The Resistance: LARPers and Myth-Makers

The Resistance: LARPers and Myth-Makers

This is a subject I’ve covered before – many times – but which has reemerged as a vital matter this week, with President Trump’s inauguration.  Much of our political discourse these days, especially  but not exclusively on the Left, is nothing more than LARPing (Live Action Role Play).  I don’t know whether it’s a majority of the discourse, but if it’s not, it’s close.  All day, every day, in the mainstream media, on social media, in legislatures and government bureaus and agencies, at schools and universities, and in the streets of our cities, people claim to be addressing political matters or seeking solutions or voicing their opposition, when all they are doing, in reality, is pretending to be something that they’re not, putting on costumes and playing superhero.

Additionally, and perhaps just as importantly, people are out playing superhero, in large part, because they believe things that simply aren’t true.  Sixty years ago last fall, in his famous and career-defining “Time for Choosing” speech, Ronald Reagan noted that “the problem with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant.  It’s that they know so much that isn’t so.”  This remains the case today, although with far more widespread, readily apparent, and serious consequences.

For all practical purposes, our story today begins more than a century ago, with the turn-of-the-century leftist Georges Sorel – another subject I have covered before.

Throughout his three decades as a radical and a writer, Sorel embraced an eclectic mix of Marxist and other Leftist thought. He supported the revolution, advocated for violence, and yet feared the collapse of Christianity and the rise of the omnipotent state in its place. More than anything, in his early writings, Sorel was a syndicalist, which is to say that he was a supporter of small, worker-based revolutionary groups that sought to change the relationship between labor and capital through either the use or the threat of violence and strikes.

But Sorel wasn’t necessarily interested in a general strike, per se, which might be complicated and unpredictable. Rather, he was more interested in the idea of a general strike, in a glorious “myth” of the gen­eral strike, which would motivate workers to action and strike fear into the hearts of capitalists. The strike didn’t actually need to happen. It only needed to attract heroes to the cause and inspire their glorious deeds.

Sorel argued that the creation and promotion of myths was much more persuasive in motivating people than truth, reason, economic theories, or obtuse philosophical discussions. Indeed, he argued that workers grasp myths intuitively, which, in turn, meant that there was no need for a Leninist élite schooled in the scientific theory of Marxism and no need for or benefit from an all-powerful state. Real strikes were financially and personally damaging. They were, in many cases, disastrous for the men and women involved. But the myth . . . the myth could only make heroes.

Sorel also insisted that all of the great events and movements of history were driven by these myths, including Christianity, which, he claimed, was the most successful utilization of the heroic myth in all of human history.

The myth replaces the need for revolution. It replaces the need for death, violence, and destruction and replaces them with the threat of death, violence, and destruction, with the myth of death, violence, and destruction. The myth does not need to be realized. It only needs to be believed and for that belief to produce better ends. “Even if the only result of the myth is to render the socialist conception more heroic,” Sorel wrote, “it already would on that account alone be looked upon as having incalculable value.”

Today, countless millions of people in this country believe the myth that police storm troopers are roaming the streets of this country hunting and killing young black men.  They believe the myth that a desire to protect girls-only spaces from biological males is motivated by hatred and anti-trans animus.  They believe the myth that a desire to see the border secured and to have violent illegal aliens deported is animated exclusively by racism and white privilege.  They believe the myth that President Trump has both the ability and the desire to strip women of their “rights” and to make them second-class citizens.  They believe the myth that the world is on the verge of imminent collapse from the use of fossil fuels.  They believe these myths and countless others.  And they believe them because the myths enable them to see the world exclusively in terms of injustice and discrimination and thus to see themselves as playing a heroic role in righting historical wrongs.

If this particular myth-construction-tale sounds familiar, that’s because it is.  In a series of essays written in 2020, I argued that Kyle Rittenhouse – the Kenosha, Wisconsin protest shooter – and people like him were pitiable but problematic LARPers.  I wrote::

With nothing else of significant value in his life, this 17-year-old kid, adrift in materialistic and nihilist America, chose to put on his superhero’s cape – and his gun – and cross state lines to help defend someone else’s private property.  He was, at the very least, “playing” cop in the streets of Kenosha and, more likely, playing out a heroic script in his mind….

Kyle Rittenhouse was in the wrong place at the wrong time because he had delusions of heroism and saw himself as a savior, stepping in to protect the unprotected from the forces of evil.

This is the tie that binds BLM to the Capitol Rioters to leftist teachers, legislators, and bureaucrats who have taken to social media in the last few days insisting that they will violently oppose ICE if it dares to enter their jurisdiction looking for illegal aliens.  They are all connected by their belief in the MYTH that this country is filled with a vast oppressed population, and it’s up to them to liberate this population from their oppressors who are, conveniently enough, ALWAYS on the other side of the ideological/partisan spectrum.

Throughout the country, millions of people who have lost faith in “the system” as a whole and who have been hit especially hard by the economic and social changes of the last couple of decades are agitated, motivated, and frustrated.  Their frustration, in turn, is being manipulated and re-directed by a handful of myth-makers or narrative-creators to convince them that they are the only true heroes left in the world and they must, therefore, save the world through their actions.  They must, as a great man once put it, Be the Change They’ve Been Waiting For.

Unfortunately, all of this will end only when the disillusioned and dispirited find something more substantive and more serious in which they can believe.  Nihilism has been the overwhelming cultural force in this country for the last six decades at least, and it will remain so as long as we, as a people, put our faith exclusively in politics and politicians.  There is a better way, but the LARPers can’t see that yet.

Stephen Soukup
Stephen Soukup
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Steve Soukup is the Vice President and Publisher of The Political Forum, an “independent research provider” that delivers research and consulting services to the institutional investment community, with an emphasis on economic, social, political, and geopolitical events that are likely to have an impact on the financial markets in the United States and abroad.