JAKE AS THE MONSTER

Jake, well Happy Birthday man.

By the way you will not know it that my favorite video game, “Hunter Hunted” has a main character called Jake. Hahahaha! My wife and I used to play it often during our courtship years. It was a silly game but we loved it and I hope that playing it doesn’t imply that we are stupid or silly or that we don’t read The Nation. Occasionally Jake would encounter a terrible monster, (read hard to kill,) and the monster would very condescendly say, “you cannot win, put down your weapons you cannot win.” I always found those instructions hilarious, they really got your optimism down, whenever the stupid monster came out he would make all kinds of voided of syllables noises and you knew, you just knew things were going to get ugly.

Of course after a while as with all games, the Virtual Intelligence repeats its logic errors or reaches its rationalizing limits and an average human being learns that if he ducks or jumps at just the right split second the monster will react differently and give the human a chance at victory. Through repetition and error correction and of course the ability to restart the game, the eventual victim becomes the monster. The game becomes such an obvious little plot that the human being becomes bored and ignores the game and the monster, and both game and monster fade into obscurity.

You know Jake that I am going to give you a “moral to the story”. The puppet masters, in this case the game makers are aware that if the game is too complicated the majority of the people will feel dissatisfied with the game-play and abandon the product. And the disillusioned will tell their friends the game is too difficult and this in turn will lower sales expectations; and so the game has to be just right, just hard enough, just fun enough to satisfy the greatest number so that the sales figures are properly aimed at a mass market. Which is also why the cheats are available online so as to help those of us that are not gamers by nature to enjoy at least a simulated victory.

In your worldview the game creators are manipulating the gamers so as to get their money, in my world view both parties are manipulating each other and one cannot exist without the other. Your assumption that the elite and the masses are two separate entities is the equivalent of imagining that a tiger and the jungle have different priorities as far as the rainforest is concerned. They don’t!

Why would I take issue with your world view? Because it is condescending; you remind me of the monster that thought I was doomed without knowing that indeed I had more power over his existence and my own happiness. You see without me playing the game monster would be truly dead. In fact the objective of monster was to keep me alive, more than wanting to kill me the people at Hunted Hunter incorporated, which I think was Interplay, were working hard day and night to keep my attention, without that they too would be dead.

You can rightly imagine all the game designers working hard to comprehend the dynamics of my game play and mindset; “what does Ricardo like about the game? What does Ricardo dislike? When does he play more? What will give him greater satisfaction so that he buys the sequel?” But more important the game designers, undoubtedly fanatic gamers themselves, were also sacrificing their purity of game design so as to meet my less than exemplar gaming aspirations. The game designers were busy dumbing down the game so that I could be a part of their universe, so that I would play in their world, but obviously not at their Creator level of game-play.

Of course the CEO of Interplay was involved with a bunch of futurologist asking them to please guess what I was going to like next. While the Marketing group would call my house and offer me a 50% discount on any future game if I just answered a few questions so that they could best meet my expectations. Meanwhile the Sales Staff was dully working to meet sales quotas by trying to shove the game down my throat through every outlet possible.

You see Jake, perhaps because I am a common man, getting my attention is lot of work. And I must admit that getting my money is a little harder still, in part because I have limited resources, (read poor,) and in part because I am really not a consumer. And to be more honest still I don’t believe in intellectual property rights, so I didn’t even pay for the game, I got it for free and because I liked it so much I gave copies to my friends.

I don’t know how much money Interplay lost in Hunter Hunted but rumor has it that it wasn’t a very successful title, it was discontinued as sales figures did not warrant a sequel. My wife and I lost our copy and we are still trying to find one so as to recollect that period of our romance where we didn’t fight.

I think what I am saying is that the problem your Elite/Common Folk aspect ratio has is that the boundary cannot be clearly drawn. You fault the masses for not reading The Nation or Foreign Policy Review but you fail to administer the fact that it is, for instance, The Nation and what it values that has failed to capture the average imagination. I have read Foreign Policy Review and The Nation and frankly The Nation sounds like a forever in angst teenager, feeling cheated at every angle. Alexander Cockburn is surely a master of the verb and more a master at the ability to insult others at every turn. The Nation of course does have a way with words, it is purely an intellectual diatribe where the ability to toss superlatives around is only outstripped by the cult of character absolutism. Frankly I am not surprise people don’t want to read it, it is an intellectuals child’s den.

I use to read The Nation when they were still in that old newspaper print magazine format, and I seem to remember that they trashed Mother Jones for going to a colorful magazine format, it wasn’t for intellectual papers to be flashy and colorful, they must be serious and cold and sterile.

Mother Jones itself is another interesting case, I call them “the good earth people” I mean this people still think that the Indians were nice to nature, that they were one with the universe. You know I know that the American Indian wasn’t that nice, the Incas and the Chibchas and the Aztecs were even less nice, but according to Mother Jones only the white man is brutal and insensitive. One has to be blind to history to not realize that the entire evolution of humanity has been a savage adventure; and that it is only through squatter-incorporation of territory and DNA-mergers that we have grown this thing that we call a civilization.

The Nation, I don’t know how many subscribers they have, last time I checked I think it was around 170k, that is probably an accurate representation of 10% of the 3% of peoples in America that are wholly dead to their emotions and live purely in Intellectual hubris. At least The New Republic, another lover of things intellectual, has it in their sights to cater to popular opinion by expressing a liberal conservatism that tells us all that they are one of us even though they feel elitists and in fact are comfortable being elitists! The New Republic is not saying we are with the masses as The Nation likes to clamor, rather it is saying we are elitists, join us and you can be elitists too. As my favorite economist once said, “the masses more than wanting to overthrow the rich more want to be like them.”

As for Foreign Policy Review, why would you expect a publication that is a feeler for prospective policy with political insiders to be popular with the general public? I don’t read Trains and Caboose Review and don’t get me started on Slate. But to my point is that you are faulting the masses for not paying attention to obscure values and ideas. You are being just like The Nation, that is, condescending by assuming that you know more than the masses what is better for the masses; and that they are being controlled by an elitists clan and that they don’t know it because they don’t have the attention span that apparently you do.

First it must make you feel smarter to do that and if it does good for you. But allow me to pose an alternative view, that in a world of common people lucky are those that learn to be common quickly. When ever I feel special I am amazed to find my favorite rare sauces at the supermarket; throughout the years I have learnt that much of what I considered original about my philosophy was based largely on my own ignorance.

A common person has a world that caters to common people, if you are then satisfied by common undertakings this is a perfect world. How fun it must be to enjoy the Super Bowl, a sport that is glorified all over the place and that allows you to have something immediately in common with a lot of people. I myself despise violent sport so I don’t like watching those men smashing conviviality into each other, but certainly those that enjoy it are indeed in synch with each other, and that builds both family and community and nation. The fact is that the masses are tuning to each other every time they watch a basketball game or a game of golf or tennis, or dance and listen to a popular song, this is how they sync with one another, from there it is easier to be with anyone that has shared similar experiences. Under such terms you might well argue that the Elite synch with each other by going to Film Festivals, the Opera or reading droll Shakespearian witticism.

The massification of thought, ideas and interests has positively unifying aspects, uniqueness after all, even the cry for individualism has been dimmed by the commonness of such an aspiration. It is sort of the same with the ego, we all have one and it stands in the way of unification but it is equally one more thing we all have in common. Further one should always worry more for those that think they have the formulae for liberating the masses from themselves; after all they have a huge misunderstanding of the scope of the problem, for before we can liberate the masses we must be sure that the world is not a pragmatist dream come true. The masses by an large don’t try to change the world because they are generally ok with it, and more they realize that as often as the world has changed it largely has remained the same.

Personally I wished I liked McDonalds and Disneyland because I would then have more in common with Americans and the world masses, and besides that my lunches would be cheaper. The masses dominate modern society, they are the ones that are leading the world consumer order; public opinion is the marching order of the day. I don’t think that you should worry about the masses more worry about your won uniqueness which makes you a rare and endangered species.

I am limited in my beer drinking but a can never resist a Guinness Irish Stout.

Cheers.

Ricardo
A sophist