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We Are All Individuals!
We Are All Individuals!
We Are All Individuals!



Clip: We are all individuals!

Brian (not wanting to be a messiah): "You are all individuals..."
Crowd (in unison): "We are all individuals..."
Monty Python's "Life Of Brian"


"Real-Life" Arguments

Popeye in real life

It would be just plain wrong to post an article full of political arguments drawn from so-called "real life". (Reference Michael Porter's "Conservative Revolution" platform.)

Certainly I would never do that! (Reference Phoenix Quinn's "What is Socialist Freedom?" article.) Oh. Oops. Well. No one's perfect... Heh.

But certainly nobody would be silly enough to carry on a long debate in eRepbublik or to post Comments about Old World ideologies and religions like Objectivism, Libertarianism, Anglicanism, Catholicism, Islam or Marxism. (Reference countless articles and comments that do just that.) Or be so unimaginative as to simply name their political parties after real-life ones. (Umm...)

Or, perish the thought, could you imagine if a player based their in-game economic arguments on concepts drawn straight out of American economic textbooks that they were force-fed in b-school? Ha, wouldn't that be silly! (See US Forum postings from the Economic Council.) Or criticized other players who had built up a coherent mechanics-based in-game economic theory, like, say, the nodal-communal theory of e-socialism, by referencing, oh, I don't know, Friedrich Hayek's arguments made in the 1940s and then echoed ad nauseum by humorless drones from the Belligerant Alice Rosenbaum Fanboiz Society (as in, "Ha! Try reading 'The Road to Serfdom', you Rachmaninoff-hating altruist!&quot😉.

No. Indeed not! I think we can all agree that using such methods of argumentation in a fantasy-world browser game are unsporting, not to mention both dull and preposterous.

Although, now that you mention it... I did find a funny Hayek story...
"I can't resist telling you that when the Vienna Economics Institute celebrated its centennial, many years ago, they invited, as their keynote speaker, my father, John Kenneth Galbraith. The leading economists of the Austrian school-- including von Hayek and von Haberler -- returned for the occasion. And so my father took a moment to reflect on the economic triumphs of the Austrian Republic since the war, which, he said, 'would not have been possible without the contribution of these men.' They nodded -- briefly -- until it dawned on them what he meant. They'd all left the country in the 1930s."
--James K. Galbraith

OK. Well then. As a public service, and as something of a self-criticism for occasionally delving too deeply myself into the pool of non-wikified allusions, here is a simple guide to e-phenomenology...



Three World Theories



There are, more or less, exactly three schools of thought on how this world, the real eRepublik world, can and should interact with that other confusing world of toil and turmoil. Each theory has their merits and I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide which one smells better and which one makes better soup.

(In fact, they're not mutually exclusive. But as we all know, approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, not being absolutely sure of anything, and knowing that there are many things we don't know anything about, well, that rot's just for theoretical physicists and other boring scientific types. Real men take some idea -- often legitimate in its own sphere -- to the extreme, make clear cut choices between good and evil, truth and falsehood, and know that there's one easy standard to judge all cases. This relieves us from making difficult distinctions.)

The 3 world theories can be summarized as:

1) The Continuity Theory
2) The Experimental Theory
and
3) The Devil-Take-the-Hindmost Theory



eRep Continuity of Form



The first wizened school of e-thought wisely says, in an e-nutshell, that any theories, plans, names, ideologies, strategies and so on that are cooked up in the New World should be internally fully consistent.

It's like those novels where the "hero" character is just a cookie-cutter golem who delivers long, boring speeches superficially disguised as fiction. Your eRep avatar (or party) shouldn't do that. It (or they) should build on and relate to events in this world. That's called continuity. (Being funny helps too.)

If you absolutely must reference an event, idea, person or historical from that dreary world where travel is not instantaneous and people actually die in wars, then it should make some kind of sense here, as part of our shared storyline as embodied in the eRep wiki, in the various newspapers, and in the history of wars, countries, governments, politics and personalities which have emerged under the watchful and benevolent eyes of the dear old Dear Admin Department.

Here's an example. Keeping with the literary allusions, y'all... References to "realness" should be done like in Kim Stanley Robinson's Green Mars triology. He can have a character say "That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves." because within that novel the inter-play between characters who are scientists, eco-socialists, libertarians and Sufis is a key part of the story-line.

But if Robinson'd had a character just say, totally out of the blue, something gauche like... "There are two Hayeks. One, the modest and imaginative social theorist. The other Hayek is Hayek the libertarian; Hayek the paranoid and splenetic reactionary; the Hayek who fulminates against his pet hates -- 'the counter culture', 'permissive education', 'dropouts', 'parasites' and so on -- like any dyspeptic ten-a-penny rednecked blimp. This Hayek is unconnected with the former, and should be ignored." ...when in fact there was no character on Mars named "Hayek", well, that would be absurd and the reader would be justifiably annoyed.

So don't do that.



Experimental Knowledge



The second school of e-thinkers says that adopting concepts from the smelly, muddy world is acceptable here if they are clearly being used as a basis for experimentation. To wit: I will take this action because I want to be like that and then see what will happen.

Say, for example -- purely hypothetically speaking -- there was an eRep player who graduated from school and got a job.

Now let's say this person, while in schoool, had had that luxury available in a scholastic fantasy world, of grasping firmly to certain apodictic truths and a dogmatic philosophy. Let's pick one at random. Say, Objectivism. Perhaps our student even became a master of rhetoric and found that his dogma allowed him to act out emotions in which a group of followers could revel: like righteous indignation and contempt for the common herd. And that he drew immense pleasure from being able to affect and control a crowd, even though it sometimes required the unjust and "irrational" use of force.

Now let's say that the act of working instead of going to school gave him a new-found respect for organized labor movements. Perhaps it was even a sudden appreciation, like a sudden knock up the side of the head, for the extent to which corporations screw their customers. Furthermore, let's say that our hypothetical former student became very disheartened to learn over time that this fact applies to most businesses, regardless of whether or not they happen to be corporations that profit from state favor. And to top it all off, he discovered through his own experience that if they don't actually receive favors from the state, then it's typically their aim to receive them.

His righteous indignation at those who didn't support his former dearly-held view of "all for ourselves, and nothing for other people" is in the toilet. He goes back to his bookshelf and re-reads some of the greats, but this time he notices some stuff he hadn't seen before, like where Hayek wrote in 1982, "Far from advocating a 'minimal state', we find it unquestionable that in an advanced society government ought to use its power of raising funds by taxation to provide a number of services which for various reasons cannot be provided or cannot be provided adequately by the market."

http://i2.ytimg.com/i/5cKbd7HMKu2y5I5raweShQ/1.jpg">OMFGBBQ! He starts to read even more heretical stuff... Proudhon, Bakunin, Tolstoy, and even... horror of horrors... Karl Marx!

Our theoretical student-turned-worker is in a tizzy. Nothing makes sense any more. Marx's explanation of exploitation resonates more deeply with him than his former belief that "selfishness is the highest virtue". How could this be? Now let's say, theoretically, that it turns out that the "real world" is considerably more complicated and difficult to understand than he'd realized. He begins to have even more heretical thoughts, like maybe that Hume and Kant are not loathsome villains after all and that perhaps the music of J.S. Bach is kinda cool.

Then, while trying to drown his existential misery in a late-night web browsing session, he stumbles upon something called eRepublik (yay!) and is happily whisked away, out of that tawdry other world, into our delightful alternative universe.

Here, he decides he has an opportunity for a fresh start. A chance to see what life might've been like if he'd started it off with the view, say, that one cannot be ethically bound by agreements that restrict one's liberty to be self-governing.

Under his experimental vision of anarcho-communism, nobody would be forced to join a commune or a federation. If one wished to be free to work independently of a democratically-run collective, that freedom would be acknowledged and respected, provided that one doesn't attempt to hoard more resources than one uses or employ people for a wage. In which case his "Peoples' Militia" would intervene to try to adjust the balance. He would pretty much ignore the structures of the "e-state" and "e-capital" and instead build up a different kind of social structure!

Yeah, that's the ticket! He is feeling much better now.

Our student-turned-worker is having fun now, trying to figure out how to make it work. He learns that his e-anarchists couldn't actually ban wage labor -- after all, in this game, they can't -- but "agreements" in which workers sign away their liberty could be combatted by any number of means...


Well. OK. That was a long and rather extraordinary, bizarre example. Of course, it's not like anybody like that actually plays eRepublik! A real worker is too burned out after being exploited all day to participate in such things.

But if he did, you could see where he might very well choose to be, say, an "e-Proudhonist", pulling in -- on an experimental basis -- some ideas off the bookshelf in order to make the game fun for him by refusing to re-create the "real world" within the New One.

So that's the basic idea of the experimental knowledge schoool: eRep should be fun, and if that means re-inventing some wacky ideas you pulled in from the ether, so be it.



Conversations With the Devil



The third and final school of e-phenomenologists say there are no rules whatsoever binding how this world and that other world should inter-penetrate.

They are a wildly diverse bunch, often at odds with each other.

Some of them aren't even human, but are represented instead by little engines of artificial "intelligence". These can be particularly devilish.

Others just don't give a crap, but don't mean any harm. For example, they like a certain band and think everybody else in eRep should too. Or they just really like telling jokes. Or they're stark raving mad. Loony Tunes. Around the bend bonkers. Those latter ones usually don't last too long, but they do add a certain panache to the game, kind of like when your batty uncle comes for a visit. (An old friend of mine likes to say, "Wouldn't life be boring if some of our friends weren't crazy?&quot😉

Some of the partisans of the Devilish school are just plain boring. You have to wonder what the heck they're doing playing a browser game. For example, supposes there was an article in an eRep newspaper that simply criticizes right-libertarian free-marketism without tying it into anything to do with the game in any way. That would be tedious and offensive. So if you see someone post something like...

"If a Martian were asked to pick the most efficient and humane economic systems on earth, it would certainly not choose the countries which rely most on markets. The United States is a stagnant economy in which real wages have been constant for more than a decade and the real income of the bottom 40 percent of the population declined. It is an inhumane society in which 11.5 percent of the population, some 32 million people, including 20 percent of all children, live in absolute poverty. It is the oldest democracy on earth but also one with the lowest voting rates among democracies and the highest per capita prison population in the world. The fastest developing countries in the world today are among those where the state pursues active industrial and trade policies; the few countries in the world in which almost no one is poor today are those in which the state has been engaged in massive social welfare and labor market policies."

...then the right thing to do would be to post a comment like: &quot😉uh! Epic FAIL dood. Penix-socialism SUX! USA! USA!" or some equally clever retort that brings the topic back to the New World.






Well. There you have it. I hope you've learned something from this exploration into in-game e-phenomenology. I know I sure have. 😉