Soul in the Game

Renaissance Humans, #82

I few weeks ago, I did a review of Warfare and mentioned I wanted to circle back and discuss Civil War at some point. I think it’s relevant to this week of darkness. Be warned, spoilers ahead.

The film is set in a near-future America, one in open conflict between the forces of the United States, the “Western Forces” of California and Texas, and several other breakaway factions. Thomas PM Barnett makes an interesting case for the unlikely duo here. Maybe California and Texas symbolically represent dynamism, innovation, and the American frontier spirit, while the Loyalist states are the calcified and unresponsive old order. That’s just me spitballing. The point isn’t to adhere to some ideological probability, it’s to showcase a possible future.

Veteran war photographer Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst, in a standout performance) and her adrenaline-seeking colleague Joel (Wagner Moura) decide to drive from New York to Washington, D.C., hoping to interview the embattled President (Nick Offerman) before secessionist forces reach the capital. They’re joined by aspiring photojournalist Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) and their weary mentor Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), whose old-school instincts and worldview clash with the group’s hard-eyed pragmatism. Garland keeps motives and politics deliberately hazy, framing the story as journalists embedded in a failing state rather than partisans in a civil war.

The journey provides a chance to survey a broken down America—suicide bombers waving American flags, roadside militias, sniper battles, refugee camps, and tense embeds with the advancing “Western Forces.” In one of the film’s most haunting scenes, the team encounters an ultranationalist militant (Played to dead-eyed perfection by Dunst’s real-life husband Jesse Plemons) whose “What kind of American are you?” interrogation distills the movie’s themes into a searing set-piece.

Each stop hardens Jessie and hollows out Lee; by the time they ride with assault troops into D.C., the film morphs from roadtrip movie to door-kicking urban combat, choreographed by former Frogman Ray Mendoza.

During the climactic moments inside the White House, Nick Offerman’s third-term tyrant president is revealed to be an empty-suit. Rather than argue the causes of the war, Civil War asks what conflict does to those who witness it: how proximity to atrocity can numb, addict, or break people who insist they’re only there to observe.

It has a purposefully unsettling vibe, which I think is why more people haven’t watched it. Maybe it’s like watching something about the pandemic. It’s too soon/too close to home, and people don’t want to see that. They get enough of it in real life.

Stories usually fall into two camps—prescriptive (do this) or cautionary (don’t do this). Civil War is decidedly the latter. It’s meant to wake us up to the implications of our current political trajectory. Lee (Dunst) makes the point on the journey that she hoped by documenting violent conflict zones overseas, Americans would take heed, and avoid going down the path of political violence. Both Lee and Jessie remark that their parents are back on farms, away from the conflict, pretending the war isn’t happening.

Iain McGilchrist is fond of saying “attention is a moral act” — meaning where we individually and collectively focus our attention is both a moral choice and a curation of our reality.

The one two punch of the murder of Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk within such a short period of time hit me pretty hard this week, as I’m sure it did many of you. The motives of Kirk’s assassin are still unclear. Everyone is scrambling to attribute it to a group they despise.

The act itself, regardless of motive, is poisonous to the body politic. I’m reminded of this Sam Kriss piece on President Reagan’s attempted assassin, John Hinckley. People seek celebrity in an act like this, incentivized by the funhouse mirror of social media.¹

If you haven’t watched the videos of either event, I advise you to. I realize some people aren’t comfortable with graphic violence. But violence is part of the world.

And looking away is how we got here.

We looked away from extreme views on the political left and right. Those conjoined cancers have grown and festered over time.

Social media is full of vitriol— gleeful celebrations of Kirk’s death and calls for a ruthless crackdown. I’m reminded of Yeats and his line “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” It feels like an inflection point, a phase transition to a deeper level of political instability.

I feel sick for Iryna Zarutska, and that no one stood up on that train. I don’t know how much of the Kitty Genovese situation was real and how much has been mythologized over time, but this event echoes how we understand it in public consciousness.

I feel sick for Kirk’s young family. He was struck down while embodying the values of free and fearless debate in public. It shouldn’t matter what his views were. I don’t agree with many of them. He has a right to say them, to engage in dialogue and argument. That’s one way that humans improve our understanding of reality, through making and testing claims. Iron sharpens iron.

In my time in the military, I deployed to conflict zones in South America, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. I’ve seen when politics turns to violence, and that fire leaves no party unscathed. Each act like this sends psychic ripples through the ether, perturbations that sow violence in other places.

I had to write one sentence to finish my novel blurb. I settled on, in the Infernal Tower, the only way out is through.

The same holds for us. We have to get through. It’s the only way.

To do that, we need to take our headphones off and attend to reality as we move through.

Joseph Campbell makes a point about adulthood rituals, and their absence in the modern world. They denote a moment when a young human becomes an adult member of the tribe. They take ownership of their stake, do their bit to pay it forward and leave things better than they found them.

What can we do? Here’s some things I’m thinking about.

Don’t listen to the siren call coming from the political extremes. We know extreme views are over represented on social media, relative to the population. These algorithms are optimized to create a schizophrenic break at the societal level. Most of us want and believe in the same things— creating a world of respect, trust, and grace for our fellow citizens. That’s the world we have to summon into being. Politicians aren’t going to do it for us. They will take their cue from their voters.

If you have kids, ensure they understand civics, and the importance of civil discourse. This is a legacy we cannot afford to gloss over. Like a frog in a boiling pot, we grow desensitized to violence as a legitimate form of politics—the permission structure is laid. Our universities are fostering acceptance of violence in our kids. Like air, we won’t miss it until it’s gone.

Words are not violence. Violence is violence.

When we assert that words are violence, we open the door to using physical violence in response to speech, however “hateful” we deem it. Using our words is how we prevent violence in the first place. And when we don’t push back against an idea like that, it gains strength like a demonic typhoon feeding on warm air.

There are groups seeking to heal the political divide, like Braver Angels. If you have the bandwidth, I recommend checking them out. They are hosting an online event Sunday, September 14th, at 6pm EST. You can register for it here.

Today all the excitement goes to the political extremes—who can be the most based/edgy in short visual clips. We have to make centrism sexy. Our media ecosystem rewards Hedgehogs and downvotes Foxes, and we have to figure out a way to reverse that.

Cultivate relationships with humans who believe different things about reality than you do. Many of my military friends think I’m a leftie, and some of my civilian friends think I’m a rightie. Foster diversity of thinking in your orbit, not just race/sex/gender diversity. Heterodox Academy seeks to promote viewpoint diversity on campuses. We have to make space, and grace, for those who don’t see the world as we do, without demonizing them.

This moment is like a vast, raging wildfire. It’s going keep burning—the endgame of the turbulent twenties described by so many big history-type thinkers.

There is no going back to the pre-wildfire world. That world is gone. It was great while it lasted, but now we’re in a new world. And that new world requires different things.

It’s going to get worse before it gets better. These spirals of violence and rancor are not easy to slow, as Dr Seuss teaches in The Butter Battle Book.

We will get out of it.

In several of his books, author and trader Nassim Taleb talks about the idea of skin in the game— having a vested interest in the outcome of a given situation. Taleb is critical of those with no skin in the game, who make policy decisions in the corporate and political world with little impact to their own lives. But besides skin in the game and no skin in the game, there is a third state. A state Taleb terms soul in the game. Someone with soul in the game has everything on the line—their performance, their conduct, their decisions. Life and death consequences for their actions.

We all have soul in this game. We have to act like it. The cumulative impact of our words and deeds are significant.

Iryna Zarutska died at the hands of a mentally ill man, while fellow passengers looked on without intervening. It’s scary and dangerous to say or do something in that moment, but we’re called to do it.

Charlie Kirk, whatever you think of his views, had soul in the game. He died in service of a vision of America, where we could say what we think openly and let our ideas wrestle in a public forum. It’s up to the rest of us whether we let that vision die with him or recommit ourselves to it.

There is a better world, waiting on the other side of this darkness, but we have to build it.

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy, instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. —Martin Luther King Jr.

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1. I’ve been building a curriculum on Irregular Warfare for my day job, and political warfare is a subcomponent. It’s important to remember that outside actors will exploit this event to pour gasoline on our existing fractures through our information ecosystems.