Public Officials Are LARPing, And Their Fantastical Projects Harm All of Us
Thoughts I've had lately about harmful institutions and the "respect" we've been told to show automatically, without exception.
Sometimes when I read the news, I’m overwhelmed by a sense of the uncanny. I’m watching something emulate humanness without quite getting the movements down. Exploitative behavior and sinister intent looms under the surface.
It appears to me that there are not humans thinking about human actions and behaviors. Instead, there are talking heads representing institutions and the talking heads are either ignorant or do not care about the consequences of their actions. They only care about playing the role.
One such instance occurred earlier this week when news broke that Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic and mouthpiece for war, was accidentally included in a signal group chat in which JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, Michael Waltz, and other high-ranking officials in the Trump administration discussed extremely sensitive military plans for an impending airstrike in Yemen.
The Vice President seemed more like a character in a role playing game than a human with layered, varied interests. He played his role about as well as one would expect from an indie RPG studio, with such interesting dialogue as “I just hate bailing Europe out again.” Hegseth played off Vance’s role brilliantly with the scathing “VP: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.”
I don’t even write dialogue that stilted.
The group proceeded to celebrate the targeted airstrike (aka death of fellow humans, mostly civilian woman and children) with emojis of the flag and biceps flexing, among others.
As I mentioned, this is not a one-off occurrence. It’s not even unique to JD Vance. A few weeks ago he tore up the stage with his performance for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, asking Zelenskyy to say thank you and be grateful. It was like watching an alien engage in diplomacy after researching father-son dynamics on the CW.
While I appreciate JD Vance’s willingness to perform for us all, this phenomenon is ubiquitous. Of course it exists at the top of world governance, but you see it in the small places too—anywhere a person gets an inkling of power, of authority, of being OFFICIAL.
So what is this uncanny feeling?
Here’s my case against bringing LARPing to real life and instead chilling out a little.1 Don’t take yourself too seriously!
Reification or When Evil People LARP
When people are assigned roles in institutions, it is incredibly easy for them—for us—to forget the wider context one’s role may have. Our socioeconomic structure is compartmentalized; we aren’t supposed to see the wider context because, if we did, we’d be horrified.
This is why corporations and governments have convinced generations of people that recycling and using paper straws is the best way to stave off the worst effects of climate change, rather than divesting from fossil fuels or trust busting the handful of corporations that contribute the vast majority (80%) to greenhouse gas emissions.
So what is it about the roles we play that leads us to make horrifying decisions every day?
Theodor Adorno was interested in this idea, and it was Adorno who wrote the most hauntingly beautiful line I’ve ever read. In his essay “Education After Auschwitz,” Adorno tackled the issue of self-critical reflection in the face of technology fetishization or, simply speaking, the idea that people become so entranced in their scientific endeavors that they are blinded to the material harms caused by pursuing those endeavors.2 From this context came the following quote:
"It is by no means clear precisely how the fetishization of technology establishes itself within the individual psychology of particular people, or where the threshold lies between a rational relationship to technology and the overvaluation that finally leads to the point where one who cleverly devises a train system that brings the victims to Auschwitz as quickly and smoothly as possible forgets about what happens to them there." - Theodor Adorno, "Education After Auschwitz"
Aside from being the most beautiful and horrific sentence ever written, it was a prescient warning: if we don’t stop to consider the surrounding context, we’re doomed to cause serious, material harm. And this idea extends much further than just technological fetishization, though that is the famous example (remember Oppenheimer’s words upon seeing his creation work).
To prevent ourselves from making the same mistakes as the train system engineer, we must constantly and painstakingly engage in critical self-reflection and constant education. It is never enough to say “that’s it, I know it all. I can make any decision.” We must evolve continuously with our decisions and even admit when we’re wrong. Because we are always wrong. Especially me.
But it’s easy to get carried away. Our hyper-compartmentalized society demands structure via stratification. This is why we have borders, why corporations have departments and divisions and wings and branches and so on, why cities are split into blocks and suburbs split into neighborhoods and roads cut up our lives into neat little pieces. We are never supposed to know the full extent of our actions or the actions of our office neighbors. We are supposed to simply play our role without question.
So when JD Vance celebrates a successful airstrike in Yemen, which also killed children, or Barack Obama celebrates a successful airstrike in Yemen, which also killed children, it isn’t surprising that we see their celebrations and don’t question it.
If you’ve kept up with the news lately, you’ll understand what I’m saying. The media is reporting on Signalgate and the leakage of classified information, but I haven’t seen a single article about the children murdered. In the chat, NSA Mike Waltz says that they identified their target as he was walking into his girlfriend’s apartment building, but the entire building was destroyed.
An entire apartment building of innocent civilian people all for one suspected terrorist (never mind the tepid justifications politicians might lob at questions about killing people so indiscriminately, which, by the way, nobody even bothers to make anymore).
What angers me more was the Vice President’s response: “Excellent.”
Human beings so carelessly killed.
These public officials aren’t being people anymore—they’re being institutions. They’re the physical embodiment of ideas and abstractions, and we have been conditioned to accept it.
They wear the mask of The President or The Secretary of Defense and suddenly they become immune to moral quandaries like the trolley problem. The solution to that problem is simple: fuckin’ bomb it.
Adorno, among other critical theorists, discussed the problem of reification. Reification, again simply speaking, occurs when people take abstractions and project them out onto the world. The world is no longer an objective thing that changes; things in the world become frozen and subjected to a person’s limited understanding of reality, sense-data for people to glance at and make subjective determinations about. This is what public officials do. They take their own abstraction—the elected office, the president of a pee wee football organization, the principal—and they cast their understanding of that abstraction outward.
From that moment on, there is no “world” for that person. There is no reality. There is only sense-data. There are only obstacles to the implementation of their goals. And the best way to get a job done is to bomb it.
This is what strikes me as so unnerving about public officials. They don’t seem to register that the world moves on with or without them because they don’t see the world. They see a thing to deal with through whatever institution empowers them to deal with things.
So when cities are bombed we don’t consider why or who. In my high school history class, for example, there was no consideration about whether we needed to drop the atomic bomb or not. We were just told it was a good and necessary event.
As the LARPing progresses, it will only get worse. The office of the executive so and so will have to live up to the honor and promise of the office by taking the next big step. How do you stop it?
You Can’t LARP If Nobody Takes You Seriously
To all my LARPers out there, how do you really embarrass somebody and make sure they never LARP again?
You invite them to a LARP in a big, popular park and ensure them everybody will be LARPing, and then watch them walk through a normal park on a normal day in full LARPing gear.
AKA, we have to stop taking highly revered institutions and roles so seriously!
We have to stop worshipping the institutions and people (i.e., the rich and celebrities) we’ve been indoctrinated to love all our lives and treat them as potentially fallible, corrupt systems and people that still require human inputs and human outputs. Institutions need the touch of empathy, compassion, and equity, that thoughtful, self-critical people provide. They do not need more mechanistic, unilateral action.
This does NOT mean go storm a building somewhere. What it does mean is wear jeans to work. Stop using honorifics and titles unless you like to. If you’re in a position of authority somewhere, stage a fall in front of everyone you lead and then laugh about it.
Just chill out. It’s not that serious. The world is for cultivation and cooperation. It’s not a placeholder for a bunch of objects for you to exert your will onto.
Destroy the illusion and stop LARPing in real life. All you congresspeople and presidents out there who are surely reading my substack, go LARP for fun in your spare time where you can’t endanger undocumented immigrants,3 strip rights away from our trans friends and family, or destroy the future of education for generations.
Be people. See people. The world is more than a series of abstractions and offices. The world is not a sandbox where you can bury bombs and pretend you’re a good leader.
Stop LARPing (the harmful kind; well-intentioned LARPing is just good fun :)
Don’t get me wrong, I love role play. I love Dungeons and Dragons, Baldur’s Gate 3, the Fallout Franchise, and basically any role playing game. But let’s not let our love of role play ruin someone else’s life!
My copy of “Education After Auschwitz” comes from Adorno’s book Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, translated by Henry W. Pickford and published by Columbia University Press.
Such a great essay! This is how I feel all the time—everything we’ve built, every societal structure, every dollar or rule is all made up. None of this exists in nature. None of this is meant to be the way we live. And yet, these rules and structures are why people’s lives, families, and mortality are at stake / in question. We assume these roles and everything worsens.
Have you ever spoken to a manager like a normal human and not like some God to worship? They get pissed off.
Anyway, well researched and well said.