(2022-06-08) Hunt Being Human In A LARPing World

Ben Hunt: Being Human in a LARPing World. That’s a painting of Alexander the Great “untying” the Gordian Knot. You remember the story, right?

it was impossible to untie the knot on its own terms. So Alexander created new terms, external to the game that he had been told to play. He cut it with his sword.

That’s exactly how you get out of a bad equilibrium in game theory. You change the terms of the game by creating a larger game, a metagame.

That’s exactly how you solve the electoral polarization problem in political theory. You introduce a new, cross-cutting issue space that has a single-peaked distribution of political preferences. You add a new dimension to the game so that voters choose to cooperate for a better policy outcome within the larger issue space.

Or we can just keep LARPing our way from one human disaster to another, playing the game exactly as we are told.

The hardest part of writing this note was getting past the anger.

I’m not there yet – past the anger, I mean – but I want to talk now about what the Uvalde massacre is and what it isn’t, before this, too, gets autotuned into the memory hole oblivion of red vs. blue

Uvalde is not a symbol of anything.

Uvalde IS our American society, where gun culture and police culture have metastasized into a chronic, disabling illness

our society is literally infected with the ideas of gun culture and police culture that live virus-like in the metaverse

once you see that the ideas and narratives of gun culture and police culture are as real and powerful (more so!) than guns and police themselves, I think you’ll more easily see the challenge before us.

Uvalde IS an incredibly stable equilibrium of ideas and narratives where it is distinctively advantageous to the two dominant political parties and the two most powerful social institutions of the modern American age – public safety and public schooling – to preserve the conditions which made this massacre possible.

The ideas and narratives that allow a Uvalde massacre provide each of these institutions with an eternal, amorphous enemy, with a readymade set of rallying cries in the metaverse

To be clear, I am all for policy reform around both guns and police.

Defund the police? No. Demilitarize and deunionize the police? Oh my god yes. As for guns, of course I think we should prevent teenagers, criminals and mentally ill violence-fantasists from buying any firearm

But I also know this: policy reform, of whatever degree and whatever type, is not enough.

American politics IS an equilibrium

path of least resistance and the best way to get a pat on the head from the Nudging Oligarchy and the Nudging State.

American politics IS a race to the metaversal bottom between Trumpism, Wall Streetism and Wokeism

constant economic stimulus and equally constant political fear to maintain a profoundly anti-human and profoundly self-stabilizing status quo.

The Long Now pulls forward the economic future through credit and leverage to make a present of constant economic stimulus, so that Bitcoin!™ becomes just another game in the Wall Street casino

The American political equilibrium is a forever war. The other side, whatever that other side might be, is not just mistaken on this particular issue (say, gun control), they are Bad People. (culture war)

so long as these engagements are embedded within the forever war (and phony war!) of Libtards versus Magats, then there is no authentic engagement to be had. There is only LARPing.

So that brings me to the second hardest part of writing this note – what can I say about Uvalde that is constructive?

I believe that the answer to our intractable, unsolvable problem of American politics is found in the story of Alexander and the Gordian Knot

Not with a sword, but with a shared spirit of human autonomy and dignity.

reform ideas around culture, ideas that create a new dimension of American society that rejects LARPing and LARPers alike.

Just like Alexander, we will cut through the knot by creating a new set of terms

What are these ideas? The ideas of being human. The ideas of Make / Protect / Teach. ((2019-09-11) Hunt The Long Now Pt2 Make Protect Teach)

it doesn’t have to be your day job. It just has to be your identity, how you choose to carry yourself in the world, how you choose to assign your attention and your inherent human autonomy regardless of your day job.

on the personal scale. On the scale of our families and our communities

Here are three examples

Being Human is the first principle of what it means to make or to protect or to teach, the first principle of what it means to have an identity based on human autonomy and dignity. Being Human is a choice

The Human hero is on the right. This is the guy who actually went through the door, took a bullet across his scalp, and shot the murdering psychopath dead

Being Human means that you do not wait for permission from the Nudging State or the Nudging Oligarchy to act constructively in the world.

My examples for Make and Teach are not nearly so dramatic, and intentionally so. Why? Because you don’t have to be a hero to be a Human.

My Make example is Frontline Heroes, a project that Rusty and I started in March 2020 with friends and family to source, purchase and distribute PPE – particularly N95 and equivalent masks – to the emergency responders

In the early months, it wasn’t just that US supply chains for PPE were completely bollixed up, so were “normal” supply chains from China

So working with a friend at Intel, we connected with individual Chinese citizens who – spending their own money and on their own time – would buy as many high quality masks as they could under the Chinese government’s personal allowance, and then mail them to my home

Because they are Humans. I often think of this when our LARPing political leaders and their LARPing political leaders tell us that China and the US are enemies.

When you engage with the real world on a project of urgent need … you are never alone. You will find other Humans from all over the world, and they will support you.

My Teach example is even more personal and even more mundane. It’s our decision to homeschool our kids.

We homeschool because most of the practices and structures of the modern school, public or private, exist for the benefit of the institution, not the child. There’s nothing evil or bad about this, it’s just inherent in the logistics and organization required for any effective institution responsible for hundreds or thousands of people

I’ll start with Protect, because it brings us full circle back to Uvalde.

Modern education is a perfect example of the Industrially Necessary Egg — spotlessly clean and cool to the touch, not because that makes for a better tasting egg, but because the protein factories that supply mass society with mass quantities of eggs require chemical washes and refrigeration to turn a profit.

Nudges are the commands crackling in our earpieces.

But I also know that you don’t have to homeschool outright to be a truly active and engaged participant in your child’s education.

Being Human isn’t about a specific outcome, like “homeschool your kids”. It’s about making a choice to live a life of autonomy and active participation in the real world of the real people who mean the most to you. It’s not a chore! It’s about play. It’s about exploration. It’s about empathy. It’s about being a human.

The solution to the Long Now is not a political movement from the top down, but a social movement from the bottom up.

It’s a personal social movement based on resistance and refusal

It’s also a personal social movement based on more than refusal, more than turning the other cheek. There is also the action of being human, action in service to your Pack and your self-realization as a Human.