Social Matter

The Dark Enlightenment has trading cards, but so do progressives. Progressive Trading Cards have been in development for much longer—true to the progressivist spirit, the cards represent not individual heroes, but groups of afflicted minorities. The powers the cards have are more advanced: descriptive, yet with actual quantities assigned for calculation purposes. After all, we need to know who beats whom, why and when.

But it’s not a regular trading card game. You’ll note that I’ve left out a few groups: whites, males, straights, Christians, and crimethinkers. When all the cards are dealt, one person in particular has one card: the straight, white, male, Christian, crimethinker card. There’s no need to separate assign cards based on those distinct groups. They’re all the same, anyway. And the card is desperately evil. We’ll call it the SWMC card.

In a sense, it’s like an extended version of rock-paper-scissors, except the SWMC always loses. Muslims beat Christians, lesbians beat Christians—Christians, too, have the same equivalent powers as all the rest. It’s just that in their case, they have a 99% fail rate. “Assert equal rights and double-standard-hypocrisy-blaster! Damn, failed again. Is the game rigged?” Bill Whatcott has been a prescient case—back in 2005, he was fined $17,500 by the Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal. The literature he was distributing was deemed hateful and anti-gay.

Well, he should have known better. He was holding the SWMC card, so of course his defense cards were ineffectual. That’s common sense. Since all the afflicted cards have precisely the same stipulated powers, everyone gets a little confused when one of the cards has to battle the other. It wasn’t really covered in the rulebook, so the players sort of…play it by feels. That is, in many cases, a dice is rolled: 1-3 works out to feelsbad—the policy is rejected, while 4-6 are equivalent to feelsgood, and the policy passes.

Sometimes it’s more systematic. What happens, after all, when the Muslim card is played against the Lesbian card? Does the Muslim barber have a right to deny the Lesbian a haircut for religious reasons? Islam beats Christianity, surely, but although all afflicted groups have all the same powers, for some reason, the Lesbians beat the Muslims. Quebec Premier Jean Charest is noted on record for saying that women’s rights are a sort of trump: all other afflicted group cards must bend the knee. Seems reasonable, but we’re not sure why. So it becomes clear that there are two rulebooks. The spoken and the unspoken. The spoken rulebook says that all groups are equal, but the unspoken rulebook necessitates the SWMC card. The spoken rulebook says that all groups are equal in power, but the unspoken rulebook hierarchically ranks powers in the ugly, sticky, unfortunate event that the Lesbian card is played against the Muslim card. The Lesbian card wins.

It’s a tough game to play, too. The rules are always changing, progressing, as it were. And the rules never seem to apply to the players consistently. Take the case of ol’ Billy Whatcott that I mentioned earlier. Playing the SWMC card directly is no good. The spoken rulebook said it would work, but dammit the spoken rulebook just never seems to model outcomes very well. But there’s also a more clever strategy it recommended. Bill is excited. It’s the ‘check your privilege and apologize profusely’ card. He really thinks there’s something to it. He may be correct, but, well, I for one am a little suspicious.

But lately, there have been some clever, new strategists at play. It might be smart to pay them some attention. What they’ve been doing is sitting out for a few rounds and then putting on the pattern recognition glasses, at which point they reverse-engineer a theory of rules from observing iterated games. The SWMC, despite all the rules and rhetoric to the contrary, is almost irreversibly stuck in a David-vs-Goliath scenario, which is all the more confusing: Is the SWMC David? Is he Goliath? Well, the rules say he’s Goliath, and that the White Privilege Rewards Card is pervasive and trumps all, but it never quite seems to work out that way in gameplay. In reality, he’s advantaged and disadvantaged. The privilege the SWMC has comes from the innate qualities of the card, leading others to treat him favorably, but this favoritism doesn’t necessitate high powers, or a high quality of life or play. But regardless, he’s hated nonetheless. It’s all so confusing.

“What a stupid game. I don’t want to play anymore.” What Billy doesn’t understand is that while you may not be interested in the game, the game is interested in you. There is no exit. There is only strategy.