April 22nd, 2020
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Thread re Finite & Infinite Games
- Finished James Carse's classic Finite & Infinite Games yesterday, & started writing a thread that was gonna be more of a summary, but got bored: I'm not a summary guy.
Back blurb is an ok summary👇 rest of thread will just talk about connections I made & other thoughts- IMAGE
- Oddly somehow @callumflack's tweet wasn't what got me to pick up the book🤔
But I totally agree. Inasmuch as finite player & infinite player are ways of being, they map quite closely & beautifully onto what seems to be going on with the brain hemispheres.
twitter.com/callumflack/status/1200801403683262465 - As I've noted while reading, the style of the book reads like an impossible & impressive mashup of a syllogistic argument and free-verse poetry.
There's definitely a kind of logic to it, but
twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1243613332478844930 - Infinite games are bothandy, finite games are eitherory
twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1229894109181157376 - Carse elegantly makes it clear that he's talking about both things that are widely agreed to be games (chess, sports, war...?) as well as many other human activities (business, politics, religion, conversation)
twitter.com/gordonbrander/status/1008133787270635520 - As I reflected to @rjgoodin a few years ago as we had a conversation while dynamically balanced on each end of a seesaw in a park:
twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1262486092902735875- (partially an insight about humans and partially an insight about nebulosity)
- I hereby juxtapose 4 quotes about freedom, self-entrapment, struggle, suffering, craving:
- from Finite & Infinite Games
- from Already Free by Bruce Tift
- from Dzogchen Teachings by Chögyal Namkhai Norbu
- from @xuenay (partway down a long thread)
twitter.com/xuenay/status/1248661944904699906 - I'm pretty satisfied with having pulled together these 4 quotes. They seem to me to together form a kind of mutual causality loop:
we are afraid to experience sunyata (freedom, infinite game-ness) because it feels like losing the finite game - I'm enjoying the art form of assembling these quotes. They seem to me to together form a kind of mutual causality loop:
Carse: we veil our freedom so we can stay at the struggle
Tift: we stay at the struggle so we don't have to experience our freedom
twitter.com/Buddh_ish/status/1249155863987748864 - And then Kaj's tweets start speaking to another layer:
> dropping the craving feels like losing
Kaj's saying "losing the money"
I say it's also "losing the [finite] game" - In my work developing cultures of samesided non-naive trust-building, I've noticed a common schema many people have (that they may or may not be conscious of) that goes something like
"giving up the power-over games is losing"
(I'm one of the people I've noticed this in) - (There is, fwiw, a way to attempt to give up the power-over games that's self-understood as *winning*, as in "I'm too good for power-games", but that is fundamentally still hooked into that old value system—)
twitter.com/nosilverv/status/1249762717654757378 - something girard, something actual-martyrs, something ego death
- propaganda