guilty by association

or, the decimation of politics

I’m e rathke, the author of a number of books. Learn more about what you signed up for here. Go here to manage your email notifications.

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This is sure to be unpopular and a smarter person would write something differently or ignore this altogether, but I’m a big dummy so here I go.

I share the above for a very specific reason, and it’s not to attack Angela Davis. The renowned political activist, academic, and philosopher has spent her life fighting injustice, standing against racism, imperialism, and, to the extent it’s possible in the US, capitalism.

For those who don’t know who Jim Jones was or what Jonestown was: this is where the term drinking the koolaid comes from. If that reference is still too old (welcome, zoomers), I’ll just say it plainly.

Jim Jones was a cult leader who, in order to escape indictment on a few crimes (human rights abuses, for example), fled to Guyana with his cult where he established a commune. After a few years of disaster there, he ordered the mass suicide of his 909 cult members, including 304 children who were unaware that they were being fed poison.

This happened on November 18th, 1978, almost exactly a year after Angela Davis voiced this support.

Why did she publicly stand with Jim Jones?

Well, in the early days of his cult, he was a true anti-racist activist. These were the 1950s and early 1960s when it was truly radical—especially as a white man—to stand with black people against an oppressive, racist government. Along with that, he was a peace advocate. Eventually, he even described his church and religious movement as Apostolic Socialism.

Jim Jones, even while he was abusing people within his church (including rape and forced abortions), was a vocal and powerful political activist for the Left throughout the 1960s, gaining more and more influence while his cult grew, pulling in young idealistic people who believed in a mission of socialism and peace and economic and political justice.

I bring this all up because I read something that I find annoying but that has become incredibly common on the world wide web. Which is to ostracize people, not based on their actions or beliefs, but based on associations.

If we used the rubric outlined in the following article, it would mean we should have canceled Angela Davis way back when, which sure would have been convenient for the fucking FBI and CIA.

In this specific case, it has to do with an indie game studio who made a critically acclaimed game several years ago and hope to repeat that same success with their new game.

Sea of Stars and the Jordan Peterson thing

Cards on the table:

I stand with both feet planted firmly on the Left.

With regard to Jordan Peterson, I believe Nathan Robinson at Current Affairs wrote all you need to know about him as a public intellectual five years ago. That he has persisted in the public consciousness for the last five years is mostly too bad, but I think his zenith of popularity and cultural significance peaked shortly after Robinson wrote that piece and Joe Rogan accidentally revealed him to be an intellectually stunted weirdo.

Now, why does any of this matter?

Well, I suppose it doesn’t. Not really. This game will live or die based on how well it tells its story and how enjoyable it is to play. Especially now, in a time where game reviewers are largely dismissed by large segments of the gaming population for a variety of reasons, some of them good, many of them bad.

But I do want to discuss this piece because I feel that it exemplifies something I find incredibly frustrating with the way culture is discussed, and especially the way people are assessed.

Jordan Peterson, for all his many faults, has helped many young men. His version of self-help—and for the vast majority of people, Peterson was understood primarily as a writer of self-help books—has become incredibly popular, especially with young men, for a reason, and that reason is that it’s mostly just generally good advice or at least the kind of advice you’d find in any self-help book.

Be disciplined, take care of yourself, be principled, and so on. There’s a whole weird undercurrent to Peterson that Nathan Robinson goes into so I don’t think I need to get into it myself.

But he is a psychologist and he has improved the lives of many people, whether you or I like it or not.

My real frustration with regard to that has little to do with Peterson and more with the Left in general. We have allowed paleoconservatives like Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro to succeed in reaching vulnerable young men because we, as the Left, have not done enough to reach these people.

There is a crisis among young men. Many people have pointed to many directions or possible causes, but few on the Left (outside of, like, ContraPoints and Hbomberguy and pre-transition Philosophy Tube) are reaching directly out to these young men who are becoming radicalized and then doing things that you may have heard about in the news.

Like, you know, mass murdering children.

This isn’t to say that things are going great for young women either! But when women become alienated and radicalized, they don’t seem to go out and murder a bunch of people, and so I’d say it’s crucial that we do something about these young men (should go without saying, but we also need to help young women, especially in a country without healthcare, sex education, access to contraceptives or abortion).

And that means do more than castigate them and tell them that they are an irredeemable product of their race and sex. That exact kind of argument and general cultural sentiment is what opens the door so wide to the Jordan Petersons of the world. And that’s if they’re lucky, honestly.

American History X came out 25 years ago. This is England came out nearly twenty years ago but is dramatizing events from 40 years ago.

I bring this up because this is a known problem and it has not been meaningfully addressed, or at least satisfactorily dealt with. We have young men falling down the blackholes of inceldom, for example, who then go out and murder a bunch of women purely because they’re women.

I dislike a whole lot about Jordan Peterson, but he is a better alternative to people tattooing swastikas on their chests and planning to murder every woman who rejected their advances.

The developer of Sea of Stars was, apparently, a man at such a crossroad years ago. He was undergoing a very trying time, mentally. He grasped out for anything and everything that could help him.

One such book was written by Jordan Peterson. Now, we may find it easy to sigh and shake or heads, but Peterson helped, to some degree, save this man’s life or at least help him dig out of the hole he found himself in.

The implicit thesis in the piece above is that we should not platform people associated with the wrong people, or who think the wrong way.

What I find most curious about this is that I’d never heard this critique of the Sabotage Studio developers, and I’ve been following this game passively since the kickstarter. The author quotes one user on Discord as the proof of this critique. And then, by the end, we learn that the developer has sufficiently atoned for reading and finding meaning in a book written by some asshole.

In essence, this piece attempts to enlarge the size of a controversy and then also dismisses the controversy. The very next day, he posted a glowing review of the game.

I find it astoundingly odd. And I like Maher. I liked his book (I have quibbles! especially about Final Fantasy IX - expect my gargantuan essay on FFIX before the end of the year, I hope) and I’ve enjoyed his writing that I’ve encountered around the internet, but this piece engages with, I think, a pernicious aspect of writing influenced by the sociopolitics of twitter.

We have created a sort of incentivized belief that knowing certain people or being friends with certain people or even reading what certain people wrote is enough to indict you for their sins.

It’s all quite Christian, in a way.

The sins of the father, and all that.

It reminds me, honestly, of the 90s and the various satanic panics and Christian backlashes to popular culture. Pundits and parents demanded people like Eminem and Id Software take responsibility for Columbine.

Dungeons and Dragons has demons and magic and these kids, who happened to play dungeons and dragons, went on a killing spree, so maybe Gary Gygax is responsible for the murder.

Like musicians and game developers are a bunch of clandestine Charles Mansons, Pied Pipers of societal collapse.

Even demanding Sabotage Studio answer for an association with Peterson is such an odd kind of behavior, especially since, as Maher points out, they have been quick to embrace movements that Peterson loudly detests.

You’d think the behavior would speak for itself.

But, no, first they must go and confess their sins.

Maybe we should hand the fucking Catholic Catechism to everyone too. Just so they understand the sacraments and what sin is and what it means for their eternal soul.

And if we take a step back from all this, the reason people are even talking about this game is because of the Chrono Trigger and old school JRPG feel.

Yuji Horii and Hironubu Sakaguchi are 70 and 60, respectively. Akira Toriyama is another old ass rich dude. I bet they have some social views that many in the anglophone twitter sphere would find questionable, to say the least. We know Koichi Sugiyama was a proponent and apologist for Imperial Japan and he wrote all the music for Dragon Quest.

Are we going to tell everyone to stop playing Dragon Quest?

Have you stopped playing Dragon Quest?

You think the children and grandchildren of comfort women care that some videogame developer read a self-help book by some freak who refuses to eat vegetables?

And I ask you again, quite seriously, should we silence Angela Davis because of the things she said in the 1970s about a social activist turned cult leader?

To make this about me for a moment:

Fyodor Dostoevsky and Arthur Rimbaud saved my life when I was sixteen and seventeen. I mean that quite seriously. I do not know if I would be alive at all if not for them.

Now, who were they?

Dostoevsky, as it turned out and much to my dismay, was a rabid antisemite. Rimbaud, after abandoning poetry, became a soldier in the Dutch Colonial Army in Indonesia and an unsuccessful gun runner in Ethiopia.

These were not nice men. Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Knut Hamsun wrote novels that were very important to me.

Turns out, they were also propagandists for the Third Reich.

Does anyone think it necessary for me to write a statement speaking out against Hitler or French and Dutch colonialism or Russian pogroms of the 19th century?

I mean, maybe that is how you feel.

Every month, I publish a new essay about Harry Potter that leads to a string of unsubscribes, presumably, because of their feelings about JK Rowling, and specifically her views on the trans community.

I’m not sure how someone could read my essays about Harry Potter and conclude that I’m politically aligned with Rowling in any way (for the record, I’ve been a political opponent of hers since the Scottish Referendum in 2014), but, perhaps, the mere platforming, as the kids say, is reason enough to write me off.

Clearly I think this is a shortsighted, conservative (Christian, really), and, well, frankly bizarre.

When we treat people and ideas this way, I believe we operate in an antipolitical manner.

What I mean by this is that the only advantage—the only weapon—the Left has are people. The Left is fundamentally about mass politics. Without the masses, we have no chance against Capital.

And so when we begin dissecting who can and who cannot be a part of our society, a part of our movement towards a redistributive economic system, we destroy politics. Mass politics means that, sometimes, you will cooperate with people you don’t like, who you disagree with ideologically. It’s Workers of the World Unite, not Workers who check all my boxes unite if that’s cool with everyone else’s boxes.

It also means that comrades today may be people you march against once this specific political issue is solved.

But if the Black Panthers can cooperate with literal Nazis to preserve their Second Amendment rights, then you can cooperate with people who read Maps of Meaning when they were seventeen and found it beneficial in the same way people find any self-help books beneficial.

When we look at fellow workers and fellow members of the underclass as enemies because, maybe, they listen to the wrong music or read the wrong books or like the wrong celebrities, we eliminate the possibility for mass politics, which is to say that we are shooting ourselves in both feet at the same time and relying on the capitalist class to lend a hand so we can make it to the Company Store and be fleeced by a pay-as-you-go doctor hired by the Company to stitch us workers up just enough that we don’t bleed out on the floor, so we can keep the machine’s gears turning.

I’ll leave you with Mario Savio’s most famous speech.

We were told the following: If President Kerr actually tried to get something more liberal out of the regents in his telephone conversation, why didn't he make some public statement to that effect? And the answer we received, from a well-meaning liberal, was the following: He said, 'Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his board of directors?' That's the answer!

Well, I ask you to consider: If this is a firm, and if the board of regents are the board of directors; and if President Kerr in fact is the manager; then I'll tell you something. The faculty are a bunch of employees, and we're the raw material! But we're a bunch of raw materials that don't mean to be—have any process upon us. Don't mean to be made into any product. Don't mean… Don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We're human beings!

There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

Savio continually fought against Capital and against oppressive institutional power. He is strongly associated with fighting for Freedom of Speech, which some people will now tell you is a dogwhistle for racist extremists.

Angela Davis was put on the FBI’s most wanted list by J Edgar Hoover.

And, you know, why not some Charlie Chaplin.

My novels, whose paperbacks are all $9.99 for the month of September:

• Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster

• Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion

• Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure

• Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera

• The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.

• Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.

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