I’m coming to the conclusion that the 2010s did not actually exist. The time passed, certainly. People were born and died. But, from a cultural perspective, I think it’s a dead end that doesn’t lead anywhere in particular.
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You see, the libertarian model – which is based largely on the work of Adam Smith – is that employees sell their labor to employers. Lacking capital, this is the only means by which many of them can avoid homelessness and starvation. It is, in short, a buyer/seller relationship, the way that we might conceive of the sale of a commodity or the purchase of necessary supplies. The logic goes that employing a waiter is the same kind of deal as buying a bottle of floor cleaner for that same waiter to use after close to mop up after the day’s business.
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My worry is that, as alienating and bad as things are now, that the cessation of modernity might be followed by merely swapping one savagery for another. We like to believe that the world is growing less brutal and less violent, but the moral arc of the universe doesn’t bend towards justice: there is no arc. There is no absolute, inevitable progress. Everything that we get, we need to push for, fight for, argue for. It’s possible that the world might be a better and more just place if the modern era had never happened, but it has happened. If it is undone, it will most likely be undone through a great deal of suffering.
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More than anything else – as several reviews I’ve written over the years indicate – I’m interested in tabletop role playing games. These games are fascinating for several reasons, but the one I want to focus on is an intuition that I’ve been working with for a while: Tabletop role-playing games – which don’t, in any but the most loose sense work anything like other games – are toy models of political economy, and I suspect that they could be used as models for alternative political-economic systems.
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