Game-B, Christianity, and why they're important in my romantic life
I ended my reverie with a struggle for power between me and my ex. Now we get into Game B, politics, and religion, and how it all ties together.
I started to consider that searching for truth was simultaneously bad and ineffective in my relationship, but I also couldn’t stop searching. If something in my relationship wasn’t working, there had to be a reason for it. But even if there was nothing I could do to improve the relationship, it couldn’t hurt to pursue truth with greater vigor. I realized that many of my problems are moral problems. Time spent thinking about them couldn’t be a waste. At the same time, if I didn’t write down my thoughts, I end up forgetting. So I pursued moral questions and moral frameworks. Christianity appealed to me because of Jordan Peterson, the frankness of Proverbs, and the sermon on the mount. Smart people like Nassim Taleb, Rene Girard, Justin Murphy, Wolf Tivy, Peter Thiel and others were also Christian. What made them different is they had a mechanical rather than a superstitious view or religion. They took Christianity, thought from first principles, many of them had nuanced ideas about God’s existence. They weren’t dismissive of God like the atheists, and they weren’t like the salespeople at the pulpit. They didn’t seem interested in apologetics, and were able to explain why it was a distraction, or just the wrong way to thinking about religion. Others like Jews, Buddhists, and Muslims didn’t have the kind of depth that I was looking for. These other religions felt shallow.
I’ve been obsessed with the sermon on the mount. It’s so radical and so hard to believe that I have to read some history of the early church because I wanna see how these people followed it and how it all played out. It would seem that following Christian teachings couldn’t possibly work? Jesus says a lot of things that are hard to believe: turn the other cheek, don’t worry about tomorrow, give up all your wealth, and let the dead bury their dead. Sometimes he speaks in riddles, but sometimes he’s so frank that it’s hard to believe him. And yet, in believing and in studying the sermon, I gradually learned started to use this sermon as a lens through which I saw the world. And in acting in accordance to it, it was easier to love, forgive, and to see the good in my ex. It seems to be working? In any case, Christian ideals do feel like they’re worth dying and dedicating myself to.
Simultaneously, I also suspect that when Game-B enthusiasts discover Christianity, they’ll have amazing mental tools by which to justify the need for their faith. One way to become a Christian isn’t by direct proof, but out of an exhaustion of trying every other alternative and failing. The purpose behind Game-B is to create a social operating system that allows people to cooperate at scale. It wasn’t supposed to be Game-B. It started out as a set of meetings. People are becoming more polarized and isolated. The world has limited resources. World economies are interlinked. Every civilization has collapsed, and so will the one we’re in now.
Interestingly, I also thought about political parties around 2018. I felt that something like that was necessary. During the pandemic around 2021 people started talking about cults. I started hanging out and spending time with people interested in similar ideas. However, if you’re going to start a cult, you should probably study successful ones. The most successful cult is Christianity, and it’s a religion that is still inspiring deep new ideas. Unlike Game-B, people have died for Christianity. It’s an old religion. Maybe the reason we’ve fallen away wasn’t just because we wanted to sin, but because our understanding of it got corrupted. If you’re a Fayerabend fan, you know exactly what to do. You discover truth not by analysis, but by comparison.
So, to understand what might be wrong in Christianity, you look to Dawkins and other atheists. To look into the the problems of atheism, you look to religion. If we give up on atheism, we’re back at religion. We’re back to right before the enlightenment. Are we now destined to get back to fighting religious wars? Religious wars are axiomatic wars. We’d be fighting over first principles. I suppose if there’s going to be a war, an axiomatic war is better than an economic war, an ethnic war, or a civil war. What this also means is that if all the wars for democracy were axiomatic wars, and democratic values are things like a right to vote, individual rights, etc, then such wars are satanic wars. The satanic motto being, “do what thou wilt”. Such democracies work only if people operate on principles beyond those of a democratic constitution. There’s a way in which the inability to instantiate a democracy in a country serves as an honest signal of the inherent moral corruption in that region. It suggests that the people do not have enough of a moral framework to be able to rule themselves, and that their democracies naturally degenerate unlike those in the West.
I’m sure this reverie could keep going? I have no clear idea of how to end it. But it was weird to sit down to write about writing, then to start writing about why I’m writing, and finally to get into the topics that interest me and how they’re connected. Any fundamental truth will have relevance at the smallest and the largest scales. Electrons are too small to see, and yet now they’re eating the world. The humble electron at the bottom of everything ends up in charge :)