Playing Game In-Between
Tomorrow’s events:
Collective Journaling w/ Peter Limberg and Co-Hosts. Daily @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck and Co-Hosts. Every Tuesday @ 3:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
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October 25th, 2021
Beyond Self-Discipline (BSD) as a title plays with dual meanings…
Beyond Self-Discipline. Beyond the old ways of the “just do it” self-discipline towards a more effective approach to discipline: a communal discipline.
Beyond Self Discipline. The discipline of being beyond the self, e.g. being plugged into the daemon, to use my preferred languaging.
I sense both of these will appeal to people who are residing in different ontologies. The former is for people in a Game A ontology, the latter for people in (or at least having glimpses of) a Game B ontology.
I am sure I have defined Game A / Game B here before. I am not really called to provide another definition though, at least not in a way that is beholden to the people who originally shaped its meaning. I am not in the business of intellectual “boundary-work” - fighting over the conceptual borders of what a term should mean. What makes me come alive is “boundary-play” - the art of playing with the conceptual borders.
A part of boundary-play is making up new terms (memetic tribes, wisdom hunger, goal artistry). It is also taking old terms that are “up for grabs” (daemon, thumos, communitas) and breathing life into them. The other aspect is putting forward new definitions for terms that actively have a collective life to them. With this said, here are my new definitions for Game A / Game B…
Game A. The current collective game that is ending.
Game B. The new collective game that is beginning.
It is fun to keep definitions simple and mysterious. Besides, most people do not need to know about all the cool ideas from game theory and complexity science. Having a conceptually rich understanding of “Moloch” is not needed to play the new game. I sense people just have to sink deeply into their bodies, engage in entangled forgiveness, and realize the game they are playing is not the game that makes them come alive.
It is hard to get excited about life when the collective game being played does not make one come alive. One needs to feel alive to want to continue life, create a life, and have a life. The good news is that many of us are stumbling our way towards a new game. Please do not beat yourself up if you are not a skillful player or do not even know how to play this game. Beating oneself up is a part of the game that is ending.
We are just beginning with this game. The first part of the play seems to be figuring out what the game could be. For inspiration let us look at a guy like James Naismith, the creator of the game basketball. The dude was probably weird - the kind of weird that Stoans would vibe with. Inspired by a medieval children’s game called “duck on a rock,” he took a soccer ball and a pair of peach baskets to create the game that is now known as basketball.
Was James Naismith even good at the game he created? Probably not. He would not even be in the game against someone like LeBron James. This is okay, as they were playing different games. When it comes to Game In-Between, the game between the games, better to think of us as James Naismith, not as LeBron James. That is the right James to be here.
As a Weird Stoic living during “The Great Weirding,” I am inclined to create new games or boost the signal of strange and beautiful games created by others, like Ria Baeck’s Collective Presencing or Laurence Currie-Clark's Glass Bead Game. Some recent games The Stoa has featured: The Flow Game, Deep Philosophy, Uncertainment Lounge. All fun games, playing towards the new game.
I am not inclined to become a LeBron James, or worse, appear like I am one. Sadly, that is what the spectacle encourages us to do. Guy DeBord describes the spectacle’s effect as “the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing.” Many people are merely appearing, crafting what cyborg anthropologists call their “second self” (one’s online identity) as a supernormal stimulus - something so hot our eyes have no choice but to spectate at it. It is choice, especially an effective one, that we need now.
Coyote men like Frank Yang got around the spectacle problem. He leveraged appearance to pop back into being. While others like Jasun Horsley and the Doomer Optimists are using the spectacle to get people back to the land in an embodied way. I want BSD to be a game that uses the spectacle towards a new game. To pull this off one really needs to be playful with the boundaries of the current games at play.
Circling back to the dual meanings of Beyond Self-Discipline / Beyond Self Discipline. I am sensing that we can market this thing in a way that speaks to people who are plugged into both Game A and Game B ontologies.
Those in Game A are always looking for a silver bullet so they can become successful like the alpha male/female they think are on the top of the prestige hierarchy. Mason Hartman recently had a series of tweets describing this phenomenon...
One of the weirdest ideas in Bay Area rationalist/adjacent circles is that you become someone like e.g. Elon Musk, hyper-productive and motivated, by introspecting a ton. In other words, Elon Musk was pricing out illicit Russian rocket parts while you were doing shadow work with LSD.
A lot of people who are still playing-to-win Game A (trying to become the next Elon Musk) are using Game B inductive psychotechnologies, thinking they will “step up their game” in Game A, unwittingly making their Game A gameplay harder to play. The examined life does not lead to unexamined play. BSD can openly play with this.
The promise of being more effective at discipline (which I believe a communal discipline does provide) could attract the Game A novelty junkies mistakenly hunting for a silver bullet so they can become more like Musk. Experiencing the wholesomeness that BSD hopes to engender hopefully will inspire them to play the new game.
The people who are already tasting the deliciousness of Game B need something different. They need the skill to actuate what the daemon is asking them to do. To do this they need to learn from the talent stack of those who are currently “crushing it” at Game A. This is why I focused so much on super practical goal stuff in yesterday’s entry.
I sense the good people drawn to play Game B dismiss a lot of the practical wisdom that those playing Game A have. For example, managing time when acting as if the construct of time is real, aka time management, is a needed skill to have. Of course, knowing how to sink into a timeless state is also important. One will be untethered from consensus reality though, hence ineffective at playing Game In-Between, if they cannot switch back and be effective in a time-bounded ontology. This “ontological code-switching” is needed to play Game In-Between.
BSD is a game oriented toward discovering how we can be effective at this code-switching, so more of us can play towards creating the new game.
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