(7). no more
Self-awareness has become a poison.
Postmodernism has colonized our minds. When you hear people whining about lack of consensus reality, this is why. We have all been convinced, subtly, and not-so-subtly, that we are alone, adrift, canted toward violence.
When there is no collective project, there is no project at all. We are confronted with the thin bonds of wage slavery, consumer culture, and constant alienation. Everyone is an enemy. You don’t know who’s going to inform on you, to other people, to your boss, to the cops, to a landlord. If you need help, and you exhaust your meager network, who do you turn to?
A society built around consumption eventually cannibalize themselves, directing its nutrients to the top-most echelon of its hierarchy. The myth of exceptionalism propels this mentality. When the heady feeling of self-determination and control proves itself to be an illusion, and there’s nothing left but a meat grinder, who do we turn to?
Well, I hope it’s games, but really, I think I’ve articulated that there’s no such thing. Just people, and the rules and agreements they make with one another. People believing that cooperation exists, that shared agreement and consensus also exist. A shared conception of reality is a powerful thing.
More so, games are a great reminder of the enormous, unpayable debt we owe to other people. Our continued existence on this planet requires enormous sacrifice on the part of other people. The silicon that enables you to read this, the mineral wealth that was extracted to make the blather I’m blathering possible for anyone but me to see—I owe a debt. You owe a debt.
The machinery that we have built to discipline and control our lives is killing us, sucking the very marrow from our bones. But, you know, we don’t have to stop feeding it. We don’t have to keep trusting it. The trust we require was always here, it was in the person next to you, your fellow person. There is no force that can overcome the collectivization of the weak, an agreement to, at the very least, acknowledge the debt we owe others, a recognition that even our high-mindedness comes at a cost. We have agreed to play this game, and we continue playing it, though we now know the cost.
Why? Is it because there is no alternative? Or is it because we are unwilling to face a future where we actually accept the demands and responsibilities of games like love, companionship, mutualism, care, games that we ostensibly claim to be playing?
I’m not sure, but I know that within our world, love is a game we have not yet begun to play.