labor, they think I’m just being flowery. I am not. There is a deeply moral foundation to this conception of reality. To exploit, to harm, to destroy, to extract—these are godless behaviors. They contain evils, small and large, and we must face them, name them. Lives free of suffering are worth striving toward because to do so bring kindness and goodness into our souls.
This struggle for our hearts is inextricably tied to the games we play, the art we create. There is a moral and political dimension to art which we have thrown out with godlessness. This art, these games, reflects the broken spirit of the human. So many games are perfect little worlds constructed for the express purpose of metering out dopamine. A neat machine that delivers pleasure at a measured rate.
In our moment, when people are more alienated than they have ever been, when every decision to continue is wrapped up in extraction, the art of our time has an imperative. To inflame, to irritate, to surprise. A game design with a moral imperative is one that demands players engage with the world they have wrought through play, demands a difference in thinking, acts as a mirror of expectations, rather than simply meeting them. Games are not meant to be drugs, they are not meant to be numbing devices.
In a sense, having fun is a revolutionary activity. To be delighted by something, to be surprised, to be changed, these are the seeds of revolution. To meet the demands of capital and exploitation is to meet the demands of alienation, of silence, of emptiness. We ought not to be concerned with this because of some imaginary utopian future, a place where our children can grow and thrive. We ought to consider this because this is now, this is our present moment, and it all is burning.
Most religions have an ablutive practice, an act that physically or metaphorically represents the cleansing of sin. This is a reminder, if nothing else, of the promise of not yet being done. You are not yet done.