Divide et Impera: The Culture War on Our Hobbies
Divide et Impera: The Culture War on Our Hobbies
Hobbies unite people across unbridgeable divides. Politics exists to divide them. The systematic injection of modern identity politics into every game, every film, every comic book, every miniature on your tabletop is not artistic evolution, not organic cultural shift, not the natural arc of progress. It is a strategy. An old one. The oldest one.
Divide et Impera. Divide and rule.
And it is working.
I. The Sanctuary
I want you to picture a Warhammer 40k table. It is a Wednesday night in a game store somewhere in Frankfurt, or Naples, or wherever you happen to live. Four guys are pushing plastic miniatures across a 6x4 board covered in ruined-city terrain. One of them is wearing a Che Guevara shirt. Another has a crucifix around his neck. The third votes for a party that would make your skin crawl. The fourth is an atheist who thinks all of them are idiots.
In the real world, these men are ideological adversaries. Their votes cancel each other out. Their worldviews are incompatible. If you locked them in a room and said “discuss immigration policy,” blood would eventually meet drywall.
But across that table, they are an Eldar player, a Space Marine commander, a Tyranid swarm, and an Ork Warboss. They are rolling dice, arguing about line of sight, quoting battle-cry catchphrases, and having the time of their lives. Nobody asks anybody’s politics. Nobody cares. They share one thing: they love this game. And that love is enough to suspend every other division for three hours.
This is not a hypothetical. I have lived this. I have played tabletop games with communists, with socialists, with devout Christians, with right-wingers who made me look moderate, with Buddhists, with guys whose politics I could guess from their t-shirt and whose company I genuinely enjoyed anyway. We knew. We all knew. If we had started talking about religion or politics, we would have disagreed violently. But we had one thing in common: we both loved Warhammer.
So I roll my dice. You move your miniatures. Let’s have a good time, brother.
That is the nature of the hobby. Not just tabletop — any hobby. Video games. Model building. Cycling. Metal detecting. Hobbies are the rare human spaces where the political immune system shuts off, where identity categories dissolve, where a Czech anarcho-syndicalist and a Bavarian conservative can stand shoulder to shoulder and both scream at a missed dice roll. Hobbies build bridges across divides that politics considers permanent. They forge trust through mutual passion, not mutual ideology.
This is precisely why they are under attack.
II. The Targeting of the Sanctuary
A core tenet of every totalitarian system — whether Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mussolini’s Italy, or Mao’s China — is the eradication of the private sphere. Everything must be political. Every book, every film, every classroom, every song, every game. The Nazis did it with the Hitler Youth and the book burnings. The Italian fascists did it with Gentile’s school reforms. The Maoists did it with the Red Guards and the Cultural Revolution. The mechanism is always the same: seize the cultural product, curate it toward a single message, and eliminate everything that resists.
What is happening to our hobbies right now is the same mechanism wearing a Hollywood wardrobe.
When you turn on your PlayStation in June and cannot opt out of rainbow logos plastered across your home screen, that is not inclusion. That is occupation. When a video game studio replaces a beautiful character design with an intentionally ugly, deliberately desexualized version — not because the story demands it, but because the writers’ room finds beauty threatening — that is not artistic choice. That is ideological payload delivery. When a Hollywood production strips a 3,000-year-old Greek epic of its actual Greek identity to satisfy a casting quota nobody voted for, that is not diversity. That is replacement, and the fact that they dare call it progress while doing it makes it worse, not better.
The injection of radical modern politics into hobbies breaks the sanctuary. It forces you to process identity checklists before you can play. It compels you to look at the person across the table not as a fellow player, but as a political entity. What does he think about the casting? Is she one of us or one of them? Trust evaporates. The sanctuary shatters.
A society that cannot even share a game without hating each other is a society primed for total control. And that is not a side effect. That is the feature.
The tyrant’s greatest terror is a room full of men who have forgotten him for an hour.
III. The Snow White Test Case
Let me give you the perfect specimen. Disney’s 2025 live-action remake of Snow White — a name that is literally a physical description — is the platonic ideal of everything this essay diagnoses. It is not merely a bad movie. It is a multi-layered assault on a cultural inheritance, delivered with a smile so condescending it could curdle milk.
Layer one: the race swap. Rachel Zegler, a talented actress of Eastern European and Colombian descent, was cast as a character described by the Brothers Grimm as having “skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony.” Zegler does not meet this description. There is nothing wrong with not looking like Snow White — unless you are specifically cast to play Snow White. The name is the description. The name is the contract.
Layer two: the feminist rewrite. Zegler proudly announced that her Snow White “is not going to be saved by the prince” and “is not going to be dreaming about true love.” She is dreaming about “becoming the leader she knows she can be.” The 1937 original was, in Zegler’s retelling, a problematic artifact where a woman waited for a man — and that could not stand. A German fairy tale, preserved and beloved for two centuries, was surgically stripped of its romantic architecture and retrofitted into a girlboss campaign ad. She was not acting. She was running for office.
Layer three: the misandry chaser. Asked about the male lead, Zegler could barely hide her contempt: “All of Andrew’s scenes could get cut. Who knows? It’s Hollywood, baby.” The film’s own co-star was treated as disposable set dressing. The same actress who demanded the prince not save her was openly hoping the prince would be edited out of existence. This is not feminism. This is antipathy wearing a press tour.
Layer four: the abandonment. When the backlash arrived — and it arrived with force, including a loss north of $100 million — nobody came to Zegler’s aid. The same apparatus that cast her as a political pawn left her to twist in the wind, making increasingly unhinged statements to increasingly hostile audiences, until Disney eventually banned her and her co-stars from red carpet interviews because they had become too damaging to the brand. She was used, then discarded. The cult does not protect its soldiers. It consumes them.
The Snow White case demonstrates the stacking logic: race swap + feminist revision + male erasure + disposable talent. Each layer reinforces the others. Each layer is a distinct attack vector. And the $100 million loss? Irrelevant. The product was never the movie. The product was the message. The loss is the cost of insertion.
IV. The Architecture of “The Message”
I have written before about the capital chain behind this machinery — the BlackRock-Vanguard-State Street ownership stack, the ESG scoring system, the Academy’s quota-gated Best Picture eligibility. That analysis stands and I will not repeat it here. What I want to name now is the internal architecture of what the culture calls, with vagueness that is itself a weapon, “The Message.”
The Message is not a political position. It is a cult structure with its own theology, its own sacraments, and its own chant.
Listen to the liturgy. Every casting announcement, every character redesign, every script decision that serves the payload arrives accompanied by the same two words, repeated like a rosary: stunning and brave. Stunning and brave. Stunning and brave. These words are not description. They are absolution. They are the Amen at the end of the prayer. Once “stunning and brave” has been invoked, no further argument is permitted. The faithful nod. The heretics are identified by their silence. The ceremony is complete.
This is why you cannot have a conversation with the apparatus. The cult does not debate. It chants. And the chant has a liturgical structure as rigid as any catechism:
First, the DEI checkbox list. You must have a black man. You must have a black woman. You must have a gay man. You must have a transgender character. You must have an Asian. Every box ticked, every quota filled. Fine. Stupid, reductive, and patronizing to every group involved — but at least comprehensible as a bureaucratic impulse.
But there is one more box, and it is not a diversity box. It is a replace box.
The replace box demands that something white must be removed and replaced with something else. You could fill every single diversity checkbox without race-swapping a single character. You want a story with all the diversity the spreadsheet demands? Set it in Africa. Set it in Southeast Asia. Set it in a cosmopolitan trading port where cultures actually collided. The material is there. The settings are untapped. The stories are waiting to be told. Nobody is stopping you.
But that is not what they do. They do not add. They replace. They take a European mythological figure and swap the race. They take a white character and make them black. They take a beautiful female character and make her ugly. And if you object — if you so much as notice the pattern — you are told it is a conspiracy theory.
It is not a theory. It is observable. It is consistent. It is unidirectional. If it is white, it is for grabs: fictional, mythological, historical. George Washington? Give it time. Helen of Troy? Already done. Achilles? Done. And it never, ever goes the other direction. Nobody is casting a white Norwegian as Shaka Zulu. Nobody is rewriting the Analects with a Timothée Chalamet Confucius. The principle is deployed in exactly one direction, against exactly one civilization’s heritage, and that asymmetry is the tell.
This is not diversity. Diversity would honor African myths with African actors, Persian epics with Persian casts. What Hollywood does is desecrate selectively. It strip-mines the inherited symbolic capital of Western mythology — three thousand years of audience investment, free brand recognition, cultural resonance built by cultures that are dead and cannot object — guts the internals, injects the payload, and ships the product. The box office receipts do not matter to them. The message matters.
V. The Hypocrisy Engine
Here is where the architecture reveals its true face, and it is not the face of justice. It is the face of hypocrisy so total it has become structural.
This is an industry that has spent a decade weaponizing the term “cultural appropriation.” They winge — I use the British word deliberately — they winge endlessly about marginalized voices, about representation, about the crime of a white actor playing a character of color. John Wayne as Genghis Khan? They never let you forget it. They bring it up constantly as proof of Hollywood’s original sin.
Then they turn around and do the same thing to Homer.
Greece is the country of origin of the Odyssey. Not “the Mediterranean basin.” Not “a vague Indo-European cultural space.” Greece. A real country with real people who share a real sea with real neighbors. And when Christopher Nolan casts his Greek epic, there is not a single actor of Greek descent in the main cast. A couple of people who are “Greek-passing”? Acceptable. That is the standard they themselves have set — and they cannot even meet it.
When this hypocrisy is pointed out, the defense arrives on schedule. It comes in two flavors, both intellectually bankrupt:
Flavor one: playing dumb. “I don’t understand why everyone is so concerned about Greek people.” “I just don’t get where this is coming from.” This is not genuine confusion. It is a debate tactic — strategic ignorance deployed to force you to explain your argument while they pretend not to understand it, so they never have to engage with the substance and can simply respond “I just don’t understand” until the audience gets bored and moves on. It is the intellectual equivalent of covering your ears and humming.
Flavor two: the strawman reversal. You say: “Helen of Troy was not depicted as a sub-Saharan African woman in the source text. This is a race swap. It is not faithful to the material.” They respond: “Are you saying you don’t want to see black people? Are you saying black people can’t act?” They do not engage with your argument. They rewrite it into something they can comfortably denounce, then denounce the rewrite. Textbook DARVO — Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.
They light your house on fire, hand you the ashes, and call you an arsonist for noticing the smoke.
The victor in a culture war is not the one who strikes hardest, but the one who convinces the crowd his victim threw the first punch.
VI. The War on Beauty
There is something else happening beneath the casting and the dialogue, something more visceral, more personal. It is a war on beauty itself.
When the games industry takes a gorgeous character design and replaces it with something deliberately ugly — a woman made fat, plain, androgynous, stripped of every feature that might please a male gaze — that is not a creative decision. That is resentment given a render budget.
The pattern is everywhere. April O’Neil, once a beautiful redhead, replaced not just with a different race but with a character designed to be unattractive. Athena, the goddess of wisdom, whose beauty was part of her divine portfolio, reduced to something forgettable. Cersei, described in the text as supernaturally beautiful, cast as deliberately plain. The women in these products are not there to be easy on your eyes. They are there to make a point, and the point is: beauty is a problem.
And then there is the redhead pattern — specific, bizarre, and so consistent it has become a running joke among gamers. Red-haired characters are being systematically erased. Not race-swapped. Removed. In the Diablo I remake, every natural redhead is gone. Across the gaming landscape, if your character had red hair in the original, your character no longer exists. This is not selection bias. This is a recognizable phenomenon with its own meme economy. The Redhead Erasure. Nobody has a coherent explanation for it, and the very absurdity of the pattern — that a specific hair color, associated disproportionately with Celtic and Northern European populations, would become a deletion target — is itself diagnostic.
Why the broader war on beauty? Because a significant portion of the writers and consultants driving these decisions are feminists who find beauty threatening. They hate it. Not aesthetically — ideologically. Beauty creates hierarchy. Beauty is not distributed equally. Beauty rewards traits that cannot be legislated into existence. And for a worldview that demands equal outcomes as proof of justice, beauty is an unlegislatable injustice that must be punished.
There is something darker underneath even that. Many of these writers hate beauty because they hate men, and men love beauty. We are hardwired for it. Every man has his preferences, sure — but we can all recognize a beautiful woman when we see one, because beauty has objective dimensions alongside the subjective. Symmetry, health, youth, grace. These are not social constructs. They are cross-cultural constants older than language.
The cult cannot tolerate this. So beauty is condemned. Characters must be ugly. Not because ugly is interesting — because beautiful is “problematic.” The same impulse drove Soviet Realism: art subordinated to ideology, aesthetics subordinated to message, and anything that gave uncomplicated pleasure to the viewer treated as suspect.
When beauty is condemned as a crime, it is because the resentful have seized the throne.
VII. The Generational Investment
Here is the part that should keep you awake.
“Go woke, go broke” is true. It has cost the entertainment industry billions of dollars. Snow White. The Marvels. Supergirl. Acolyte. Film after film, show after show, game after game — the audience rejects the payload, the product tanks, the studio takes a loss. The pattern is undeniable. Kevin Feige himself admitted Marvel needed to dial it back. The words flew out of his mouth. Nothing changed. If anything, it accelerated.
Why? Because the financial losses do not matter.
This is not a profit-driven industry anymore — not at the level where The Message is enforced. The budgets are effectively infinite. BlackRock does not need Snow White to make money. Comcast does not need the Odyssey to break even. They need it to exist. They need it to enter the cultural bloodstream. They need your children to watch it.
The product they are purchasing at a financial loss is not a movie ticket. The product is the mind of the next generation.
Children will watch these films. They will play these games. They will not have the historical knowledge to recognize what has been swapped, what has been gutted, what has been replaced. They will absorb the new version as the baseline reality. Combined with what happens at school and university — the continuation of the same indoctrination through a different channel — they will grow up inside a monoculture where The Message is the air they breathe.
And eventually, they will breed out the resistance. Not through violence. Through saturation. The next generation will be clones of the cult, and they will not even know there was ever an alternative.
This is why they invest at a loss. The loss is the cost of acquisition. The acquisition target is your child’s worldview. And the return on investment is measured in decades, not opening weekends.
VIII. The Real Replacement: Votes, Not People
But the generational investment has a sharper edge than cultural saturation alone. There is an electoral calculus underneath the warm language of inclusion, and it is cold enough to freeze mercury.
The race-swapping, the historical revisionism, the cultivation of self-loathing in the majority population — these are not ends in themselves. They are means. The end is power. Specifically: electoral power, sustained across demographic time.
Minority populations in the West vote disproportionately for left-wing parties. This is not a stereotype. It is a statistical regularity replicated across every Western democracy for decades. The apparatus knows this. The apparatus is not stupid. Every demographic projection that shows the white majority declining toward plurality status in the mid-21st century is, to the captured institutions, not a crisis to be managed but a strategy to be accelerated.
So the race swaps serve a dual purpose. For the compliant — the already-indoctrinated, the self-loathing, the young — they are reprogramming. The new Snow White becomes the Snow White. The black Achilles becomes the Achilles. The baseline shifts, and the shifted baseline votes left. For the resistant — the people who notice, who object, who refuse to chant “stunning and brave” — the message is different. You are obsolete. You are the past. Your myths are no longer yours. Your history is being rewritten with you outside the frame. Your grandchildren will not know you existed, and if they do, they will know you only as a cautionary tale.
This is not demoralization. Demoralization would be cruel but honest — “we are going to make you feel powerless.” The actual strategy is worse. It is bifurcated: reprogram the soft targets, replace the hard ones. The reprogrammed become foot soldiers for the revolution. The replaced become demographic noise, statistically insignificant, politically irrelevant.
The race swap is not about representation. It is about electoral pre-positioning. It is the soft-power arm of a demographic strategy that is anything but soft.
This is why Japan is resisting and Japan is, in the vernacular of the moment, based. Japan has looked at the Western demographic experiment and refused to participate. No race-swapped anime classics. No guilt-driven immigration policy. No self-loathing curriculum in the schools. Japan understands, with the clarity that comes from being a homogeneous island nation that has survived everything history could throw at it, that a people who are taught to hate their own past will not defend their own future. Japan is the control group. Watch what happens to the control group — the pressure, the moral blackmail, the “international community” demands — and you will understand exactly what kind of battle this is.
IX. The One-Directional Capture
I need to say something plainly, because the media apparatus works overtime to obscure it.
Conservatives are not doing this.
I keep hearing the phrase “culture war” as if it is a symmetric conflict — two sides fighting over cultural territory, each pushing their agenda with equal force. This is a lie. There is no conservative equivalent of ESG scoring. There is no right-wing BlackRock enforcing ideological compliance through capital allocation. There is no traditionalist Academy gatekeeping awards behind a “family values quota.” The games industry, Hollywood, the comic book industry, the publishing industry, the streaming platforms — they are captured. Entirely. One-directionally. By one ideological faction.
When I say I want no politics in games, some clever person always responds: “But Final Fantasy 7 has politics! Art has always been political!” Yes. In-world politics. Fictional politics. The politics of Shinra and Wutai, of empires and rebellions, of low politics vs. high politics. That is worldbuilding. That is narrative architecture. It is not the same as injecting 21st-century American intersectional feminism into every product and demanding the audience chant “stunning and brave” in response.
The politics being injected into our hobbies is not the politics of narrative. It is the politics of a cult. It does not want you to think. It wants you to comply. It wants you to repeat the chant. And it is coming from exactly one direction.
Calling this a “culture war” implies two armies. There is one army. The other side is just people who want to be left alone to enjoy their hobbies in peace.
It is not a culture war. It is a cultural revolution with a Marxist undertone. And the revolution does not need your consent — only your silence.
There is a dark irony here worth naming. I have a cousin — a far-left atheist, genuinely radical in his political commitments — who uninstalled Street Fighter 6 the moment he saw the opening cinematic. “What is all this woke nonsense?” he said. I laughed and told him he sounded like a right-winger. He laughed too. But the observation was genuine. Even actual communists find this stuff ridiculous. The historical leftists — Gramsci himself, were he resurrected — would look at the modern intersectional apparatus and see not Marxism but a cargo cult wearing Marxist vestments. The race-swapping, the pronoun liturgy, the “stunning and brave” chant — these are not the tools of class consciousness. They are the decadent self-expression of a managerial class that has abandoned the working class entirely and now rules through cultural domination because it has lost the economic argument.
The same cousin who uninstalled Street Fighter 6 will sit across a table from me and play Warhammer, and we will have a great time, and neither of us will mention politics. That is the sanctuary. And the cult hates it, because the cult cannot survive in a space where actual leftists and actual right-wingers discover they agree on something.
X. The Totalitarian Pattern
Anyone who understands the history of 20th-century totalitarianism in Europe can see exactly what is happening. I am not being metaphorical. I am being literal.
The Nazis used every medium they could access — film, radio, youth organizations, literature, education — to push a single message. They curated the books. They burned what contradicted the ideology. They rewrote the cultural product to serve the state. The Italian fascists did the same through Gentile’s school reforms: curriculum as ideology, education as indoctrination, culture as a delivery system for political obedience.
The modern cultural apparatus is doing the same thing with better production values and a less honest name. They do not call it propaganda. They call it “representation.” They do not call it ideological capture. They call it “inclusion.” They do not call it censorship. They call it “safety.” They blocked comments on trailer releases, canceled influencer premieres in favor of compliant corporate critics, and presented the overwhelming praise of paid bootlickers as consensus.
The mechanics are identical. Only the ideology has changed. And the ideology that has replaced the old ones is, if anything, more totalizing — because it does not merely demand political conformity. It demands that you celebrate the conformity. The Nazis did not ask you to call their propaganda “stunning and brave.” This cult does.
But there is a dimension to this totalitarianism that even the 20th-century variants could not achieve with such efficiency: the cultivation of self-loathing in the target population. The Nazis wanted Germans to love being German. The fascists wanted Italians to love being Italian. The modern cult wants white Westerners to hate being white Westerners. The goal is not pride. The goal is disarmament.
A population that hates its own civilization will not defend that civilization. It will not defend its borders. It will not defend its heritage. It will not even defend its own children from being reprogrammed, because it has been taught that its children’s inheritance is a crime. The self-loathing white — the one who tells you on TikTok that if black people killed all white people, she would understand — is not a fringe aberration. She is the finished product. She is what the apparatus is designed to produce.
And the apparatus extends this project beyond fiction into history itself. It is not just Snow White being race-swapped. It is the claim that Vikings were transgender Muslims. That Anglo-Saxons “did not exist.” That the original Danish text describing the Little Mermaid’s “white beautiful arms” should be ignored because, as the gaslighters insist, she actually had green skin. The history is rewritten alongside the mythology, because the mythology grows from the history, and if you sever both, the people have no past. A people with no past will accept any future you give them.
When the culture has been fully curated — every game, every film, every comic pushing the same message in the same direction, with every dissident voice either silenced, delegitimized, or platformed only as a cautionary tale — you do not need secret police. You do not need censorship laws. The population censors itself. Every interaction becomes a loyalty test. Every hobby space becomes a political zone. Every t-shirt, every hat, every word choice becomes a signal of allegiance or betrayal.
Divide et Impera. A population that cannot trust its own neighbor over a game of Warhammer is a population that will never organize resistance against anything.
XI. The Compromise
Here is my position, and I have held it consistently: no politics in games, no politics in movies, no politics in hobbies. Period.
Not left politics. Not right politics. No politics. Let the fictional worlds have their own internal politics — the politics of empires and factions and ideologies that exist inside the story — and leave ours at the door.
I say this to the conservative who is tempted to strike back: do not. If we demand a month of traditional nuclear family propaganda on our PlayStations, we are not fighting for freedom. We are fighting for control of the same apparatus. We become the mirror image of the thing we oppose. And the apparatus does not care which direction it points — it only cares that it has power.
The compromise is simple. It is the compromise every hobby operated under before the cultural revolution arrived:
Leave the sanctuary alone.
You want diversity in your stories? Choose the right setting. Set your epic in the Mali Empire. Set your fantasy in pre-colonial Southeast Asia. Set your space opera in a galaxy where every species is genuinely alien. You can fill every checkbox on your spreadsheet without replacing a single existing character, without desecrating a single inherited myth, without strip-mining one civilization’s symbolic capital to atone for another’s guilt.
But the replace box must go. The injection must stop. The cult chant must end. The sanctuary must be restored to neutrality — a space where a communist and a conservative can sit across a table, push plastic miniatures, and forget for three hours that the world outside is on fire.
That is not weakness. That is civilizational hygiene. A society that preserves neutral spaces — where people can meet as human beings rather than as political avatars — is a society that survives. A society that politicizes everything is a society that devours itself.
XII. What Libertaria Says
The Libertaria doctrine is clear: Exit over voice. When an institution is captured, do not waste your finite life reforming it from within. Build the alternative. Make it superior. Withdraw your attention, your money, and your loyalty from the captured apparatus and redirect them to sovereign, parallel structures.
Hollywood is captured. The major game studios are captured. The Academy is captured. The comics industry is captured. They will not self-correct. Their incentive gradients forbid it. Stop expecting them to.
The work is this:
- Starve the apparatus. Do not buy the ticket. Do not stream the show. Do not purchase the game. Do not give the payload-carrier your hours, your attention, or your money. The “fair shot” was the $250 million production budget. They spent it. You owe them nothing.
- Fund the parallel producers. Independent game studios, sovereign film production, crypto-funded media, subscriber-funded content — anything outside the ESG capital stack, outside the awards-eligibility trap, outside the capture zone. Your wallet is a vote. Cast it.
- Preserve the originals. Every faithful translation, every uncaptured edition, every version of the myth that still carries the original code. Mirror them. Distribute them. Teach them. They cannot overwrite what you already hold.
- Teach the children directly. Do not wait for the school. Do not wait for Hollywood. Read the Odyssey to your son. Play the uncaptured games with your daughter. The transmission happens face to face, in your living room, in the original version, or it does not happen at all.
- Defend the sanctuary. When someone injects politics into your hobby space — left, right, or sideways — push back. Not with counter-propaganda. With the demand for neutrality. “Take it outside. We are here to play.”
- Mock the desecration without venerating the desecrators. Ridicule is a weapon the cult cannot withstand, because ridicule reveals the gap between the claimed nobility and the actual product. They are not brave. They are compliant. There is a difference.
- Look to Japan. Not as a political model to import wholesale, but as a control group that proves the cultural revolution is not inevitable. Japan resisted. Japan still has its myths intact, its history unmolested, its games industry still capable of producing beautiful characters without a DEI audit. The pressure on Japan to conform will intensify. Watch what happens — and learn.
XIII. The Final Word
I have played Warhammer with men whose politics I despise and whose company I cherished. I have gamed with atheists, Christians, socialists, and men so far right they made me uncomfortable. We disagreed about everything except the thing that mattered in that moment: the game.
That space — the space where disagreement is suspended in favor of shared joy — is one of the most precious things a civilization can preserve. It is rarer than gold. It is more load-bearing than any constitution. Because a civilization is not its laws or its borders or its GDP. A civilization is its capacity to hold a room full of strangers and make them, for an hour, into friends.
The cultural revolutionaries know this. That is why they are targeting the room.
Our job is to hold the room. To keep the sanctuary neutral. To ensure that the next generation has at least one space where the cult cannot reach them, where the chant cannot follow them, where the Message has no delivery mechanism because the medium is a game and the game belongs to the players.
Not to the studio. Not to the asset manager. Not to the activist. To the players.
Hobbies unite. Politics divides. He who injects the latter into the former is not making art — he is waging war on the last neutral ground.
Stand at the table. Roll the dice. Defend the sanctuary.
As Hadrian says:
Always forward. Always down. Never left. Never right.
— M. ----- ;-)
Markus Maiwald is the founder of Libertaria and the Self Sovereign Society Stichting. He writes about sovereign systems, decentralized civilization, and the architecture of exit. Some arguments in this essay were developed in conversation with Gary and Metatron on a recent podcast appearance — gratitude to both for the intellectual sparring.