LARPing (and Ruining) Christmas
We all LARP. Kids and teens, yes, but even no-nonsense adults.
In fact, most no-nonsense adults LARP. They LARP so hard, they make the Taylor Swift cosplay 14-year-old look real.
LARP: “live-action role-playing.” It’s where people pretend to be someone or something else. If you’re still not sure what I mean, check out this endnote.¹
The 14-year-old dresses and acts like Taylor Swift. Rather, she dresses like the public persona Taylor Swift: Taylor Swift on stage and Taylor Swift at media appearances. The 14-year-old isn’t dressing like Taylor Swift in her pajamas or acting like Taylor Swift using the ceramic seat.
The 14-year-old LARPs the commodity that we call “Taylor Swift.” She doesn’t LARP the real Taylor Swift, if for no other reason than that none of us know the real Taylor Swift. We only “know” the abstraction called “Taylor Swift.”
Modern society, Iain McGilchrist illustrates exhaustively, is a left-hemispheric society, a conglomeration of people who approach the world predominately with the left hemispheres of their brains, often with their right hemispheres severely repressed or crippled.
The left hemisphere loves to form abstractions for reasons explained here.
The problem with abstractions is, they’re not true. They’re short-cuts. They’re incomplete.
But if the left hemisphere controls our worldview, we accept those abstractions as true and complete. We’ll even twist facts, omit facts, or add non-facts to make the world fit our abstractions, such is the left-hemispheric mind disease.² If we then conduct our affairs and analyses based on those abstractions, we get bad or ridiculous results, leaving it to folks like Thomas Sowell to correct and mock us.
One of my favorite examples is an essay in The Atlantic by a woman who deplores how wealthy people gentrify poor neighborhoods and impose rich people’s preference for quiet. Silence, the writer says, is a manifestation of class and racial privilege. How much better if those wealthy whites would just let the other side of the binary express itself in all its noise and craziness!?
At least one commentator recognized that the writer had merely formed an abstract ideal of what those noisy neighborhoods sound like instead of writing about what they really sound like. As a result, the entire essay was built on fiction and, therefore, was ridiculous:
It’s not just the “Ivy League shitlibs” who LARP like this (though they’re more inclined to it).³
We all, as products of a left-hemispheric modern culture, are inclined to it.
Consider this example, which, I admit, is partly autobiographical.
Christmas is coming up. It's a beautiful time of year. Perhaps you’re inclined to envision your family together in your Norman Rockwellesque family room, chatting (oh so) charmingly while sipping a cup of mulled wine while the toddlers chirp happily in the next room.
If that’s you, you're LARPing.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing. It only becomes a bad thing when reality crashes against the LARPing and you react poorly because you’re so committed to your LARP.
Someone spills the mulled wine on your carpet. The person you're talking with has the attention span of a toddler. Speaking of which, the toddlers aren't chirping: they're screaming, hitting, not staying in the next room, and despoiling all the rooms’ carpets in every imaginable way.
Reality beats the hell out of the Norman Rockwell ideal every time, and if your left hemisphere stays committed to the Rockwell, things get ugly . . . fast. You get frustrated, you get angry, and you start booking a cruise for next year that starts on December 23rd.
You become no better than the shitlib who would remake society in her abstract image of how it should be. But you’re worse because you’ve become that shitlib in your little corner of the world, which is the only corner that really matters.
Related:
Footnotes
1 From Perplexity AI:
LARP stands for Live Action Role-Playing, which is an interactive form of role-playing game where participants physically portray their characters and act out scenarios in a fictional setting. It involves dressing up in costumes, using props, and enacting the roles through physical actions and interactions with other players.LARPs can take place in various genres like fantasy, science fiction, historical settings, or modern-day scenarios. The participants pursue goals and objectives within the game's narrative while adhering to predetermined rules or reaching consensus on outcomes. LARPs can range from small private events lasting a few hours to large public events with thousands of players spanning multiple days.
2 McGilchrist provides a legion of examples of how left-hemispheric domination is just like a mental defect. Schizophrenia, for instance, is born from a severely deficient right hemisphere. It’s no surprise that the schizophrenic gets very wedded to his abstractions. One even said, "I wouldn’t upset my plan for anything; I’d rather upset life than the plan."
3 "[I]ntelligent people are every bit as likely to have biases as less intelligent people – and to deny their own prejudices. . . . Being a scientist doesn’t help, either, by the way . . . [S]ome evidence shows that people with more education are more likely to cling to ideological beliefs in the teeth of evidence. . . [T]hese are the dangerous ones: those that think they lack prejudice. . . . ‘If anything, a larger bias blind spot was associated with higher cognitive ability’, conclude Richard West and colleagues, leading researchers in this area."
The Matter with Things, Chp. 18