Eight Provocations

Day 4,558, 08:27 • Published in USA USA • by Pfenix Quinn
No: 29 Day: 4559


䷀ ䷁ Eight Provocations ䷾ ䷿


John Brown and Harriet Tubman



1. The only just war ever fought by the RL USA was the Civil War. It was sparked by a justifiable rebellion against the abominable institution of chattel slavery, which was decisively ended as a legal institution as a result of that war.

Apologists for the ante-bellum slaveocracy, as well as some "liberal" and "conservative" historical revisionists, bemoan to this day the "sadness" of that war for pitting "brother against brother", while extolling to one degree or another numerous "patriotic" acts of neo-colonial and imperialist aggression that both preceded and followed it. Such "sad/nostalgic" views of the Civil War are utterly spurious as historical observations.

For proletarians, such views are utterly useless politically .

Expressing a revisionist understanding of the US Civil War perpetuates the misunderstanding that the many still-unresolved institutionalized imbalances that were purposefully built into the genocidal slave republic founded in 1776 are merely "strange" features of this somewhat bizarre republic, rather than aberrations that still perpetuate because the Civil War did not go far enough. Such as: the "electoral college", the make-up of the Senate, and the perpetual/eternal war of colonizer brutality, occupation and murder directed at people of the first nations, which is on-going, as well as the widespread modern institutionalization of a carceral state -- the new Jim Crow -- that now exceeds the scope of the Stalinist gulags, and an equally murderous application of the "law" in multiple venues that is intended to (continue to) suppress and intimidate colonized people, women and gender minorities.




So many billionaires and millionaires, yet not one RL Batman? What's up with that?



2. Today, the most interesting and challenging question in philosophy is neither suicide/existentialism/a reason to live (Camus), nor how to change the world (Marx, Mao Zedong, etc.), nor the relationship between the symbolic and the real (Freud, Wittgenstein, Lacan), nor ontology/the meaning of meaning (Sartre, Žižek, et al), nor the phenomenology of subject and object (Heidegger, Neitzsche). Nor is it, finally, even epistemology/the meaning of knowledge (Pyrrho, Belatthiputta, Upadhaya, Descartes, Fichte, Kant, Ferrier, Hegel, Pierce, Russell, Popper, Badiou, and of course many others). As interesting as all these lines of inquiry are, and as much as they still deserve careful study and attention, the really interesting question nowaday is a two-parter, which itself contains a twisty-pretzel internal paradox:

a. "Why is there Something instead of Nothing?"
and
b. "How does Something emerge from Nothing?"



Two main schools of thought on this, which are likely reflective of the current state of the international class struggle in the Age of Late-Neurotic Capitalism, can be observed by the discerning reader.

The first school can be characterized as the Deleuzian, or the eRepublican, school, summarized in a nutshell as: "Repetition repeats repeatedly. It's just the same damn thing over and over." The second school can justifiably be called the "Dark Enigma" school, harking back to the first chapter of the Tao Te Ching. It might be characterized as: "Impossible things are possible because they are part and parcel of the possible". Or, as Leonard Cohen put it: "There's a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in.". Or as Lao Tze had it so long ago, right up front in the second chapter: "Being and nonbeing give birth to one another".

Given the many defeats and setbacks suffered by the proletarian (anarchist, anarcha-syndicalist, revolutionary socialist, communist, revolutionary anti-colonialist, new communo-anarchist, etc.) efforts since the US Civil War came to its decisive, but not decisive-enough conclusion, one should be able to discern, at this point, that to focus too much attention on any other philosophical debates is probably useless to the proletarians. This one needs to be addressed foremostly because, clearly, the "repeatists", while touching on an important aspect of Truth, ultimately serve the bourgeois states, since Truth, which the best medicine for carrying forward the proletarian-internationalist project, is more fully expressed on the side of the "impossibilists".

Of course, just saying so does not spread understanding. Nor is it much fun to simply assert a thing. Nevertheless. There it is.








3. Anything other than a complete overthrow and re-write of the eRepublican ludic model (the game design) is ludicrous. As the e-President of e-Germany correctly summarized the other day: "It's all shit." It's great to have cool, even mentally-stimulating discussions about the state of the game and so on. But the staggering level of boredom and suffering engendered by the game, and its inane "pay to win" action/reward economy can no longer be tolerated. There is no happy garden here. There never will be.




4. The history of thoughtful and heartfelt criticism of eRepublic, and the many attempts to improve it, reform it, tweak it, extend it, outwit it, bludgeon it into submission, hack it, make peace with it, excuse it, and even make love to it is a rich and valuable tradition that is dear to the proletarian players. BUT. A critical contradiction has existed within this fine legacy for a long time: between a correctly philosophically-grounded critique vs. aspects of the reformist (and even the "revolutionary") traditions which have run counter to Impossibilism.



5. When all is written and posted, the truthfulness of a impossible possibility can only be addressed head-on: the Grand Old Forum itself (which is to say, the game as a whole, all of its interfaces) should be detourned in the direction of designing a new New World, one that is free from ALL of the baggage of the old New World. Think: what would a truly fun massive multi-player browser game that toys with real-life Republican state models, is widely accessible, has multiple levels of engagement and play that help players to be better humans, look like? Lay out the blueprint for a truly new world here, on the corpse of this dying one.




6. Everything that is actually true is good for the proletarians. Repeating old patterns is not the same thing as truth.



7. The only way to resolve the dead-end ludic model of eRepublic is to imagine and to engineer response/reward mechanisms -- along with story-telling/cultural tools -- that serve to deploy complex feedback loops for inventing new forms of statehood and of international cooperation and development. Without a lively, fresh internationalist component that exceeds the needs of any one particular state, the game falls into pointless and dull Repetitionism.




8. As Subcomandante Marcos so eloquently put it in 2003: "I shit on all the revolutionary vanguards of this planet."

Socialists, anarchists, communists, colonized people, women and gender minorities and so on do not have a monopoly on the truth. Those who do not consciously seek to employ revolutionary proletarian thinking, and those whose personhood does not rely on an identikit "branding" are not always "incorrect". The social method for re-inventing the New World, for bringing Something from Nothing, is to encourage a solid core of gaming activists who are very elastic in their thinking to sift through and sort out what is brought forward by many diverse streams of gamer activity, coming from people with a broad range of perspectives. Thinking that an "official ideology" will provide sufficient basis for this transformation is a fool's errand. Most forms of ideology in this Age of Late-Neurotic and Increasingly Fundamentalist-Psychotic Capitalism are garbage. Don't eat from the garbage pail.

Retreat. Regroup. Think. Listen. Sketch. Design. Code. Compose.


Something New Can Happen.








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