No Game

Recently a clever former student of mine, one who is dedicating himself to becoming an expert player and has certainly surpassed me, decided to remind everyone in our group how little poker means. Fair enough: games are trivial, perhaps even juvenile when placed in reference to the usual hierarchy of needs and passions.

So why do we spend so much time on them?

Because, of course, they are trivial but not small. Henry V understood this the best, as exemplified in “our play”: that we make good use of our diversions, that they train us and so capacitate us for our best deeds. Thus should serious poker players think when they need a grounding or are told how meaningless their time is compared to whatever vanity of vanities is preferred: that I am training for something greater, or making money for something greater, or spending social time for something greater, all in the abstraction of our rudimentary contest which is so fascinating despite lacking the full colors of the greater world. Easy answers: too easy to be that good. No problem: the real answer goes much, much deeper.

Meaning, it may well be good that we step away from the chaos of what the world demands in order to be reinvigorated. This is literally, by the way, what recreation means: we are recreating ourselves in games and in play and in time off. (Think of that next time they make whatever their talking point is on the treatment of recs.)

This recreation is all the more needed today, for the apparently non-trivial world is so ugly, at least through the lenses it currently offers us. Of late I am told a thousand times how my black brothers are primitive and cruel and cannot be in our advanced society, or how the recalcitrant whites cannot be tolerated by the correctly composed identitarian state. Of course, all this while the Paris games show us getting along, vying together to defeat the enemy which is both others and our mortal limitations. I would say this is the sentimentalizing force of our gaming, but that is not the right word, not quite, not any longer, because there is such a gap between the reality of the game and our lies about reality that the two no longer meet in the same language.

We need anchors to what is good and just, more than ever, when the culture is so dangerously unmoored, but where are they? And in their lack, what ship or foundry shall deliver them? Poker’s own Zachary Elwood spends his time quixotically attempting to mend this polarity of society; I increasingly see it his way even though I know polarity is, or at least was, healthy. Polarity is a feature of the game and the bigger game of life itself. Someone must win, there must be a crisis and a champion. The problem is today’s mode of polarity doesn’t seem to create good outcomes but instead seems to be making us weaker. Strange.

The players, it seems have not merely abandoned themselves to triviality but are abandoning the very game itself. You can feel it, and the doubters do too, ever more confidently waiting for the final breakdown they have predicted each year, our secular Adventists, whether they are rabid dogs inside the camp or jackals outside. There is a whole pack of people who hate 1776 and 1789, the inevitable American empire and its manifest peace through violence, a growing bunch who think they belong to and are owed a different world. Strangely, these jackals aren’t hungry Jacobins at all: most are busy checking their 401k or double checking the security cameras; others save their wrath for fiat; many have a knack for nineteenth century economic theory; all of them perfume their social media with irony and contempt for what’s been given to us.

So our poles are a bit rotten these days; melting you might say. This lack of will to make the big game work is worse than any pandemic and seems to have no vaccine.  Our difficult conflicts – the real conflicts – become all the worse.

One of the nicest people in poker, one who has miraculously created an independent full poker media based on enthusiasm for the game and sponsored clickbait, has been spoiling for a social media fight since October 7. I don’t blame him. However, we do not give him one, for the most part, out of respect for his sunny character, not his arguments. He should have understood this, but as Epicurus reminds, enough is never enough for those who live for satiation, and so to get his fill he went after poker’s surprising lead pro-Palestinian.

Our man had finally got what he wanted: conflict and attention. Sure of his opinion, he rested his argument on the state’s definition of terrorism and called for the deplatforming of his opponent. Not the best or brightest stuff, really, but this is about blood and anger, not arguments.

So what happens when the dog finally catches the car?

If we are playing the game well, we learn. There is barely any motivation to criticize the call for “deplatforming” someone: this is the tiring language of the censorious, whose objections were solved by John Milton and others hundreds of years ago. Some of us still just don’t get it, somehow. Both the right and the left avail themselves of this stuff all too easily, then humorously hide behind Voltaire’s pompous restatement of free speech once they think you’ve forgotten their trespasses. I do not forget, however, nor do those who think like me and won’t join the party. The game trains you not to forget, but to remember every hand. So, this embarrassing call for censorship criticizes itself – the game taught you long ago if you cared to listen.

Just as importantly, the player of games is a seer who finds the bluffs. He knows that the word terrorism is a fool’s word, a propaganda, a canard for consumers and fish. It is a replica of a real idea, one designed to elicit outrage and make cowards of us: will you live in fear, inshallah? All asymmetric warfare – the warfare of the weaker player, the out of position – is terrorism. You do what you can, you block bet, you humbly reduce frequency or check range. Yet so is the brutal warfare of the stronger player: he too terrorizes in his own way, he brings the overbet down upon your humble stack of chips and your bluff-catching holdfast. Or upon your twenty-five-mile-long hovel of hope and hatred, say.

To be a terrorist, in other words, is simply to engage in the appropriate warfare of your status, and we are always at war. We are always at the game. Always were, as the meme goes. Every sentinel, every soldier, and alas, every child who has ever stood at the border of chaos understands this, just as every childlike adult thinks they are “pro-peace.” Who is not pro-peace?

The player of games learns to see through the fog of lies. For instance, it does not matter who owned what land when. All land has passed through control, and all the names, even those written in blood and stone, will wither to dust. (In fact, for a really stupid brand of politics, find the “land back” people.) If you cannot control a bit of turf, it is not really yours beyond sentimental attachment. The Palestinian and Israeli each claim justice and whatnot through this foolish stuff, a sort of sloganeering not merely for themselves or the great arbiter giant beyond the sea but to the universally weak minded of every nation – hey, just in case you’ll swallow anything, here’s an idea…

However, this doesn’t mean you don’t have some protections from your neighbor that are grounded in “solidarity,” or better, empathy. We are all more or less the same people and we don’t necessarily like our brothers being killed. While all the Palestinians are children because the adults have few other liberties to partake in and future fodder for the war is wanted, they are still children and their “innocence” is more relevant than their irritating qualities.

In fact, that is one of the darker points of the current conflict: if you are a realist and understand you can’t exist with your enemy, why can’t you just admit your genocidal policy? It is the only real and successful policy, after all: Caesar might call it winning. It is the audacious man who today uses words correctly – perhaps he is nowhere on social media, totally vanished, but surely great leaders can surpass internet losers and costless outrage? A man calls his shot, names his revenge, takes it, and then answers no questions. Life should be lived obscurely, as the master taught.

So, in seeing the absence of this bravery the gamer knows we are being bluffed by Israel and by their weak-wristed handlers in D.C. The Israelis are, in fact, carrying out an incomplete “genocide” but they won’t name it as such, and so others in their impotent rage must. Equilibrium. If we could only accept the truth, dealing with the reality would be so much easier. Are we ready to save the Palestinians? Eh. Didn’t think so but do prattle on about genocide and “war crimes” – as if war itself is not more horrible than any crime. (What weirdo calls balls and strikes when the stadium is on fire?) And why are their brethren not willing to (if you are informed you uncomfortably know why: basically no one likes them.)

It gets yet worse. The ultimate black pill is that even if you are protesting, you realize are merely passing the time waiting for it all to go away, because you won’t do enough. Even further, what point is the concept genocide itself? Why can’t we merely say war? Who made you so sacred that your right to exist is assured? No one, because there are no rights written on your heart nor in the sky.

So why shouldn’t Israel think they can wipe out their enemies? If you are “chosen” you have unlimited domain over others. We don’t have to look very far for the justification of genocide, it’s in a book every priest, rabbi, and imam distribute for us to revere. Gott Mit Uns, as Abraham carved into his best sandals.

Yet there is no god, and no one is chosen. That is a tragedy, however, not a joy. This realization ripples slowly and unevenly and the horrible responsibility it entails must have us abandon our founding myths. We do not forget these myths easily, for we, to get here, attached everything to them. This means that growing up forces us to slowly accept the universe without illusion while simultaneously crying for the guidance of our illusions. This is no trifling thing, no joke, to see the thing as it is.

So what was it you were saying that I should be doing instead of playing games? Do you have a petition for me to sign or something? Everything, not just games, pales against the great philosophical questions because they influence everything you do.  Worse, you barely know how they affect you, down to the way you eat and shit, to who your lover is and how you treat them, to how you raise your children: to what you do with every moment of your time. The great questions are great because you are not.

And so we turn to the trivial in our confusion, not to despair, but to rediscover ourselves, to recreate ourselves and be ready. We pass our time with trivialities that are not small. We learn from them until we are ready. Until the losing player admits, at last, that he is wrong and needs help. Until the winner finds he was just running well and sees the game afresh. Until we can take responsibility for what and who we wish to kill (and everything will die, life is not infinite or infinitely valuable, alas) or what we wish to defend (if we love something we will do anything to save it). Until all the truly hard lessons that must be learned, are. Until then, we simply pass the time gaming, for all things are a game to the children of the universe, who are so small, so weak, and so frightened that they must cry so loudly, so much, and so often.