Enter the Scale Problem

Extended Reflection on the second part of O.G. Rose's Belonging Again: An Address

This month in The Portal we are focused on the concepts of Home and Origin, and welcome three special guests, Alyssa Polizzi of The Artemisian, Daniel L. Garner of O.G. Rose, and Michelle Garner of O.G. Rose. You can find out more or get involved here: The Portal.

You can pick up a physical or digital copy of Belonging Again: An Address at the following link: Belonging Again: An Address.

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In the first part of my reflections on

O.G. Rose

’s Belonging Again: An Address, we addressed the idea that “The Hard Road Is The Only Road Left”. What this signifies is that in the “meta-crisis” of our world we can no longer avoid a confrontation with “childhood” through “self-reference” as the creative origin, whether in the form of the biological child, or whether in the form of the spirit child (inspired by Nietzsche’s dialectic of spiritual metamorphosis). There is a sense that starting with the “meta-crisis” as opposed to starting with the “spirit child” is putting the “cart before the horse” so to speak; but that if we put the “spirit child” first, then perhaps we will be working with something more singular and concrete, and can build up from that foundation.

If this movement in the first half of the book can be described as a movement from an abstract universality to a concrete singularity (the spirit child), then the second half of the book might be read as a movement from a concrete singularity and back towards the speculative possibilities of universality. To be precise, the question that Rose moves to in the second half of Belonging Again is the problem of scale: can this emphasis on childhood and self-reference be scaled without losing the baby in the metaphorical bathwater?:¹

“This is the Nietzschean Child, and there are Children amongst us, but can Childhood scale?

He starts to approach the problem of scale as an open question for ontological design,² with reference to a historical engagement in a “liminal web” conflict which involved me directly: that is the conflict over an interpretation of Game A and Game B. There is a well-known movement that calls itself “Game B”, led by entrepreneur, businessman, and former chairman of the Santa Fe Institute, Jim Rutt. Rutt claims that “Game A” is basically the operating system of mainstream historical civilisation, an operating system in which the human is dehumanised, losing itself in the process of complexification. Here is the definition of Game A from the Game B wiki:³

Game A was written as part of our collective evolutionary path from simple to complex form. In the expansion of our consciousness from one to many we lost ourselves in the fear that comes with no fully groking the "other".

The problem with Game A, according to the Game B community, is that Game A is a self-terminating system. Game A is fundamentally structured by “destructive externalities” and “power asymmetries” that produce “existential risk”. Consequently, if we keep running this operating system, our system will simple encounter an absolute collapse in the form of the “meta-crisis”.⁴ In contrast to Game A, Rutt suggests that we need to develop a multiplicity of alternative operating systems for civilisation that can help us collectively escape the meta-crisis. Here is the definition of Game B from the Game B wiki:⁵

Game B is a memetic tag that aggregates a myriad of visions, projects and experiments that model potential future civilisational forms. The flag on the hill for Game B is an anti-fragile, scalable, increasingly omni-win-win civilisation. This is distinct from our current rivalrous Game A civilisation that is replete with destructive externalities and power asymmetries that produce existential risk. Yet Game B is not a prescriptive ideology (or an ideology at all): while the eyes of Game B players may be fixed on the same flag, the hills are multitudes and the flag sits atop each, and no player individually is equipped to map a route in advance.

As it relates to the conflict that involved my work, I simply pointed out — inspired by my reading of dialectical logic, which expresses identity in a contradictory formula — that the set up of the opposition between Game A and Game B, was too simplistic an interpretation to be plausible or viable for future resolution of our situation. If we were to apply dialectical logic to the problem of the meta-crisis, we can not only think in terms of Game A vs. Game B opposition, where we create alternative Game B societies to overtake Game A society. This just leaves us in a simplistic ideological combat that will confront its own repressed core in the actuality of scaling:⁶

• Game A = bad, i.e. you are parasitized, competitive, far-from-equilibrium, separated, exclusive, rivalrous, dominating, lead to certain death

• Game B = good, i.e. you are non-parasitized (wise/wisdom centers open?), cooperative, thriving, whole, no longer excluding or dominating or rivalrous

To be precise, when one is thinking of identity as contradictory, i.e. always-already Game A/B, we cannot think “one system bad” vs. “other system good”. The same logic parasitised the whole human species in the Cold War of the 20th century in relation to “Capital Game Good” vs. “Communist Game Bad”, or “Communist Game Good” vs. “Capitalist Game Bad”. We rather have to think about how the bad and the good are fundamentally connected. In the context of the 20th century, that capitalism is a system that inherently produces communitarian symptoms; and that communism is a system that inherently produces capitalist symptoms. In the broader context, we will always have to wrestle with the darkness or the negativity of our society and civilisation, from within. We cannot cut ourselves away and totally eliminate “destructive externalities” and “power asymmetries” or even “existential risk”. These will always be elements and dimensions of human civilisation, and we can only reduce or minimise their threat, by working internal to and with Game A(/B), rather than thinking of ourselves as somehow separating off from it, and creating an intentional utopian alternative, because we are the “higher ones” (which is often how the Game B community performs (or performed) its discourse).

The idea of the “Dark Renaissance” was a response to this. In the idea of the “Dark Renaissance”, there is the affirmation of the fundamental unity of the “dark” and the “light” or the “negative” and the “positive” as the very expression of “A/Bness”. We cannot escape Game A for Game B, but must learn how to work with the A/B at the core of each of our hearts, and at the core of each of our societies.

Here Rose takes up this debate and offers his perspective:⁷

“There are arguments to be made that modern societies are so essentially and fundamentally broken that there is no way to negate/sublate them, which is to say that Game A is so self- effacing that there is no possibility of a Game A/B, per se, only an entirely alternative Game B.”

However, this immediately raises the following problem:⁸

“Will Game B corroborate with Game A or compete? If corroborate, how will Game B not “enable” Game A? If Game B must compete, how will Game B not be Game A? (How will Game B overcome Game A if it doesn’t ultimately beat it?) These questions suggest […] that “Game A/B” is needed, but what does that look like?”

Thus, for Rose, the problem that Game B immediately confronts in its oppositional perspective versus Game A, is the effacement of its own violence in the direct identitarian belief structure which will prevent scale, because it can only scale, if everyone adheres to the opposition of Game A vs. Game B:⁹

“The problem of society is the question of how to manage people with different ideologies so that they don’t kill one another. If Game B only works if everyone believes in Game B, then arguably Game B doesn’t work at scale: it might be a perfectly fine way to organize a given community and way of life, but we cannot say it addresses “the problem of scale”.”

As Rose often states, in a very Žižekian way (re: Niels Bohr’s horseshoe), one of the great things about capital, is that it works even if you don’t believe in it. Even die hard communists or communitarians have to pay their food and rent, they have to participate in the transactional nature of an individualised and atomised neoliberal culture. Thus, if we can reduce the contemporary historical manifestation of Game A to neoliberal capital (which produces destructive externalities, power asymmetries, existential risk), and if we can reduce the contemporary historical manifestation of Game B to alternative start-up communities that try to infuse a humanitarian spirit into the world, we should not forget that what our world historical moment is precisely struggling to realise at scale is a proper socialist response to capitalist universality.¹⁰

In this way, it could be that many of the efforts of the Game A vs. Game B opposition manifest, is precisely a particularist symptom (particular in the precise sense of not being capable of universal scale) in the context of the absence of proper political thinking of the universal dialectic of capitalism to socialism. In this absence of proper political thinking, we do see a precise opposition that Rose was trying to work with in the first part of Belonging Again: An Address, namely the opposition between “Plato/Christianity” on the one hand, and “Deleuze/Singularity” on the other hand.

What’s most interesting is that, if we read the actual mediation of key Game B figures on the liminal web, what we find is that these symptoms do appear, concretely. There are increasingly individuals on liminal web, who are going through their “Christian moment” of identification, precisely on the level of finding in Christianity a vehicle that they cannot find in the actuality of Game B, namely concrete particular community infused with humanitarian spirit. Indeed, this shift to the “Christian moment” has been so forceful that the entire discourse of “Game B” seems to have been replaced with the idea of the traditional Christian community. Who even knows if the Game B as signifier still holds or will continue to hold for the Deleuzian multiplicity of liminal web figures who are looking for an alternative way of living in relation to the alienation of neoliberal capitalism?¹¹

What is important to address in the context of Rose’s work, are the stakes in this concrete opposition between “Plato/Christianity” and “Deleuze/Singularity”. If in concrete actuality of many Game B figures are tending towards “Plato/Christianity” against the multiplicity of “Deleuze/Singularity”, and if the “Deleuze/Singularity” multiplicity is struggling to relate and maintain a discourse, what we are dealing with is something that, to my mind, only the logic of A/B can work with: namely the ethics of the real that deals with “pathos” or the sublimation of sexual energy.¹² Rose picks up this thread well in the work as crucial to the issue of scaling, and precisely an issue that has only been resolved up to this point, in neoliberal capital:¹³

“A concern of Dark Renaissance seems to be that Game B requires “negotiating” to work, but given the realities of “pathos,” the likelihood that negotiating is effective drops the greater the scale and size of the society (generally, it seems that only “the pricing mechanism” has figured out how to deal with this problem, as will get into, but that is Game A). Though it’s not always easy, it’s more likely that negotiations between people who all believe in Game B will work out than say negotiations between millions of people who have never heard of Game B. If ultimately Game B wants to scale, it would seem that a “system” would be required that will work if “programmed right,” for there are simply limits to what “negotiations” can accomplish (without ultimately turning to force, power, shaming, and the like). This is what I mean when I say that Game B will require a replacement to “the pricing mechanism” if Game B indeed wants to transcend the mechanisms of “competition” which define Game A (seeing as “the pricing system” might require competition).”

In other words, if Game A runs at scale because of the “pricing mechanism” — which effectively allows is to by-pass or massively simplify issues of desire because we can just use money to mediate our desire instead of discursively mediating it, as Joris de Kelver of the Multiversity has pointed out in his concrete explorations of the commons — then to truly think a “Game B” is to think of a better way to mediate desire at scale than via capital. While such a form of thinking may take us beyond the Dark Renaissance response to Game B, without such a mechanism, the basic tenets of the Dark Renaissance are unavoidable, insofar as to move from a capitalist society to something like a commons, involves a massive investment of timenergy on the level of negotiating conflictual and antagonistic desires.¹⁴ To be the type of subject that can hold those conflicts and antagonisms, even on a small scale, requires a total transformation of subjectivity (which is why Rose starts Belonging Again: An Address with a focus on the conditions of possibility for the appearance of the spirit child).

The spirit child may be the type of being that can take all those “destructive externalities” and “power asymmetries” and “existential risks”, and make them immediately reflexive on the level of our own heart, like a fault line across our own identity, and not just externalised by-products that can be avoided by running from “Game A” to “Game B”. In other words, the spirit child can work with and potentially mediate pathos or the ethics of sexual energy, since at the core, desire must start with and mediate sexual difference if it is to be sublimated in real ethical community. It is only in the mediation of sexual desire on the level of sexual difference, that we get the possibility for community, let alone the possibility for such communities to work at scale on the level of the state, and then on the level of the state, towards the level of the interrelation between states (i.e. to be truly universal).¹⁵ From my point of view, this is why many figures on the liminal web are having their “Christian moment” of identification, because in the inability to think this concretely, it becomes easier to recoil to a set of givens that are ready-made, as opposed to reflexively working with the contents of the unconscious mind, as analytically trained philosophers.

Here Rose continues his critique of Game B on the level of the problem of the pricing mechanism, concluding that without a higher order mechanism than the pricing mechanism, we are left with the scaled norm of Game A society, and Game B intentional communities that remain particularist, unable to really scale:¹⁶

The Game A which makes possible computers, heating, running water, and the like may now be going “too far,” as Game B warns, and contributing to the collapse of the human world (not just environmentally but also psychologically and existentially), and there doesn’t seem to be any clear way to “change the programming” or stop it. What must we do? Well, it seems like we need to replace Game A with Game B, with something new entirely, but I’m not sure if that is desirable or possible (for we would lose the supply chain, as far as I can tell). Ideally, we could perhaps somehow live like the Game B tribes in the wilderness without giving up the internet, but keeping the internet requires keeping the supply chain (as far as I can tell), and that requires Game A. Indeed, we discussed before the need for Game A/B versus A or B, but “The Reformation of Game A/B” requires the spread of Childhood, and how might that be possible?

As mentioned, the way I would frame this on the level of a dialectic of political universality, is a mechanism that could help us move from neoliberal capitalism to something like democratic socialism. But this should be a sublation, meaning that we try to preserve what is great in liberalism, and we preserve what is great in capitalism, while also recognising its limits on the level of the commons, and which requires a new level of democracy, and a new level of social policy or social contract, to face the new challenges of global society. It seems increasingly obvious that the state as nation is struggling to maintain the semblance of democratic society in the increase of polarisation, and the increase of capital control of state organisation.

The ideas that I have found the most intriguing and compelling, both in regards to their capacity to “spread Childhood”, and move towards “universality”, involve recognising the need for a new social contract in the face of a new technological environment that has dramatically transformed our general relation and need for labour. While I only have speculative hypotheses, and no definitive conclusions, how do we support the establishment of a new social contract, that, for example, raised the ground floor of material scarcity and need (in something like a basic income), while also raising the ground floor of ethical commitment to higher ideals (like necessary community service, or volunteer work, or social service, up to a certain age)? This way we both eliminate our absolute reduction to neoliberal capitalist individualism, while also raising human spirit to the level of commitment to an ethical ideal.

The motivation for ideas that point in this direction is that such a program is universal in that it is working within Game A, and not against it in opposition, while also sublating Game A to a higher standard based on its own presuppositions. Moreover, it introduces potentially a new foundation for coordination that is not just reduced to price. Here I am thinking in relation to what Rose states here:¹⁷

“In every society, there are millions of pieces of data and information that must be effectively coordinated and accounted for each day, and the best way to address that problem, according to Hayek, is across millions of people, each of whom handle a very small percent of the information, relative to what they know and can understand. […] Countless examples could be made, but the point is that society makes millions of decisions every day, and each decision is made relative to what people “think is best,” which is relative to the information they have available to them (all of which suggests that “the highest probability” for a good outcome rests with them).”

If we establish a new social contract, that both raised the floor of material scarcity and need, while also raising the ground floor of ethical commitment to higher ideals, then we would be introducing a new condition of possibility for coordination, because people’s coordination would not be reduced to price, while also opened to social universality. The point is to establish a new ground floor that is truly scaleable on the level of universality that opens up the real of the collective mind to make decisions that are local to real situations and conditions that real people are facing.

I am here not too wedded to specific ideas of how some sort of necessary community service, or volunteer work, or social service, may work. It could also be a different social ideal, or social incentive, like related to investing in small businesses, or non-profit organisations. The main point is to attach a new ground floor alleviation from basic material scarcity and need so that capital could be contained to its place, while not reducing the entire human experience, while also encouraging people to make decisions that are best for their own well-being, as well as the well-being of the society as a whole. Moreover, this approach also lifts us above the problem that does appear in the commons, that of the problem of having to constantly mediate the negativity of conflictual and antagonistic desire.

Rose points in a similar direction regarding the need for having some sort of universal system of incentives and social pressures beyond reduction to the pricing mechanism:¹⁸

“Note also that people often don’t like making decisions and don’t like being responsible, a point stressed by many psychoanalytical thinkers like Freud and Erich Fromm (a point which can also be associated with the Dark Renaissance rebuttal, I think), suggesting the need for a system of incentives and social pressures so that people actually make the decisions that they in their particularity are best suited to make. Also, if the whole sum of information in society is broken up into millions of different decisions, the existential weight of each one becomes much less and bearable (not that it will be easy).”

As mentioned, I think this ends up raising us above the entire conflict between Game B and the Dark Renaissance, while not raising us above the logic of Game A/B as such.¹⁹ Rose points in the same direction, namely that the tension between Game B and Dark Renaissance is ultimately one of how to mediate pathos at smaller scale, but that the need for something beyond the “pricing mechanism” suggests that, on the level of universality, something about the values of neoliberal capital are fundamentally broken.²⁰ Thus, while thinking about the mediation of pathos is crucial, and a real difference for any small-scale communities and the mediation of morality and ethics; to scale on the level of universal society we need to think more about large-scale conditions of possibility for different systematic coordination.²¹

Ultimately, for Rose, this leads him to thinking in terms of “laws of scale”, inspired by physicist Geoffrey West,²² that we need rise above ideological differences via the spirit child, and become more attuned to the possibility that there are scientific laws related to moving from particular communities to universal society.²³ For example, in the context of my aforementioned speculative proposal, when the pricing mechanism spreads to a certain scale, something may become fundamentally broken on the level of the social contract, and thus we may need to introduce a new social contract, that preserves the principles of liberal capital, while also introducing a new social ground floor and social ethical commitment. While Rose notes the importance of new programming, he does not jump too quickly in proposing any concrete social program, but rather sits with some of the paradoxes of how much intentionality will be required to scale. Rose remains committed to the starting point of the singularity of the spirit child, but suggests that it does not necessarily (although it still might) lead to a resolution of scale problems on the level of universality:²⁴

“There has always been for me a question regarding “the spread of Childhood,” which is the idea that we don’t even need to concern ourselves with “the problem of scale,” because again it will “take care of itself”. […] [But] we cannot assume this [as] […] “The laws of human creations” may actually work against us, meaning that inaction could prove destructive.”

He ultimately concludes his opening discussion on the problem of scale with a dramatic ambiguity, expressed in the following five points:²⁵

1. There is reason to think “the problem of scale” requires intention.

2. It might not and might take care of itself emergently.

3. Thus, we should not address “the problem of scale” in a manner that doesn’t increase the quality of human life, so that if it turns out “the problem of scale” doesn’t need us to do anything, we’ll still be better off for acting.

4. The “spread of Childhood” increases the quality of human life regardless if “the problem of scale” requires intention or not.

5. Thus, we should continue considering if “the spread of Childhood” is possible.

In short, for Rose, while the question of scale — what I am interpreting to be the problem of universal political dialectical movement from capitalism to socialism — seems currently impenetrable and mysterious, what he does suggest, is that the starting point of the spirit child, or A/B-ness, is the best position to currently locate oneself. In other words, we should move away from ideological oppositional thinking, of Game A versus Game B, and instead move to the logic of the spirit child, for the best chance at future thriving. It should be noted that such thinking absolutely fills out the second Philosophy Portal anthology, Abyssal Arrows.²⁶

In future meditations on Belonging Again: An Address, we will continue to explore with Rose how we thinks through the conditions of possibility of enjoying the spread of this A/B logic.²⁷

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This month in The Portal we are focused on the concepts of Home and Origin, and welcome three special guests, Alyssa Polizzi of The Artemisian, Daniel L. Garner of O.G. Rose, and Michelle Garner of O.G. Rose. You can find out more or get involved here: The Portal.

You can pick up a physical or digital copy of Belonging Again: An Address at the following link: Belonging Again: An Address.

1. Rose, O.G. 2024. The Problem of Scale (Part I). In: Belonging Again: An Address. O.G. Rose. p. 156.

2. See:

Daniel Fraga

’s book: Fraga, D. 2022. Ontological Design: Subject Is Project. Independently published.

3. Game A. GameB Wiki. https://www.gameb.wiki/index.php?title=Game_A (accessed: May 19th 2024).

4. Perhaps similar to what historian Jared Diamond worries about in his book Collapse, with reference to the patterns of smaller scale collapse throughout history, see: Diamond, J. 2011. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Penguin.

5. Game B. GameB Wiki. https://www.gameb.wiki/index.php?title=Game_B#:~:text=Jordan%20Hall,model%20potential%20future%20civilisational%20forms.

6. See: Game A/B.

7. Rose, O.G. 2024. Chapter I: Problem-Prevention and the Hope of It All Melting Away. In: Belonging Again: An Address. O.G. Rose. p. 164.

8. Rose, O.G. 2024. Chapter II: Game B and the Dark Renaissance. In: Belonging Again: An Address. O.G. Rose. p. 178.

9. Ibid. p. 179.

10. This is why The Portal’s foundation rests on thinking the threat of “technofeudalism” and the possibility of “technosocialism”, see: Stakes of Sublation in Technofeudal Society; and Towards a Portal for Thinking Technosocialism.

11. Funny enough, the Dark Renaissance as signifier, seems alive and well, if also exploring new political identity, see:

Dark Renaissance Radio

.

12. That is why Philosophy Portal has focused a lot of work on psychoanalysis, as well as the philosophy of psychoanalysis, see: Freudian Unconscious; Ecrits; What Is Sex? (co-taught with

Theory Underground

).

13. Rose, O.G. 2024. Chapter II: Game B and the Dark Renaissance. In: Belonging Again: An Address. O.G. Rose. p. 183.

14. A theme that emerged in the recent Multiversity x Philosophy Portal x

Theory Underground

event focused on Timenergy and the Commons.

15. This is why Philosophy Portal is currently focused on teaching Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, which recognises marriage and sexual difference at the concrete ground of the ethical system, see: Philosophy of Right.

16. Rose, O.G. 2024. Chapter II: Game B and the Dark Renaissance. In: Belonging Again: An Address. O.G. Rose. p. 187.

17. Ibid. p. 190.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid. p. 206.

20. Ibid. p. 199.

21. Ibid. p. 201-2.

22. West, G. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press.

23. Rose, O.G. 2024. Chapter III: Will the Problem of Scale Self-Correct? In: Belonging Again: An Address. O.G. Rose. p. 206-7.

24. Ibid. p. 208.

25. Ibid. p. 213.

26. A few notable examples include: Last, C. 2023. Spirit’s Logic: Zarathustra as the Becoming of Being-Nothing. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2023). p. 19-48.; Garner, D. (

O.G. Rose

) 2023. The Overman and the Allegory of the Cave: The Problem of Intrinsic Motivation and Living as the Children of Zarathustra. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. p. 49-140.; Crooijmans, D. (

Dimitri Crooijmans

) 2023. The Birth of the Spiritual Child. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. p. 251-272.; Ebert, A. (

Alex Ebert

) 2023. Excess/Absence: The Mask of the Child. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. p. 273-301.

27. Rose, O.G. 2024. Chapter III: Will the Problem of Scale Self-Correct? In: Belonging Again: An Address. O.G. Rose. p. 213.