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sailorgreywolf-german · 4 years

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Warning Shots

Characters: Prussia, Germany

Summary: Prussia attempts to prepare his brother to go to Versailles to sign the armistice after the disastrous war.

Word Count: 5.5K

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The room was deliberately silent, the intense kind of silence that could only be described as oppressive. Prussia was keenly aware of it, but it was difficult to find the words to break it. His brother was sitting by the dying fire, his demeanor deflated. His blonde hair was unkempt and his arm was still bound beneath his coat, the damage from the mortar not healing as quickly as it should. His eyes were glazed over as he contemplated the patch of the rug in front of him.

The sight of the young man so broken rendered Prussia speechless. He had not intended any of this and there was no way for him to remedy it. The feeling of impotence and the rage that accompanied it was boiling in his blood. For all his effort, all his care and training, he had failed yet another brother. The spark of optimism and nationalism that had lit his brother's eyes when the war had begun was gone, replaced with the cold, distant grey of resignation.

Prussia was pacing the room, and the sharp sound of his boot heels against the floor were the only accompaniment to the scene. Even the fire did not have the energy to crackle or pop as it slowly ebbed into embers. Each of them were alone within their own regrets, their own recollections of what had happened. Prussia had gone East and been able to break through the front. He had been able, through a stroke of genius, to topple Russia's precious tsarist regime and expose the man to the agony of Civil war. He had assumed himself victorious when he returned with the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in hand. One part of the war had been easily won and their territory had been extended, which was all they had sought from this war.

But, the situation he had returned to was nothing more than a war of attrition, both sides wearying of the constant fighting. It was his brother's responsibility to handle the Western Front, and that front had turned into nothing but carnage. Prussia, in all his years of war, had never seen anything comparable. Those trenches were not the way that war should be fought. They were the stuff of Dante's inferno, like the never-ending purgatory of the ambitious country. Only fatigue had ended it all.

Now, even the victory that Prussia had won in the East was at risk and he could do nothing. He was not even privy to the decision. Finally, the frustration seized his voice and he gave expression to his thoughts, "This is an insult. We deserve a say in the peace, but they make us wait here while they talk in Versailles."

Germany looked up slowly at his older brother, pain and the fatigue of the years of war clear on his face. There was a tinge of red that stained the whites of his eyes. It looked as though he had been crying, but Prussia had not seen it. Was he hiding it for fear that his brother would think him weak? His voice was that of a broken young man as he spoke, "I'm sorry, Gil. I'm so sorry. I lost the war, and now the allies can punish us."

There was an unbearable weight in each word that Prussia wished he could alleviate. He would do what he had to as a brother to comfort him. He walked over to the couch and stood right in front of the blonde. He said, his voice ringing of the confidence he didn't not truly possess, "Don't apologize to me. You've done nothing wrong."

Those deep blue eyes, still slightly red, looked up at him unbelieving. The unmistakable sound of restrained tears permeated Germany's voice as he responded, "Yes I did! I wanted so badly to win glory like you did. But, I'm not you. No matter how hard you tried to teach me, I lost without you." He paused for only a moment to pull in a deep shuttering breath. Then, he continued, "You were wrong. I'm not ready to be a country on my own."

This final painful realization seemed to break the last of his discipline and glassy tears started to roll down his cheeks. A physical pain was growing in the middle of Prussia's chest. He couldn't watch this; he couldn't hear these words. The boy he had raised to be a strong military country was crying in front of him, trying to wipe away the tears with his single good hand.

The albino took a firm step forward and reached out. He put both of his hands firmly on his brother's face and tilted it back up so that they were looking directly at each other. He spoke deliberately and slowly so that Germany could understand every word he said, "Listen to me, Ludwig. You did not lose. We still had troops on French soil. We still have all the land Russia gave up to us. This was an armistice, not a capitulation. If I ever hear you say you are not ready to be a country again, I'm going to make you run laps until you collapse."

His own voice could no remain calm and even as he spoke words of comfort. On the last sentence, he could hear a break in his own decidedly stern tone. But, it was worth it when he saw a small smile appear on his younger brother's face. It faded quickly, but there was hope in it all the same. There was also a degree of wit in his response, "You know how many laps that would be, right?"

Prussia decided that it was enough progress to release his brother's face and sit down next to him. It was always disorienting how he had to look up at his younger brother. Since Germany had become a country, he had grown out of an adolescent body. Prussia could only infer that he had inherited his mother's height and build, because he was far shorter than his brother. He could see the clear shadow of his father in Germany's broad shoulders and towering height, there was a striking similarity in the face as well.

He responded to the question with a small smile of his own, "I know, and I also know that I've brought stronger soldiers than you to their knees." But, this levity could not last. The first comment the albino had made was still hanging in the air, not yet properly addressed. Germany's face fell again as he said, "When I agreed to the armistice, France said this was how it was done. He said that the victor always decides the term of the peace."

This information was certainly new to Prussia, and it was blatantly untrue. He understood, with a sense of revulsion, what exactly had happened. France had used his brother's inexperience to enact his own vendetta. Prussia had no doubt that the man still held a grudge for the peace that Prussia had forced upon him the last time they had fought. Trying to hide how angry this news made him, the albino said, "That is completely untrue. The idea that he won is a farce. If he wants to say he beat us, I suggest he have troop in Berlin first. But ask him if I made him sit on the sidelines when his emperor was defeated."

He gritted his teeth so that nothing more caustic could spill out. But, Prussia was raging on the inside. He had had the honor to give Talleyrand a spot at the table at the Congress of Vienna, despite the fact that the coalition had soundly crushed Napoleon. Now, Francis didn't have the decency to do the same. If the Frenchman thought that he could expect Prussia to passively sit by during this insult, then he was completely wrong. Both of the albino's hands curled into fists. Germany noticed the action and put his own hand on top of one of his brother's fists. He said, apparently deciding that he should not be the one doing the comforting, "Please just be calm, Gilbert. I made my own decision. Now we just have to wait for the terms. I'm sure they will be fair."

The albino responded with an incredulous scoff and stood back up. There was too much warring inside of him right now to be still. He said, explaining his initial reaction, "How little you know about European politics, little brother. Without us there to defend ourselves, they will pick our bones clean like vultures." Germany blinked at him, disbelief clear in his eyes. Then he said, "But why would England and America let France take advantage of this?"

The naiveté in his eyes was painful to Prussia. He knew how wrong his little brother was. He had been at far to many peace conferences to believe in such fantasies. A blind eye could be bought with the promise of land or power. It would be too easy for France to sweep the others aside and take whatever revenge he wanted to. Prussia's hands remained clenched in tight fists as he thought about what his former friend was probably doing at this very moment. France's grudge over the ostentatious way Germany had been crowned an empire was enough for him to want to bleed them dry. It was the typical, vicious, vindictive nature of European politics to demand more flesh than was owed.

Prussia finally spoke once the thoughts stopped rushing in his head, telling his brother the sad truth, "They probably have no interest in restraining him. It's best that you learn now: None of Europe will defend you." The albino had looked away to continue pacing as he spoke. It was a nervous habit that was better suited to a military encampment. In this setting, it seemed strange. At least his brother was used to it. He turned back to Germany to see how the words had impacted him. These were the truths that Prussia had hoped his brother need never experience. Now, it was his fault for not preparing his brother to face them. But, there was a light in the blue eyes as Prussia met them.

Then the younger spoke, and it explained his expression, "But you've always been here. Even when I don't deserve it." Prussia was torn between the urge to smile or shake his little brother. Instead, he forced himself to sit back down on the couch and put his arm around his brother. This was the best thing to do for now, for Germany's sake. He said, "Of course, Ludwig. What kind of awesome brother would I be if I left you alone?"

He meant to lighten the mood, but the words still sounded bitter to his own ears. He had failed in his duties as a brother once, he wouldn't make the same mistake. Germany still seemed to be struggling to express himself. He finally just said, "I'm sorry for everything. I made so many mistakes." Prussia tightened his hold on his brother's shoulder, wishing that this would actually be comforting. He just wanted his brother to stop apologizing, This war wasn't his fault, and whatever was coming was not either. But it was easy to see how Germany blamed himself, it was natural that a young country should take his first draw hard.

Prussia spoke again, trying to calm the blonde like he had used to when Germany had been little, "No matter what happens next, I am still proud of you. You fought as hard as you could; it's not your fault that war has become so ignoble." It was difficult to make the words sound completely sincere when Prussia was still seething. But, it was more painful to watch Germany break down. It wasn't Germany's nature to be so emotional; Prussia hadn't had to comfort him like this since he was very young.

This was supposed to have been a glorious war to help Germany really establish himself as a country, but now it was all falling apart. Germany leaned over so that some of his weight was resting on his brother. It was a familiar gesture from when he was a young child, he seemed to find physical contact comforting. The tension of the moment was broken when a door behind them opened. A third person, who was just a mortal, entered the room and spoke immediately, "We just received a phone call from Versailles. It is time for you to sign the treaty."

Prussia gritted his teeth, trying not to say what he would prefer the others do with their treaty. This was farce, revoltingly unfair farce. Considering what the outcome of this would probably, Prussia wished he could leave his brother here. It would hurt him to see the injustice that was coming. The albino got to his feet anyway, resigning himself to the Sisyphean task of shielding his brother from whatever was to come.

The trip to Versailles was marked by the same uneasy silence that had pervaded since the mortars had fallen silent. In the car, as the gleaming garish palaces of Versailles became visible on the horizon, Prussia reached over and put his hand on top of his brother's hand, which had clenched itself into a fist. He worked small circles on the back of Germany's fist, trying to relax the muscles. He said, trying to hide the edge in his own voice, "Everything is going to be fine."

Germany turned his head and his blue eyes met Prussia's red. There was a certain shine to his eyes that spoke of tears threatening to spill out again. His reply was curt, most likely because he was trying to keep his voice from breaking again, "I hope so." Prussia could hear the fear beneath the facade. He had taught Germany how to hide emotion behind a disciplined military front, and that technique did not fool him. But, he would let his brother act strong now. It would be better to show an unaffected face to France, England, and America. They did not need to see how much their mockery of a treaty affected Germany; it would only make them take further advantage of the situation.

As the manicured lawns came into view on either side, Prussia felt a rising sense of disgust. He had never liked this place. It wreaked of pretension and a false superiority. Why did France think he had the right to exert control over nature the same way he tried to control the rest of Europe? Both of them were lies. Sanssouci was far more beautiful because it understood its own restrictions. It also had the discipline and grace of the man who had built it. Versailles was an ugly, sprawling, ostentatious metropolis by comparison. It always caused an unpleasant taste in his mouth. He had only chosen to crown Germany an empire here as a gesture to wound France's pride.

Coming back to this place was a sick twist of fate that could be nothing but intentional. France knew what he was doing, and he knew what this would symbolize. Prussia stepped out of the car, and fought back the urge to walk on the grass to ruin the artifice. He glanced over at his brother, and saw that the muscles in the blonde's jaws were tense as they held a firm clench. It was clear that he was channeling all of his emotions into keeping himself silent and stoic. It was better like this for now. Prussia promised himself that he would do the same.

It did not take them long to find the hall of mirrors. The way was far too familiar. They had both walked it before, not so long ago. The atmosphere had been different, but the place was the same. Prussia noticed that his brother kept glancing at his as though he was expecting emotion of some kind. But, Prussia would not show it. If he broke, then Germany certainly would. Regardless, the emotion he was repressing was not sadness, it was anger and outrage. It was a soldiers skill to be able to act against his own rage. Losing your head in the middle of battle would only lead to loses.

France's voice carried into the hallway, his arrogance dripping from every word. There was a light hearted laugh in his voice that he had no right to. Did he really think he had won something? Prussia's knuckles turned white as he grabbed the golden doorknob and turned it. It was all he could do to keep himself calm. Germany walked past him into the room. The blonde's footsteps carried unmistakable heaviness. Prussia felt himself recoil a little. How had he failed again? Why hadn't he protected Germany the way he had promised to? If France stepped over the line again, he would pay for it.

The albino followed his brother into the room. It was brightly lit, and the mirrors on the wall reflected the light back in all directions. France was sitting in a chair speaking to England, who seemed to be bored of the conversation. There were a smattering of other smaller countries seated near the walls. Like scavengers, they wanted to gain from the scraps of the confrontation. None of them were actually important.

The Frenchman was speaking in his native language, but Prussia understood the words perfectly. Fritz had spoken beautiful, eloquent French and it had not been a chore to learn the language to understand him. France seemed to have forgotten that the albino spoke the language, because even as he turned to look at Prussia, he said, "I bet I can get the boy to beg my forgiveness before we're done."

The albino's jaw muscles were beginning to ache from how much he was attempting to hold back his passion. He could not respond to France's inflammatory comment. There was a slight comfort when England responded, in English, "Just do your job Francis, you've gotten enough out of this already." Their bickering was exceptionally usual, and did little to help the situation.

Prussia decided that it would be better to interrupt them, "Where is your third? Has your bickering finally driven your bastard child away?" The absence of America was interesting though. If the boy had stormed out, then Prussia felt a slight sense of respect for the boy. At least he held to his loudly proclaimed ideals. England threw a glare at France before turning back to Germany and saying, "It's not important. We have finalized the treaty and you two just need to sign it."

Germany took a solemn step forward, as though walking to his own execution. But, Prussia said sharply, "No, Ludwig." He turned back to the pair of blondes facing them, "We will sign nothing until we get a chance to read it." France grimaced and said, "Why do you have to read it? It's your punishment and you don't get a say!" England snapped at him, "They have every right to read what they're agreeing to. Give them the document, frog."

The Frenchman's eyes were daggers as they fell first on the Englishman, and then on Prussia. He was making it perfectly clear that he knew who his enemy really was. He paid no mind to Germany, because he knew the man was young and naive enough to accept anything. It had been a mistake for Prussia to leave his brother alone to negotiate the armistice, but he was going to rectify that now. If France wanted a fight, he was going to get one.

France deliberately stood slowly, making Prussia wait for him. It was an old trick of diplomacy. The one who could control the speed of the conversation had the power over the negotiations. But, this trick was cheep, and the Prussian would not let it fluster him. He tapped his foot impatiently on the ground as France leisurely walked over to hand him a copy of the treaty to the albino. The sound echoed off the walls, and more than one of the leaches in the room winced at the sound.

The Frenchman finally reached Prussia and fixed his gaze directly on the other's face. His expression was meant to be a clear warning, but the albino met it unwaveringly. He had sacked Paris more than once and seen France on his knees; he did not fear this man. What seemed like an eternity ago, they had been friends. Those days were long gone, and the pair now stood in a cold, tense silence. They were close enough that either of them could have drawn a knife and plunged it into the other's flesh.

The blonde finally broke the tension when he thrust the paper into the albino's hands. His voice was devoid of all levity when he spat, "Here. Read it all you want. It's no worse than what you did to me." Prussia snatched away the document so quickly that the paper almost tore. Out of the corner of his eye, the albino could see his brother's look of utter shock. Prussia could not turn back now; he could not let France intimidate him. A warrior, a knight never backed down from an inferior opponent.

He looked down at the document and read over it quickly as France looked on, a small smirk on his face. Prussia got through the majority of it quickly. It was far from standard, but it was what Prussia had been expecting. With each article rage crept its way up the albino's throat. He could taste it hard and metallic on his tongue. This was an more than an affront, it was an attack. Who was France to reduce the size of the army? The army that had made Prussia great, that had allowed Germany to be unified.

It only got worse as he read. He was struggling to keep his face blank. If France knew how much this hurt, he would glory in it. But, as he flipped through page after page, the treaty took even more that it had no right to. The lands Prussia had won against Russia were not up for debate. The reparations were far more than he had asked of France. But, as he reached Article 231, all the rage he had been feeling overwhelmed him. This simple insult, written as though it was innocuous, broke through the dam of discipline. The anger washed over him in curiously cold waves. The rage that animated him in battle was hot, but this was cold and remarkably certain. Prussia said, his voice flatter than it had been all day, "You want us to admit guilt for the war? That's low, even for you."

He looked directly at France, the sight of the man's face brought back hundreds of years of affronts and insults. One stood out among all the rest. Prussia remembered in sharp detail what France's rapier had done to his little brother. He remembered the stink of the quagmire of blood and wet earth Holy Rome had been left in. He remembered brushing back pieces of blonde hair off of his little brother's cold forehead as he realized the devastating truth.

The Frenchman seemed to detect the shift in Prussia's manner, but he did not seem to know what to make of it. Yet, his arrogance continued to rule him, and he said, "You are guilty. You goaded Roderich into war." Prussia took a small step forward, and he spoke, "If you want a reason for this war, look in the mirror."

Then, he dropped the stack of papers that constituted the treaty. They hit the floor and the loosely bound pages flew in every direction. Gasps echoed around the room as the onlookers realized what was happening. No one looked more throughly appalled than Germany, who looked like he couldn't quite comprehend his brother's action. But, Prussia knew he was speaking out to protect his brother's honor. He would never let his brother sign a document that took the blame for the entire war.

Prussia took a side step and walked around France, who was looking dumbfounded. He then addressed the entire room, "Do any of you really believe that I started this? We are all guilty, and you know it." He turned slightly so that he was able to hurl more words at France, "If that was the case, Francis, why did you have fortifications on your border? You wanted an excuse for a fight as much as I did."

The albino could hear his blood pumping in his ears. He could feel every eye on him. He continued, "You all wanted a chance to fight. We all have our ambitions for power or land. All of us had the weapons ready to fight. I doubt any of us were actually fighting for Serbia." The feeling of finally laying bare the truth that had existed in European politics for centuries was intoxicating. These were the words that no one dare speak.

Prussia continued to speak, even though he could hear the whispers and gasps of the assembled countries, "I wish I was the belligerent tyrant you want to paint me as. You would all be kissing my boots by now. If you want to find the reason for this war, look to your own actions."

He caught the eyes of England, and the look in the green eyes was judgmental. Without a word, the British man condemned this entire speech. But, he would not escape scrutiny either. The albino turned his attention to him next, "Oh, but you hide your intentions behind pretty words like neutrality and self determination. If you want countries to determine their own fates, then ask India what he actually wants. But you wouldn't dare risk your precious empire for your professed ideals. You are both terrible hypocrites."

Another round of gasps went around the room, although there were some slight smiles from some of the colonies. They were glad to hear their precious, thwarted ambition spoken. That was enough to make Prussia smile and say, "You don't hate me because I'm different than the rest of you. You hate me because I'm honest about what I want. I'm your mirror and you hate seeing what you all really are. We are all thirsty for each other's blood."

Having finally, apparently recovered from Prussia's flippant refusal, France rounded on Prussia. His blue eyes were alight with a rage that seemed to match the albino's in strength. He said, "Don't you dare play the victim, Gilbert. You have attacked me over and over again to satisfy your own ambition. I tried to be your friend and you took advantage of it."

The albino could scarcely believe that France could lay the failing of their friendship at his feet. He was not the one who had rend the bond between them with the chaos of war. Prussia squared his stance in front of the blonde and met his condemning gaze unflinchingly. He wanted France to see his eyes and know exactly who he was dealing with. This blonde peacock could not possibly understand what Prussia had given up for the power he had now. It was easy for a man who had been handed an easy life by Rome and Charlemagne to condemn ambition. And yet, France had always stomped his feet like a petulant child when he lost.

Prussia smirked, "Tell me, Francis, when did you stop wanting my friendship? Was it when I became a threat instead of someone to pitied?" France snarled back at once, "I should have stopped you from walking over the rest of this continent decades ago!" The albino took a step forward, and sneered, "Do you really think you could have?"

England could no longer sit back with idle judgment. He appeared in Prussia's field of vision at France's side, his usually pasty white face bright red. Prussia didn't fear him either. England was a small man with a very large navy. Attempting to reassert order, the Englishman said, "You are both being childish! Just sign the treaty so we can put this entire unfortunate business behind us."

Prussia scoffed again; it was so predictable that England would make himself look like the perfect gentleman. He said, voicing his contempt, "You know I'm right, Arthur. Or are you that deluded?" The scowl deepened on the Briton's face. There was some satisfaction in seeing both France and England frustrated with his resistance.

But, the soft touch of a hand on Prussia's shoulder stopped him from elaborating. He turned to look at the source of the touch. His brother had put his hand on his shoulder. Germany's eyes were painfully pleading, the blue was begging for understanding. Prussia bit his tongue immediately, unwilling to continue if he was hurting his little brother. There was an ache in his chest as he met his brother's eyes, and it hurt enough to silence him. The younger spoke, using German to make sure they only understood each other, "Please stop, Bruder. I can't fight anymore."

Prussia's eyes passed over his brother's bound, injured arm and his worn face. All this European fighting was hurting him, and Prussia had been doing more of it to defend him. No matter how angry the albino was, this was not worth it. Germany continued to speak, "I'm not as strong as you. I wish I could be."

Prussia took a deep breath to calm himself. His duty was to be a good brother, so he would shelve his grudge for now. When he had given Germany the title of empire, he had trusted him. So, he nodded and said, "Do what you think is right." He glanced back at France, who was glancing from him to Germany, waiting for one of them to speak. Prussia fought back the urge to hit France. It would not be productive, but it would make him feel better. But, he would let Germany speak for them both.

The younger said, "We will sign the treaty." A sickeningly triumphant smile spread across Frances face, while England let out a relieved sigh. The Frenchman, unable to contain his smugness, said, "It's good to see that one of you has sense."

Prussia clenched his hands again, channeling all his anger into them. He wanted to snap back, but he was restraining himself for his brother's sake. France walked over to where the treaty was laying on the floor, and he looked as though he was about to bend and pick it up. But, then he stopped himself. Prussia had a sinking feeling as France turned to look at him with that same triumphant smile. His playful lilt sounded incredibly out of place when France said, "Ludwig, you should pick this up so you can sign it."

Germany looked uncertainly at Prussia. He was clearly confused, but Prussia understood perfectly. France wanted Germany to submit to further humiliation. But, England stepped in. The Briton stormed over to the scattered pile of papers and said, "Bloody hell, Francis. I have had enough of your games."

With that, he angrily bent down and picked up the entire document. He stomped over to a table that had apparently been set up for the formal signing. There were fine pens, still completely untouched, sitting on the table. England turned again and with the air of a school master chastising his students, said, "Now, sign the damn treaty. No more petty arguments from anyone."

Germany took the pen and put his signature on the last page of the offensive document, all in complete obedient silence. Prussia knew he must do the same, but he hated it all the same. France was making a mistake that history would undoubtedly repudiate. Prussia would not let himself forget this, and the next time he invaded Paris he would not be kind.

The albino's steps were dignified and measured as he approached the repugnant document. He did not dare look at France, lest he lose his temper again. The pen was smooth against the callouses of his sword hand. A tiny crack showing in his soldier's discipline, Prussia looked directly at his French rival and said, "You should be careful who you call a monster." He flicked his wrist casually and finished his signature, the ink looking like the blood of Judas on the page. Then he said, "Because, someday you might find they've actually become one. Then you'll be the one begging for mercy."

#hws prussia #hws germany

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pip-n-flinx · 4 years

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Among Us

So this is going to get long, this is going to get personal, this is going to be about prejudice and race and self-serving bad-faith arguments and flawed rhetoric. And for all of these reasons I’m going to leave the rest of this under the cut.

As a few of my friends will know, earlier this week I was delivered an ultimatum from my landlord/roommate. He disguised it well, telling me he was ‘concerned for my mental health’ that my ‘negativity was dragging the whole house down’ and that I was simply too filthy to live with. I won’t pretend I’m a neat freak, and I can honestly say that I have taken some pains to clean more since, to his surprise and delight, though its particularly hard to take coming from him.

“You’re always so down. It’s making you lazy and thin skinned” You know its funny you should say that, now specifically, because I’ve actually been on the up and up this last week and you didn’t mention this at all in January when I was actually at my worst, or February when I was afraid I was going to have to quit my job, or back during the holiday season when retail work was breaking my back... Only now do you think to check in on me?

“You left a pair of gloves, a letter, and a small wooden trinket on the table!” Indeed I have, as you have left your pair of gloves, well over 21 letters, and regularly set your packages on this same table, including today two packages to be returned to amazon. I didn’t realize I didn’t get to use the table the same way you do.

“You don’t do dishes! except that you did this week, which is cool I guess but still!” You do realize that I actually hand-wash every dish I use within 24 hours of using it, right? And that often the dishes you come to me bitching that I never cleaned are in fact your fiances, yes? Ok good, next question.

“You’re always complaining about work. I don’t mind that you vent, but its all you talk about anymore!” I have either lost or walked away from 4 jobs in this last year, and that has not been easy, or fun. I have worked essential retail jobs the entire pandemic thus far. Additionally, in the months leading up to you storming out of your 75k a year salaried sales job, I had told you to leave it because I could see that it was killing you. You got so fed up with the job that for 4-5 months before you left your grandma-paid-off-my-second-mortgage capitalism-knows-best-pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-ass spent more time playing valorant and league of legends on the clock than doing actual work. Need I remind you that every time I stepped into your office, or simply stepped upstairs to get ready for work, you would complain about how awful your managers were, or how shitty someone had been to you over the phone? DID I EVER BELITTLE YOU FOR ANY OF THESE THINGS????

The real kicker was that the spark, the moment that started this (at least for him) was me trying to explain why racism and ‘cultural supremecy’ was bad. I had brought to him something I thought we could both agree on, that we could both laugh at. I brought him a series of tweets about how problematic Van Gogh was for studying and imitating traditional japanese painting techniques. He took this, and immediately turned into a piece of the culture wars. Now, I agree, this is an egregious example of trying to ‘cancel’ someone. How cancelling a long dead artist who couldn’t sell his art while he was alive is important is beyond my comprehension, its not as though the market value of these comes up very often, and almost no-one will ever have a chance to buy or reject a Van Gogh. But to him this was emblematic of ‘liberals’ cancelling Seuss and Rowling.

He even went so far as to say that Van Gogh probably ‘did it better’ than the artists he was studying/imitating. Now, this is a huge red-flag to me because this is straight out of the Nazi playbook. This is William Shenker, proposing a theory of music to proof ‘German cultural superiority.’ This, if you will pardon my language, is the real culture war: trying to supplant other cultures art and history with western figures and events.

Now, for those of you who don’t know who I’m talking about, this man is sexist. He doesn’t believe women are equal, complains about women’s sports, and rejects a woman’s right to choose. This man is a transphobe, questioning the logic of ‘safe-spaces’ and allowing people to change their pronouns. This man is a Trump supporter, and voted for him twice. And all of these things I found out years after we became friends. I have in the past contemplated what it would take to cut him out of my life wholesale. Despite our wealth of shared experience and our shared interests, we’ve been drifting apart as he drifts further and further to the right. And he has been drifting. He’s parroted more bad-faith arguments from Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson in the last 6 months then he ever did when I first moved in with him.

I have been trying to push back, especially when he says the quiet parts out loud. I try to let him know that it is not acceptable to say he would rather an unarmed black man die that risk that a police officer might be injured. When he compares the people in control of Seuss’ intellectual property and works choose to stop printing less than 6% of his published works to the book burnings in Mao’s china. When he says that its more important to protect teacher from students trolling them by changing their pronouns than it is to protect trans or NB kids. When he espouses his belief that trans and NB kids are ‘just mentally ill.’ Whenever he says any of this shit, I have pushed back. I have tried to halt, or at least slow, his descent towards eugenics and white supremacy and fascism.

It has been to no avail.

And to be honest its exhausting. I wanted to believe that he would trust me, not just to be a moral and thoughtful person, but to be educated and informed on these issues. We went to school together, spent countless hours solving homework and trying to crack games together. If I don’t know the answer to his questions immediately, he often jokes ‘C’mon, you’re supposed to know everything!” and has frequently told me that I’m selling myself short.

But apparently all that trust and all that respect goes out the window when I challenge him. Suddenly I’m ‘overly negative’ or ‘too sensitive’ or he’ll ‘need to look into that, but...’

And the thing is, he is capable of great acts of kindness. He offered to rent me a room in his completely paid-off house, no mortgage at all, simply because he could see living at home was killing my mental health. He offered me 50-75% off of market rate. He buys gifts all the time, has landed tenants job interviews, set people back on their feet, and refused to press charges for several major financial loses he’s taken on the determination that it would do more harm to the defendant than he could ever recoup from it.

But he does not extend this kindness, this generous soul, to everyone. And lately, his circle grows smaller, and his kindess has waned, and it’s been so devastating to see him slip further and further towards his own worst impulses.

I know there will be people who think I should have cut him out of my life years ago, who can’t believe we never talked enough to know that he voted for Trump in 2016. I think back then he was genuinely ashamed, or at least guilty, about that vote. Now? It’s almost a matter of pride for him. I can’t tell you the number of times in the last 4 months that he’s told me that Biden “couldn’t possibly” be as “great” a President as Trump.

And he hides behind this “praise them when they do good, cuff them when they do bad” line and I used to take comfort in it but now... Now it’s clear that it was just a front or excuse for liking these abhorrent people.

I’ve had a couple of hard conversations with some of our mutual friends about what this means for me, and how I interract with the whole group of friends as a whole, in the last 3 days. None of our mutual friends seem to take any of these things as seriously as I do, with my oldest friend even telling me that he ‘can’t imagine’ breaking a friendship off over politics.... I know I know, the caucasity of it all, yes ha ha. And it does make me genuinely worried that I’ll wind up losing the 5-6 close friends that I actually rely on these days over this horrible sonuvabitch. But all this personal venting aside, there’s something bigger here I want to address:

I sat down this evening to watch Last Week Tonight and I was struck by this piece about Tucker Carlson, because while I knew some of what was said on his show, he is remarkably confident for a man who spouts the quiet parts of racism/sexism/homophobia on TV. I have a hard time imaging a more blatantly racist thing to do then declare that a woman who suggested ‘dismantling systems of oppression wherever they are found’ wants to dismantle the American system...

And I have to say, we should go back to punching Nazis. I want these fuckers afraid. I want them to crawl back to the furthest reaches of the internet, relegated to be laughed at for their bigotry by pundits of every political ideology. I want their vile vitriol hidden away where it doesn’t embolden others. I want them to know that they are out of line, out of touch, out of time. I want them to feel ashamed, like the relics of a bygone and worse era that they are, and for them to quietly fade to an ignominious death. I’m tired of seeing them on National News. I’m tired of Pewdiepie’s channel and influence refusing to die despite all the horrible things he’s said and done. I’m tired of Ben Shapiro spouting off about a woman’s place and rights, as if he has any fucking authority on the matter. I just want these people to lose their platforms and their followers. And for me the fact that they haven’t yet is so incredibly discouraging.

I know I didn’t offer any answers here I’m just tired of being alone with this defeated attitude and I guess I needed to get this off my chest as I try to disentangle myself from the losing battle of trying to save a friend from alt-right radicalization.

#tw/ white supremecy #tw/ sexism #tw/ racism #tw/ transphobia #wooow this got longer than I expected #meta: alt right radicalization #and how they're reaching people my age #plus a lot of personal venting

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fleurbastien · 5 years

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✧･ﾟ( persephone + jordan fisher + demiguy ) 𝒎𝒂𝒎𝒎𝒂 𝒎𝒊𝒂 !! have you seen Bastien Lalande around ? they/he have/has been in kaos for fourteen months. the twenty-six year old is a botanist from martinique. people say they can be detached but maybe that’s not too bad ‘cause they can also be amicable. whenever i think of them, i can’t help but think of (( a sunlit greenhouse, sand underfoot on a temperate beach, a streak of dirt smudged across the cheek )). ･ﾟ✧

Bio

Bastien Lalande was born and raised on the island of Martinique to Danielle and Henri Lalande. Their plan was to have a flock of children. Family was what they prized most in this world. They could imagine no happier future than peering out the window of their sizable family home and see kinds running through the grass, kicking back and forth a football. Their plans were abruptly thwarted. Between their first and third years of life, Bastien was too young to understand or remember the complications that Danielle experienced with having another child. How close she came to passing away after the third surgery. It was this near-death experience which prompted the couple to mutually agree on focusing raising Bastien, and to spare Danielle anymore physical and emotional pain. Despite their agreement, a fragment of Henri and Danielle died; their dreams shattered as though a rock had been thrown squarely into a mirror. Because of this, a seed was planted deep within their minds that, just maybe, if they hadn’t had Bastien, they would still have some semblance of future aspiration.

Life on Martinique was personal. Communal. Familial. Everyone said hello to one another as they passed. Honking was a sign of neighborly greeting, not irritation at the traffic. You can imagine that, growing up in this culture, Bastien became quite the socialite. They were charming, active, knowledgeable, and sportive. People loved seeing him skipping down the road on his way to school, and cheered him on as captain of the Yole Sailing team. He was the picture of stability, as his parents’ world was on the decline. Running a cafe was difficult with a staff of three, and even harder when you had to run operations at the age of thirteen. There were days when he was in charge of opening and closing procedures, and some days more during which he would have to miss school in order to help out at the shop. Bastien was growing to resent the positions into which he was thrust. He was convinced that he should be out enjoying his life, not toiling under responsibilities which should not be his own. A heavy weight began to oppress his shoulders. His personality began to dampen, despite his best efforts. What was worse, he didn’t let on to the community that he was struggling. He felt that, for the sake of dignity (or some other noble reason), he had to keep private the fact that his parents were no longer fit to care for him.

After several years, a poetic path appeared. A divergence of destiny. Bastien could travel halfway across the world and attend the University of Hawaii at Manoa, or they could continue looking after their parents, who severely needed their help. The decision sent the youngling into a depressive state. He knew his dreams lay at the other side of that graduation stage in Hawaii, but he also knew that there was no real choice; he had to stay for his parents, despite their contentious relationship. Danielle was fatigued more often than not, and if Bastien couldn’t anticipate her needs, she would find it in her energy to berate him (putting it kindly). At that point, Henri had enough of a reason to despise Bastien. Not only did his son take away three more children from him, but contributed to the heartbreak and physical condition of his beloved as well. It was at this important crossroads that Bastien’s behavior altered radically, deviating from his usual sunny disposition. As it happened, nothing went unnoticed by his extended family for long. By and by, upon discovering his dilemma, they practically made the decision for him. They would take care of his parents and send him off to college.

Sparing unnecessary details of Bastien’s college life, he obtained an undergraduate degree in biology, and went on to get his Master’s degree in Botany from the very same school. His intelligence and charisma had his professor’s hooked, and it was easy for him to be admitted to the PhD program there. His advising professor won a grant from the NSF and was further funded by the university to conduct a field school on the island of Kaos in Greece. Before applications even opened, the professor had made his decision, for the only name that jumped into his mind for a field assistant was none other than Bastien Lalande.

The two, along with four undergraduates, have been on the island for just over a year, doing extensive research on Mediterranean vegetation. Bastien is using this opportunity to develop his doctoral research, simultaneously writing his dissertation. Weekdays, Bastien can be found in the field and in the lab, running soil samples, or peering into microscopes. On the weekends, he clacks away at his keyboard, synthesizing as much information as possible. When he finds free-time, or needs to clear his head, he loves swimming, or sailing if he can find a boat.

Running into Bastien, one would encounter a shining smile, a charming accent, and hospitality that would make you feel as though you knew him for an eternity. He might invite you on a hike, or show you a greenhouse. It is rare to catch him without a flower tucked behind the ear. However, if one truly tried to dig deeper beneath the surface than the charisma that he emanates, they might find that there isn’t much they actual know about Bastien, as if all information on his deep, honest thoughts have been entombed far beneath the ground.

Although they miss the Caribbean islands, they feel something deep in the pit of their stomach which anchors them to Kaos. A lifetime’s worth of knowledge sits at their feet in Greece. It would take all of their willpower to turn away from it.

Headcanons

very much “gerry durrell” from the durrels in corfu vibes

if you havent seen it i recommend

but instead of being obsessed with animals hes obsessed with plants

very smiley, outgoing, charismatic, loves chatting with strangers as long as the questions dont get too personal

A-1 athlete, can swim until the cows come home

flower aesthetics galore. he likes to draw flowers, wear flowers (prints and real flowers, ofc), and grow flowers in his window sills and from hanging pots

are u french ? he will speak french to u if so

underneath, hes a lil moody. his parents began to blame him for his mother’s health complications. they wanted a family so badly that they kinda alienated their only child

he loves loves loves martinique but dreads going back to that life that was hard, tortuous even

writes to his family to make sure everyone is okay, but doesnt talk to anyone on kaos about it

kinda wonders if he should blame himself for complications ?

can be found lying in the dirt contemplating his woes. or singing. or singing because of his woes.

you honestly cant be a fan of botany without developing a relationship with bugs. in this case, bastien l o v e s them. even the scary ones

Insp

click the link !

Playlist

orange trees - marina

le monarque des indes - pierre lapointe

be my baby - the ronettes

harvest moon - neil young

sweet creature - harry styles

at last - etta james

buttercup - hippo campus

semaphore - requin chagrin

home again - first aid kit

motivation - normani

dream a little dream of me - doris day

#* about #* intro

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mediaeval-muse · 4 years

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Video Game Review: Assassin’s Creed Revelations (Ubisoft, 2011)

Genres: action-adventure, third person, open world

Premise: Ezio Auditore travels to Constantinople to unlock the secret of Altaïr's vault in Masyaf, battling Templars who also want the vault’s contents. In the present day, Desmond Miles is trapped in the Animus and must find a "synch nexus", a key memory that links him with Altaïr and Ezio, to reintegrate his splintered subconscious and awaken from his coma.

Platform Played On: PC (Windows)

Rating: 3/5 stars

***Full review under the cut.***

I am evaluating this game based on four key aspects: story, characters, gameplay, and visuals. I will not be evaluating the multiplayer mode because I don’t like playing video games with other people.

Content Warnings: violence, blood

Story: The main premise of Revelations’ story is that, following the end of Brotherhood, Desmond has fallen into a coma. The stress of being controlled by Juno has splintered his subconscious, so in an effort to save his life, Rebecca Crane and a mysterious figure have placed him back in the Animus. In order to repair his mind and escape, Desmond must “play out” the remainder of Ezio’s memories, so he follows his ancestor as he travels to Masyaf in search of Altaïr's vault, which requires five “keys” to open. These keys have been hidden around Constantinople, and Ezio must race against the Templars during the political conflict between Şehzade Ahmet and Selim I.

Desmond’s plot follows a somewhat natural progression. Though I missed his interactions with the Assassin team, it makes sense that his next big adventure would involve being trapped in the Animus and learning more from Subject 16. I liked that gameplay in Ezio’s world unlocked some puzzles in Desmond’s world (even though he’s trapped in the Animus, he inhabits a little island where he can be himself) and that these puzzles told us more about Desmond’s past. I did not think, however, that Desmond’s past was related in a compelling way. Most of it is told to us through Desmond monologuing as the player completes puzzles that are somewhat reminiscent of Portal. I thought Desmond’s past could have been done better, perhaps by having flashback scenes like how Altair’s past is related.

Ezio’s plot felt like it was lacking, and I think the reason is that the past 3 games have focused on finding and controlling the Apple/Piece of Eden, whereas this game is about opening a vault/library. Ezio’s story also lacks a strong antagonist to tie things together; instead of battling the Borgias, Ezio is competing with general “Templars,” and even though there are some prominent Templar figures, none of them had “stage presence” like Cesare Borgia did. Though I liked the political backdrop, I think Ezio himself was ill-suited for it. It sort of feels like the creators wanted to extend Ezio’s story rather than start something new with a protagonist who was more connected to the setting, and though recovering Altair’s library is a fun goal, I think the story should have revolved around someone who grew up in the region.

I did like that we got to delve a little deeper into Altair’s past and learn more about him. Unless you play the portable Assassin’s Creed games, you don’t get to learn much about what happened to Altair in ACII and Brotherhood, so it was nice to see some exploration of his life in a game that was centered on uncovering his work.

Characters: Ezio, our protagonist and player-controlled character, is a little older in this game, and while he’s still likable, he’s much more serious and down-to-business. I’m a bit torn as to whether his demeanor fits the setting of the game - on the one hand, I loved that the European character wasn’t presented as someone who comes to the Middle East and takes charge. Ezio definitely has much to learn, and his skills are seen as having value without being superior. On the other, I do wish the protagonist had been someone who lived in the area - I got the feeling that Ezio was made the protagonist because of his popularity rather than his suitability for the setting, and while I appreciate that Revelations closed out his arc, I don’t really think it was needed.

The major supporting character in this game is Yusuf Tazim, leader of the Turkish Assassin Order. He shows Ezio around and provides much-needed instructions and lore, and he’s incredibly charismatic and personable. Ezio also encounters historical figures such as Manuel Palaiologos and the future Suleiman the Magnificent, which were fun treats for history enthusiasts, but not extremely commanding personalities. Instead of courtesans appearing throughout the city, there are Romani people seen hanging about, and though I liked that they were included and talked about their oppression, I do think their visual design and function during gameplay were somewhat stereotypical.

Ezio furthermore gets a real love interest in this game in the form of Sofia Sartor, an Italian traveler and book collector who helps him locate the keys. I thought the interactions with her were sweet, but she was a kind of damsel in distress and she didn’t have much personality other than liking books for a large part of the game.

Desmond, for his part, doesn’t get a lot to do, despite this game being about reconstructing his psyche and digging into his past. I liked that we learned more about him, but I do wish the stakes of being trapped in the Animus were higher.

Gameplay: Revelations uses almost all of the same mechanics as Brotherhood. There are armor and weapon upgrades, treasure stashes, upgrades to the city of Constantinople (which stimulates the economy and earns the player more money), etc. Art merchants are replaced with book merchants, so instead of buying paintings, players can purchase codices, but functionally, they were the same. Similarly, instead of freeing areas from Borgia influence, players liberate “Templar dens” and turn them into “Assassin dens,” and while they’re thematically different from the Borgia towers, they’re functionally the same. Players complete assassination missions in which you kill the captain of the guard responsible for overseeing the Templar den, but instead of blowing it up, you trick your enemy by signaling Templar retreat, allowing the Assassins to move in and take over the area. You can also recruit assassins and make use of thieves, mercenaries, and courtesans much the same way as in Brotherhood, though courtesans are replaced by Romani people. There was a moment in Sequence 2 when Ezio had to defend the Assassin safehouse from a Templar attack, and gameplay involved placing barricades, commanders, archers, riflemen, and cannon fire. while balancing morale and damage. I kind of liked the strategy involved and it could have been an interesting mechanic for the rest of the Templar dens/Assassin safehouses, but alas, this moment only occurred the one time unless you’re not paying attention to your infamy meter (which was easy to take care of).

The major weapon upgrade in this game is the introduction of the hook blade and various types of bombs. Bombs ranged from simple noisemakers, to stink bombs, mild explosives, smoke screens, and other useful ranged attacks, while the hook blade enabled faster climbing as well as traveling along zip lines. These weapons were fun, but because so much of the other gameplay was the same as in Brotherhood, they felt like cosmetic patches to an otherwise repetitive gameplay experience.

Visuals: As always, I adored the look of the historical setting. The artists and developers beautifully rendered Constantinople, and I loved seeing more rich colors and details on the buildings and clothing of NPCs than when playing as Altair in the first Assassin’s Creed. I also really loved the look of Ezio’s armor, which forwent the classic white and red palette and opted for a more somber grey. The grey blended with the surroundings a bit better, in my opinion.

What really threw me off was that the facial models for some of the returning characters were altered. Both Ezio’s and Desmond’s face shapes are a little different from how they appear in Brotherhood, and though I do not doubt the change was in service to testing out advancements in graphics, I couldn’t quite shake the uncanny valley vibe.

Animations were up and down; upon starting this game, I encountered a horrible glitch that made the screen flicker and movement impossible, but luckily, I was able to fix it easily using instructions from other players who had the bug. There were some really satisfying combat animations, including finishing moves that upped the level of Ezio’s epic skills, but sometimes they lagged or a bug would make them not connect to an opponent. While not the end of the world, it was noticeable and sometimes took me out of the immersion experience.

Final Verdict: Despite repeating much of the gameplay from Brotherhood and unnecessarily extending Ezio’s story, Revelations presents a beautiful atmosphere and fun adventure to unlock some much-desired background to Altair’s narrative.

#video game review

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stardust--kid · 5 years

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to love and be loved

i’ve been thinking about these things for a long time, but i wrote this because of my english class. i haven’t talked about this on this blog at all, and i haven’t talked about it with my family much either. it’s kinda scary putting this out there, but i think i want to. my english teacher said i should think about publishing it but uhh idk how to do that so i’m just gonna post it lmao. anyways yeah it’s scary being vulnerable so pls be kind ty

We’re writing an essay in english class. I don’t know how to start. I’m already failing the class, so who knows if it matters anyways. The inquiry question I wrote is “Can an individual hold personal beliefs about gender and sexuality without endorsing or contributing to the long history of oppression and violence against the LGBTQ+ community?” I looked through the databases but I haven’t found anything that directly talks about it. Nobody really does.

I grew up going to church. Nearly every Sunday for seventeen years. The first time I heard that gay people existed was in second grade. My best friend told me about a woman who married another woman. I didn’t believe her. Then, I forgot about the whole conversation.

My first year in middle school we had rainbow day. I’ve always loved rainbows, so I found as many colourful articles of clothing that I could. They gave us rainbow tattoos. When I came home, my mom was skeptical. Rainbows are fine, she said, but you do know what this day is about, right? I didn’t. I couldn’t figure out why she was uncomfortable.

In seventh grade my teacher told us that if a boy likes a girl, that’s okay. If a girl likes a boy, that’s okay. If a boy likes a boy, that’s okay. If a girl likes a girl, that’s okay too. Nobody had ever told me that before. I asked my friend who also went to church “Isn’t being gay a choice?” She told me yes it was. I believed her.

In grade eight, I met one of my best friends. They had moved back to [my city]. They taught me that not everyone was straight, not everyone was cisgender, and it’s not something they choose. They taught me to be more open minded. I still believed what I had been told, that it was a sin, but I loved them anyways. I loved all my friends with everything I had.

It took me until halfway through high school to realize I liked girls. I was terrified. When I told my parents, I thought they might disown me. They didn’t, but my mom wouldn’t believe me, and my dad forgot. I went to christian camp every year starting the summer after grade nine. My friends there joked about things being gay, but not in a good way. None of them would ever think it was okay to murder someone for their sexuality. They’re not bad people. I knew that. But I didn’t feel safe.

There was a conference at my church last November. It was called Gender, Sexuality, and Grace. I paid five dollars to go. I’d never met anyone else who wasn’t straight, but still had a faith that was the most important thing in their life. I felt seen for the first time in my life. I bought the speaker’s book, and cried in the car on the way home. Nobody else from my family went with me. Nobody at my church talked about it afterwards. I’m scared to bring it up.

I recently was at a retreat where the speaker talked about being vulnerable. He told us how in order to have the kind of church community the Bible talks about we need to stop hiding and pretending our lives are perfect, because it makes others more afraid to be open if everyone seems like they have their lives together, and so they struggle alone. He challenged us to be vulnerable with someone next to us. I told them my story. They didn’t know what to say.

I’m not the kind of person to like keeping secrets. I like being open with people. I know that my friends at church, my youth pastor, my small group leaders, my family, they would never hurt me. I’m not likely to experience violence. Not everyone here is accepting but this city is a pretty safe place. I’m lucky. But I’m still so scared. I don’t know how to tell my extended family. I don’t know how to tell my brother. I don’t know how to tell anyone at church. I’m the same person I’ve always been, but I don’t know if they would be able to see that.

At the conference I went to in November, I remember this one quote stuck out to me. “The church is meant to be a hospital for broken people, so when did it become a graveyard for gay people?” I want to know that too. Queer people are seen as different, as others. There are so many people who lie, who gossip, and who are envious. But nobody ostracizes them. They are not defined by their sin. But then again, neither am I. I know that no matter what I do, my salvation is secure. I’m a child of the most high God. Despite our differences, we’re all in the same boat in the end. I wish more people could see that.

I still don’t know how to write my essay. I don’t have a thesis or proper research. But I wish this wasn’t a topic that nobody talks about. It makes me feel alone. I want community and relationship and love. Really, that’s all anyone wants. Queer people are people first. We’re not that different.

#christian #actuallychristian #lgbtq community #side a #side a christian #side b #side b christian #homophobia mention #i'm still not sure if i'm side a or side b yet ;-;#whatever God wants for me i'll trust Him in that #but i don't know what that is yet #but the internet is the only place rlly that i've heard people talk abt stuff like this #post by kate #storytime with kate

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laranjatoranjalaranja · 5 years

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Aesthetics and History of Art: what is their role under fully-automated luxury communism?

Aesthetics has become unpopular among the left. Today, it is commonly associated with fascism and right-wing manipulative propaganda tactics. Walter Benjamin’s famous text about the modern reproduction of artworks can be credited with laying out a great part of the structure and terms of this discussion. In his work, what he calls the “aestheticisation of politics” is famously associated with fascism, while art, understood as a kind of aesthetics that has been politicised, is contrarily and positively associated with communism.

The main reason why this text acquired the cult status it has today, within the artworld, is because of the way in which it defines contemporary art as inherently revolutionary. Benjamin believes that, thanks to recent advances in its technological reproducibility, truly contemporary artworks were finally freed from old hierarchical ideas of originality, and thus acquired a new and enhanced political potential, particularly suitable for the communist political project.

Aesthetics, on the other hand, without the politisation that would turn it into art, becomes simply the domain of appearances, simulation, and spectacle in the Debordian sense. And this is where this theory starts to show its fragility.

A closer look at Benjamin’s theory reveals it to be susceptible to the same criticism as Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. As Jacques Rancière has pointed out in The Emancipated Spectator, the separation between the simulated appearances that seduce the masses, and the true reality only accessible to some, is unfounded and misleading, despite being commonly understood to be a fact of life.

The legitimacy of this separation depends on a thriving platonic idealism that often affects both right and left of the political spectrum and which is particularly prevalent in the Western world. According to this ideology, the mind and the body are hierarchically separated. While the mind is our reliable means of accessing the truth, the body is the deceiving realm of flawed sensorial perception which is completely unreliable unless previously subjected to correction by reason.

If we understand aesthetics in its broadest possible form, as simply that which relates to the senses, it inevitably falls into the suspicious second half of this division. But art can still be saved if it is not understood in aesthetic terms but as politicised aesthetics. The politicisation of aesthetics entails fighting ‘the spectacle’, by subjecting the ‘simulations’ our body perceives to the political ‘corrections’ of our intellectual reason.**

To further clarify why this kind of framework is flawed, it becomes useful to make a quick detour to the work of another author. In Pedagogy of The Oppressed, Paulo Freire defines praxis as a dialectical union between theory and practice. This means that, while our theory can, and should, inform our practice, this same practice also needs to inform our theory, thus making sure it matches our actual, lived reality. This means that the relationship between mind and body, theory and practice, reason and senses, is better understood as one of cooperation and mutual dependency than one of hierarchy and antagonism. It also means that aesthetics, broadly understood, plays an essential role in this dialectical process.

But, going back to Benjamin, I have said that the main reason his theory got so popular within the artworld is because of the revolutionary character he assigned to art. But this is not the only reason. Complementing this idea, we have a second one which relates to the phenomenon of demonization of aesthetics I mentioned in the very beginning.

It is becoming increasingly hard to ignore the fact that the art faces serious, and inherent, issues and contradictions. The complementing aspect of what makes Benjamin’s argument appealing is that it allows us to keep our faith in art, while also feeling like we are targeting the problems that ‘threaten its purity and integrity’. These problems are thus presented as non-inherent, originating from external sources, and a great deal of what made this ‘outsourcing’ possible has been the use of aesthetics as a scapegoat for the issues affecting art in general.

Aesthetics has proven to be a particularly good fit for this. This is because if, on the one hand, some people felt suspicious towards art because they thought it was shallow, futile and even deceiving, we could argue, like Benjamin, that this was a problem of aesthetics and not art. Although this ‘futility’ argument is relatively common, it is not a very strong one (as I have tried to show when I mentioned Ranciere’s critique). A strong argument that can be directed against art, on the other hand, would be that it is a historical invention of the modern West, which means it has not always existed and, therefore, the usefulness of its continued existence becomes open for debate. But this critique too can be diverted towards aesthetics.

In fact, aesthetics much more that art, was accused of being something made up in the 18th century by Western white males unaware of their privilege, to create rules that would validate what they thought of as beautiful and worthy of attention. Aesthetics, as a discipline, deserved all the criticism it got. More recently, the art market and the ‘artworld’, where also targets of a similar critique which, was also perfectly valid but, for some reason, continued to assume that all these things can be separated from art itself. As if art could ever have come to existence, and continue to exist, without them.

This criticism of aesthetics as an academic discipline, the art market or the artworld, is usually done using a leftist discourse. But critiques that extend to the notion of art itself are rare.

Occasionally, more radical leftists will become interested in topics like art. And many of them do end up realising, half way through their own research, courses or degrees, that all these accusations often thrown at ‘aesthetics’ are just as applicable to our notion of art. Frequently, these people end up being the ones who are more dismissive and suspicious of our contemporary cultural institutions in general. They often believe that art, like most of our contemporary culture, can be categorised as ‘capitalist spectacle’, and therefore should be understood as a distraction to be ignored.

These people can be easily convinced that art is a capitalist invention of the modern West. But the conclusion they draw from this is that the best thing to do is to dismiss all the things presented as art by our artistic institutions as capitalist distraction tactics, meant to divert our attention from the ‘real’ issues. What they fail to recognise, on the one hand, is that art is not a distraction to be ignored, but a weapon to be fought. And, on the other hand, they make the mistake of accepting the terms in which the capitalist artworld defines what aesthetics can be.

Capitalism knows well how to use aesthetics to its advantage. It has developed things like marketing and branding, as well as art, which are complex and highly effective techniques designed to work specifically to its own advantage. It knows how to tell the seductive and persuasive story of its own triumph and legitimacy.

This left, on the other hand, has little more than outdated ideas of communist propaganda, which are literally from the last century. And this is because, today, the left often conceives of aesthetics as either evil or merely secondary. We haven’t taken any time to develop an alternative way to understand this other part of us, the one that is more connected to the senses and which is equally essential to understanding the world around us.

While part of what I will do here is question the validity of, and politics behind, our modern notion of art, I also want to argue that aesthetics is, actually, not necessarily susceptible to the same criticism. Unlike art, the artworld and the art market, the word aesthetics can have an older, broader meaning. Aesthetics, as that which simply relates to the senses, is not susceptible to the same criticism as its modern academic homonym, or as art, because it is not to be understood as a Human creation. It is not connected to any idea of ‘what it means to be Human’ or any ‘essence’ of Humanity. So, in this specific sense, aesthetics can be said to be an a-historical concept.

The prevailing platonic idealism I mentioned previously, leads people to prefer thinking in terms of Art and Humanity, rather than in terms of aesthetics, which would imply the recognition of a common ground, shared among us and all the other animals.

Aesthetic sensibility, understood in this way, is possessed by anyone and anything that simply possesses senses. From humans, to animals and maybe even other kinds of beings. While we can say that not all cultures have art because the concept of art is an invention of the West, we cannot say the same of things like aesthetics in this broad sense.***

Rather than dismissing aesthetics as a product of capitalism or a more or less futile thing to be dealt with ‘later’, we need to recognise that capitalism will thrive as long as it continues presenting itself as the best, or even the only, materially realistic, viable, alternative. No matter how many theories and manifestos the left has, as long we are not capable of presenting aesthetic alternatives to what capitalism has been imposing, none of it will feel, or even be, translatable to real life.

The left cannot go on pretending like aesthetics is a dispensable, secondary issue. Aesthetics is not a distraction, it is an essential part of how we experience our lives and therefore it too deserves a pride of place in our political agenda. Ignoring it will not make it irrelevant.

At this point, I have been studying History of Art in academia for 5 years, and it strikes me how, despite appearances, truly revolutionary History of Art barely exists. Despite the overwhelming number of so-called radical journals and other kinds of left-wing publications, most of it is actually liberal. What I mean by this is that most of the people who write for these publications seem to share a common goal: to free art from the elites’ domination (much like Benjamin). This is a liberal goal because it aims at reforming rather than revolutionising the existing system. It aims at saving art at all cost and it rules of even considering that its obvious and persisting problems might be inherent and that a possible solution would be to replace it with something radically different. Related to this, is another striking problem which is the prevailing assumption that art and the elites are separable to begin with.

I want to make it clear here that art cannot be understood (especially within academic contexts) as a human constant. Studying the history of art implies that art has a history and, therefore, a historical origin. Humans were not ‘artistic’ by nature, since the beginning of time. Art is a concept created by the modern West. There were no actual synonyms to the word Art in non-Western cultures and no one in Europe was even talking about such a thing until the 18th century (see Kristeller’s The Modern System of The Arts (pt. I and pt. II) and Shiner’s The Invention of Art*).

It is irresponsible and anachronistic for Art historians to say or imply that art is something that humans have always done. This is an imperialistic tendency that we need to, not only distance ourselves from, but also actively fight against. And I stress actively fight against because these things I am writing about here have already been mentioned in academic publications from decades ago (Kristeller’s first article was published in 1951).

Since its creation, Art has existed to serve the capitalist elites (see Taylor’s Art, An Enemy of The People*). It was created by them, for them. To both serve and represent their interests.

I say capitalist elites, specifically, because the works commissioned by the traditional nobility did not fit with our modern idea of art in their original contexts. The treasures of the French monarchy only became Art when the bourgeoisie took over and made them what they are today - the collection of an Art museum. These objects were stripped of their original meanings and functions and became targets of ‘disinterested contemplation’ and those who see this as a revolutionary triumph over an oppressive regime conveniently forget that the reality is more complex and the same thing was also done with foreign objects stolen by the French colonisers, shortly after.

Today, many people are still wondering why is Duchamp’s Fountain Art. The answer is, mainly, because this is what the elites behind our art institutions decided is art. The line between Art and non-Art is merely an institutional one. Art is an institutional system. And this is a system whose tables cannot simply be turned because, in order for Art to exist, it needs to distinguish itself from other modern categories like crafts and popular culture. The category of Art depends on this hierarchical distinction because, simply put, Art is High Culture.

This means that as long as art, as we understand it today, exists, there must also exist a privileged group that gets to draw the line between High and low culture. The cultural identity of these elites might change overtime, but their status as oppressors will always remain, within this structure. This is why the quest to ‘democratise’ art is merely reformist rather than revolutionary.

I am not advocating for the burning of museums, Futurism style. I do think museums are important sources of information that should be free especially when they are public. What I am saying is that when these museums exhibit things that were not originally intended to be art as if they have always and unquestionably been so, they are making a serious mistake. They are silencing alternative narratives and disrespecting the people who created the objects they claim to be spreading knowledge about. They are suppressing aesthetic diversity, not promoting it.

Regarding contemporary Art museums and galleries, I think it would be fair to say that they are mostly bullshit. I make intentional efforts not to give any of my money to them (this also applies to academic Art Schools). I sometimes visit them, when they are free, because I want my opinions to be informed. I don’t usually pay for any tickets (they are usually even more expensive than regular museums anyway) nor do I let myself be troubled by those who believe I cannot be an expert on Art with a proper opinion, if I don’t go to all the ‘landmark’ cultural events. I try not to let art snobs like Jonathan Jones dictate which cultural events are or aren’t worthy of attention.

To conclude, History of Art as an academic discipline still has serious issues. Real History of Art should recognise that Art has a specific historical origin, and not treat it like a mysterious (mythical) part of ‘Human Nature’.

To do leftist History of Art, nevertheless, we need to take this even one step further and study the consequences of the capitalist origins of this phenomenon and how it developed from there. The impacts of its structure, the way it works, how it legitimises itself, its weaknesses, all these should be analysed in ways that will allow this phenomenon to be coherently perceived through a left-wing lens, subsequently enabling us to imagine viable alternatives to the current Art system (Richard Sennett does something like this in his book The Craftsman. If you don’t feel like reading, he also explains it beautifully in his lectures on craftsmanship available on youtube).

Also, I feel like I should mention that the mythical treatment Art historians give their subject, either emphatically and intentionally or through the passive and implicit acceptance of this mythical definition, is probably one of the things that mostly contributes to the much criticised workings of our contemporary art market. Surely, one of the reasons why artworks are sold at such exorbitant prices is because what these people are buying is not just good looking paintings. These objects are being sold as the latest, most recent pieces in the important puzzle that is Human History. Once gathered all in the correct order, these pieces are thought to reveal what it means to be Human. The ‘History’ of Art I’ve been criticising here is largely responsible for the maintenance of this profitable myth, that has been giving the powerful disproportionate control over the narratives of our collective existences.

Notes:

* If you don’t have access to these texts via your public libraries, genesis online library should have it for free download, just click here and try following the links presented (they are forced to keep changing domains because certain people don’t like it when information is too accessible).

** I do believe there is something more to be said about this politicisation of aesthetics. I think it can be a very useful and interesting terminology, but it needs to be conceptualised outside of this limited ‘reality versus simulation’ framework.

*** Or, for example, of something like venal blood. All people and animals with venal blood can be said to have venal blood, despite understanding or not what this means. A culture which does not understand what we mean by ‘art’ today, cannot be said to have it (they will have other things, which they will understand in different terms, and which, I want to emphasise, are not of lesser value just because they won’t fit our ‘artistic model’).

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goldenagewebnovel · 3 years

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Volume 1 Chapter 1

The feeling of loading into a new area is really weird. Not to say that it’s unpleasant, but for those first few seconds nothing makes sense. Then it's like everything is being drawn in three dimensions with different colored lines and vectors. Then just as you slowly start to get an outline of what’s in front of you, boom! All at once, with color and sound, the whole world explodes into life.

I remember hitting that cloud at terminal velocity but now, not only am I no longer falling but there’s even a gentle breeze blowing across this still field.

There is a quaint little village further in front of me. Rows of houses and buildings, all made up of wood and stone, and looking like they belong in medieval Europe. There’s even smoke coming out of some of the houses. There are cobblestone roads connecting everything in the village, that eventually extend into dirt paths, and those paths lead into green grass everywhere else.

Off to the right of the village is a small forest, with inviting shadows and soft rays of light glowing in-between the trees. Instead of a sky it looks like there is a softly glowing cloud dome surrounding the entire area.

Directly in front me is what looks to be a ring of flowers. They are surrounding a perfectly manicured circle of grass that I’m standing on…

Wait.

I look down with trembling eyes and realize: I’m standing. I’m actually standing on my own two feet. That’s a sight I thought I would never be able to see.

Whatever strength was allowing me to stand leaves my legs, and I collapse to me knees. I can only hold on to my face and cry. Deep, shuddering cries. In this moment it doesn't matter what else this game promised. For this gift alone I am already grateful.

I would be embarrassed to say how long I sat there crying, but I genuinely don't know how long it was. By the time I could stop shaking and actually wiped my eyes I noticed that there were other people in a half circle around me. There were eight people standing just in front of the flower ring and they were all looking at me. At least none of them looked too uncomfortable because of my breakdown; in fact, most of them were giving me really warm smiles.

If I hadn't just finished crying my eyes out I would have been shocked at the spread of people in front of me. Nothing quite prepares you to see creatures that are clearly not human but still entirely intelligent. That aside, all of them looked to be varied in age and ethnicity. The one in the middle, who looked to be in charge, stepped forward.

“I’m guessing this is your first time playing a Full VR game. It’s different for everyone, but from my experience a lot of people with disabilities who play for the first time react pretty much the same as you.”

“Yeah, I’ve been in a wheelchair my whole life. I know this technology is supposed to be crazy, but it kind of overwhelmed me there. Sorry about that, my name’s D0n.”

“No worries. I’m Arinn, the Magic Instructor. I’ve got first shift to greet the new players. We’re heading to the Magic building first, so follow me and I'll give you a basic rundown of the game.”

Arinn looked young, but aside from that he was wearing the classical magic outfit. Flowing red robes with a big gnarled wooden staff, just like you would expect to see from a sorcerer in a fantasy world.

I put my hands on my knees to stand up, but in that moment I realize that I have no idea how to really stand. I don't know how to walk.

“Um, do you think I can get a hand? I don't really know what I'm doing.”

“Oh, sure. My bad.”

Arinn and two of the guys waiting with the group come over and help pick me up. It’s wild; I know this is just a game but I can really feel their touch. The roughness of the cloth and the feeling of their body heat are clearly felt through my arms.

They set me on my feet but the most I can do by myself is wobble in place. Arinn turns to me and tells me not to worry about it.

“You're really not alone, D0n. A lot of first timers — no matter their situation — tend to have a hard time wrapping their head around how to move in Full VR. I'm going to go continue the tutorial with the rest of the group but why don't you stay with these two? They also need a bit of time to get adjusted, you all can help each other out.”

He points at two other players, already off to the side, who look as unsteady on their feet as I do. One of them appears to be a young boy, who can't be much older than 10. Next to him is an old woman, she’s looking around the area and appears to be a little shocked by what she is seeing. From the way they are holding on to each other it looks like they are grandson and grandmother.

The two players who helped me stand up also help the three of us walk over to a soft patch of grass near the Magic building. Both of them are nearly two feet taller then me and with their green skin they’re clearly orcs. They let us know that these are actually some alt characters they are making, so they don't need to go through the tutorial. Once they finish helping us out they are just going to go straight to the main game.

After the three of us get situated the orc pair make their way towards what looks to be a gate at the far end of the Village, in front of a large hole with a pedestal. We wave happily to them until they are completely out of sight. I hope they have a good time with their new characters.

The sensation of standing still feels really unnatural to me, so I stay sitting on the grass and try to get used to the feeling of being able to move my legs freely and without pain. The grandmother is leaning against a nearby wall, using it to support her walking; it looks like she has plenty of strength and balance to walk but is unused to having that strength available in the first place. Her grandson is still a little bit clumsy in his movements but he is already running in literal circles around the both of us. His eyes are shining as he tries to look at everything at once — getting dizzy multiple times because of it.

“What's your name again, dear? Oh, I guess I should ask what your character’s name is. I decided to call myself Nana, that way my little Ethan can continue to call me like he’s used to.”

“My name’s D0n. It’s an old username I’ve had forever. Those old games were definitely different then this though. It’s a lot to get used to, but I got the time so I figure I'll take it slow.”

The young boy, Ethan, walks over to his grandmother and hugs her around her hips. Nana gently pats his head.

“You’re not quite at at my age yet, but us older people can't allow ourselves to fall behind the youth. Nothing else to do but try it out and get used to it, right?”

I really respect how open minded this old lady is, but something she said doesn’t make sense. “That’s an awesome perspective to have! But, I'm still only 28.”

“Oh my, so young, I'm so sorry. Still, if you go out of your way to give yourself gray hair like that you're only going to give people ideas. Enjoy your youth, there's no need to rush into having hair like mine.” Nana says as she pats her snow white hair.

I have no idea what she’s talking about. Then it hits me — I told the Overvoice to just make my character look exactly like I do in real life. Wait… so even in a video game, I still can't escape everyone saying I look like an old man???

I put my head in my hands and groan, realizing my mistake. Nana and Ethan laugh lightly while I grumble about how I could've picked any other hair color. It’s a fantasy game after all!

Despite what she said, Nana is able to pretty quickly get used to moving around with a game body. I wave at the two of them as they go to enter the Magic instruction building a few minutes behind our group. I’m still going to need a bit more time to wrap my head around legs that actually work.

It's not that standing or walking is all that hard to do. In fact, whenever I stop thinking about it I'm able to do them both fairly easily. It's just that since I never had to get used to that feeling in the real world, I get caught up with how unreal it is that I can do it in the game, and then it’s like all the strength leaves my legs. Still, I decide to go at it without getting discouraged, and I'm eventually able to walk a full circuit around the village — and even run a little — without falling down.

The secret is to make sure I just don't look down.

I was able to see the whole scope of the tutorial village from the spawn point but as I walk along the cobblestone roads it hits me that this place really is quite small. Most of the buildings look identical. Wooden walls with cobblestone foundations and big oak doors. The biggest difference between them are the signs hanging above the doors. Each one has a picture on it: a sword, a shield, an anvil, a bow.

All the doors are closed and there are no windows to look inside. But I can still hear totally different sounds coming out of each of the buildings. At the far end of the road there's a building larger than the rest, that has a big sign with the word “Library” on it.

I'm tempted to walk over there right now and see what books they have but since the village is so small that there’s not much to do in the first place, I decide to finish exploring the outside first. I still have to get used to my body anyway.

I leave one of the dirt roads and start to cross the grass, towards that small forest I saw earlier. Behind me I can hear players walking about and I can see Arinn going to greet a new batch of new players.

The edge of the forest looks just as inviting as it did at first glance. There are plenty of trees and bushes and vegetation, but none of it is so dense as to feel oppressive. In fact, it looks like the perfect place for a nature walk. Deeper in, I think I can see some deers and rabbits grazing.

I reach out by the foot of a nearby tree and pick up a rock the size of a baseball. I toss it up in the air and catch it as it falls.

It's strange how natural the action feels. Even if my strength wasn't the best my hand-eye coordination was always pretty good. But there's nothing special that I have to do to use it inside the game, it feels just like doing it in real life. I take the rock and mimic the pitching throw of the baseball players I’ve seen on TV. The rock shoots out in a straight line, flying so far between the trees that I can't see where it lands. It flew with way more force then I ever would have been able to use normally.

So like real life, but a little cooler.

There's not much else to look at in the outskirts of the village. The clouds that make up the surrounding dome are super fluffy but totally impenetrable. I’m tempted to start poking around some of the other class instruction buildings but I want to save them as a treat for later. I spend most of my time getting used to walking and jogging and comfortably moving in my own body.

Arinn comes to ask me if I'm ready to move on a couple of times but I’m honestly having a lot of fun just running around. At one point I'm even able to pull off a cart wheel for the first time in my life!

I have no clue how much time I spent just playing in the field. I’m so used to having a watch or my phone on me at all times that it’s hard to judge time off the top of my head. I guess it's something I'll have to get used to in a medieval fantasy game. Eventually though I see Arinn waiting by the flower ring for a new group to spawn, so I make my way over to him.

He gives me a wiry smile and says, “Had your fill?”

“For the moment.” I give a grin back. “So what are you doing in this place?”

There's no way I can imagine an NPC acting this much like a real person.

“I've been playing this game for about six months now.” Says Arinn. “I do it pretty casually, so I don't really level up that fast. But theres a really cool book of fire magic available for instructors at the moment and I gotta have it.”

He goes on to tell me that Golden Age offers quests with rare rewards for putting in time a Tutorial Village as a class instructor; as long as you are above a certain skill level. This way, new players can get a chance to talk to people who actually know what the game is like, and experienced players get the chance to get unique rewards. If no player has taken the quest yet, an NPC will spawn in the village.

“Since I won't be able to devote a lot of time to this place in one go I'm just gonna put in a little bit of time each week, for about a month. I know it's a little odd to basically have a part-time job inside of a game, but I have to say, when I look at players who are just starting out it really lets me feel how far I've come.”

I smile at Arinn. It’s really cool that the game devs found a way to offer this kind of support to new players. But man, people really will do just about anything as long as you say the words “rare loot.”

A new batch of players spawn in a beam of light at the stone column. Arinn greets them and we all make our way to his class building.

It doesn't look like anyone broke down crying in this group.

The Magic instruction building seems to be pretty sparse on the inside. One wall has an array of bookshelves, filled with all kinds of super old-school magical looking books, and little knickknacks of strange creatures and oddities in glass bottles. On the other wall there is a row of straw dummies, lined up like a shooting range.

“All right, since you all decided to play a fantasy game, I figure you'd want to learn how to use magic first. So I'm assuming some of you have played an MMO before. Honestly, what can be done in Golden Age isn't that much different from traditional MMO’s. What makes this game special is that unlike a normal game, Full VR gives allows you to feel what it’s like to use magic for yourself.”

With that said, in one smooth motion, Arinn turns, points the end of his wooden staff at a training dummy, and says the word, “Fireball.” From the tip of his staff, streams of bright red fire gather into a ball, pause for a moment, and then shoots off. It strikes the center of the straw dummy, catching it on fire. The dummy safely extinguishes after a few seconds.

“As you can see players are able to genuinely wield magic in this world. There are three things that make magic special in Golden Age.

“For the more experienced gamers, you can see that unlike most MMO’s there are no damage counters or enemy health displays. Those numbers still exist but the developers decided to show them through the way a mob or a player reacts to getting hit. As you get used to fighting you're going to have to get used to reading the responses of your opponents.

“Second, is that almost all magic in this game is run through Golden Age’s elemental system. There are eight elements: fire, water, wind, lightning, earth, metal, light, and dark. Now there are some outliers, like combined elements or neutral mana, but I’ll let some of the other class instructors cover that. The main point is that these elements affect what spells you can use, what skills are improved by what element, and what the effect on the target is.

“The last and most important thing for you to get used to in this building, is that you can physically feel mana as it moves through your body. There is a plate in front of each dummy that has the incantation words for each of the basic elemental spells. While you are in the Tutorial Village, you don't have any specializations; so while the game will not assist you much, you can try out anything you want while you’re here. Why don't each of you walk up to a dummy, hold out your hand, and recite one of the spells? They may not always come out right the first time, but it will give you a chance to get used to what mana feels like.”

I don't know how I was able to hear anything Arinn said. As soon as I saw that fire ball spell — real magic — I feel like I've been bouncing on my feet the whole time. Considering some of the giggles coming from the players next to me, I think I might've actually been bouncing.

I ignore it, and make my way over to the row at the back of the building.

I pick up the plaque and stand behind the shooting line. It looks like the basic spell for each element is some form of ball that you shoot out. Seems like a good standardized way of setting up the magic, since the most basic use is just shooting it out of your hand. I decide to re-create the fireball spell that I saw the magic instructor use. Because after all, when you think about magic, it's got to be a fireball right?

“I call upon the spirit of the flame to guide my path, Fireball!”

As I read the words for the incantation it suddenly feels as though I am aware of every time I miss-speak or fail to put emphasis on certain words correctly. From the center of my body I feel a warmth gather and then travel up my shoulder, through my arm in a clockwise spiral, to gather in my hand. When that warmth reaches my palm I see little streams of fire come forward and gather with the mana leaving my hand, all curling together into a tight ball. I am so surprised by the alien sensation that I completely fail to aim my hand, made worse as the backlash of the spell shooting out shoves back my arm. The fireball dissolves pointlessly against the wall over the right shoulder of the dummy.

I can hear the other players doing about as well me, with Arinn repeating for us to not worry about our aim and just get used to the feeling of it.

I look at my hand, shocked. Again, I know it's a fantasy game, and I know it's not real life. But I could feel the heat of the fire against my palm before it shot. I even feel a little bit of an emptiness from the mana that left my body.

Arinn gets all of our attention one more time.

“Even though those were basic spells, they still cost some of your mana. I want each of you to focus on your status window, and get an idea of how much mana that spell just used. You can either focus on the symbol that is in the corner of your eyesight, or some players get used to it by reaching out to try to touch it.”

Until he said something, I hadn’t noticed it, but in the corner of my eye there is a small, almost translucent square with what looks to be the symbol of a body on it. When I try to see what it looks like more clearly it expands like a hologram in front of my eyes. I can see my name, my stats. An empty section for my skills and my future classes.

There is a section for what looks to be my inventory — the only things in there being the clothes that I am wearing. In the top corner of the screen there is a dual clock that shows the current in-game and real-world time.

Huh, so that’s where the watch is.

Underneath my name I can see a green bar and a blue bar. The blue bar is not quite full, but it looks like the mana has already started to regenerate.

Arinn speaks again.

“Now there are some players who don't like doing this, saying that it messes with their immersion, but I highly recommend that you all select the option to always show your Health and Mana. That way, it'll be in the bottom right of your vision, and you won’t be shocked if they ever run out. At least do it until you get used to feeling out where you are by yourself.”

I decide to take his advice and click on the display option next to my health and mana. When I exit out of my menu I can still see the body icon in the left-hand corner of my vision, but now on the bottom right I can see green and blue bars that are just as translucent. If I try to look at them, they come into sharp focus.

By now the blue bar has pretty much refilled. I wonder what the actual rate of mana recharge is. Did it refill so fast because the spell I used was a basic one or because I only used a little bit and then took a break? In fact, I realize there are a lot of things in this game I just plain don’t know about.

Arinn begins to suggest other buildings — and other instructors — the players gathered in the room might be interested in visiting. Essentially, we’re free to do as we wish now.

There are some people next to me that are still testing out a couple of spells, with varying degrees of accuracy. I can hear a party of three friends — two elves and a dwarf — discuss how they might check out the archery building, but they seem more excited to just get into the game and start playing. In fact, that seems to be the general idea of a lot of the players in this room. I guess it is true that if there is anything they don't understand, they can always just look it up later.

As many of the players make their way out of the building I see Arinn pull out a few books from the bookshelf and sit in a chair by the doorway. I guess he’s off duty from greeting the new players now.

I’m still a little undecided on what to do myself. I look at the emptying room, with it’s wall of bookcases and knickknacks. There are still two people here practicing spells; I’m still just as wowed by the sight of real magic in front of my eyes. So for lack of a better idea I decide to try one more spell before moving on.

“Wash away the obstacles before me great spirits, Waterball!”

I can feel the mana start to gather in my core again but it’s different this time. Not a warmth, but like a cool flush. It flows into my shoulder, taking a slightly longer path, and flows to my palm in a counter-clockwise spiral. This time, I feel little droplets of water against my palm as the spell shoots out. I’m just as distracted as the last time though, and the waterball hits the wall above the dummies left shoulder.

Wow. These devs were able to make a game so realistic that it feels like I’m really here, standing on my own two feet. It’s like the most freeing dream imaginable. The fact that they even put that attention to detail in the magic, that the elements move and feel different from each other: it’s impressive.

But more than that, it makes me curious.

It’s that same curiosity I had when I didn’t know exactly how mana recharged. And I think back to what Arinn had said. That even though all of the numbers and stats are really there, you can only tell by feeling.

I hold on to the spell plaque I was going to put down. I stretch my hand out, reading the incantation for a windblade in my head first.

I wonder… if I take my time and experiment… just how much control over magic can I get?

#Volume 1 #Story

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lavotha · 4 years

Text

There are always two sides to a story

In Zen thinking, “Nothing is what it seems” is why you should question everything, as people’s intentions are not always clear. Or, simply said: Don’t judge a book by its cover!, a phrase dating back to the mid-19th century.

I was a competitive swimmer for my local club in the suburbs of Buenos Aires during my teens, and I love to swim in rivers and especially in the sea. So, I can best explain how this unprecedented world situation feels to me, by comparing it with getting caught in an undertow at the beach, sucked under a big wave. You get disoriented while the wave holds you down for what seems several eternal seconds until it lifts you again a few feet out, behind the breaking wave. Your heart is literally in your throat, and you feel like a puppet. The best is to try to keep calm, and then swim upward to the surface. You swallow the salty water getting choked, but then you spit it out and breathe again!

On December 31, 2019, Chinese authorities alerted the World Health Organization of pneumonia cases in Wuhan City, Hubei province, China, with an unknown cause. Immediately after you start hearing alarming news announced by “so-called” experts, that the virus will infect and kill millions, based on unproven facts and faulty comparisons, later refuted. Panic ensues crowding the health care system in affected countries. Instead of helping those nations to cope, the world goes into lockdown! Every man for himself. Information comes fast and pounding like a giant wave, more like a Tsunami that spares nothing on its path!

Nothing gets media coverage but “the virus” as if nothing else matters in the world. (I refuse to use its proper denomination because it is getting far too much PR from everybody else.) Drowned under waves of sensationalist news, you have to gain your calm, reflect, sort out the information, and find the real facts, compare, and form a personal opinion. Then start searching avidly and systematically for the other side, because there are always two sides to a story, never forget that!

Fear is a powerful drug

An experienced journalist friend of ours told me recently, “There is no oxygen in the media for other opinions at this time.” The counting of the virus victims worldwide is published everywhere, day-in-and-day-out obsessively and relentlessly, as never done before! It plays on the fear of dying most of us have, causing extreme anxiety, known as Thanatophobia. (In Greek language, Thanatos refers to death, and Phobos means fear.)

Having lived under the military ruling in Argentina during my youth, I know by experience that fear is a powerful drug used by totalitarian regimes. The goal is to create an enemy, real or perceived, and then offer protection, demand total obedience, and end up exerting massive control of the population. I reacted to the present situation with the same alarm bells ringing in my whole body. How comes that with viruses every season and a plethora of other illnesses, there has never been daily worldwide public counting? Immediately, I ask myself: Are they trying to create panic and scare us purposely?

Respect other people’s opinions but dare to voice yours!

My moral values, my principles, my deeply set beliefs that have served me all my life are the underlying truths on which I base my dealings with the world. When somebody starts challenging those values and beliefs, I immediately question, especially when they are testing my fundamentals of humanity. I may not get the answers, but I will keep challenging. I have been an avid reader since a young age and I am very curious. I ask so many questions that my husband says I am like a 5-year old child. Well, I nurture that child inside me and hope it never leaves me, because it helps me in my quest for truth and meaning, particularly during difficult times.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan said: “Everyone is entitled to his opinion, but not his own facts.” I do respect other people’s opinions, but at the same time, I am more of an independent thinker. However, through the years, I learned the hard way that it is better to encourage dialogue, not hostility. You do not grow and evolve by arguing with others, but by gaining new insights, exchanging opinions, and perspectives.

You are guided in your reasoning by your experiences, good or bad. Writer B.J. Neblett said: “We are the total of our experiences. Those experiences – be they positive or negative – make us the person we are at any given point in our lives. And, like a flowing river, those same experiences, and those yet to come, continue to influence and reshape the person we are and the person we become. None of us are the same as we were yesterday, nor will be tomorrow.”

Are we losing our humanity?

I remember growing up in Buenos Aires, whenever a friend or member of the family was ill, everybody in his entourage took turns in keeping him company in the hospital or at home. Are we now being asked to leave suffering people alone? It is common knowledge that human contact helps healing, a gentle embrace, touching a hand can not only lower stress levels but also boost the immune system and promote healing. Will the human touch become obsolete? Are we going to treat every illness, every virus through isolation? Are we losing our humanity?

Humanity is the human race, which includes everyone on Earth. It also defines the qualities that make us human, such as the ability to love and have compassion by helping one another, and not be a robot or alien.The word humanity is from the Latin humanitas for “human nature, kindness.” Humanity is about caring for and helping others whenever and wherever possible; it means giving a hand when they need it the most; it is about extending unconditional love to each other and every living being on Earth. Humaneness is the quality of compassion or consideration for others, people, and animals.

Love your neighbor as yourself – Mark 12:31

Do you believe that we find strength through unity? I certainly do, but it seems to have been replaced by Run for cover and forsaking all others save yourself! In the name of the good of all, most countries agreed to go into confinement, some more than others, at different stages, in a domino effect. The slogan everywhere is: Stay home until we say so! It seems incredible that this is happening on a worldwide level!

Life in Monaco under lockdown since March 17 is calm and very civilized. I just learned it will go on till May 3. The Prince’s Government has confidence in the population and vice versa, and decide the best way to protect the people. The Mayor and his team efficiently reorganized our local market in respect of social distancing measures. Additionally, they put together a vendors’ delivery system, including pharmacies, plus meals home delivery for those who need it. The Princess Grace Hospital created a special unit to treat patients affected by the virus who need extra care.

Additionally, they offer treatment consultation online for outpatients who remain in their homes, thus avoiding overcharging the hospital. The Government strengthened psychological assistance by establishing a call center providing support during self-isolation. I find it to be a very conscientious overall approach to the situation.

We may go outdoors for brief exercise or jogging or walk the dog, allowing our bodies to absorb the necessary Vitamin D from the sun, breathe fresh air, and feel alive. The Government demonstrates they care for the overall health of the people over and beyond the virus threat, applying common sense. We made the right decision moving to Old Europe end of 2003.

View of the Monte-Carlo Casino, April 5, 2020 @Celina Lafuente de Lavotha

The market in the Condamine organized during confinement, Monaco, April 5, 2020 @Celina Lafuente de Lavotha

Remnants of the Grand Prix installations in Port Hercule, Monaco, April 5, 2020 @Celina Lafuente de Lavotha

Deserted street in the heart of Monte-Carlo, Monaco, April 5, 2020 @Celina Lafuente de Lavotha

Boulevard des Moulins with its empty boutiques, Monaco, April 5, 2020@Celina Lafuente de Lavotha

In some countries, confinement rules are far stricter, and in some cases starting to be highly oppressive, forcing authoritarian practices on their people. Civil liberties that took so much effort to conquer are being challenged. While we are in a safe and comfortable position in the Principality, I do care what happens to other fellow citizens around the world, and it has direct consequences on all of us because we are interconnected.

On the other side of the spectrum, Sweden chose not to lockdown, exercising the right to national autonomy versus totally adhering to, what seems, harsh authoritarian “new world order” demands. The Government issued sanitary guidelines, but is totally confident on their people to take responsibility themselves.

While I agree that our planet is getting a deserved rest from our overconsumption, people around the world are already suffering the catastrophic consequences of the lockdown at a social, health, and economic level. In many countries, small and medium-sized businesses will face foreclosure, unable to ride the mounting crisis. The stock market is a roller coaster crushing many. Has the world economy been purposely reset? If so, who will benefit? Follow the money. (A catchphrase in the film All President’s Men, 1976.)

People living from paycheck to paycheck are not even able to buy goods to endure the quarantine. Millions are already losing their jobs everywhere, and with that, their sanity and livelihood, suicide, and domestic violence are on the rise, healthy people are suffering in isolation, many in very tight quarters. The bells of the church continue to ring calling worshipers but nobody is allowed in at a time they need it the most. These issues and many others are not making headlines in the media saturated by the virus.

Everybody anxiously wonders when this kind of house arrest will end in his or her country. It makes my skin crawl when I hear proposals of massive mandatory vaccination against “the virus,” as a certificate to get out of confinement, followed by tracking and digital control of the population. Isn’t compulsory vaccination against our human rights? Do we want biometric ID systems and big data algorithms to control our lives?

Keep close to nature’s heart!

I grew up in Argentina, playing the entire time outdoors; I could not wait to get out of the house and meet my friends on the street. We drank water from a hose, played in the dirt, run in the fields, and climbed trees! We got runny noses when we had a cold; we stayed in bed a few days, had plenty of vegetable soup and chamomile tea, and lots of gentle cuddling. Our smart and adaptive immune system did the rest. My adorable grandma, who was from Spain, told me that our body is a fortress with guards who run from place to place, seeking for invaders! She nurtured the belief in my immune system. I often say that living in a developing country helped me build antibodies that ward off diseases!

But do not take just my word for it; research shows that spending time in nature is good for our bodies, minds, and spirits. That makes me wonder why we are all under forced quarantine, not only people who are ill but also the majority who are healthy. Most don’t have sunny balconies, houses with gardens, or villas with a pool and lots of space, or live on a farm or in the mountains. Research indicates that social isolation and loneliness can affect physical and mental health, and long-term isolation even increases the risk of premature death. That makes me wonder: Is placing healthy people in quarantine worsening their health more than the virus itself? Every life matters!

I invite you to read an interesting article from Harvard Health Publications titled “A prescription for better health: go alfresco,” as well as studies published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, that acknowledges the value of spending time out in the sunshine.

The benefits of being outdoors are many. To start higher levels of Vitamin D from direct sunlight, which is known to help fight off osteoporosis, cancer, and depression, and can modulate the innate and adaptive immune responses. It offers the potential for faster healing, as spending time in the sun could help you get over an illness or injury faster. Studies show that those exposed to more natural light have quicker recoveries and experience less pain than those exposed to artificial light.

When we are outside, we are more likely to engage in physical activity than being indoors. Going outside can get your brain moving thanks to the sensory stimulation that nature provides, providing a better sense of overall health. Psychologist’s studies link time spent out in fresh air and sunshine to greater vitality, thus helping our bodies become more resilient to illness. Spending time outside greater feelings of happiness – We have a natural connection to living things, so when we are out in nature, we feel we belong in our environment and foster a sunny disposition.As said in an article by the University of Rochester, “Being outside in nature makes people feel alive.”

Yes, I do comply with the current social distancing and quarantine rules; we eat healthy thanks to living with a man who loves to cook, I take extra vitamins, go briefly for a jog outdoors, and workout inside to keep in shape. But that does not mean I stopped thinking and questioning!

Today’s Quote

“No oppressive order could permit the oppressed to begin to question: Why?” Paulo Freire

Postcards from confinement

I am grateful for my friends around the world for contributing photos from their towns. I hope we will all be able to regain our freedom and visit each other soon!

Nice, France – Olivier Huitel, Chrystal Pictures

The man and the sea, Nice, France April 9, 2020@OH Chrystal Pictures

The lonely beaches, Nice, France, April 9, 2020 @OH Chrystal Pictures

Promenade des Anglais, Nice, France, April 9, 2020 @OH Chrystal Pictures

The priest outside his church, Nice, France, April 9, 2020 @OH Chrystal Pictures

Bergen, Norway – Joaquin Tiago

Bergen, Norway last week in February 2020@Joaquin Tiago

Bergen, Norway (2)last week in February 2020@Joaquin Tiago

Buenos Aires, Argentina – Juli Urmenyi

El Obelisco, Avenida 9 de Julio, Buenos Aires, Argentina April 5, 2020@Juli Urmenyi

Children’s park closed, Buenos Aires, Argentina April 5, 2020@Juli Urmenyi

View of Tribunales from Plaza Lavalle, Buenos Aires, Argentina, April 5, 2020 @Juli Urmenyi

Paris, France – Lorene Edelstam

Voltaire observing the tourists Paris April 5 2020 @Lorene Edelstam

The lonely jogger along Quai Anatole France, Paris, April 5, 2020. @Lorene Edelstam

Lonely tourists strolling by an empthy Les Deux Magots, Paris, April 5, 2020 @Lorene Edelstam

Lockdown park in Paris, April 5, 2020 @Lorene Edelstam

London, UK – Ella Montclare

Pink masks and pink flowers, Kensington Gardens, London, UK, April 7, 2020 @Ella Montclare

The masked jogger along Serpentine Lake, London, UK April 5, 2020@Ella Montclare

Lonely Jogger passing Prince Albert Memorial, Kensington, UK April 5, 2020 @Ella Montclare

Swans practising social distance at the Round Pond, Kensington, London, UK April 5, 2020@Ella Montclare

From my Rear Window, Nothing is What it Seems There are always two sides to a story In Zen thinking, "Nothing is what it seems"

#care for each other #confinement #economic crisis #fear #freedom #health #human rights #humanity #immune system #national autonomy #Principality of Monaco #truth #virus

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lodelss · 5 years

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Shoshana Zuboff | An excerpt adapted from The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power | PublicAffairs | 2019 | 23 minutes (6,281 words)

In 2000 a group of computer scientists and engineers at Georgia Tech collaborated on a project called the “Aware Home.” It was meant to be a “living laboratory” for the study of “ubiquitous computing.” They imagined a “human-home symbiosis” in which many animate and inanimate processes would be captured by an elaborate network of “context aware sensors” embedded in the house and by wearable computers worn by the home’s occupants. The design called for an “automated wireless collaboration” between the platform that hosted personal information from the occupants’ wearables and a second one that hosted the environmental information from the sensors.

There were three working assumptions: first, the scientists and engineers understood that the new data systems would produce an entirely new knowledge domain. Second, it was assumed that the rights to that new knowledge and the power to use it to improve one’s life would belong exclusively to the people who live in the house. Third, the team assumed that for all of its digital wizardry, the Aware Home would take its place as a modern incarnation of the ancient conventions that understand “home” as the private sanctuary of those who dwell within its walls.

All of this was expressed in the engineering plan. It emphasized trust, simplicity, the sovereignty of the individual, and the inviolability of the home as a private domain. The Aware Home information system was imagined as a simple “closed loop” with only two nodes and controlled entirely by the home’s occupants. Because the house would be “constantly monitoring the occupants’ whereabouts and activities…even tracing its inhabitants’ medical conditions,” the team concluded, “there is a clear need to give the occupants knowledge and control of the distribution of this information.” All the information was to be stored on the occupants’ wearable computers “to insure the privacy of an individual’s information.”

By 2018, the global “smart-home” market was valued at $36 billion and expected to reach $151 billion by 2023. The numbers betray an earthquake beneath their surface. Consider just one smart-home device: the Nest thermostat, which was made by a company that was owned by Alphabet, the Google holding company, and then merged with Google in 2018. The Nest thermostat does many things imagined in the Aware Home. It collects data about its uses and environment. It uses motion sensors and computation to “learn” the behaviors of a home’s inhabitants. Nest’s apps can gather data from other connected products such as cars, ovens, fitness trackers, and beds. Such systems can, for example, trigger lights if an anomalous motion is detected, signal video and audio recording, and even send notifications to homeowners or others. As a result of the merger with Google, the thermostat, like other Nest products, will be built with Google’s artificial intelligence capabilities, including its personal digital “assistant.” Like the Aware Home, the thermostat and its brethren devices create immense new stores of knowledge and therefore new power — but for whom?

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Wi-Fi–enabled and networked, the thermostat’s intricate, personalized data stores are uploaded to Google’s servers. Each thermostat comes with a “privacy policy,” a “terms-of-service agreement,” and an “end-user licensing agreement.” These reveal oppressive privacy and security consequences in which sensitive household and personal information are shared with other smart devices, unnamed personnel, and third parties for the purposes of predictive analyses and sales to other unspecified parties. Nest takes little responsibility for the security of the information it collects and none for how the other companies in its ecosystem will put those data to use. A detailed analysis of Nest’s policies by two University of London scholars concluded that were one to enter into the Nest ecosystem of connected devices and apps, each with their own equally burdensome and audacious terms, the purchase of a single home thermostat would entail the need to review nearly a thousand so-called contracts.

Should the customer refuse to agree to Nest’s stipulations, the terms of service indicate that the functionality and security of the thermostat will be deeply compromised, no longer supported by the necessary updates meant to ensure its reliability and safety. The consequences can range from frozen pipes to failed smoke alarms to an easily hacked internal home system.

By 2018, the assumptions of the Aware Home were gone with the wind. Where did they go? What was that wind? The Aware Home, like many other visionary projects, imagined a digital future that empowers individuals to lead more-effective lives. What is most critical is that in the year 2000 this vision naturally assumed an unwavering commitment to the privacy of individual experience. Should an individual choose to render her experience digitally, then she would exercise exclusive rights to the knowledge garnered from such data, as well as exclusive rights to decide how such knowledge might be put to use. Today these rights to privacy, knowledge, and application have been usurped by a bold market venture powered by unilateral claims to others’ experience and the knowledge that flows from it. What does this sea change mean for us, for our children, for our democracies, and for the very possibility of a human future in a digital world? It is the darkening of the digital dream into a voracious and utterly novel commercial project that I call surveillance capitalism.

Surveillance capitalism runs contrary to the early digital dream, consigning the Aware Home to ancient history. Instead, it strips away the illusion that the networked form has some kind of indigenous moral content, that being “connected” is somehow intrinsically pro-social, innately inclusive, or naturally tending toward the democratization of knowledge. Digital connection is now a means to others’ commercial ends. At its core, surveillance capitalism is parasitic and self-referential. It revives Karl Marx’s old image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labor, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of labor, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience. Google invented and perfected surveillance capitalism in much the same way that a century ago General Motors invented and perfected managerial capitalism. Google was the pioneer of surveillance capitalism in thought and practice, the deep pocket for research and development, and the trailblazer in experimentation and implementation, but it is no longer the only actor on this path. Surveillance capitalism quickly spread to Facebook and later to Microsoft. Evidence suggests that Amazon has veered in this direction, and it is a constant challenge to Apple, both as an external threat and as a source of internal debate and conflict.

As the pioneer of surveillance capitalism, Google launched an unprecedented market operation into the unmapped spaces of the internet, where it faced few impediments from law or competitors, like an invasive species in a landscape free of natural predators. Its leaders drove the systemic coherence of their businesses at a breakneck pace that neither public institutions nor individuals could follow. Google also benefited from historical events when a national security apparatus galvanized by the attacks of 9/11 was inclined to nurture, mimic, shelter, and appropriate surveillance capitalism’s emergent capabilities for the sake of total knowledge and its promise of certainty.

Our personal experiences are scraped and packaged as the means to others’ ends…We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial surplus.

Surveillance capitalists quickly realized that they could do anything they wanted, and they did. They dressed in the fashions of advocacy and emancipation, appealing to and exploiting contemporary anxieties, while the real action was hidden offstage. Theirs was an invisibility cloak woven in equal measure to the rhetoric of the empowering web, the ability to move swiftly, the confidence of vast revenue streams, and the wild, undefended nature of the territory they would conquer and claim. They were protected by the inherent illegibility of the automated processes that they rule, the ignorance that these processes breed, and the sense of inevitability that they foster.

Surveillance capitalism is no longer confined to the competitive dramas of the large internet companies, where behavioral futures markets were first aimed at online advertising. Its mechanisms and economic imperatives have become the default model for most internet-based businesses. Eventually, competitive pressure drove expansion into the offline world, where the same foundational mechanisms that expropriate your online browsing, likes, and clicks are trained on your run in the park, breakfast conversation, or hunt for a parking space. Today’s prediction products are traded in behavioral futures markets that extend beyond targeted online ads to many other sectors, including insurance, retail, finance, and an ever-widening range of goods and services companies determined to participate in these new and profitable markets. Whether it’s a “smart” home device, what the insurance companies call “behavioral underwriting,” or any one of thousands of other transactions, we now pay for our own domination.

Surveillance capitalism’s products and services are not the objects of a value exchange. They do not establish constructive producer-consumer reciprocities. Instead, they are the “hooks” that lure users into their extractive operations in which our personal experiences are scraped and packaged as the means to others’ ends. We are not surveillance capitalism’s “customers.” Although the saying tells us “If it’s free, then you are the product,” that is also incorrect. We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism’s actual customers are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior.

Google is to surveillance capitalism what the Ford Motor Company and General Motors were to mass-production–based managerial capitalism. New economic logics and their commercial models are discovered by people in a time and place and then perfected through trial and error. In our time Google became the pioneer, discoverer, elaborator, experimenter, lead practitioner, role model, and diffusion hub of surveillance capitalism. GM and Ford’s iconic status as pioneers of twentieth-century capitalism made them enduring objects of scholarly research and public fascination because the lessons they had to teach resonated far beyond the individual companies. Google’s practices deserve the same kind of examination, not merely as a critique of a single company but rather as the starting point for the codification of a powerful new form of capitalism.

With the triumph of mass production at Ford and for decades thereafter, hundreds of researchers, businesspeople, engineers, journalists, and scholars would excavate the circumstances of its invention, origins, and consequences. Decades later, scholars continued to write extensively about Ford, the man and the company. GM has also been an object of intense scrutiny. It was the site of Peter Drucker’s field studies for his seminal Concept of the Corporation, the 1946 book that codified the practices of the twentieth-century business organization and established Drucker’s reputation as a management sage. In addition to the many works of scholarship and analysis on these two firms, their own leaders enthusiastically articulated their discoveries and practices. Henry Ford and his general manager, James Couzens, and Alfred Sloan and his marketing man, Henry “Buck” Weaver, reflected on, conceptualized, and proselytized their achievements, specifically locating them in the evolutionary drama of American capitalism.

Google is a notoriously secretive company, and one is hard-pressed to imagine a Drucker equivalent freely roaming the scene and scribbling in the hallways. Its executives carefully craft their messages of digital evangelism in books and blog posts, but its operations are not easily accessible to outside researchers or journalists. In 2016 a lawsuit brought against the company by a product manager alleged an internal spying program in which employees are expected to identify coworkers who violate the firm’s confidentiality agreement: a broad prohibition against divulging anything about the company to anyone. The closest thing we have to a Buck Weaver or James Couzens codifying Google’s practices and objectives is the company’s longtime chief economist, Hal Varian, who aids the cause of understanding with scholarly articles that explore important themes. Varian has been described as “the Adam Smith of the discipline of Googlenomics” and the “godfather” of its advertising model. It is in Varian’s work that we find hidden-in-plain-sight important clues to the logic of surveillance capitalism and its claims to power.

In two extraordinary articles in scholarly journals, Varian explored the theme of “computer-mediated transactions” and their transformational effects on the modern economy. Both pieces are written in amiable, down-to-earth prose, but Varian’s casual understatement stands in counterpoint to his often-startling declarations: “Nowadays there is a computer in the middle of virtually every transaction…now that they are available these computers have several other uses.” He then identifies four such new uses: “data extraction and analysis,” “new contractual forms due to better monitoring,” “personalization and customization,” and “continuous experiments.”

Varian’s discussions of these new “uses” are an unexpected guide to the strange logic of surveillance capitalism, the division of learning that it shapes, and the character of the information civilization toward which it leads. “Data extraction and analysis,” Varian writes, “is what everyone is talking about when they talk about big data.”

Google was incorporated in 1998, founded by Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin just two years after the Mosaic browser threw open the doors of the world wide web to the computer-using public. From the start, the company embodied the promise of information capitalism as a liberating and democratic social force that galvanized and delighted second-modernity populations around the world.

Thanks to this wide embrace, Google successfully imposed computer mediation on broad new domains of human behavior as people searched online and engaged with the web through a growing roster of Google services. As these new activities were informated for the first time, they produced wholly new data resources. For example, in addition to key words, each Google search query produces a wake of collateral data such as the number and pattern of search terms, how a query is phrased, spelling, punctuation, dwell times, click patterns, and location.

There was no reliable way to turn investors’ money into revenue…The behavioral value reinvestment cycle produced a very cool search function, but it was not yet capitalism.

Early on, these behavioral by-products were haphazardly stored and operationally ignored. Amit Patel, a young Stanford graduate student with a special interest in “data mining,” is frequently credited with the groundbreaking insight into the significance of Google’s accidental data caches. His work with these data logs persuaded him that detailed stories about each user — thoughts, feelings, interests — could be constructed from the wake of unstructured signals that trailed every online action. These data, he concluded, actually provided a “broad sensor of human behavior” and could be put to immediate use in realizing cofounder Larry Page’s dream of Search as a comprehensive artificial intelligence.

Google’s engineers soon grasped that the continuous flows of collateral behavioral data could turn the search engine into a recursive learning system that constantly improved search results and spurred product innovations such as spell check, translation, and voice recognition. As Kenneth Cukier observed at that time,

Other search engines in the 1990s had the chance to do the same, but did not pursue it. Around 2000 Yahoo! saw the potential, but nothing came of the idea. It was Google that recognized the gold dust in the detritus of its interactions with its users and took the trouble to collect it up…Google exploits information that is a by-product of user interactions, or data exhaust, which is automatically recycled to improve the service or create an entirely new product.

What had been regarded as waste material — “data exhaust” spewed into Google’s servers during the combustive action of Search — was quickly reimagined as a critical element in the transformation of Google’s search engine into a reflexive process of continuous learning and improvement.

At that early stage of Google’s development, the feedback loops involved in improving its Search functions produced a balance of power: Search needed people to learn from, and people needed Search to learn from. This symbiosis enabled Google’s algorithms to learn and produce ever-more relevant and comprehensive search results. More queries meant more learning; more learning produced more relevance. More relevance meant more searches and more users. By the time the young company held its first press conference in 1999, to announce a $25 million equity investment from two of the most revered Silicon Valley venture capital firms, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, Google Search was already fielding seven million requests each day. A few years later, Hal Varian, who joined Google as its chief economist in 2002, would note, “Every action a user performs is considered a signal to be analyzed and fed back into the system.” The Page Rank algorithm, named after its founder, had already given Google a significant advantage in identifying the most popular results for queries. Over the course of the next few years it would be the capture, storage, analysis, and learning from the by-products of those search queries that would turn Google into the gold standard of web search.

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The key point for us rests on a critical distinction. During this early period, behavioral data were put to work entirely on the user’s behalf. User data provided value at no cost, and that value was reinvested in the user experience in the form of improved services: enhancements that were also offered at no cost to users. Users provided the raw material in the form of behavioral data, and those data were harvested to improve speed, accuracy, and relevance and to help build ancillary products such as translation. I call this the behavioral value reinvestment cycle, in which all behavioral data are reinvested in the improvement of the product or service.

The cycle emulates the logic of the iPod; it worked beautifully at Google but with one critical difference: the absence of a sustainable market transaction. In the case of the iPod, the cycle was triggered by the purchase of a high-margin physical product. Subsequent reciprocities improved the iPod product and led to increased sales. Customers were the subjects of the commercial process, which promised alignment with their “what I want, when I want, where I want” demands. At Google, the cycle was similarly oriented toward the individual as its subject, but without a physical product to sell, it floated outside the marketplace, an interaction with “users” rather than a market transaction with customers.

This helps to explain why it is inaccurate to think of Google’s users as its customers: there is no economic exchange, no price, and no profit. Nor do users function in the role of workers. When a capitalist hires workers and provides them with wages and means of production, the products that they produce belong to the capitalist to sell at a profit. Not so here. Users are not paid for their labor, nor do they operate the means of production. Finally, people often say that the user is the “product.” This is also misleading. Users are not products, but rather we are the sources of raw-material supply. Surveillance capitalism’s unusual products manage to be derived from our behavior while remaining indifferent to our behavior. Its products are about predicting us, without actually caring what we do or what is done to us.

At this early stage of Google’s development, whatever Search users inadvertently gave up that was of value to the company they also used up in the form of improved services. In this reinvestment cycle, serving users with amazing Search results “consumed” all the value that users created when they provided extra behavioral data. The fact that users needed Search about as much as Search needed users created a balance of power between Google and its populations. People were treated as ends in themselves, the subjects of a nonmarket, self-contained cycle that was perfectly aligned with Google’s stated mission “to organize the world’s information, making it universally accessible and useful.”

By 1999, despite the splendor of Google’s new world of searchable web pages, its growing computer science capabilities, and its glamorous venture backers, there was no reliable way to turn investors’ money into revenue. The behavioral value reinvestment cycle produced a very cool search function, but it was not yet capitalism. The balance of power made it financially risky and possibly counterproductive to charge users a fee for search services. Selling search results would also have set a dangerous precedent for the firm, assigning a price to indexed information that Google’s web crawler had already taken from others without payment. Without a device like Apple’s iPod or its digital songs, there were no margins, no surplus, nothing left over to sell and turn into revenue.

Google had relegated advertising to steerage class: its AdWords team consisted of seven people, most of whom shared the founders’ general antipathy toward ads. The tone had been set in Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s milestone paper that unveiled their search engine conception, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” presented at the 1998 World Wide Web Conference: “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market…we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.”

Google’s first revenues depended instead on exclusive licensing deals to provide web services to portals such as Yahoo! and Japan’s BIGLOBE. It also generated modest revenue from sponsored ads linked to search query keywords. There were other models for consideration. Rival search engines such as Overture, used exclusively by the then-giant portal AOL, or Inktomi, the search engine adopted by Microsoft, collected revenues from the sites whose pages they indexed. Overture was also successful in attracting online ads with its policy of allowing advertisers to pay for high-ranking search listings, the very format that Brin and Page scorned.

Prominent analysts publicly doubted whether Google could compete with its more-established rivals. As the New York Times asked, “Can Google create a business model even remotely as good as its technology?” A well-known Forrester Research analyst proclaimed that there were only a few ways for Google to make money with Search: “build a portal [like Yahoo!]…partner with a portal…license the technology…wait for a big company to purchase them.”

Despite these general misgivings about Google’s viability, the firm’s prestigious venture backing gave the founders confidence in their ability to raise money. This changed abruptly in April 2000, when the legendary dot-com economy began its steep plunge into recession, and Silicon Valley’s Garden of Eden unexpectedly became the epicenter of a financial earthquake.

The idea of being able to deliver a particular message to a particular person at just the moment when it might have a high probability of actually influencing his or her behavior was, and had always been, the holy grail of advertising.

By mid-April, Silicon Valley’s fast-money culture of privilege was under siege with the implosion of what came to be known as the “dot-com bubble.” It is easy to forget exactly how terrifying things were for the valley’s ambitious young people and their slightly older investors. Startups with outsized valuations just months earlier were suddenly forced to shutter. Prominent articles such as “Doom Stalks the Dotcoms” noted that the stock prices of Wall Street’s most-revered internet “high flyers” were “down for the count,” with many of them trading below their initial offering price: “With many dotcoms declining, neither venture capitalists nor Wall Street is eager to give them a dime…” The news brimmed with descriptions of shell-shocked investors. The week of April 10 saw the worst decline in the history of the NASDAQ, where many internet companies had gone public, and there was a growing consensus that the “game” had irreversibly changed.

As the business environment in Silicon Valley unraveled, investors’ prospects for cashing out by selling Google to a big company seemed far less likely, and they were not immune to the rising tide of panic. Many Google investors began to express doubts about the company’s prospects, and some threatened to withdraw support. Pressure for profit mounted sharply, despite the fact that Google Search was widely considered the best of all the search engines, traffic to its website was surging, and a thousand résumés flooded the firm’s Mountain View office each day. Page and Brin were seen to be moving too slowly, and their top venture capitalists, John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins and Michael Moritz from Sequoia, were frustrated. According to Google chronicler Steven Levy, “The VCs were screaming bloody murder. Tech’s salad days were over, and it wasn’t certain that Google would avoid becoming another crushed radish.”

The specific character of Silicon Valley’s venture funding, especially during the years leading up to dangerous levels of startup inflation, also contributed to a growing sense of emergency at Google. As Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter and his colleague Michel Ferrary found in their study of valley venture firms, “A connection with a high-status VC firm signals the high status of the startup and encourages other agents to link to it.” These themes may seem obvious now, but it is useful to mark the anxiety of those months of sudden crisis. Prestigious risk investment functioned as a form of vetting — much like acceptance to a top university sorts and legitimates students, elevating a few against the backdrop of the many — especially in the “uncertain” environment characteristic of high-tech investing. Loss of that high-status signaling power assigned a young company to a long list of also-rans in Silicon Valley’s fast-moving saga.

Other research findings point to the consequences of the impatient money that flooded the valley as inflationary hype drew speculators and ratcheted up the volatility of venture funding. Studies of pre-bubble investment patterns showed a “big-score” mentality in which bad results tended to stimulate increased investing as funders chased the belief that some young company would suddenly discover the elusive business model destined to turn all their bets into rivers of gold. Startup mortality rates in Silicon Valley outstripped those for other venture capital centers such as Boston and Washington, DC, with impatient money producing a few big wins and many losses. Impatient money is also reflected in the size of Silicon Valley startups, which during this period were significantly smaller than in other regions, employing an average of 68 employees as compared to an average of 112 in the rest of the country. This reflects an interest in quick returns without spending much time on growing a business or deepening its talent base, let alone developing the institutional capabilities. These propensities were exacerbated by the larger Silicon Valley culture, where net worth was celebrated as the sole measure of success for valley parents and their children.

For all their genius and principled insights, Brin and Page could not ignore the mounting sense of emergency. By December 2000, the Wall Street Journal reported on the new “mantra” emerging from Silicon Valley’s investment community: “Simply displaying the ability to make money will not be enough to remain a major player in the years ahead. What will be required will be an ability to show sustained and exponential profits.”

The declaration of a state of exception functions in politics as cover for the suspension of the rule of law and the introduction of new executive powers justified by crisis. At Google in late 2000, it became a rationale for annulling the reciprocal relationship that existed between Google and its users, steeling the founders to abandon their passionate and public opposition to advertising. As a specific response to investors’ anxiety, the founders tasked the tiny AdWords team with the objective of looking for ways to make more money. Page demanded that the whole process be simplified for advertisers. In this new approach, he insisted that advertisers “shouldn’t even get involved with choosing keywords — Google would choose them.”

Operationally, this meant that Google would turn its own growing cache of behavioral data and its computational power and expertise toward the single task of matching ads with queries. New rhetoric took hold to legitimate this unusual move. If there was to be advertising, then it had to be “relevant” to users. Ads would no longer be linked to keywords in a search query, but rather a particular ad would be “targeted” to a particular individual. Securing this holy grail of advertising would ensure relevance to users and value to Advertisers.

Absent from the new rhetoric was the fact that in pursuit of this new aim, Google would cross into virgin territory by exploiting sensitivities that only its exclusive and detailed collateral behavioral data about millions and later billions of users could reveal. To meet the new objective, the behavioral value reinvestment cycle was rapidly and secretly subordinated to a larger and more complex undertaking. The raw materials that had been solely used to improve the quality of search results would now also be put to use in the service of targeting advertising to individual users. Some data would continue to be applied to service improvement, but the growing stores of collateral signals would be repurposed to improve the profitability of ads for both Google and its advertisers. These behavioral data available for uses beyond service improvement constituted a surplus, and it was on the strength of this behavioral surplus that the young company would find its way to the “sustained and exponential profits” that would be necessary for survival. Thanks to a perceived emergency, a new mutation began to gather form and quietly slip its moorings in the implicit advocacy-oriented social contract of the firm’s original relationship with users.

Google’s declared state of exception was the backdrop for 2002, the watershed year during which surveillance capitalism took root. The firm’s appreciation of behavioral surplus crossed another threshold that April, when the data logs team arrived at their offices one morning to find that a peculiar phrase had surged to the top of the search queries: “Carol Brady’s maiden name.” Why the sudden interest in a 1970s television character? It was data scientist and logs team member Amit Patel who recounted the event to the New York Times, noting, “You can’t interpret it unless you know what else is going on in the world.”

The team went to work to solve the puzzle. First, they discerned that the pattern of queries had produced five separate spikes, each beginning at forty-eight minutes after the hour. Then they learned that the query pattern occurred during the airing of the popular TV show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The spikes reflected the successive time zones during which the show aired, ending in Hawaii. In each time zone, the show’s host posed the question of Carol Brady’s maiden name, and in each zone the queries immediately flooded into Google’s servers.

As the New York Times reported, “The precision of the Carol Brady data was eye-opening for some.” Even Brin was stunned by the clarity of Search’s predictive power, revealing events and trends before they “hit the radar” of traditional media. As he told the Times, “It was like trying an electron microscope for the first time. It was like a moment-by-moment barometer.” Google executives were described by the Times as reluctant to share their thoughts about how their massive stores of query data might be commercialized. “There is tremendous opportunity with this data,” one executive confided.

Just a month before the Carol Brady moment, while the AdWords team was already working on new approaches, Brin and Page hired Eric Schmidt, an experienced executive, engineer, and computer science Ph.D., as chairman. By August, they appointed him to the CEO’s role. Doerr and Moritz had been pushing the founders to hire a professional manager who would know how to pivot the firm toward profit. Schmidt immediately implemented a “belt-tightening” program, grabbing the budgetary reins and heightening the general sense of financial alarm as fund-raising prospects came under threat. A squeeze on workspace found him unexpectedly sharing his office with none other than Amit Patel.

Schmidt later boasted that as a result of their close quarters over the course of several months, he had instant access to better revenue figures than did his own financial planners. We do not know (and may never know) what other insights Schmidt might have gleaned from Patel about the predictive power of Google’s behavioral data stores, but there is no doubt that a deeper grasp of the predictive power of data quickly shaped Google’s specific response to financial emergency, triggering the crucial mutation that ultimately turned AdWords, Google, the internet, and the very nature of information capitalism toward an astonishingly lucrative surveillance project.

That this no longer seems astonishing to us, or perhaps even worthy of note, is evidence of the profound psychic numbing that has inured us to a bold and unprecedented shift in capitalist methods.

Google’s earliest ads had been considered more effective than most online advertising at the time because they were linked to search queries and Google could track when users actually clicked on an ad, known as the “click-through” rate. Despite this, advertisers were billed in the conventional manner according to how many people viewed an ad. As Search expanded, Google created the self-service system called AdWords, in which a search that used the advertiser’s keyword would include that advertiser’s text box and a link to its landing page. Ad pricing depended upon the ad’s position on the search results page.

Rival search startup Overture had developed an online auction system for web page placement that allowed it to scale online advertising targeted to keywords. Google would produce a transformational enhancement to that model, one that was destined to alter the course of information capitalism. As a Bloomberg journalist explained in 2006, “Google maximizes the revenue it gets from that precious real estate by giving its best position to the advertiser who is likely to pay Google the most in total, based on the price per click multiplied by Google’s estimate of the likelihood that someone will actually click on the ad.” That pivotal multiplier was the result of Google’s advanced computational capabilities trained on its most significant and secret discovery: behavioral surplus. From this point forward, the combination of ever-increasing machine intelligence and ever-more-vast supplies of behavioral surplus would become the foundation of an unprecedented logic of accumulation. Google’s reinvestment priorities would shift from merely improving its user offerings to inventing and institutionalizing the most far-reaching and technologically advanced raw-material supply operations that the world had ever seen. Henceforth, revenues and growth would depend upon more behavioral surplus.

Google’s many patents filed during those early years illustrate the explosion of discovery, inventiveness, and complexity detonated by the state of exception that led to these crucial innovations and the firm’s determination to advance the capture of behavioral surplus. One patent submitted in 2003 by three of the firm’s top computer scientists is titled “Generating User Information for Use in Targeted Advertising.” The patent is emblematic of the new mutation and the emerging logic of accumulation that would define Google’s success. Of even greater interest, it also provides an unusual glimpse into the “economic orientation” baked deep into the technology cake by reflecting the mindset of Google’s distinguished scientists as they harnessed their knowledge to the firm’s new aims. In this way, the patent stands as a treatise on a new political economics of clicks and its moral universe, before the company learned to disguise this project in a fog of euphemism.

The patent reveals a pivoting of the backstage operation toward Google’s new audience of genuine customers. “The present invention concerns advertising,” the inventors announce. Despite the enormous quantity of demographic data available to advertisers, the scientists note that much of an ad budget “is simply wasted…it is very difficult to identify and eliminate such waste.”

Advertising had always been a guessing game: art, relationships, conventional wisdom, standard practice, but never “science.” The idea of being able to deliver a particular message to a particular person at just the moment when it might have a high probability of actually influencing his or her behavior was, and had always been, the holy grail of advertising. The inventors point out that online ad systems had also failed to achieve this elusive goal. The then-predominant approaches used by Google’s competitors, in which ads were targeted to keywords or content, were unable to identify relevant ads “for a particular user.” Now the inventors offered a scientific solution that exceeded the most-ambitious dreams of any advertising executive:

There is a need to increase the relevancy of ads served for some user request, such as a search query or a document request…to the user that submitted the request…The present invention may involve novel methods, apparatus, message formats and/or data structures for determining user profile information and using such determined user profile information for ad serving.

In other words, Google would no longer mine behavioral data strictly to improve service for users but rather to read users’ minds for the purposes of matching ads to their interests, as those interests are deduced from the collateral traces of online behavior. With Google’s unique access to behavioral data, it would now be possible to know what a particular individual in a particular time and place was thinking, feeling, and doing. That this no longer seems astonishing to us, or perhaps even worthy of note, is evidence of the profound psychic numbing that has inured us to a bold and unprecedented shift in capitalist methods.

The techniques described in the patent meant that each time a user queries Google’s search engine, the system simultaneously presents a specific configuration of a particular ad, all in the fraction of a moment that it takes to fulfill the search query. The data used to perform this instant translation from query to ad, a predictive analysis that was dubbed “matching,” went far beyond the mere denotation of search terms. New data sets were compiled that would dramatically enhance the accuracy of these predictions. These data sets were referred to as “user profile information” or “UPI.” These new data meant that there would be no more guesswork and far less waste in the advertising budget. Mathematical certainty would replace all of that.

* * *

From THE AGE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, by Shoshana Zuboff. Reprinted with permission from PublicAffairs, a division of the Hachette Book Group.

Shoshana Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor emerita, Harvard Business School. She is the author of In The Age of the Smart Machine: the Future of Work and Power and The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism.

Longreads Editor: Dana Snitzky

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A community of servants.

Read for This Week’s Study: 2 Cor. 2:14–16, Exod. 32:1–14, 1 Pet. 2:12, Phil. 2:15, Eph. 2:19, Heb. 10:23–25.

Memory Text

“Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful. And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works” (Hebrews 10:23, 24, NKJV).

In seeking to fulfill the Christian mission, we should not underestimate the potential of the church as an organized community of believers. We have already noted the challenges that we can face when seeking to deal with injustice and poverty. But by working with fellow believers in a community of faith, we can be a blessing to those around us.

The temptation is that when we get together as a church we become distracted with keeping the church itself going, forgetting that the church exists to serve the world in which God has placed it. As a church body, we must not ignore the suffering and evil that exists all around us. If Christ didn’t ignore it, we must not either. We must be faithful to our mandate to preach the gospel, and along with that preaching comes the work of helping the oppressed, the hungry, the naked, and the helpless.

Together as a church community and organization, we are the body of Christ (see 1 Cor. 12:12–20). As such, we as a community should walk as Jesus walked, reach out as Jesus did, and serve as the hands, feet, voice, and heart of Jesus in the world today.

Additional Reading: Selected Quotes from Ellen G. White

Those who are of the household of faith should never neglect the assembling of themselves together; for this is God’s appointed means of leading His children into unity, in order that in Christian love and fellowship they may help, strengthen, and encourage one another. . . .

As brethren of our Lord, we are called with a holy calling to a holy, happy life. Having entered the narrow path of obedience, let us refresh our minds by communion with one another and with God. As we see the day of God approaching, let us meet often to study His Word and to exhort one another to be faithful unto the end. These earthly assemblies are God’s appointed means by which we have opportunity to speak with one another and to gather all the help possible to prepare, in the right way, to receive in the heavenly assemblies the fulfillment of the pledges of our inheritance.—Our High Calling, p. 166.

God is calling for men who are willing to leave all to become missionaries for Him. And the call will be answered. In every age since the advent of Christ, the gospel commission has impelled men and women to go to the ends of the earth to carry the good news of salvation to those in darkness. Stirred by the love of Christ and the needs of the lost, men have left the comforts of home and the society of friends, even that of wife and children, to go to foreign lands, among idolaters and savages, to proclaim the message of mercy. Many in the attempt have lost their lives, but others have been raised up to carry on the work. Thus step by step the cause of Christ has progressed, and the seed sown in sorrow has yielded a bountiful harvest. The knowledge of God has been extended, and the banner of the cross planted in heathen lands.

There is nothing more precious in the sight of God than His ministers, who go forth into the waste places of the earth to sow the seeds of truth, looking forward to the harvest. None but Christ can measure the solicitude of His servants, as they seek for the lost. He imparts His Spirit to them, and by their efforts souls are led to turn from sin to righteousness.—Gospel Workers, pp. 464, 465.

The disciples made no move toward serving one another. Jesus waited for a time to see what they would do. Then He, the divine Teacher, rose from the table. Laying aside the outer garment that would have impeded His movements, He took a towel, and girded Himself. . . . This action opened the eyes of the disciples. Bitter shame and humiliation filled their hearts. They understood the unspoken rebuke, and saw themselves in altogether a new light.

So Christ expressed His love for His disciples. Their selfish spirit filled Him with sorrow, but He entered into no controversy with them regarding their difficulty. Instead He gave them an example they would never forget. His love for them was not easily disturbed or quenched. . . . One of the last acts of His life on earth was to gird Himself as a servant, and perform a servant’s part.—The Desire of Ages, pp. 644, 645.

Agents of Change

We have seen in the early chapters of Acts how the first Christian believers established a different kind of community, caring for those in need among them, and together reaching out to those outside the community, offering them help where needed and inviting them to join in with what God was doing among them.

Adding to Jesus’ descriptions of salt and light, Paul uses a number of metaphors to portray the church’s action in the world. Among others, he describes those who live as God’s people as a sacrifice (see Rom. 12:1), as Christ’s body (see 1 Cor. 12:12–20), as ambassadors (see 2 Cor. 5:18–20), and as perfume (see 2 Cor. 2:14–16). Each of these images talks about a role as representatives or agents of God’s kingdom even now, even amid a world ravaged by the great controversy.

Review each of these “representative” descriptions above. Which best describes how you would like to represent God and His ways in your community, and why?

Each of these images has action associated with them, not as a means of being acceptable to God but as people already accepted by God through Christ’s sacrifice, who have responded to God’s love and grace by being His agents in a hurt and dying world.

But they also can be considered on a still deeper level: because God’s love and grace is what the kingdom of God is about, when we act in such a way, reflecting to others in love and grace, we enact and participate in that eternal kingdom, even now.

In international law, a national embassy is considered part of the nation it represents, even when physically located in a foreign country, perhaps a long distance from the home nation. In a similar way, enacting the ways of God’s kingdom offers glimpses of that eternal reality here and now and, as such, points to and is a foretaste of the final defeat of evil. And by so doing—as Christ’s ambassadors, as Christ’s agents—we can experience the reality of His love and justice in our own lives, in the church, and in the lives of those we seek to serve.

Read 2 Corinthians 2:16. What is the difference between the two aromas, and how can we know which one we are?

Additional Reading: Selected Quotes from Ellen G. White

We are to fit ourselves with the self-same spirit that was in Christ Jesus. Christ is working for us; will we work for Christ in His lines? . . . Cultivate patience and faith and hope. May the Lord increase our joy of faith in this ever-living Intercessor. Try to let no day pass in which you fail to realize your accountability to God through the sacrifice of His only begotten Son. Jesus does not receive glory from anyone who is an accuser of the brethren. Let not a day pass that we are not healing and restoring old wounds. Cultivate love, and let no words of evil surmising escape our lips. Close this door quickly, and keep it closed; open the door where Christ presides, and keep it open, because we know the value of Christ’s sacrifice and His unchangeable love. Drink in the ever-refreshing waters of life from the wells of Lebanon, but refuse the murky waters from the valley—the dark, suspicious feelings. There is much truthfulness in the cause, but shall we spoil our fragrance of spirit because others clothe themselves with bitterness? God forbid. . . . Cut away from our speech all severity; talk sweetly; and hold our confidence in Jesus firmly.—Lift Him Up, p. 321.

Our profession is an exalted one. As Sabbathkeeping Adventists we profess to obey all God’s commandments and to be looking for the coming of our Redeemer. A most solemn message of warning has been entrusted to God’s faithful few. We should show by our words and works that we recognize the great responsibility laid upon us. Our light should shine so clearly that others can see that we glorify the Father in our daily lives; that we are connected with heaven and are joint heirs with Jesus Christ, that when He shall appear in power and great glory, we shall be like Him.

We should all feel our individual responsibility as members of the visible church and workers in the vineyard of the Lord. We should not wait for our brethren, who are as frail as ourselves, to help us along; for our precious Saviour has invited us to join ourselves to Him and unite our weakness with His strength, our ignorance with His wisdom, our unworthiness with His merit. None of us can occupy a neutral position; our influence will tell for or against. We are active agents for Christ or for the enemy. We either gather with Jesus or scatter abroad. True conversion is a radical change. The very drift of the mind and bent of the heart should be turned and life become new again in Christ.—Testimonies for the Church, vol. 4, pp. 16, 17.

How few of us regard the salvation of sinners in the light in which it is viewed by the heavenly universe,—as a plan devised from eternity in the mind of God! How few of us are heart to heart with the Redeemer in this solemn, closing work! There is scarcely a tithe of the compassion that there should be for souls unsaved. There are so many to be warned, and yet how few sympathize with God sufficiently to be anything or nothing if only they can see souls won to Christ!—Gospel Workers, p. 116.

A Servant Remnants

The standard definition of the remnant people identified in Bible prophecy is found in Revelation 12:17: those “who keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus Christ” (NKJV; see also Rev. 14:12). In the Bible’s story, these features mark out God’s people in the later stages of earth’s history. But, also in the Bible stories, we can find examples of how such a remnant acts and particularly how such people serve others.

Consider the example of Moses in this regard. Read Exodus 32:1– 14. What is the comparison between Moses in this story and the remnant described in Revelation 12:17?

In His anger at the people of Israel, God was threatening to destroy them and transfer the promises given to Abraham—that his descendants would become a great nation—to Moses and his family (see Exod. 32:10).

But Moses didn’t want that. Instead, Moses had the boldness to argue with God, suggesting that for the Lord to act as He was threatening to act would make Him look bad (see Exod. 32:11–13). But then Moses went further and put himself on the line to urge his case with God.

Moses had been struggling to lead these people through the wilderness. They had been complaining and bickering almost from the moment he led them to freedom. And yet, Moses says to God, If You are not able to forgive them, “ ‘then blot me out of the book you have written’ ” (Exod. 32:32, NIV). Moses offered to give up eternity to save those with whom he had shared his journey.

What a powerful example of self-sacrificing intercession in behalf of those who don’t deserve it! And what a powerful symbol of the entire plan of salvation!

“As Moses interceded for Israel, his timidity was lost in his deep interest and love for those for whom he had, in the hands of God, been the means of doing so much. The Lord listened to his pleadings, and granted his unselfish prayer. God had proved His servant; He had tested his faithfulness and his love for that erring, ungrateful people, and nobly had Moses endured the trial. His interest in Israel sprang from no selfish motive. The prosperity of God’s chosen people was dearer to him than personal honor, dearer than the privilege of becoming the father of a mighty nation. God was pleased with his faithfulness, his simplicity of heart, and his integrity, and He committed to him, as a faithful shepherd, the great charge of leading Israel to the Promised Land.”—Ellen G. White, Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 319.

What does this tell us about how, to the degree possible, we should deal with the erring around us?

Additional Reading: Selected Quotes from Ellen G. White

He who is a citizen of the heavenly kingdom will be constantly looking at things not seen. The power of earth over the mind and character is broken. He has the abiding presence of the heavenly Guest, in accordance with the promise, “I will love him, and will manifest myself to him” (John 14:21). He walks with God as did Enoch, in constant communion. . . .

Daily beset by temptation, constantly opposed by the leaders of the people, Christ knew that He must strengthen His humanity by prayer. In order to be a blessing to men He must commune with God, pleading for energy, perseverance, and steadfastness. Thus He showed His disciples where His strength lay. Without this daily communion with God no human being can gain power for service. It is the privilege of every one to commit himself, with all his trials and temptations, his sorrows and disappointments, to the loving heavenly Father. No one who does this, who makes God his confidant, will fall a prey to the enemy.—In Heavenly Places, p. 85.

Moses lingered; for he could not consent to give up all that vast multitude to perish, although he knew that they deserved the vengeance of God for their persistent rebellion. He prostrated himself before God because the people felt no necessity for humiliation; he mediated for them because they felt no need of interceding in their own behalf.

Moses here typifies Christ. At this critical time Moses manifested the True Shepherd’s interest for the flock of His care. He pleaded that the wrath of an offended God might not utterly destroy the people of His choice. And by his intercession he held back the arm of vengeance, that a full end was not made of disobedient, rebellious Israel. He directed Aaron what course to pursue in that terrible crisis when the wrath of God had gone forth and the plague had begun. Aaron stood with his censer, waving it before the Lord, while the intercessions of Moses ascended with the smoke of the incense. Moses dared not cease his entreaties. He took hold of the strength of the Angel, as did Jacob in his wrestling, and like Jacob he prevailed. Aaron was standing between the living and the dead when the gracious answer came: I have heard thy prayer, I will not consume utterly. The very men whom the congregation despised and would have put to death were the ones to plead in their behalf that the avenging sword of God might be sheathed and sinful Israel spared.—Testimonies for the Church, vol. 3, p. 358.

We are living in a special period of this earth’s history. A great work must be done in a very short time, and every Christian is to act a part in sustaining this work. God is calling for men who will consecrate themselves to the work of soulsaving. When we begin to comprehend what a sacrifice Christ made in order to save a perishing world, there will be seen a mighty wrestling to save souls. Oh, that all our churches might see and realize the infinite sacrifice of Christ!—Testimonies for the Church, vol. 9, pp. 125, 126.

Reaching souls

Church discussions sometimes seem to get stuck on the apparent need to choose between a focus on social work or gospel work, either charity or witnessing, either justice or evangelism. But when we better understand each of these concepts and observe the ministry of Jesus, the difference breaks down, and we realize that preaching the gospel and working to help others are closely linked.

In one of Ellen White’s best-known statements, she explained it like this: “Christ’s method alone will give true success in reaching the people. The Saviour mingled with men as one who desired their good. He showed His sympathy for them, ministered to their needs, and won their confidence. Then He bade them, ‘Follow Me.’ . . .

“The poor are to be relieved, the sick cared for, the sorrowing and the bereaved comforted, the ignorant instructed, the inexperienced counseled. We are to weep with those that weep, and rejoice with those that rejoice.”—Ellen G. White, The Ministry of Healing, p. 143.

As we have seen, these two kingdom actions—justice and evangelism— were closely entwined, not only in Jesus’ ministry but in Jesus’ first commission to His disciples: “ ‘As you go, proclaim this message: “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received; freely give’ ” (Matt. 10:7, 8, NIV). In short, one of the best ways to reach others with our message is to minister to their needs.

Read 1 Peter 2:12 and Philippians 2:15. What do Peter and Paul say about the witnessing power of good works done by God’s people? _

With a broader understanding of God’s good news, evangelism does not make sense in the absence of a passion for people. Verses such as 1 John 3:16–18 and James 2:16 emphasize the contradiction in preaching the gospel without living it out. At its best, evangelism—bringing the good news of hope, rescue, repentance, transformation, and God’s all-embracing love—is an expression of justice.

Both evangelism and the desire for justice spring from recognizing God’s love for lost, broken, and hurt people—a love also that grows in our hearts under the influence of God in our lives. We don’t choose one action or another; instead, we work with God in working with people, meeting their real needs, and using whatever resources God has entrusted us with.

How can we make sure, though, that as we do good works for others, we don’t neglect preaching the good news of salvation, as well?

Additional Reading: Selected Quotes from Ellen G. White

The Lord wants His people to follow other methods than that of condemning wrong, even though the condemnation be just. He wants us to do something more than to hurl at our adversaries charges that only drive them further from the truth. The work which Christ came to do in our world was not to erect barriers and constantly thrust upon the people the fact that they were wrong.

He who expects to enlighten a deceived people must come near to them and labor for them in love. He must become a center of holy influence.—Testimonies for the Church, vol. 6, pp. 121, 122.

It is the privilege of the Christian to connect with the Source of light, and through this living connection become the light of the world. Christ’s true followers will walk in the light as He is in the light and therefore they will not travel in an uncertain way, stumbling because they walk in darkness. . . . As the light of the sun is light and life and blessing to all that live, so should Christians, by their good works, by their cheerfulness and courage, be the light of the world. As the light of the sun chases away the shades of night and pours its glories on valleys and hills, so will the Christians reflect the Sun of Righteousness which shines on him.

Before the consistent lives of Christ’s true followers, ignorance, superstition, and darkness will pass away, as the sun dispels the gloom of night. In like manner the disciples of Jesus will go into the dark places of the earth, disseminating the light of truth until the pathway of those in darkness shall be illuminated by the light of truth.—This Day With God, p. 92.

Those who gather the sunshine of Christ’s righteousness, and refuse to let it shine into the lives of others, will soon lose the sweet, bright rays of heavenly grace, selfishly reserved to be lavished upon a few. . . . Self should not be allowed to gather to itself a select few, giving nothing to those who need help the most. Our love is not to be sealed up for special ones. Break the bottle, and the fragrance will fill the house.—My Life Today, p. 80.

From every Christian home a holy light should shine forth. Love should be revealed in action. It should flow out in all home [relationships], showing itself in thoughtful kindness, in gentle, unselfish courtesy. There are homes where this principle is carried out—homes where God is worshiped, and truest love reigns. From these homes, morning and evening prayer ascends to God as sweet incense, and His mercies and blessings descend upon the suppliants like the morning dew. . . . All can see that there is an influence at work in the family that affects the children, and that the God of Abraham is with them. If the homes of professed Christians had a right religious mold, they would exert a mighty influence for good. They would indeed be the “light of the world.”

He who lives Christianity in the home will be a bright and shining light everywhere.—The Faith I Live By, p. 278.

Grace within the Church

At the beginning of the book of Job, God points to Job and his faithfulness to Him as a demonstration of the goodness of God’s ways and His dealings with fallen humanity (see Job 1:8). It is remarkable that God allows His reputation to hang on how His people live on this earth. But Paul expanded this faith God has in some of His “saints” to include the community of the church: “His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms” (Eph. 3:10, NIV).

Read Ephesians 2:19. What do you think is included in the idea of describing the church community as the “household” of God? How should this description influence how the organized church operates?

In any community or organization, how that entity treats its members reflects the foundational values of the group. As the household of God, the body of Christ and the community of the Spirit, the church has the highest of callings to live out and live up to: “For God is not a God of disorder but of peace—as in all the congregations of the Lord’s people” (1 Cor. 14:33, NIV).

The values of justice, grace, and love—as demonstrated in God’s justice, grace, and love—should govern all that happens within the church. From local church communities to the worldwide church organization, these principles should guide church leaders in how they lead, make decisions, and care for the “least of these” among the church community. They also should guide how we resolve the disputes that arise from time to time among members. If we can’t treat those among us with fairness and dignity, how are we going to do that with others, as well?

Where the church organization employs people, it should be a generous employer, valuing people before any other consideration and working against unfair treatment of members. Churches should be safe places, with all church members doing what they can to protect the vulnerable. And, as we see in the early church, members of the church community should be especially prepared to give to support those of their church “family” who are suffering or in need.

Jesus gave this as a command, saying that this would not only transform the community of faith, but it also would demonstrate the reality of their faith to those looking on: “ ‘A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another’ ” (John 13:34, 35, NIV).

Additional Reading: Selected Quotes from Ellen G. White

We have an ever-living Advocate who is making intercession for us. Then let us become advocates in principle in behalf of those who err. “And having an high priest over the house of God [here is His intercession in our behalf]; let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience; and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering.” He is a “faithful high priest in things pertaining to God.”

Then as He is working for us, let us work just as earnestly and interestedly to promote union with one another. Christ prayed that we might be of that same nature and oneness as that existing between Himself and His Father. Try in everything we do to secure confidence and love one for another, and thus we will answer the prayer of Christ Jesus. . . . Not all your suppositions and your ideas of your brethren are correct. . . . Let us put away these ugly supposings and imaginings; keep close on the side of Christ, and think of the rich encouragement He has given us, that we may in our turn give to others. . . . Let envy and jealousy be quenched in the flow of love from the fountain of God’s love. The cry of them that are ready to perish finds swift entrance into His ear. “He shall deliver the needy when he crieth, the poor also and him that hath no helper.”—Lift Him Up, p 321.

How earnestly should the professed followers of Christ seek to answer this prayer [for unity] in their lives. Many do not realize the sacredness of church relationship and are loath to submit to restraint and discipline. Their course of action shows that they exalt their own judgment above that of the united church, and they are not careful to guard themselves lest they encourage a spirit of opposition to its voice. Those who hold responsible positions in the church may have faults in common with other people and may err in their decisions; but notwithstanding this, the church of Christ on earth has given to them an authority that cannot be lightly esteemed.—Testimonies for the Church, vol. 4, p. 17.

The order that was maintained in the early Christian church made it possible for them to move forward solidly as a well-disciplined army clad with the armor of God. . . . Thus the efforts of Satan to attack the church in isolated places were met by concerted action on the part of all, and the plans of the enemy to disrupt and destroy were thwarted.

“God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints.” 1 Corinthians 14:33. He requires that order and system be observed in the conduct of church affairs today no less than in the days of old. He desires His work to be carried forward with thoroughness and exactness so that He may place upon it the seal of His approval. Christian is to be united with Christian, church with church, the human instrumentality co-operating with the divine, every agency subordinate to the Holy Spirit, and all combined in giving to the world the good tidings of the grace of God.—The Acts of the Apostles, pp. 95, 96.

Encourage each other to good work

Even with the best motivations and intentions, and believing that we are on the side of God and goodness, working for the Lord can be difficult and discouraging. The sadness and pain of our world are real. This is one reason we need a church community. Jesus modeled this kind of supportive community with His disciples. He rarely sent people out on their own, and even when that happened they would soon come together again to share their stories and renew their energy and courage.

Read Hebrews 10:23–25. Hebrews 10:25 is the best known of these verses; so, what do the preceding two verses add to our understanding of the well-known verse? What are some of the ways in which we can encourage each other “toward love and good deeds” (NIV)?

In almost any task, cause, or project, a group of people working together can achieve more than all of those people working individually. This reminds us again of the picture of the church as the body of Christ (see Rom. 12:3–6), in which we all have different but complementary roles to play. When we each do what we do best, but do it in a way that allows our influences to work together, we can trust by faith that our lives and work will make a difference for eternity.

While results are important when seeking to do what is right—the results are about people and their lives—we sometimes have to trust God with what the results might be. At times when working to alleviate poverty, to protect the vulnerable, to free the oppressed, and to speak up for the voiceless, we will see little progress. But we have the hope that we are working in a far greater and inevitably victorious cause: “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers” (Gal. 6:9, 10, NIV; see also Heb. 13:16).

This is why we are called to encourage—literally, to inspire with courage—one another. Living faithfully is both joyous and difficult. Our God of justice and our community of justice are our greatest supports and what we invite others to join.

Whom do you know or know of who regularly works at alleviating the suffering of others? How could you encourage that person or group in the good work they are doing?

Additional Reading: Selected Quotes from Ellen G. White

Many declare that it is certainly no harm to go to a concert and neglect the prayer meeting, or absent themselves from meetings where God’s servants are to declare a message from heaven. It is safe for you to be just where Christ has said He would be. . . . Jesus has said, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Matthew 18:20.—The Faith I Live By, p. 246.

Let not one word of fretfulness, harshness, or passion escape your lips. The grace of Christ awaits your demand. His Spirit will take control of your heart and conscience, presiding over your words and deeds. Never forfeit your self-respect by hasty, thoughtless words. See that your words are pure, your conversation holy. Give your children an example of that which you wish them to be. . . . Let there be peace, pleasant words, and cheerful countenances.—Child Guidance, p. 219.

Oh, let no word be spoken to cause deeper pain! To the soul weary of a life of sin, but knowing not where to find relief, present the compassionate Saviour. Take him by the hand, lift him up, speak to him words of courage and hope. Help him to grasp the hand of the Saviour.

We become too easily discouraged over the souls who do not at once respond to our efforts. Never should we cease to labor for a soul while there is one gleam of hope. Precious souls cost our self-sacrificing Redeemer too dear a price to be lightly given up to the tempter’s power.

We need to put ourselves in the place of the tempted ones. Consider the power of heredity, the influence of evil associations and surroundings, the power of wrong habits. Can we wonder that under such influences many become degraded? Can we wonder that they should be slow to respond to efforts for their uplifting?

Often, when won to the gospel, those who appeared coarse and unpromising will be among its most loyal adherents and advocates. They are not altogether corrupt. Beneath the forbidding exterior there are good impulses that might be reached. Without a helping hand many would never recover themselves, but by patient, persistent effort they may be uplifted. Such need tender words, kind consideration, tangible help. They need that kind of counsel which will not extinguish the faint gleam of courage in the soul. Let the workers who come in contact with them consider this.—The Ministry of Healing, pp. 168, 169.

Further thoughts:

Further Thought: Read Ellen G. White, “A Faithful Witness,” pp. 546–556, in The Acts of the Apostles; “Kindness the Key to Hearts,” pp. 81–86, in Welfare Ministry. “The work which the disciples did, we also are to do. Every Christian is to be a missionary. In sympathy and compassion we are to minister to those in need of help, seeking with unselfish earnestness to lighten the woes of suffering humanity. . . .

“We are to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and comfort the suffering and afflicted. We are to minister to the despairing, and to inspire hope in the hopeless.

“The love of Christ, manifested in unselfish ministry, will be more effective in reforming the evildoer than will the sword or the court of justice. . . . Often the heart that hardens under reproof will melt under the love of Christ.”—Ellen G. White, The Ministry of Healing, pp. 104, 106.

“Slavery, the caste system, unjust racial prejudices, the oppression of the poor, the neglect of the unfortunate,—these all are set forth as unchristian and a serious menace to the well-being of the human race, and as evils which the church of Christ is appointed by her Lord to overthrow.”—General Conference president A. G. Daniells, speaking of the work of Ellen G. White at her funeral, in Life Sketches of Ellen G. White, p. 473.

Summary: Yes, as Christians, we are called to minster to the needs of others, especially others who are hurting, suffering, and oppressed. And though we have our individual responsibilities in this area, as a community focused on ministering to others, we can be much more effective working together as a church family.

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reomanet · 6 years

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Andrew Sullivan: America’s New Religions

Political cults are filling the space left by the decline of organized faiths. Photo: Loren Elliott/Getty Images Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. It’s in our genes and has expressed itself in every culture, in every age, including our own secularized husk of a society. By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying “Truth” or God (or gods). Which is to say, even today’s atheists are expressing an attenuated form of religion. Their denial of any God is as absolute as others’ faith in God, and entails just as much a set of values to live by — including, for some, daily rituals like meditation, a form of prayer. (There’s a reason, I suspect, that many brilliant atheists, like my friends Bob Wright and Sam Harris are so influenced by Buddhism and practice Vipassana meditation and mindfulness. Buddhism’s genius is that it is a religion without God.) In his highly entertaining book, The Seven Types of Atheism , released in October in the U.S., philosopher John Gray puts it this way: “Religion is an attempt to find meaning in events, not a theory that tries to explain the universe.” It exists because we humans are the only species, so far as we can know, who have evolved to know explicitly that, one day in the future, we will die. And this existential fact requires some way of reconciling us to it while we are alive. This is why science cannot replace it. Science does not tell you how to live, or what life is about; it can provide hypotheses and tentative explanations, but no ultimate meaning. Art can provide an escape from the deadliness of our daily doing, but, again, appreciating great art or music is ultimately an act of wonder and contemplation, and has almost nothing to say about morality and life. Ditto history. My late friend, Christopher Hitchens, with a certain glee, gave me a copy of his book, God Is Not Great , a fabulous grab bag of religious insanity and evil over time, which I enjoyed immensely and agreed with almost entirely. But the fact that religion has been so often abused for nefarious purposes — from burning people at the stake to enabling child rape to crashing airplanes into towers — does not resolve the question of whether the meaning of that religion is true. It is perfectly possible to see and record the absurdities and abuses of man-made institutions and rituals, especially religious ones, while embracing a way of life that these evil or deluded people preached but didn’t practice. Fanaticism is not synonymous with faith; it is merely faith at its worst. That’s what I told Hitch: great book, made no difference to my understanding of my own faith or anyone else’s. Sorry, old bean, but try again. Seduced by scientism, distracted by materialism, insulated, like no humans before us, from the vicissitudes of sickness and the ubiquity of early death, the post-Christian West believes instead in something we have called progress — a gradual ascent of mankind toward reason, peace, and prosperity — as a substitute in many ways for our previous monotheism. We have constructed a capitalist system that turns individual selfishness into a collective asset and showers us with earthly goods; we have leveraged science for our own health and comfort. Our ability to extend this material bonanza to more and more people is how we define progress; and progress is what we call meaning. In this respect, Steven Pinker is one of the most religious writers I’ve ever admired. His faith in reason is as complete as any fundamentalist’s belief in God. But none of this material progress beckons humans to a way of life beyond mere satisfaction of our wants and needs. And this matters. We are a meaning-seeking species. Gray recounts the experiences of two extraordinarily brilliant nonbelievers, John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell, who grappled with this deep problem. Here’s Mill describing the nature of what he called “ A Crisis in My Mental History ”: “I had what might truly be called an object in life: to be a reformer of the world. … This did very well for several years, during which the general improvement going on in the world and the idea of myself as engaged with others in struggling to promote it, seemed enough to fill up an interesting and animated existence. But the time came when I awakened from this as from a dream … In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: ‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions that you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant; would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered: ‘No!’” At that point, this architect of our liberal order, this most penetrating of minds, came to the conclusion: “I seemed to have nothing left to live for.” It took a while for him to recover. Russell, for his part, abandoned Christianity at the age of 18, for the usual modern reasons, but the question of ultimate meaning still nagged at him. One day, while visiting the sick wife of a colleague, he described what happened: “Suddenly the ground seemed to give away beneath me, and I found myself in quite another region. Within five minutes I went through some such reflections as the following: the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached; whatever does not spring from this motive is harmful, or at best useless.” I suspect that most thinking beings end up with this notion of intense love as a form of salvation and solace as a kind of instinct . Those whose minds have been opened by psychedelics affirm this truth even further. I saw a bumper sticker the other day. It said “Loving kindness is my religion.” But the salient question is: why? Our modern world tries extremely hard to protect us from the sort of existential moments experienced by Mill and Russell. Netflix, air-conditioning, sex apps, Alexa, kale, Pilates, Spotify, Twitter … they’re all designed to create a world in which we rarely get a second to confront ultimate meaning — until a tragedy occurs, a death happens, or a diagnosis strikes. Unlike any humans before us, we take those who are much closer to death than we are and sequester them in nursing homes, where they cannot remind us of our own fate in our daily lives. And if you pressed, say, the liberal elites to explain what they really believe in — and you have to look at what they do most fervently — you discover, in John Gray’s mordant view of Mill , that they do, in fact, have “an orthodoxy — the belief in improvement that is the unthinking faith of people who think they have no religion.” But the banality of the god of progress, the idea that the best life is writing explainers for Vox in order to make the world a better place, never quite slakes the thirst for something deeper. Liberalism is a set of procedures, with an empty center, not a manifestation of truth, let alone a reconciliation to mortality. But, critically, it has long been complemented and supported in America by a religion distinctly separate from politics, a tamed Christianity that rests, in Jesus’ formulation, on a distinction between God and Caesar. And this separation is vital for liberalism, because if your ultimate meaning is derived from religion, you have less need of deriving it from politics or ideology or trusting entirely in a single, secular leader. It’s only when your meaning has been secured that you can allow politics to be merely procedural. So what happens when this religious rampart of the entire system is removed? I think what happens is illiberal politics. The need for meaning hasn’t gone away, but without Christianity, this yearning looks to politics for satisfaction. And religious impulses, once anchored in and tamed by Christianity, find expression in various political cults. These political manifestations of religion are new and crude, as all new cults have to be. They haven’t been experienced and refined and modeled by millennia of practice and thought. They are evolving in real time. And like almost all new cultish impulses, they demand a total and immediate commitment to save the world. Now look at our politics. We have the cult of Trump on the right, a demigod who, among his worshippers, can do no wrong. And we have the cult of social justice on the left, a religion whose followers show the same zeal as any born-again Evangelical. They are filling the void that Christianity once owned, without any of the wisdom and culture and restraint that Christianity once provided. For many, especially the young, discovering a new meaning in the midst of the fallen world is thrilling. And social-justice ideology does everything a religion should. It offers an account of the whole: that human life and society and any kind of truth must be seen entirely as a function of social power structures, in which various groups have spent all of human existence oppressing other groups. And it provides a set of practices to resist and reverse this interlocking web of oppression — from regulating the workplace and policing the classroom to checking your own sin and even seeking to control language itself. I think of non-PC gaffes as the equivalent of old swear words. Like the puritans who were agape when someone said “goddamn,” the new faithful are scandalized when someone says something “problematic.” Another commonality of the zealot then and now: humorlessness . And so the young adherents of the Great Awokening exhibit the zeal of the Great Awakening . Like early modern Christians, they punish heresy by banishing sinners from society or coercing them to public demonstrations of shame, and provide an avenue for redemption in the form of a thorough public confession of sin. “Social justice” theory requires the admission of white privilege in ways that are strikingly like the admission of original sin. A Christian is born again; an activist gets woke. To the belief in human progress unfolding through history — itself a remnant of Christian eschatology — it adds the Leninist twist of a cadre of heroes who jump-start the revolution. The same cultish dynamic can be seen on the right. There, many profess nominal Christianity and yet demonstrate every day that they have left it far behind. Some exist in a world without meaning altogether, and that fate is never pretty. I saw this most vividly when examining the opioid epidemic . People who have lost religion and are coasting along on materialism find they have few interior resources to keep going when crisis hits. They have no place of refuge, no spiritual safe space from which to gain perspective, no God to turn to. Many have responded to the collapse of meaning in dark times by simply and logically numbing themselves to death, extinguishing existential pain through ever-stronger painkillers that ultimately kill the pain of life itself. Yes, many Evangelicals are among the holiest and most quietly devoted people out there. Some have bravely resisted the cult. But their leaders have turned Christianity into a political and social identity, not a lived faith, and much of their flock — a staggering 81 percent voted for Trump — has signed on. They have tribalized a religion explicitly built by Jesus as anti-tribal. They have turned to idols — including their blasphemous belief in America as God’s chosen country. They have embraced wealth and nationalism as core goods, two ideas utterly anathema to Christ. They are indifferent to the destruction of the creation they say they believe God made. And because their faith is unmoored but their religious impulse is strong, they seek a replacement for religion. This is why they could suddenly rally to a cult called Trump. He may be the least Christian person in America, but his persona met the religious need their own faiths had ceased to provide. The terrible truth of the last three years is that the fresh appeal of a leader-cult has overwhelmed the fading truths of Christianity. This is why they are so hard to reach or to persuade and why nothing that Trump does or could do changes their minds. You cannot argue logically with a religion — which is why you cannot really argue with social-justice activists either. And what’s interesting is how support for Trump is greater among those who do not regularly attend church than among those who do. And so we’re mistaken if we believe that the collapse of Christianity in America has led to a decline in religion. It has merely led to religious impulses being expressed by political cults. Like almost all new cultish impulses, they see no boundary between politics and their religion. And both cults really do minimize the importance of the individual in favor of either the oppressed group or the leader. And this is how they threaten liberal democracy. They do not believe in the primacy of the individual, they believe the ends justify the means, they do not allow for doubt or reason, and their religious politics can brook no compromise. They demonstrate, to my mind, how profoundly liberal democracy has actually depended on the complement of a tolerant Christianity to sustain itself — as many earlier liberals (Tocqueville, for example) understood. It is Christianity that came to champion the individual conscience against the collective, which paved the way for individual rights. It is in Christianity that the seeds of Western religious toleration were first sown. Christianity is the only monotheism that seeks no sway over Caesar, that is content with the ultimate truth over the immediate satisfaction of power. It was Christianity that gave us successive social movements, which enabled more people to be included in the liberal project, thus renewing it. It was on these foundations that liberalism was built, and it is by these foundations it has endured. The question we face in contemporary times is whether a political system built upon such a religion can endure when belief in that religion has become a shadow of its future self. Will the house still stand when its ramparts are taken away? I’m beginning to suspect it can’t. And won’t. What’s Left? Here are a couple of questions for Democrats about two of their potential 2020 candidates: What motivated Kirsten Gillibrand’s widely noted tweet this week? And why is there so much discontent on the left with Elizabeth Warren? On Tuesday evening, Gillibrand tweeted : “Our future is female. Intersectional. Powered by our belief in one another. And we’re just getting started.” I get the point: Women are succeeding more than ever before, are poised to do even better, and this is a great thing. But why express this as if men are also not part of the future? And “intersectional”? It’s telling that, in Democratic circles, this is such a mainstream word now that she doesn’t have to explain it to anyone. Gillibrand’s evolution, of course, has been long in the works — and reveals, I’d say, where the Democrats are going. When Gillibrand was a member of Congress, she identified as a Blue Dog conservative Democrat. She once campaigned in defense of gun rights, was in favor of cracking down on illegal immigration, voted against the 2008 bank bailout, and opposed marriage equality. Fast-forward a decade and look at the change. She first reversed her previous anti-gay positions, and was even instrumental in ending the gay ban in the military. By 2015, she invited Emma Sulkowicz to the State of the Union, a person who alleged they had been raped at Columbia University, despite Columbia’s, the NYPD’s, and the district attorney general’s investigations ending without a finding of rape, indeed finding “a lack of reasonable suspicion.” On social media, Sulkowicz was known as “Mattress Girl,” carrying an extra-long twin around the campus to exemplify the burden they felt (Sulkowicz identifies as nonbinary) and to pressure Columbia into expelling her alleged rapist. Gillibrand, who once opposed allowing illegal immigrants to get driving licenses, is also now a supporter of abolishing ICE. And, of course, she famously engineered the resignation of one of the more talented Democrats in the Senate, Al Franken, because of a forced stage kiss, allegations of groping, and a photo of him pretending to grab a fellow USO entertainer’s boobs. We won’t ever get to the bottom of all that because Gillibrand demanded Franken’s resignation merely on the basis of allegations, and within a day, Franken had resigned, before the Senate Ethics Committee had finished an investigation. “Enough is enough,” she declared , invoking the “existing power structure of society” to end due process for Franken. I do not begrudge Gillibrand for her transformation, but it is hard to believe that political calculation was absent. She’s running for president, and invoking the language of critical gender theory, she seems to believe, will help her in the primaries. Then there’s the Democratic backlash against Elizabeth Warren. You’d think it would be about her terrible political judgment, as demonstrated by her spectacular self-immolation on the “issue” of her claimed Native American ancestry. But no! The reason many Democrats have turned on her is that she used a DNA test at all to prove her family lore. From the New York Times : “She has yet to allay criticism from grass-roots progressive groups, liberal political operatives and other potential 2020 allies who complain that she put too much emphasis on the controversial field of racial science — and, in doing so, played into Mr. Trump’s hands … Ms. Warren has also troubled advocates of racial equality and justice, who say her attempt to document ethnicity with a D.N.A test gave validity to the idea that race is determined by blood — a bedrock principle for white supremacists and others who believe in racial hierarchies.” The social-justice movement’s suspicion of science, especially genetics, is at work here. And it is not “racial science” to examine your DNA to see which genetic subpopulation in the world you belong to, or where your ancestors lived. It’s science. So if you send off for a 23andMe test, in the view of many Democrats, you’re a white supremacist! This seems to be where the Democratic Party now is. Hunker down for a second term of Donald J. Trump. A Moment of Truth I almost never cry in movies, even tear-jerkers. But the other night, I sat down and watched Darkest Hour , the movie, now available on HBO, that follows (well, kinda) John Lukacs’s account of the five days in May 1940 when Britain, its entire army stuck in France and its air force still woefully unequal to the Luftwaffe, stared into the abyss. Many in the elite believed that some kind of accommodation with Hitler was the only option — keeping him at bay and preserving much of the Empire. That policy of a peace treaty was, to my mind, a highly persuasive way forward in the naked short-term interest of the United Kingdom. Lord Halifax famously championed it in a vital cabinet meeting. Something in Churchill resisted. There’s a factually ridiculous but dramatically powerful scene when Winston jumps out of his official car and into the tube, where the passengers greet him first with British politeness (no mass selfies back then), and then begin a conversation. Churchill lays out the reasons for a peace treaty and asks the Londoners what they think of dealing with Hitler this way. “Never!” they shout back. “Never!” Interests be damned. A figure like Hitler has to be confronted and defeated. To slink away from this moral obligation violated their sense of patriotism, their understanding of what Britain meant to a world suffocating in tyranny. The great symbol of this refusal to appease was, of course, the rescue of the troops from Dunkirk by hundreds and hundreds of ordinary Brits in various boats and ships, defying Nazi control of the air to save their “boys” as they called them. It was an upwelling of moral purpose, of real grit against all the odds, and as I watched Gary Oldman deliver the “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat” speech that Churchill gave in the Commons, my eyes were swimming. Why had my response been so intense, I asked myself when my bout of blubbering had finally subsided? Part of it, of course, is my still-lingering love of the island I grew up in; part is my love of Churchill himself, in all his flaws and greatness. But I think it was mainly about how the people of Britain shook off the moral decadence of the foreign policy of the 1930s, how, beneath the surface, there were depths of feeling and determination that we never saw until an existential crisis hit, and an extraordinary figure seized the moment. And I realized how profoundly I yearn for something like that to reappear in America. The toll of Trump is so deep. In so many ways, he has come close to delegitimizing this country and entire West, aroused the worst instincts within us, fed fear rather than confronting it, and has been rewarded for his depravity in the most depressing way by everything that is foul on the right and nothing that is noble. I want to believe in America again, its decency and freedom, its hostility, bred in its bones, toward tyranny of any kind, its kindness and generosity. I need what someone once called the audacity of hope. I’ve witnessed this America ever since I arrived — especially its embrace of immigrants — which is why it is hard to see Trump tearing migrant children from their parents. That America is still out there, I tell myself, as the midterms demonstrated. It can build. But who, one wonders, is our Churchill? And when will he or she emerge? See you next Friday. Tags: interesting times president trump social justice kirsten gillibrand elizabeth warren Andrew Sullivan: America’s New Religions Most