November 6, 2020
Jordan Hall is something of a polymath. Talking to him about the metacrisis of our time was a wild ride through history, genetics, linguistics, and more -- so comprehensive it's beyond the scope of an article (but you can listen to the full interview in English, see the link below). In this text, we follow Hall's explanation of our current global social reality, which he calls "Game A" and "The Devil's Bargain". But he doesn't leave us in the hands of the devil: "Game B" is already on the horizon.
e: There are many “wicked” problems that humanity is facing, but there seems to be a deeper crisis beneath all of them. What is the root of what is going on?
Jordan Hall: It is made up of a devil’s bargain. I will play the devil in this story, and so I say to us humans: “I’m going to teach you a new kind of game. In this new kind of game, I am going to give you two gifts in exchange for one price. One gift is the gift of avarice: all those things that you can name, you may have in plenty--piles of treasure, all of Mammon’s desire. But you have to be able to name it.
The second gift is the gift of war: you can protect those things you have from anyone else. Even more, you can take what you want from anyone. You have the possibility to win any conflict. That is the nature of the game that I am going to teach you how to play. The price? All you have to give me is your mortal soul. What do I mean by that? What I mean by your “immortal soul” is your actual connectedness to the whole of life. What I mean is the distinction between simulations of meaning and meaningfulness itself. Wholeness. Being part of the whole rather than being separate from the whole.
Jordan Hall is something of a polymath. Talking to him about the metacrisis of our time was a wild ride through history, genetics, linguistics, and more -- so comprehensive it's beyond the scope of an article (but you can listen to the full interview in English, see the link below). In this text, we follow Hall's explanation of our current global social reality, which he calls "Game A" and "The Devil's Bargain". But he doesn't leave us in the hands of the devil: "Game B" is already on the horizon.
e: There are many “wicked” problems that humanity is facing, but there seems to be a deeper crisis beneath all of them. What is the root of what is going on?
Jordan Hall: It is made up of a devil’s bargain. I will play the devil in this story, and so I say to us humans: “I’m going to teach you a new kind of game. In this new kind of game, I am going to give you two gifts in exchange for one price. One gift is the gift of avarice: all those things that you can name, you may have in plenty--piles of treasure, all of Mammon’s desire. But you have to be able to name it.
The second gift is the gift of war: you can protect those things you have from anyone else. Even more, you can take what you want from anyone. You have the possibility to win any conflict. That is the nature of the game that I am going to teach you how to play. The price? All you have to give me is your mortal soul. What do I mean by that? What I mean by your “immortal soul” is your actual connectedness to the whole of life. What I mean is the distinction between simulations of meaning and meaningfulness itself. Wholeness. Being part of the whole rather than being separate from the whole.
IT TAKES OUR ABILITY TO BE AT THE SERVICE OF THIS CREATIVE POWER.
Now, there is an actual context of this devil’s bargain where this trade may have been a good trade. If you don’t take the trade, and your neighbor does, then you go away, you no longer exist. Historically speaking, the bargain has been a cruel choice. To fail to take the choice was actually simply to choose death or enslavement, which is death by another name. Nevertheless, it is still a devil’s bargain, you really are just delaying the inevitable. So, you may have lived in a place that was becoming a desert. By virtue of playing this new game, you are for a while converting your place into a garden. But it is at two costs: at the cost of your neighbor and at the cost of your future. That I would say is the absolute central essence of it.
A Game without a Winner
e: I am struck by how far back this goes in history. For the first hundred thousand years, Homo sapiens lived in a fairly peaceable kingdom, because human settlements were small and far apart, so there was no competition for resources.
JH: Yes, relatively low density, relatively large distances—and almost always significant territory that is hard, but available. People did not become Eskimos because they liked to ski. Once they figured out how to Eskimo, it is a perfectly valid human niche.
e: Right, and there came a point, such as with the desertification of Africa, where those niches were no longer viable and violent confrontation started as humans began to take resources from each other. You’ve actually gone to the root of something that is really the beginning of what we call civilization.
JH: Yep, that is the proposition I will make. A whole technology of domination and control was developed and perfected. In the history of the Roman Empire, on the hills of Rome, they are almost overrun by the Etruscans. The Romans make it, they figure out a new way of playing this game that the devil has given us, and begin to expand. They keep running into barriers—the Carthaginians and the Punic war. But they win, they conquer the Carthaginians and they expand and they expand and they expand and they expand.
But then the expansion comes to an end. The energy of the thing that they are able to harness can only go so far. We literally have a wall, Hadrian’s Wall, in England. Two things happen: the interior of the Roman sphere of domination and control has become fragile, at the micro level. Farms are almost entirely run by slaves and only a small number control the entirety of Rome. There are almost no free Yeomen, members of legions. The legions themselves are now run by mercenaries paid with money. It becomes fragile on the inside and the exterior; the Germans outside the Roman sphere are now better at playing the devil’s game. So the Romans lose—you eventually will always lose, because this is a game where in the end, you always lose. Then the Germans move in. Each iteration is extremely intense because death is on the other side of the equation. Not just death, but extinction, extinguishment, rape and pillage, destruction. So, of course, the stakes are high, as is the intensity and the willingness to make tradeoffs—trading the long term for the short term. The willingness to build nuclear weapons that may be the end of humanity. But we need to win this fight now. This dynamic pushes innovation forward, pushes the game forward, forward and forward and so now, we are where we are.
e: Ok, where are we now and why is the lose-lose nature of the game now becoming apparent?
JH: There is actually a fundamental answer, and for this, I would like to point to a book by Geoffrey West called Scale. In the last third of the book, he talks about the fact that there is a very interesting regular mathematical consequence of each reset in this game we are playing. With each iteration of the game, the period of duration is cut in half. My first move, say the Egyptian Empire, lasts for thousands of years. But each major move after that lasts less time. We can actually see this happen. I can go from Greece to Rome and from Rome to the whole Roman Empire into the Germanic version, but the cost is that the next iteration burns itself out faster.
IF YOU ARE HUMILIATED BEFORE THE INFINITE, YOU RELEASE YOUR IDENTITY INTO YOUR TRUE SELF.
You get to a point where you have to reset faster and faster and then you get to a point where you have to reset effectively instantaneously. It is almost like the game itself has a built-in terminus point based upon just that characteristic. But my bigger point is that just as it turns out this particular finite game actually does hit bottom; more of us begin to notice that we actually are not doing the infinite thing, the thing that is real.
The Wasteland Within
e: So, is this what you mean by Game A, the game that civilization or humans have been playing in concert for the past 35,000 years? Now, the end of the game is apparent, and the human experience in Western culture is one of deep dislocation.
JH: Yes. Let’s look at simulated meaning and meaningfulness. For many people, it’s easier to see climate change, soil degradation, water pollution, or loss of water. But the interior is equally strip-mined, equally desertified. The interior here is the interior of all possible interiors, the relationships between and among people, what I call community. I define community to mean real relationships, authentic, rich, complex relationships among people—although it also pertains to nature. The other term is society. Society is formal, society is mediated. When my mom makes me dinner, that is a communal relationship; when McDonald’s gives me dinner that is a social relationship. In both cases I get dinner, but there is a very different context. Society most fundamentally is a parasite to community. Its most fundamental essence is that it just consumes the meaningfulness in the relationships of community.
Exactly the same thing is happening in the interior of the distinct individual, with self and identity. Self is like community in our analogy—or, in a bigger context, like nature. An identity is a parasite. Identity exists by virtue of intermediating relationships in the interior of self and simulating them and extracting them, making them more salient, more speakable, more controllable but at the cost of generating havoc. Identity consists of a finite string of signifiers, which is the finitization of the infinite self. The same dynamic happens at all different levels, and by the way, are mutually reinforcing; society wants identity. Society can interface with identity very well. Society doesn’t like selves, society and selves are much more problematic. Self recoils in society; identity plays the society game. The intrinsic dynamics of all these different characteristics work together, which is why the process unfolds in the way that it unfolds.
e: Because society is offering identity, but not individuation, we are ill-fitting. Our full humanity doesn't fit into our identities. If your identity is one that is disparaged in the dominant culture in society, then you're angry and resentful.
JH: There's a very powerful point there. Anger and resentment are quite likely and quite common. However, it can give way to a deeper level of wisdom and insight, because one of the things that you're afforded is that the reality of the mismatch between identity and self is perhaps a little bit more obvious.
e: I think there's also another element. Anger and resentment can be a motivating and moving force, as you're saying. But having an identity that is seen as lesser, often creates humiliation and shame.
JH: Wow, that's powerful. It's interesting because the root of humiliate is the same as the word humble. If you are humiliated before the infinite, you release your identity into your true self. But in the context of society, to be humiliated is to be bound to an identity and then degraded. A big part of the nature of the devil's bargain is precisely the requisite degradation of the other. For me to win the game of war, there must be someone who loses the game of war, and that someone must be humiliated. They must be trodden upon to make sure that they can't get back up again because you don't want to deal with them again. It's not lost on the winner that the losers are only losers at the moment. If you do not sow the fields with salt, they are waiting for their moment to get back.
However, humiliation, when matched to community and self and whole and world, is a virtue. To be humble is a very powerful thing. In playing the devil's game, all virtues must be turned on their head. Humiliation must first and foremost be made profane and then repeated over and over again in its profaned form, so we lose track of its sacredness.
Connected as a Whole
e: That feels very important, and it also serves at this point in culture to create a kind of allergy around the degree of surrender that one needs in order to be able to encounter the infinite. The cost, then, is our capacity to have integrity, meaning to be integrated into wholeness, that's the devil's bargain, right?
JH: Yeah, that's exactly it. When you made the bargain and you sold your soul to the devil, the cost was integrity. The cost was integrous-ness, to lose a well-integrated whole. At the end of the day, there is only one well-integrated whole. To the degree to which your interior begins to become a well-integrated whole, it begins participating in a well-integrated whole of community, which is itself part of a well-integrated whole of nature, which is itself a part of the integrated whole of the universe. So while the profaning of this wholeness and the extraction happens at all these levels, so also does the integration happen at all these levels.
e: I can see how this deep sharedness and deep investment in community has the quality of an antidote to what we're speaking about as Game A, which drives the meaning crisis.
JH: Yeah, when there are whole well-individuated selves, who by choice, through conscious consent, constitute a community, a particular kind of community is created. The people it produces do not become lesser by virtue of being part of it. They don't lose their individuation. So, the community both maintains its integrity as a whole, but it also is evolving and expanding in the nature of what it is. Its own interior continues to grow and maintains its continuity as a whole. That is another way of saying Game B. That is the antidote. That is the move that goes that's on the other side of the devil's bargain. It's the different kind of game that we can play. Thus, the three things that have historically caused our civilizations to fall apart are resolved.
e: What are those three?
JH: Sure. One has to do with the relationship between our civilization and nature. Desertification. We trade the long term for the short term so that when the long term comes to pass, we're screwed. The second has to do with this hierarchy of domination. In our interior, we are actually sowing the seeds of an inevitable conflict. There's always going to be the struggle to figure out who's on top. The third is the same thing on the exterior. The exterior is the relationship with the other on the outside. So, either debased or humiliated individuals on the interior destroy the civilization from its inside. Or guys on the outside eventually figure out how to break through and destroy us. Or, worst case, we destroy nature and everything collapses.
Trust opens the Way
e: For this culture to work and thrive, we're talking about a very high level of human development.
JH: But not fictional. It's more like where we're all roughly the same level of maturity and self-awareness and self-management as, say, the citizens of Tahiti before Captain Cook landed. Or have you ever noticed a person that was really very grounded and wise and seemed to be good at managing their lives without creating too much havoc in other people's lives? Like that. To be in a conversation where you ask yourself, “How do I say the thing right now that’s the most empowering version of this conversation? What can be held? What can I express with a sort of adequate truthfulness and clarity and elegance and what can be heard in the context of what the relationship can hold?” That's it. Then of course, what happens is you get an upward spiral because every conversation of that sort simultaneously teaches more skillfulness.
We have the possibility. The only question is: Do we thread the needle?
The likelihood that ten years from now will look a lot like ten years ago is from my point of view, actually zero. Not really small, but actually zero. The likelihood of success, properly speaking, should be considered very, very low. On the other hand, there's something about the nature of what we're doing, where faith is the way. By faith, I don't mean believing really, really hard in stuff that ain't true. It is something very distinctly different than that. But if we can discover what is meant by faith, then we will certainly thread the needle and then we'll be in good shape.
e: What you just said is very significant. If by faith you mean trust in the driving force of creation that has made these amazing bodies of ours, the biosphere, that which has always produced something that is of the whole. If that were to drive our agency, that would take an enormous amount of faith.
JH: Well, what I would say is it doesn't take an enormous amount of faith, but skill in some sense. The skill to become a conduit, a vessel driven by or motivated to act on behalf of and through this creative force. Maybe faith is almost like a skill. It's like becoming an artist. When someone, say, a Beethoven has the Ninth Symphony flow through him, that is faith. When a Miles Davis has creative impulses flowing through him with majesty and with grace, which they've been graced by, that is faith. The trick is we have to simultaneously not get tripped up by the devil's bargain, by the profaning of things as we have been over the past 35,000 years, and also to develop in ourselves the skillfulness, the capacity to do this thing when, as you say, in fact, it's already here. It's not like we will get there, that creative force is already here.
