Every time you play a game you are born again.
Many Lives
You enter into the game an infant, you learn how to move, how to interact with the world around you, how to do what you must.
This is intuitively recognized, the multiplicitous nature of the Gamer is experienced day by day.
But what fruit do these lives bear?
Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.
-Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
The question of fruit asked again, what’s at hazard?
The lived experience of the Gamer.
For there is no real cost other than Time, and no victory other than the not-unbearable passage of time.
The lifestyle Gamer games out of dread. A dread of the terrifying mundanity of their life. How did so many get into this bind?
Childhood’s End
The case of the modern child is a deeply tragic one. Neglectful, or simply ill equipped parents leave their child ‘to their devices’, as they don’t have the time or drive to bring their children out into the world, to show them life and joy.1
The ageless question of “What shall I do now?” is answered again and again with “Games” or “the computer”. The parent is not always a passive figure in this dynamic, in the case of neurotic “helicopter parents” they are delighted that their child chooses to stay at home rather than in the horrific and dangerous Outside.
Parents want to destroy their children, to feed on their potential. This is an eternal archetype.
Technology just offered a perfect method.
The Great and Secret Game
‘And as the child and the artist plays, so too plays the ever living fire, it builds up and tears down, in innocence—such is the game eternity plays with itself’ sage Heraclitus says, but a tawdry cheapness shall outlast all days.2
Life is a Game. A game with arcane nonsense writ in stars for a rulebook, and the players never really get it, and when they do? Watch out…
It’s a game so profoundly terrifying, that most don’t get far enough to ‘ragequit’, they just play easier games.
Video Games provide a soothing alternative to the Horror.
A thought that has often come to me in my thinking about the internet is the great irony of Plato’s Cave.
I am personally not much of a Gnostic, I think we are living in the ‘real world’, not a mere simulation, the simulation. And while there is a world of forms, it exists solely in relation to our world, it is not higher or lower.
But we have never been content with the world, and out of great fear, we created Plato’s Cave, perfected our own Matrix, a technological locality which we trap our souls in to be fed upon by nonhuman parasites.
We MAGA’d, Made Archons Great Again.
Kill Me A Son
Perhaps I’ve not explained myself well on what it is that is put at stake when we play video games and amusing ourselves to death. This is not a religious thing, I don’t think your ETERNAL SOUL is at stake, in fact, many religions (big moms and dads) would be happier to have you gaming rather than out Sinning.
The thing at stake is your Potential.
All of that Time I’ve been talking about, that is You. You are the way you spend Time.
The eternal symbol of potential is the Child.
Moloch3, the God I have identified4 with the ‘grind’ of gaming and entertainment addictions, is a God of Child Sacrifice.
And like all false idols, playing his game bears no fruit.
He demands your time, your infinite potential, and gives you nothing in return.
He grows fat on the potential of a wasted generation.
Merry-Go-Round of Life
Life is a Game, but unlike the games we’ve been looking at here, it bears the sweetest of fruit.
All religions offer a rulebook to this game, but generally for the sake of empowering themselves through strict instructions that arose from Men, not God.
Call me faithless, but I believe that playing the game well is rewarded in this Life.
Marx is right when he declares Money is Moloch. For vast amounts of people, life is a game of money.
Crowley’s thoughts on Money are a necessity in this discourse (Crowley is in any event profounder than Marx.)
Money being the fourth great power, “what are the other three?” Come, come, you can surely do that in your head. Four's Tetragrammaton, isn't it?
Very well, then!
The First Great Power is Yod, the Father. Fire, the Wand, the Flame of Creative Genius.
The Second is Hç, the Mother, Water, the Cup, the Sea to which all things tend; it is the gift of pleasing, of absorbing, of drawing all things to oneself.
The Third is Vau, the Son, the Sword, the moving, penetrating element, double in nature. For it is intellect, but also the result of Genius absorbed, interpreted, transmuted and applied through the virtue of the Cup to expand, to explain, to bring into conscious existence.
And the Fourth is the Hè final, the Daughter, Earth, the Disk, Pantacle, or Coin—the Coin on which is stamped the effigy of the Word that begat it with the aid of the other forms of Energy. It is the Princess of the Tarot of whom it is written: “Great indeed is her power when thus firmly established.”
-Magick Without Tears Chapter 55
Mankind, hitherto ignorant to all but the most basic element, have constructed life around it, denying the existence of three quarters of the world!
All religions demand the recognition of these other aspects of life. A completion of the Quaternio.
What is life but the delightful intercourse of elements? What is this world but an orgy of forms?
Why is it preferable to sit at home alone playing a lesser game, a simulation of previous simulations, than to embrace and embody the life we are gifted on Earth?
To bare all of its struggles is a Herculean task, but it is worthwhile, it is in fact the only worthwhile thing.
P.S.
If you enjoy this symbolic framing of internet problems as horrid deities, check out the other 3 monsters on my website memeanalysis.com!
After Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
This is after a long tradition, which is shown (but a bit too esoterically!) on memeanalysis.com, but I’ll give a brief chain of influence here. From Marx’s Capital, Moloch has been recognized as real. Moloch’s presence in silent films like Pastrone’s Cabiria and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis give image to Allen Ginsberg’s horrified adorations in Howl.
First time I came across this site and article, and I gotta say, it really moves me.
As a man who wasted his youth, now cruising towards 30, I can understand better than anyone the feeling of losing my youths potential to a fruitless endeavor.
Exellent! I have a brother who does nothing but push joysticks and giggle all day at tiktok complilations on discord with his friends. When he reemerges from his cave of shadows he barely purses his lips to speak nor does he walk with any purpose. The light I saw in his eyes when we were kids is gone, it is sad to see the husk he has become.
My sister is also under a similar spell but with superhero cinema and anime media; she cannot hold a conversation about anything else. I once touched her hands and it felt as if she had just been born they were so soft and clammy! Just yesterday I asked her how she can watch YouTube videos and shower at the same time "I like the background noise" she says.
One thing I've noticed though is how much posture symbolizes the psychic activity of a person. For the gamer all of his active force must be channelled into the small controller so his body contorts and is pulled towards it like a black hole.
It's so hard to watch the slow decay of everyone around me at the hands of these forces. Being aware of these truths puts me on a tightrope of madness arising a desire within me to turn around and go back to sleep. I had a weird jealousy for the ease and comfort of the sheeple which is why the substack I just started is called "I Wish I Was Like You" after the Nirvana song All Apologies. You're work is great, thanks Chris.