Truth & Power:
A Tale of Two Language Games

I’ve written about the nature of language elsewhere (Why Won’t You Debate Me, Bro?: A Brief Foray Into Context And Meaning), but the important thing I would like you to note for this what-have-you is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of Language Games as the fundamental organizing principle for ALL of human verbal language.

To put it as least nerdily as I personally can muster: Games are defined by the Rules that people agree to, and in order for a move (or whatever you would call it for a particular Game) to make sense it must conform to those Rules – and different Rules mean different Games, and different Rules mean that “the same moves” mean different things in one Game to another. For example, “move a piece one space” can look like too many different things to count – chess, go, checkers, monopoly, twister, etc, etc – and everyone should be able to come up with more examples of this in their head than they probably want to, so I won’t belabor the point.

This is the basic pattern for ALL Games, from hopscotch to the FIFA World Cup Finals – the players (and anyone else interested) all agree on the same Rules – whether the rules are explicitly stated or not. And just so we’re all on the same page, most of this agreement is tacit – playing a Game with someone who hasn’t agreed to playing the Game is bullying at the very least. However, just to keep things interesting, almost none of the agreement is VERBAL, much like the rest of human communication.

Think of it like this: the act of consciously making a move in a Game that you believe other people to be playing includes the “statement” that you are agreeing to abide by the Rules of the Game as you understand them. Them making a responding move is an affirming answer back to you. That is just how Games work – if it doesn’t have this feature it is not really a Game but some other form of human activity like bullying, hazing, or good old fashioned psychological manipulation.

The reason why you don’t notice this feature is that it is so ingrained in pretty much every single human being well before they make it to adulthood. Seriously, you start learning it about the time people start playing peek-a-boo with you when you were an infant. I mean, it was probably your first non-boob related introduction to Human Sociality.

BTW my definition of Games requiring Mutual Consent shouldn’t chafe at you unless you think that Mutual Consent isn’t an important feature of any shared human activity. Seriously, Shared Mutual Consent is not a constraint on anything ever – SHARED MUTUAL CONSENT IS THE FOUNDATION FOR PRETTY MUCH EVERY GOOD THING IN LIFE!

Moving on:

Language Games:
A Splinter Of A Primer, A Splimer

Language is like Games in that it has basically the same structure – which shouldn’t really be all that surprising given that Human Language and Human Games have the exact same source. I don’t know, but maybe the “Shared Mutual Consent” hasn’t kept pace with the scale of shared language users. I’m not sure but I do think there are at least echoes of that principle in the Justice Language Game, which I will get to at the very end of this little what-have-you.

The aspect that I really want to draw your attention to though, dear reader, is the whole “different Rules means different Games” thing – this is the most important thing about Language for understanding literally anything that anybody has ever said about anything ever: all meaningful statements are uttered inside of a Language Game because that is how meaning works – statements have meaning because they are uttered in a Language Game with at least loosely defined (that is: could be articulated if you really thought about it) Rules (customary Rules that are always in flux can be pretty hard to pin down but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, even if they’re fuzzy as all get out).

Just to keep things interesting, much like “moving a piece one space” can have infinite different manifestations in the real world, the same words can have wildly different and even completely opposing meanings depending on which Language Game you place it in. If you think this can lead to a lot of confusion and even outright animosity and hatred between people, then you are absolutely correct. If you are also wondering if that is the whole point behind my Keywords For The Apocalypse Project, then the answer to that is also yes, absolutely.

Honestly, we have pretty much no power to deal with so fucking many of the World’s problems that people already have achievable solutions for, but Rhetorical Clarity is something that I can at least feel like I’m contributing to – even if the people who need it most are the least likely to give a shit. (sad lol)

Power & Fairness:
The Language Games of (American) Politics

Okay, so there’s a lot of moving parts – national and regional Political Language Games are complex and I’m not looking to write a book about them, so I’m just gonna stick to the most significant patterns that give shape to all the ever-shifting details. And because it is complex, I will take a rather meandering approach to it – but that’s okay, I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything here, I’m just providing a Contextual Framework to help make sense of a World that increasingly resists making sense. This Framework helps me – I haven’t come across anything that doesn’t fit into it yet – and if it helps you too, then awesome, if not, then I at least hope it doesn’t hurt.

The first and most important thing to note is that any Political Language Game is grounded in Reality of some shape or form. That in no way means that it can’t stray far from Reality – and I mean so, so, so, so, so, so far from Reality if we’re being charitable – but it can only stray from what it is grounded in in the first place, and far more importantly there is no such thing as a Neutral Reality that is not built with the nails of Mutual Human Agreement holding it all together. If you move where you put the nails, then you change the shape of the structure, simple as.

The Two Types Of Social Behavior:
Expected and Unexpected

If you want to see what the Real Existing Social & Political Power Structures then the first thing you need to look at is what people do in Public – all people, even those who are generally excluded from consideration – especially those people who are generally excluded from consideration if you actually care about the “Real Existing” part of the whole thing imho.

Anyway: it’s all about what people do in Public, but honestly in a lot of private places, too, so I’m gonna talk about Social Behavior in general, which includes Public Behavior and the basic pattern holds true for any type of Human Social Behavior, so if Public Behavior specifically pumps up your jam, then by all means, have at it, imagine I’m saying Public instead of Social, it’s all cool to me – anyway, all Social Behavior fits into two categories: Expected versus Unexpected, based on Laws, Norms, and Customs.

Whether they are “written” or “unwritten” rules doesn’t really matter here, because most Human Social Rules of whatever stripe have an abundance of both written and unwritten or official and unofficial aspects – all those things kind of bleed together honestly and you absolutely have to look at all the aspects you can if you want to know what the Actual Rule is. But one thing is pretty clear: the written part of any Law or Rule is such a small part of what that Law or Rule actually is.

It’s important that official and unofficial (including written and unwritten) aspects of any Rule are taken into consideration when trying to understand what the Rule actually is in any given situation because all of that supplies the context for what kinds of Social Behaviors are Expected or not in that situation. This is something we all do in our social/public lives so we know how we are supposed to act, and I’m just applying this same natural Human thought process to Collective Social Behaviors.

Expectations that aren’t necessarily great, but normal

• Expected Behavior comes in ranges and types – we live in a complex Society so depending on the Context (Time and Place are usually good starting points, but there’s always more), Expected Behavior could mean that a million people are each doing something unique in some way but all still well within the bounds of “Expected” or it could mean that there are very few Expected Behaviors in a given situation like flight attendants giving a safety demonstration.
• What is “Expected” depends on the who’s doing the expecting – and Expectations always have Reasons for them even if no one is aware of the Reasons.
• Expectations can be managed and manipulated. Our Expectations are constantly being updated in our minds – we would not be very adaptable if they weren’t – but just as we can walk a path towards enlightenment we can also walk eight billion different pathways into the dark if we can’t reliably discern good information from bad.
• Power Structures are some of the most important ways to manage Social Behavioral Expectations.
• Expected Behavior is not synonymous with “Good Behavior” or “Polite Behavior” or “Legal Behavior” – when you flip a stranger off do you expect them to behave politely or “good” or even in a law-abiding manner? Probably not. However, conflating Expected Behavior with any of these is one of the easiest ways to manage expectations. If you need an example then just look through some corporate news headlines and I’m sure you’ll be able to find a few – if not, I’m sure it’s fine that you can’t see it even when you’re looking for it. Totally fine.
• Expected Behavior can actually be pretty crappy, which should be obvious to everyone who has lived in World lately.

Okay, I think that’s a pretty good list to get us started on what we’re looking for when we say Expected Social Behavior – but I want to break this down one more step before moving on to the next step towards understanding the Language Game of Power.

DEGRADING EXPECTATIONS

• We are looking for Patterns. Statistics help, but they can also mislead. They should always be contextualized as much as possible, with special attention given to what and who is left out and why.
• We are looking for Power Structures, so there should be different types of Expected Behaviors depending on the details of WHO we are looking at in any given situation
• Privilege is a measure of Social Power. It is always relative and so it always depends on Context and Framing. Privilege also happens to be one of the keys to understanding Real Existing Power Structures.
• Situations can be complex, so expect Power Structures to be complex, too. The bigger the Power Structure, the more complex. No one can see it all, the best any of us can do is to listen well to each other and cover each other’s blind spots.
• Speaking is a kind of Behavior, but keep in mind that Verbal Language is only one part of Human Communication. All aspects of Human Communication are important for understanding Power Structures, and fortunately they generally fit into Patterns, too.

Explicit Laws And Persistent Customs & Norms:
A Brief Splimer On Rules

A lot of very smart people will put forth arguments that Human Beings are inherently Hierarchical or not, cooperative or competitive, etc, but here’s the thing – we are not fundamentally hierarchical or not, and frankly the question misses the point of our Nature entirely.

There are a few fundamental truths about Human Beings that you need to keep in mind for the type of analysis I’m trying to do here – don’t worry this list is not supposed to be anything like exhaustive, it’s just some important things to keep in mind when we are trying to understanding something as complex as how Power really works in a large-scale Society.

• Humans are Social – this should be a “no duh”, but there are an awful lot of Social, Political, and certainly Economic Institutions that have very pronounced anti-social tendencies, so to speak.
• Every quality or trait or anything else related to Humans can be put on a range, which is a very helpful lens for analysis so long as you keep in mind that what’s actually normal is to be on the range somewhere not to be in any specific region of that range. That’s why it doesn’t make sense to ask if Humans are fundamentally Hierarchical or not – the questions should be stuff like: Where do different Societies or Institutions or any other kind of social grouping fit on that range of Hierarchy? How can we tell? Are there any interesting correlations that should be investigated? etc, etc, etc.
• Almost everything we do is based on Patterns, we create them consciously in things like Art but also collectively with no one really guiding them like Customs or Language itself.
• We all have personal limitations in every possible area of our existence – sometimes those limitations overlap and we get things like “echo chambers” that are a clear dead end for thought, but a lot of times our perspectives or skills compliment each other and we can correct for each other’s limitations.

Okay, I think that’s good enough to get us going. We want to know what the Power Structures are in a Society if we want to speak truth to them, right? Anyway, let’s use what we got here to build a framework for seeing Power Structures.

Let’s start with just combining the first two elements of the list above: Humans are Social and we make Patterns and we use Patterns to organize every aspect of our lives. Don’t believe me? What’s a year? Or any other measure of time that you want to choose that has no meaning whatsoever that isn’t grounded in some sort of Pattern like seasons or day-night cycles.

Socially structured time is pretty easy to see at pretty much any level you wanted to, but the same holds for all aspects of Human Social Behavior – and so what we are looking for are Social Patterns. Great, okay – now, what the hell does that mean?

The large Patterns that emerge from and give shape to any Society we generally call Institutions. In the chart above I break them down into Political, Social, and Economic Institutions – but honestly that’s just a helpful way to talk about Societies like the US where they try to put clean breaks between some of these categories, but understand they are simply ways of talking about Social Institutions.

Still, these categories can be useful for focusing on all the various functions and dimensions that different kinds of institutions can have, as well as how they tend to reinforce each other or not.

Alright, let’s get a bit more specific about some of the types of Social Institutions that we should focus on when we are looking for Power Structures.

Nodes of Power Enforcement & Reinforcement:
Corporate & State Bureaucracies, Pillars of the Community, Paramilitaries, Good Neighbors^TM

Social Power Structures need to constantly have Power flowing through them – that is, they must be constantly shaping Human Behaviors in some very important ways. This is just to say that if you change the way that Power flows in a Society then you change the Power Structures of that Society – and going from flowing to not flowing or visa-versa tends to be a pretty significant change.

Another important thing to note is that Institutional Stability is largely a function of how interchangeable the individuals are within the Institution, which just means that Stable Institutions require individuals to fill Roles of one kind or another.

But this is common sense, right? Anything like a cult that relies on a charismatic leader tend to fall apart without that leader – and certainly these types of Institutions can be an important part of different Societies, but I do wonder how the percentage of a population whose Social Behavior is largely directed by an Institution centered around a charismatic individual would relate to that Society’s general stability.

Anyway, Power Structures require both Enforcement, in the sense of directly shaping Social Behavior, and Reinforcement in the sense of being legitimized by other Institutions. Again, this shouldn’t be surprising because every Society needs to have its major Institutions be mutually reinforcing if it’s not going to rip itself apart.

We might say that the degree to which Social Institutions Reinforce one another is how Entrenched those Institutions are. Some Social Institutions, like those centered around aspects such as Race, Gender, or Class/Caste are so seemingly entrenched because they reinforce and are reinforced by so many other Social Institutions that they seem too large to ever change without also changing everything else at once.

Well, if you happen to live in a place where pretty much everything else needs to change at once anyway, then Hey! that’s quite the opportunity to do some things better, eh?

Anyway, based on what we just talked about, as well as some of the other stuff from before, when we are looking for Power Structures we now have a few aspects to look at:

• Stable Social Institutions are going to be based on Roles – which means that both the Institutions define the Roles and the other way around
• Institutions that are centered around a Charismatic Individual are also based on Roles, it just so happens that the Role the entire Institution is built around is tied to a specific individual.
• Mutual Institutional Reinforcement is a measure of Social Entrenchment – the more other Institutions Reinforce a particular Institution’s Roles, then the more those Roles will be Socially Entrenched.
• There are certain Institutions that intersect with just about every other imaginable Institution, so much so that the way a Society does that sort of thing, like Race or Gender or Class, the more “natural” those Institutions tend to be regarded. They aren’t though – it’s only natural for Humans to have Institutions in general, there are no “natural” Institutions specifically, though.
• Privilege is a measure of Social Power – and it is always based on Institutional Roles. Even Institutions based on Charismatic Individuals tend to get at least part of their Social Power from Privileges that stack up from other Social Roles.
• Humans are Problem Solvers, and a lot of Institutions are simply a Society’s way of solving certain Problems – consequently how well they actually solve those Problems is an excellent way to evaluate Institutions

Okay, sounds fine so far, but you know me – I can’t help but think this is all still a bit too clean and neat. Complex Societies do not move all in one direction, ever. There are Power Struggles of course, both within and between Institutions – but there is also a literal poop-ton of other Human Behaviors that don’t fit into that schema that we still definitely should want to account for.

Counter-Power Enters The Chat

Who doesn’t love Counter-Power? Narcs and dweebs, that’s who.

Seriously though, “Counter” doesn’t necessarily mean that it is in opposition to the Dominant Power Structures – although it does include that – Counter-Power is just the Power that flows through a Society via Institutions that aren’t a part of the Dominant Power Structures. Keep in mind that being opposed to something is only one way of not being that thing.

There has been a lot of theorizing about Counter-Power coming from tons of different angles over the past few decades, both inside and outside of Academia – in fact, I would say that the increased popularity of utopian and dystopian literature and tv/movies so far this century is just another expression of this collective thinking through the concept of Counter-Power.

This makes sense, though, when you consider the Geo-Political Context: It was now abundantly clear that the Planet was either broken or at the tipping point of breaking but the Society That Broke The World still had a firm grip on Power in shaping the World System – but unlike the dystopian fears of much of the twentieth century, the Society That Broke The World is not some Totalitarian Juggernaut that squashes individuality, it is a semi-chaotic mess of competing Institutions.

So it makes sense that people who aren’t a big fan of the status quo on account of the whole breaking the World thing and then violently preventing anyone from trying to heal it, would think about changing it not in terms of an umbrella Revolution but of carving out niches where people can build institutions organized around different principles than those Entrenched in Dominant Power Structures.

But always, always, always keep in mind: there are countless ways to be against something, and countless reasons why. Those things should be important, Change moves in Directions, and just because someone is moving away from the same thing you are does not mean that they are moving toward the same new thing as well. To me, at least, the Direction Toward What Exactly is absolutely the most important thing when it comes to Social Change – if we can agree on that, everything else is strategy and solidarity. But if we can’t?…

Moves & Counter-Moves:
Reform, Revolution, & Replacement

Thinking about Directions Towards What Exactly from Institutions built around Counter-Power, there are a few key ones that are going to shape Social Behavior in large ways both for the people who take part in those Institutions, but also for the Dominant Power Structures to react against.

As one might expect, each type tends to have their own Grammars (Rules to their Language Games as well as the frameworks through which they interpret other Political Language Games). I’m going to look three or four of them, basically any that I can think of that begins with the letter R.

Reform is all about tweaking the Dominant Power Structure to make some parts of it a bit less bad here and there. If the Dominant Power Structure is pretty good overall then Reform is probably going to be the most popular form of “resistance” in that Society.

On the other hand, if the Dominant Power Structures are all pretty crappy to begin with (like in the Society That Broke The World, for example) then movements and Institutions of Counter-Power in a Reform Direction tend to just reinforce the Dominant Power Structures and not address any of the real problems.

In the next section, I’m going to go a bit more into detail about this process, the important thing now is that Reform is mainly concerned with tweaks and not major Change.

Revolution is concerned with Changing the Dominant Power Structures in significant number of ways to a significant degree. Big sweeping Changes that should in turn have major effects in all the Patterns of Social Behavior.

Replacement is like the parasitic bizarro form of Revolution, that tends to borrow/appropriate rhetorically from Revolutionary Language Games as a way to defuse Revolutions or as bursts of Counter-Revolutions. Anyway, Replacement is just about replacing who occupies the social roles at the top of the Social Hierarchy without changing the general shitty shape of the Dominant Power Structures.

One More Counter-Power Before I Go…

I don’t have a good R word for this last one – Rebirth, maybe, I think Renaissances could certainly be a part of what I’m talking about, so we’ll see – but this is the kind of Counter-Power that I am more interested in:

People that are trying to build Institutions that are outside of the Dominant Power Structures even if they exist between the cracks of those Structures – people who are building networks of Institutions and Projects that are an Alternative to the Dominant Power Structures but are not necessarily in open opposition to those Structures.

I would argue that one of the largest Zeitgeists of the 21st century so far for all kinds of scholars and artists and activists is around this form of Counter-Power, where people opt in to creating new networks of Mutual Institutional Reinforcement that are based on principles that celebrate Life and Humanity’s place in it, which of course the Dominant Power Structures of the Society That Broke The World are based on the exact opposite principles.

Anyway, this is a different approach even than more traditional understandings of Revolution, because it is not about direct confrontation with Dominant Power Structures (although of course this happens, too, and some of these Institutions and Projects are created to do just that, but the network as a whole is not). Instead this approach mimics Life by making proliferation and reiteration and symbiosis it’s driving forces.

Think about it this way: when Nature “reclaims” human habitations – watch some abandoned place videos if you never have before, they’re usually pretty cool as long as they aren’t ai slop – it destroys old buildings and roads and whatnot by stuff growing in the cracks until one day it has overwhelmed the older structures that once seemed so permanent.

Anyway, I think we have a good enough sketch of how both Dominant as well as Counter- Power Structures shape and are shaped by Human Social Behavior to get to the heart of the issue – the Language Games Of Power.

Political & Social Language Games:
How We Talk About Power

The first thing to note is that a lot of Political Language Games are themselves a part of these Power Structures – and indeed a lot of the Dominant Power Structures ultimately are concerned with the flow of Information in one way or another.

In deed, there is a certain dynamic that I want to talk about that exists in the particular Dominant Power Structures of the Society That Broke The World – I’m not sure how universal this Social dynamic is, but my guess is that the more inequality there is, the more likely you are to see it.

The Social Dynamic I alluded to earlier has to do with the how the overlap between The Dominant Power Structures and What Those In Power Say They Do is managed – and it is very much managed by the way, but don’t let that prompt you to go down any Conspiracy Theory rabbit holes – this is only to admit that professional propagandists of all types exist whose jobs are ultimately to “manage” that overlap – not that there is anything like a master plan.

Anyway, I find that there are three basic ways that those in Power (or rather work in the Service of Power, which is so often the case) talk about Society in general, let alone the parts that have to do with Power or Politics specifically.

The Fairness Game, The Pragmatism Game, The Fascism Game

This Section is concerned with some very specific types of Language Games that are more on the level of a Meta-Game in that they are more like Modes than Games themselves – they are keys for interpreting things said in all the various acts of communication that make up the Political Dimension of the Public Sphere.

The three Language Games or world Views that I am going to focus on here, as well as the one in the following section, all share a few key features which I want to go into first before talking about the Games themselves.

Each of these Language Games is a distinct and mutually exclusive World View. Now, when I describe them below this might not seem the case because you will be able to think of many examples of the same person jumping haphazardly between them in a single conversation. Yes, this is what happens when people lack critical awareness and/or a coherent World View.

Anyway, as fully functioning World Views, they act as interpretative filters for literally everything that has to do with Public Life – and as they are also distinct and mutually exclusive, what one statement means in one of these Language Games rarely translates at all to the others without completely changing the meaning – which in this context amounts to the same thing. You can imagine how much confusion this causes on a regular basis.

Okay, I may have been a bit unfair when I said that people slip between the three Power Language Games because they have no coherent World View – even if it’s true it misses something very vital which is that if Power is the only thing you really care about, or in other words that Power is the Ultimate Value, then even World Views are secondary to Power. It’s not that they lack a coherent World View because they are somehow too stupid to have one like a made it sound up there – it’s that they’ve even instrumentalized their own minds in the service of Power.

For the record, I think that’s so much worse than being stupid – we are all ignorant of far more things than we have a firm grasp on, and turning other people’s ignorances into Proofs of Stupidity isn’t a Game that I want to see myself slip into playing. But the people who choose to instrumentalize their own World Views in the Service of Power? In the service of a fundamentally brutal, destructive, and cruel Power? Well…

The Emergence of 21st Century Fascism:
From Fairness To Fuck The World

So, here’s a breakdown of how I see the relationship between these three Language Games Of Power as it has evolved over the first quarter of the 21st Century, specifically in places that were the Centers Of Power in the 20th Century:

• The Dominant Power Structures coming out of the 20th Century were not only unsustainable in the long run but were highly volatile in the short term
• Coming out of the 20th Century pretty much all of the Major Powers spoke about Politics and Society and the World in the register of The Fairness Game and yet all governed by principles consistent with The Pragmatism Game
• The 21st Century has also seen a huge rise in Counter-Power, among which are an increasing amount of people who were speaking in the register of The Justice Game and are consistently deemed immediate threats by the Dominant Power Structure as a whole
• Near the beginning of the 21st Century one of the Centers Of Power (the most centerest one even, one might say) set out on a path to remake the Dominant Power Structures in an explicitly Fascist direction (if you want an exact date, then how about September 12, 2001 in case you don’t do subtext so much), and the rest have followed suit

Here’s the thing though: despite the fact that the direction that Central Powers were moving with regards to the shape of their Dominant Power Structures were in a clearly Fascist direction, all of the different “voices” of Power (politicians, corporate journalism, advertising, large movie and television production studios, etc) still interpreted everything either through Fairness or Political Pragmatist frameworks – which had the effect of shielding and fostering Fascism so that it could continue to grow into the shit-nado that it is today.

And this makes sense when you look at what these two games ultimately do: the Fairness Game seeks to legitimize Dominant Power Structures by choosing some arbitrary metric and using it to strike some kind of Social Balance; and the Pragmatism Game is all about finding a Balance between the different parts of the Dominant Power Structures, particularly those at the top.

One of the primary functions of any Fascist World View is to sharply define those arbitrary metrics as well as the different parts of the Dominant Power Structures that need to be balanced and what the balance should be.

Gender is a big one of these arbitrary metrics, in case you haven’t noticed how much Fascists are obsessed with the “Trans Question” and use it as a recruiting tool. This of course is why people who do Care try to point out that being “anti-trans” is a gateway bigotry to actual real Fascism. I’m honestly not too sure how much more clearly Reality can keep making this point over and over again for us. And yet…

Anyway, the tragedy of 21st Century Liberal Politics is how the Fairness Game and the Political Pragmatism Game have provided the cover for reshaping Public Institutions along extremely Fascist lines – and don’t think just explicitly Political or Governmental Institutions here: most workplaces are in some kind of Public Space even if The Society That Broke The World thinks that if a private individual “owns” that Space it somehow becomes not Public anymore – that deeds of paper are more important than Life for determining how Human Beings inhabit and use a Space. I’m sorry but that’s just silly. Sorry if this is how you find out.

Anyway, it has become so increasingly obvious to everyone that the Dominant Power Structures in a lot of the Big Powers left over from the 20th Century have become pretty wholly and completely Fascist – and because of how obvious it’s become, the Fairness Game has lost all credibility because there is nothing Fair about anything to do with Fascism, and with it the Political Pragmatism Game has lost credibility as well because people are also noticing more and more that all of the “compromises” move in one direction, and that one direction is towards Fascism.

And in spite of the rise in Fascism, it’s really not all that popular without a serious shitload of continuous propaganda – and one of the primary strands of Fascist propaganda is to take things that are said and done in an explicitly Fascist register and interpret them in Fairness and/or Political Pragmatist Frameworks. As the process of laundering of Fascist ideology through Fairness and Pragmatist Frameworks has lost its effectiveness, the move has been to abandon those two frameworks and become openly Fascist – which has been a surprise to a lot of people and one that many are not handling well.

I think in order to really get at why people are not coping well with the realization that so many Dominant Power Structures are actually Fascist, I need to bring in the final Language Game I want to discuss: The Justice Game.

The Justice Game:
Speaking The Good Society Into Being

Okay, I don’t generally like to look at the World in stark terms like Good or Bad, mostly because it’s usually neither very useful nor very accurate. However, these kinds of World View-sized Language Games are pretty damn simple to judge imho.

• Fascism is bad. Full stop. If you need actual reasons for this, then I honestly have no idea why you would be reading this at all.
• Political Pragmatism is bad. Full stop. It’s a World View that not only believes that the Ends Justifies the Means but also that the most important End is the Dominant Power Structure itself. Not a fan – again, I’m not sure why you would be reading this if you held this World View.
• The Fairness Game is neither inherently Good nor Bad. But because it is largely an Interpretative Framework that tries to reconcile the different parts of the Dominant Power Structures with utterances (demands, questions, policy proposals, etc, etc) originally spoken in The Justice Game, it really depends on whether people usually use the Fairness Game to advance claims (or whatever) made in The Justice Game or if they use the Fairness Game to defend and justify the Dominant Power Structures. Ultimately I think that even when it’s not actively Bad and making the World worse, the Fairness Game just still isn’t all that Good anyway.
• The Justice Game is Good. In fact, it’s how Human Beings express the Good, in Social terms.

Okay, so that last one is quite a claim, I know, but before you hit the “well, actually…” button let me explain:

First, this is just definitional for me: there is a version of The Good Society that is fundamentally Life Affirming and that truly and deeply Cares about the World and the People in it. The Justice Game is the World View that uses this version of The Good Society as a horizon to orient Societies in the Real World.

Different Cultures and Societies and Individuals and Groups of all kinds think about the details and specifics of The Good Society differently, but that should be expected. Life Affirming means embracing and celebrating diverse perspectives and respecting a whole lot of very different looking Lived Experiences. The important thing here is that Care and Affirmation are foundational for the entire World View -if these things are important to you then the only thing easier to notice in a World View is their absence.

If you look, you will probably notice that The Justice Game is usually played by those outside of The Dominant Power Structures and serves as the basis for a large swath for Institutions of Counter-Power – certainly the kind of Counter-Power that I’m interested in, as I assume is the case for most of my reader(s) as well.

Anyway, I think we just nibbled our way all the way through the crunchy shell and have finally made it to the creamy middle:

Speaking Truth To Power:
Where Justice Goes To Die

Okay, that may be a bit strong and even borderline click-baity, but also completely accurate for the first quarter of the 21st Century, at least for the Central Powers of the 20th Century.

Something that gets lost a lot in analyses of the dramatic slide toward Fascism in recent years is that the slide has been happening in a various places throughout the World this entire century and that this has not gone uncontested at any step along the way.

Over and over again this century, we have seen cries of Justice be translated into the Fairness Game by well-meaning (?) elites only to lose their essential meaning and more often than not get co-opted by those in Power for their own uses and ends. Well, one of the byproducts (or aims depending on who was doing it, I guess) of this process is that Fascists had no real opposition to reshaping the Dominant Power Structures in their image.

Anyway, places that have been doing better this century with regards to not becoming fucking Fascists (should be a low bar, but alas…) have tended to have people address the cries of Justice not to those in Power, but rather to those who share Principles based on Care and Affirmation – and then started to build stronger Institutions based on these Principles as well. Idk, but that is just a much more worthwhile use of our time than trying to convince people that Fascism is Bad through appeals that they lack the basic framework to even understand in the first place.

I say, let them come around – and until then let’s share our Truths with each other while we start to fix all that’s broken.