The Most Dangerous Game, and Another Better Game

Over the past few months I've tried to draw some connections between politics and theater, but more and more I'm thinking that the better analogy would be to games. Perhaps this is just because these days I tend to relate everything to games sooner or later :)

It's an old metaphor. Kipling displays it to great effect in Kim. But here's a way to describe the contemporary politics game: it's like that game people are always playing, where they lose if they remember they're playing--I lost the game!--only in this game, you score points by derailing conversations in a different way: by expressing indignation in such a way as to elicit indignation. The more the better, and perhaps it is cathartic if your indignations happen to line up, but perhaps it only starts a great wobbling and disintegration, like that bridge that collapsed from the little harmonious wobblings all piling up and amplifying each other in the wind. 

You keep your own score, of course, so you can decide if you prefer to get more points by aligning with others' indignation within echo chambers of ideology, or by cutting Sherman's marches across them, righteously pwning people who might think differently and at any rate express their outrage differently or even in direct opposition to yours. But in any case it seems to be about the most interesting game going right now to lots of people, pretty well overtaking Monday Night Football as the national sport. In the form of debates over the bias or appropriateness of the hugely popular CNN10 (formerly known as Student News), shown daily in schools all around the country, and much more evidently through the ever-evolving hallways of social media thronged by school-age kids, the game has already begun to be played at the little league level.

We can look back at still more gruesome entertainments, like Augustine's descriptions of gladiatorial contests and their effect on his friend Alypius, or the bear-baiting that used to be the entr'acte in Shakespeare's time, and recognize our own, more political and psychological gruesomeness, prefigured therein.

Whether by way of literary and historical perspective, or just out of simple humanity, let's play another, better game instead!

In this other game, we talk to people, whether they seem to agree or disagree with us, by asking them questions first, and asking ourselves inwardly or tacitly or aloud: why do you feel that way? Do you want to feel that way? Really? And then listening, with as much love and forgiveness as possible.

Because once indignation or anxiety or triggeredness or macro- or microaggression riles us up enough, it's bound to be painful rather than exhilarating or bonding or whatever thrill it is that it gives us, playing that game we were describing above. And once something is painful enough, we probably want to deal with it in a way that will be healthy, rather than pathological or sadistic. We should probably play this other game instead, listening to and building up selves and stories, whether through serious study or shared laughter, or both, rather than tearing ourselves and others to pieces. So we can say at the end of the game-play, "Oh, she's warm!" rather than exit, pursued by a bear.