Rhodesians Never Die

At around the 49 minute mark in BDobbinsFTW’s video “WARNING: BLACK OPS 4 IS BAD FOR YOU” he delivers the following explication of his ideal school:
“First period is Runescape, where you don't pass until you've amassed ten million gold. After the sixth grade this class switches to EVE Online. Second period is ARK Survival where and your group must tame a Titanosaurus. Third period is Overwatch where you must hit GM. Fourth period is Blackout where your squad must amass a hundred wins. Fifth period is Minecraft where in a given period you must build the greatest structure you possibly can and you are graded on just how good the instructor thinks it is. Sixth period is story games. KOTOR, Skyrim, Last of Us, Tales of Walking Dead, every semester, a whole new set of classes relying on new games pushing students to learn and adapt the mind on a neurological level to new challenges, new obstacles, neuroplasticity, neurofluidity, exposure, adaptation, kill, kill, kill. I am not kidding about any of this. This is not a joke. This is the future and I'll do it myself if I have to.”
This comes at the end of a long narrative of comparing his experience with two video games, Call of Duty and Runescape. Call of Duty, as he describes it, was a period of immense waste, a time in which he built for himself a life of childish unending indulgence in a mindless easy matchmaking while alternating between sex and marijuana in his downtime. Runescape is contrasted as positive through describing the various dramas and conflicts of his friends, the thesis of which is in his direct comparison to Lord of the Flies stating “we lived it”.

Among settler-colonial cultures, there is a recurring fascination with sporting. The mythic art of White America has in large part consisted of such glorifications, high school athletics, young attractive men hiking through rugged terrain, men and boys stalking the wilderness with firearms, etc. In Rhodesia, the culture of the whites at the turn of the century was best summarized by Piers Brandon as “when not making a fetish of sport (...) tended to worship Bacchus.”. In their myths, this plays along as an undercurrent throughout. From a vague chaos across the Atlantic, they staked out across the frontier, the singular man, the cowboy, in raw struggles against the elements. Here lessons were learned which cannot be taught in the safe, coddled, feminine world. In The Cowboys (1972) John Wayne makes a point of disrupting the lecture and erasing the blackboard to draw a crude horizontal line in order to take the boys from their school into the real world of a cattle drive. This is recreated in pageant plays of conquest every year during gun season, when all the men and boys engage in the adjectives they were taught to worship from their youngest age, parading through the untamed wilderness with firearms on patrol for the largest, the biggest, the trophy…

It would be a mistake to conflate this settler-colonial sporting with the traditionalist pursuits of often identical activities under some vague attack on “male athletics”. Mishima Yukio and Julius Evola wrote extensively on sport (bodybuilding & martial arts, skydiving & mountaineering respectively) and their usage of which to pursue pre-modern forms of consciousness and activity which has a markedly more profound and interesting character than what I am addressing. Rather, the settler-colonial sportsman is differentiated from this as seeing himself firstly as an economic unit. Notice the language of the ideal school described by BDobbinsFTW. Each grade is based not on an experience of the game as an artwork or means of social bonding, but of the ability of the player and their group to achieve high numbers within the game. Ranks, vague qualities of “goodness” for Minecraft, exact counts of monetary holdings, the lumping in of anything without this unending sporting gameplay loop reduced to “story games” and the description’s degeneration into a bizarre rant wherein single words which vaguely point to concepts of power and efficiency are thrown about, ending with an empty manly cry of “I’ll do it myself if I have to.”.

In settler-colonialism, the notion of the human was violently recreated into the economic unit, coequal with other, equally abstracted, non-human economic units such as the financial instrument or corporations, onto the equal playing field of liberal economics. The individual created is one which exists in relations of numbers and of quantity and is from this that the conception of the person that liberal materialism develops. The American glorification of engineering for engineering’s sake as example, what matters is never the meaning of objects in any artistic or experiential qualities, but in its relation to some body-without-organs of numerical value. American agricultural contests have been a long standing tradition, monocultural farms ever striving to use any means it can to achieve the best numbers, the biggest hog or tomato.

Her emerges an individual who is possessed of “freedom”, insofar as freedom is the individual’s ability to experience animal-pleasures in meaningless tasks for the glorification of a numerical abstraction. The liberal masculinity is one empty and slavish, men suited for nothing other than loops of numerical value achievement. It is thus a natural evolution from the cowboy to the “world’s biggest hog” contest winner and now into the contemporary problem of the bugman, the weak urbanites who build a life for themselves out of plastic toys and sugary troughs filled with pop-cultural slime. In their attempts at true freedom and rationality, white-male civilization has created for itself a creature suited only for slavery, a creature which derives satisfaction from nothing except the enjoyment of Sisyphean tasks, further striving for more and more, bigger and larger, greater and greater. To this new species of man, there is no meaning, nothing higher, nothing greater. There is only number and the insectoid love of increasing number.