The Pursuit of Happiness

Day 1,055, 18:52 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by Johnobrow

Over the past two years or so, the vast majority of players have chosen to pursue the rewards of conformity instead of the fruits of revolt. What they have been left with are ugly and stupid elives, ugly and stupid countries and a game pushed to the very edge of destruction by the admins' efforts to keep feeding them new promises of consumable happiness.

But the thought that one is wasting one's elife is not a cheerful one, and respectable citizens everywhere have gone to considerable lengths to avoid it. They have erected elaborate architectures of lies and self-deceptions in an attempt to persuade themselves and others that their work is not petty nonsense directed by contemptible admins and elites to idiotic and dull ends, that their political parties are not desolate bunkers of mutual contempt and shared incarceration, that their leisure and friendships are not collections of inconsequential games and insubstantial interests, that their wars are not banal tramps through despoilation, that the ways in which they think they avoid the common vulgarity are not entirely spurious, that their pleasures are not dreadfully small.

They cling to these illusions with ferocious desperation; but the whole house of lying ghosts and grim parodies is a fragile one, and it is threatened by the depredations of delinquency. To the extent that delinquency prevents respectable citizens from misperceiving themselves as happy and free players who are blessed with rich experiences and who continue to grow as individuals, it provokes their fury. It threatens to take away the very little they have, and to replace it with nothing. It threatens to bring them face to face with the poverty of eRepublik that has been there in one form or another all along.

Rebellion and non-conformism are always intolerable. They threaten to expose the lie, to tear down the facade, to disillusion. When illusion is all you know, it is your everything - no matter how unfulfilling and dissatisfying it inevitably is. All opposition must be hounded, banned and blacklisted.

This quest for contentment has spawned a series of 'rebeligions' including Dioists and Bobloists and more loosely, all the world's trolls. Each of these has put forward its own particular array of culture, language, imagery and cool behaviours as an authentic and ecstatic alternative to the misery of the orthodoxy and the ways of elife that honest and conforming people pursue. But none of these have marked the slightest departure from the global domination of bourgeois-nationalism and its logic. They have served only to assimilate players into yet more external models of thought and action, into yet more waves of commodity production and consumption. The delinquents of today remain stuck in this pseudo-rebellious process. Consider, my friends, their behaviour; the ways in which they talk and present themselves; and they're view of what makes up the good elife. Do these not reveal the extent to which they are seeking to gain status and pleasure by acting out a small variation on the templates the dominant society has shown them?

Consider, too, their unbroken, nervous concern for the visible approval of their friends. Does this not show how the individual is subordinated to a domineering collective? For all their difference, the delinquents essentially elive much as others do. Assimilating oneself into an external image of a good elife - and submitting to a collectivity - is a perfectly ordinary form of alienated "existence" in the "existing" society. The delinquents are mistaken to associate this state of affairs with autonomy, excitement, shrewdness and freedom - both by themselves and others. They may purchase some fragile self-esteem, kicks and acceptance. They may even secure some precarious means of esurvival. But they pay for them with the usual currency of submission and self-alienation.