Roleplaying in the Rotundatorium
Oblique references to The Mars Volta are going to be so cool in 2024, witness me
I read an incredible piece of scholarship1 the other day, and I hope you will too, but be warned: this is a true Red Pill Piece, not because of the concepts discussed or terminology used, but because the information contained in the progression towards the conclusion negate subsequent claims of naivete or ignorance such that, upon completion, you must either recalculate your priors or lie to yourself and Nature’s God. Be warned, and enjoy.
The third time I read through it, a wild idea appeared from the underbrush2 and jumped me like John Brown on a newlywed couple and their newborn on a Kansas homestead. It didn't really have anything to do with the linked piece, but it arose while reading it so I am forced to conclude that either The Chevauchee or some Eldritch Hyperborean Shapeshifter3 planted the thought spirituo-steganographically in the kerning of the typeface. At first it seemed silly, like a hood with no sweatshirt, but over time the snood took shape and became comfortable. My mind went off in a few directions all at once, but eventually I gathered myself, and the feathered miscreants, and went back about my business.
Here's the idea: in the same way that lots of guys like to play fantasy football, I propose we play Fantasy Local Government.
The participants chose a state or geographic area and divide it into a certain number of regions with each player in charge of a single region. We pick a state/area that generates lots of news, like California or New York or Florida4, and then we come up with three or so categories for where/how the news applies. Once a week, we gather digitally, make small talk for a bit as all good aristocrats do, then go through the news of our own regions and how we handled events. For each thing we handled, we come up with a first order effect and a second order effect. The onus is on each participant to be as realistic, logical, and believable as their own mental capacity allows. We don't cover all the news from the region, just a few juicy tidbits or instructive incidences. After each participant has gone over their rulings, the floor is opened up to pick one event from each leader, and we all decide on the third order effect. In this round, everybody has a say, it is democratized to a point, but basically the majority rules on the most likely effects, and the closer it is to split decision, the murkier the outcome5. These first, second, and third order effects impact the "game board" for the next week in terms of latitude of and capacity to respond. There is a specific time the game runs, like 1 month or 3 months or 6 months, before it is closed, we get the scores for each participant, then we reset the game.
The purpose of this exercise is to literally larp as the rulers we think we could or would be. That is it. Obviously this may seem silly, but to be perfectly frank, I think fantasy football is the most wanker thing occidental society has ever created. There's no way this can be as silly as pretending to be a coach-manager-owner that gets to pick all of their favorite players and accrue their personal athletic victories for his own betting & betterment. This can be diversionary or idle, but I think that will depend on who is included in the game. I know that England uses the concept of "shadow government," And I am sure a number of other countries probably do as well6. Of all the pointless silliness of ol' Blighty, shadow government seemed like the most silly and pointless. That is until I started to really think about it.
A shadow government serves two purposes: It gives the aristocracy a preview of what might be should they shift their allegiances, and it creates endless fodder for discussion and debate. Unlike "certain creatures" that can sit on a 9-hour Bluetooth phone conversation and say not one single, solitary, worthwhile thing, it is axiomatic that white communities put massive emphasis and importance on idle chitchat. This is not because the topics themselves are so important, rather because certain languages are incredibly nebulous and contingent upon context and speaker. This means that officially important things have a tendency to turn into boilerplate and rote speech, making unimportant things the only place where honest opinion, or perspective or positionality, can peek out its head for both speaker and listener.
The US has never utilized the shadow government concept because it has always been a communist country, and it has been run by a bureaucratic oligarchy for almost as long, so there is no need for a shadow government when you already have an inner party, an outer party, and a ruling bureaucracy all trying to hide behind eachother. All three of these components of governance are ideologically captured, and the positions are reserved for a very narrow range of type. This means there are 2 flavors of liberal, conservative, and bureaucrat, and it's basically vanilla with communist sprinkles or vanilla with socialist jimmies.
So what would it be like if an MMA superstar rose to power dramatically on the heels of some societal black swan event? I posit that it would be similar to a real estate mogul turned television star rising to power in a year of dramatic reversals. I'm not saying it wouldn't be fun for a bit, but it would most likely be a brief departure from general malaise and decline7. This is because even outsider elites and social mavericks have become what they are in bland times.
I think there are better flavors out there, and Shadow Government with Fantasy Football Characteristics is a fun and easy way to distribute little plastic spoons, as it were. You could have parameters that say players can only use certain standard types of governance, you could do throwback slates of options, and you could do Free For All. You can make everybody lone wolf or get groups to coordinate. Varying the time horizon will change approach and motivation dramatically. When the whole 07 OCT kerfuffle was happening, my wife observed that my affect was that of a normal guy8 during a Super Bowl or Championship Game, and she was correct: I view Happenings of Government and History the same way “““normal guys””” view the sportsball. This means I don’t have a set schedule of “games” to look forward to, but I can have multiple Super Bowls in a single year.
Games are games, and the seriousness with which one approaches them dictates the measure of worth and/or satisfaction derived. But there is a kind of multidimensionality to both Prisoner’s Dilemma and Baseball alike; they are the game itself, but they also represent past, present, and future in unpredictable ways. I think Fantasy Government would be fun for me in the same way Fantasy Football is fun for the Sports Enjoyer because it would add a layer of projection that was previously trapped in the, my, mind. Fantasy Football lets Joe Schmoe pretend he’s got skin in the game on the Producer side and not just the Consumer side. And that would be true of Fantasy Government. But I think there’s a more valuable dimension here, and I will go on the record and say it doesn’t really apply to me, the guy who would have fun doing it.
Our world is collapsing. Our leaders are demented freaks that actively seek our suffering. Our systems are outdated and crumbling as managerial midwits use our social inheritance to enrich themselves in their barren little urban apartments. A changing of the guard is necessary, but the pool is closed for everyone but the braindead koolaid drinkers. We need a method, some kind of process for seeing who among us, the Dissident Types, are more than just theorycels. I think Fantasy Local Government is a way we can start that process.
Or y’all can just come to my farm and we can play Paintball Stratego. Food For Thought.
I was chasing down a few runaways…
But I repeat myself
It could honestly be almost anywhere, there’s so much over-coverage of everything these days
It could also be randomized. Games are fun like that in that you can always include a Chance card and it usually only adds to the fun. Usually…
Parliamentary systems are typically copycats at best
I sincerely hope I'm wrong, so very, very wrong. God luv ya Connor, the only thing stopping you is YOU
Her words, the shrew