"The savage in man is never quite eradicated." - Henry David Thoreau

This is the primary fear that lurks in the mind of the colonizer, whose identity is constructed on a polarizing narrative of a world divided up into civil and savage, with themself on one side and the barbaric savage on the other.

It grips the west to this day, in communion not only with the more general Christian makeup as outlined in Jones Manoel's excellent essay (https://redsails.org/western-marxism-and-christianity/), but also more particularly in the characteristics of Catholicism and its symbolic vacillation between sin and confession, rooted in the irreversible mark of original sin.

Briefly (and roughly, I am not a Catholic scholar), for those less familiar with Catholic doctrine, the general idea is we are all born with "original sin" due to the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and baptism bypasses this in a way that allows us to be able to enter heaven. There are degrees of badness of sin, like venial and mortal sin. Venial sin is a minor offense. Mortal is more serious and requires more conscious intent. However, if you are truly sorry, you can confess and be forgiven for basically anything, insofar as the possibility of getting into heaven is concerned. You might have to do some penance in purgatory, but otherwise, you can get there.

The specifics of exact Catholic teaching are less important here than how the more generalized concepts of it get used in western colonial and imperial society.

Going back to original sin, colonialist history acts as a stand-in for it in the liberal mindset. Similar to how Catholicism does not seek to reconcile with its god over the behavior of ancestors once and for all, instead taking on a kind of perpetual responsibility for original sin by contact, liberalism does not seek to do reparations for colonialism, return power to the colonized, or otherwise undo the horrors its ancestors have inflicted. Instead, the focus is on confession.

But this would not be complete without taking into account the side of the conservative also, in particular in the dichotomous scheme of the US. The conservative acts the part of the sinner. The liberal the part of the one confessing to the priest. The conservative always has a justification, no matter how crass or crude they have to be, and they are often found among the most openly violent warhawks. The liberal, though their policy so often is similar to that of the conservative, does not tend to act the same. The liberal is sorrowful, mournful, and when necessary, ready to confess.

"Civil" and "savage", ideas which normally exist in contradiction and in fearfulness of corruption from the light, synthesize with confession to create redemption, the cleansing of sin, even if temporary. Like a real Catholic confessional, which might give you some Hail Mary prayers to say but does not delve into the details of your life and ask material changes of you, this confessional purification process is ideal because it demands no change of behavior. The colonizer continues on and its past crimes are washed away in the confessional.

To avoid responsibility, the confession is done by intermediaries; people who may have had proximity to the "sin", but who are not the most directly responsible for it. And so you get bizarre contradictions like when Joe Biden apologized to the indigenous of Turtle Island for past systemic boarding school abuses of indigenous children, even as his administration was funding a genocide elsewhere.

You can find examples of this inclination in media and even in mundane real life contexts. For example, the infamous character Darth Vader in Star Wars, whose crimes are prolific and horrifying, but who is redeemed when he chooses to save his son and turn against his cartoonishly evil leader. Luke (his son's) belief in the possibility and importance of his redemption reflects and validates this Catholic mindset that no matter how great the sin, it is still possible to make it to heaven. Never mind that Luke nearly martyrs himself pointlessly in order to accomplish this. Surely it is the redemption of "evil" that is of paramount importance, not the liberation of the masses! (So the colonizer's mindset implies and why wouldn't it, when it is of such great importance to the colonizer to wash away their sins rather than give up an ounce of ground they have stolen through war and slaughter.) Or in the more mundane context, almost amusingly so, when a person on the internet might start a comment with an insult and then end it with "have a nice day." As if they have washed away the "impure" intent they started out with by ending it on a more polite note.

For the colonizer's image of self-civility to hold, they have to justify it somehow. They can't justify it through how they behave when they exercise power because the majority of that is genocidal. So they turn to the process of purification, cleansing, and forgiveness. This reflects rather well the phenomenon of liberals who are "against every war but the current one." The current one is still in the grip of the conservative side's wave of overt war mongering. It is only after it is concluded, when the liberals are cleaning up and confessing, that the greater public is allowed to feel bad about it; and at that point, it is somewhat necessary that they do, in order to go through the aforementioned synthesis to create redemption.

What this redemption brings about is nothing substantive in material reality. It's an abstract notion of redemption, centering around metaphysical notions of darkness and light, corruption and valor, and the overcoming of temptation. Were the colonizer judged in its totality, it would be considered a great abuser of the confessional, one who is never actually sorry in the right places and who does the same thing again anyway. But totality is brushed away in favor of whatever is the current, both in the meaning of current events and the wave-like current of inertia.

"What cannot be properly justified right now can be forgiven later" might be a fitting adage for how this colonial and imperial structure operates.

The "savage" conservatives relentlessly pursue power and domination, and the "civil" liberals shy away from power and fear its "corrupting" influence. Through this, they can act in tandem, whether literally as one party handing over power to another, or more figuratively in media representation and language, sinning their way across the world and then moseying their way down to the closest confessional to wash it away.

"It doesn't matter what or who you are, it matters how you play."

This is a quote, likely doing some paraphrasing, from a movie about Jackie Robinson. I had not set out to watch the movie, but saw bits of it in passing from someone else watching it and my brain went spinning off on analysis of it.

I could take it as just a feel good story, a man who faces prejudice and discrimination and overcomes. But that quote lodged into my brain, along with other bits on the screen. I don't know exactly how the story went in real life, but this isn't about that exact story anyway.

It's about the broader methodology at work here and the way in which capital uses reform efforts to its advantage and then largely defangs them.

The quote exemplifies the practice well, if we do a little bit of reading between the lines: "It doesn't matter what or who you are if you can make more profit for us."

The choice of language and focus implies not an intention toward the abolishment of systemically racist practices, but the allowing of exceptions on a case by case basis, based on "merit" (which in the capitalist case, is defined as "you contribute to growing our money/power base").

This kind of idea, that you can transcend the box marginalization has put you in by helping the capitalist out, got stretched to its limits with figures like OJ Simpson and Bill Cosby. Star performers, make lots of money for the capitalist with a healthy cut for themselves, and also deal in some of the worst accusations that can be levied at a person. I am being vague because I see no gain in this context going into it in detail and being potentially triggering or needlessly graphic, and the details of it aren't that important to the point anyway. The point is incidents like these put to test the idea of, "It doesn't matter what or who you are, it matters how you play."

The capitalist method of getting lucrative people past racist gatekeepers while keeping systemic racism intact hit some limits. A method which normally works well alongside liberal mentalities about "be who you are, no matter who that is."

But it's easily observable that being "who you are" can range from being an inconvenience to others to being an actual terror. Capital and liberalism in their marriage of bullshit have no answer for this. They're not interested in policing society, but rather interested in profiting from it.

In order for this method of "reform" to function while leaving the rest of the system intact, the notion is not "you are valuable and deserve basic needs met no matter who you are," it's "you are valuable if you notably help the capitalist." This leaves most marginalized people remaining in a position of less than. As compared to a socialist project where things like racism can actually be tackled head on because the meaning of valuation of a person gets changed fundamentally when the project is based around meeting the needs of the people, no matter who they are, and because actually listening to the people means reform efforts can gain a foothold in governmental structures, not just in corporate slogans.

Another example of this kind of thing, we can see happening with sexism too. Among the most marginalized women are those in prostitution. Capital's answer is not to liberate them from coercion and from any economic incentive to turn to it for survival, but to push for formalizing it into another market; a market where prostitutes can have slightly better conditions than they would otherwise have, but capitalists also get a cut and the system is not fundamentally changed.

I don't feel like this is a "complete" take on the topic, but I wanted to get it out while it is on my mind.

I'm sure there are other examples in practice of the difference between real reform and profiting off of exceptions to the rule that don't fundamentally challenge racism/sexism/etc. Let me know what you know.

This is somewhat theoretical and somewhat based on observation, so take it with a grain of salt. I am not privy to the inner workings of most game studios, so I have to do some extrapolating. But there are glimmers of insight at times into why things go wrong, such as the disaster that was Anthem's development: https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964

Mistreatment of workers, management who flip flops on what they want, tools that are not fit to purpose, and more.

Beyond this, there are capitalist factors like how some games get designed to be more about extracting money than being fun or interesting. See "Let's go whaling", for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNjI03CGkb4

But what I'm focused on here is more about things that go wrong even when intentions are good and people are trying to make a genuinely good experience. We could try to say that most of it comes down to capital not caring about quality and leave it at that, but I don't think it's that simple. One of the elements that the video game industry is known for, is exploiting authentic passion in people who choose to work in video games. Another element that it's known for, and I don't know how true this still is right now, but I remember it being a thing in the past, is that equivalent jobs in other industries tend to pay more and have better treatment for workers.

So I think it's safe to say there is a lot of good intention going around among the working class of game developers. Yet games still tend to have many problems in development.

Ego and advancement

The easy target for criticism here is ego in management. Game directors with grandiose visions that don't account for the time and labor it takes to fulfil them. But it's not only them who are encouraged to focus on their own advancement. Regular grunt workers are encouraged to do much the same under capitalism and further encouraged in the individualist mindset of self actualization and self fulfillment.

Want better pay? A more advanced position? Job security? Being able to say you worked on XYZ project at a company that did something meaningful for it is important. It doesn't sound impressive in the same way to say that you worked on a team who accomplished something meaningful. How much did you do? What tasks did you complete? How were you useful, so that you can be useful in this other company over here?

Whether you have the ego or not, it's often made about you. Your performance, your contribution, what you as an individual bring to the table.

This is a mistake that individualism continually mistakes. The success of an organization is not the sum of the skill of each individual employee. People who can complement each other's strengths and shore up each other's weaknesses will do more together than people who can act like "rockstars" as individuals. But individualism and the structure of capitalism actively disincentivizes people from viewing organized work in this way. It instead encourages the "rockstar", the "great man theory" figure who looms larger than life and carries the project to victory against all odds through weight of their sheer "talent."

In reality, the closest thing to real such figures are not "rockstars" in their profession, but are highly skilled organizers. They can appear from a distance as if they are larger than life because they are skilled at getting other people to do more together than they would do alone. The individualist perspective takeaway here would be that they should be celebrated as astounding organizers, people whose "talents" are difficult to grasp because they are so beyond the normal, the average, the mundane. The more collectivist perspective might look more like that they symbolize the value of careful, studious, and dedicated organization.

In other words, the individualist only sees a "great man". The collectivist sees a symbol of "us" at our best, together.

Chaos glommed together

Looping back to video games in particular, these are heavily creative projects, complex and unwieldy. Developing them is often not a linear, well-treaded path. A lot of experimenting can happen and a lot of ideas will only ever become half-realized. This kind of context is surely one of the worst places you could have individualism so heavily going on. Instead of having a process through which something is iterated on and refined, you will more have a process through which something chaotic and scattered has to be glommed together into a rushed whole before a deadline is reached. And the primary motive is not to make something that is greater than the sum of its parts, but for the individuals involved to have something that looks good on a resume and fulfills their sense of individualist, creative pride in a job well done.

This can still produce good work some of the time. It's not like it prevents all success and produces nothing but dreck. Many a game has aspects of it which are memorable and enjoyable, and get a cult following, if nothing else. But many a game also has aspects of it that seem out of place, confused, disjointed, or outright unfinished. Some of this can be laid at the feet of poor management, but it's also a matter of plain consistency of themes and design, and accountability for the work of others; that is, if you see it as work that is partly your own, rather than work done by someone else, whose work won't matter so much on your resume.

Games, like any other project, work best when people are working toward the same thing, in a way that is agreed upon as something of value to work on. But the culture of individualism and capitalism encourages them to work toward their own thing, or to work toward the confused "visions" of an individualist leader who is reading the tea leaves for signs of a breakthrough in design that will make their place in "great man" theory. This is consistently going to have disastrous results.

My chaos

Now you get to tell me where you think this is accurate or not, and so on, so that hopefully we can arrive at something better than what it started as. Because I am no "great man". :)

The Food and Drug Administration is suspending a quality control program for testing of fluid milk and other dairy products due to reduced capacity in its food safety and nutrition division, according to an internal email seen by Reuters.

The FDA this month also suspended existing and developing programs that ensured accurate testing for bird flu in milk and cheese and pathogens like the parasite Cyclospora in other food products.

Effective Monday, the agency suspended its proficiency testing program for Grade "A" raw milk and finished products, according to the email sent in the morning from the FDA's Division of Dairy Safety and addressed to "Network Laboratories."

Grade "A" milk, or fluid milk, meets the highest sanitary standards.

The testing program was suspended because FDA's Moffett Center Proficiency Testing Laboratory, part of its division overseeing food safety, "is no longer able to provide laboratory support for proficiency testing and data analysis," the email said.

The US and poisoning people, name a more iconic duo. 😩

An HHS spokesperson said the laboratory was already set to be decommissioned before the staff cuts and though proficiency testing would be paused during the transition to a new laboratory, dairy product testing will continue.

Oh no biggie, it's just during a transition to a new laboratory. Everything is fine here. I'm sure the germs will go on vacation while the FDA is working through problems.