'Games People Play' An Essay in Three Parts Part 2

Part 2

Civilization is a hard concept to pin down even in this powerful analytical frame. It appears to be the motivating psychological space, the coherent array of object/idea, of a given technology that generates productive behavior related to certain objects which such process produces. It is, then, a relation of object to idea, of symbol to canon, of sign to significance. Civilization is simply meaning and that is what generates nihilism as the narratives of one civilization give way to another, or following, civilization. Dark Ages are time of creative destruction of that motivating psychological space with its narratives. They are consequent to the failure of a psychological space and precondition to the creation of a new one, without darkness we would not know light, and they are solely concerned with material existence and the keeping of lore.
What is material existence? It is simply the total of the habits and paradigms used to feed, clothe, and house a given population, its material culture. It is no more than that. Material existence is incidental to the process of civilization. The two are disparate concepts. That one must first exist in order to be a part of a civilization which is only incidentally concerned with such existence is the paradox and the genius of human social existence.
What, then, of Good and Evil in such a secular analysis? Good is that behavior, including cognitive, ordained by the accepted psychological space and functional at such a level as to aggrandize that psychological space by object and/or idea. The idea of Good is both the evolution of Truth and a due respect for human limitation. A certain amount of managed innovation is Good. A glut of innovation anarchy is Evil. Civilization is a journey, not a destination. One does not rush headlong into the future without consequences. The Twentieth Century is a chronicle of unwise objects, unwise ideas, and false relations. The idea is that we can do better than Western Civilization by its own strictures. The lesson is that we can do worse.
Material existence has its own Good and Evil, being disparate, and these resolve around social utility and efficiency. Good is being, as one expects, economically useful. Good is being economically efficient. Evil, the opposite of these, includes the leisure to think, which is exactly what a successful material culture engenders. It cannot be ignored that civilization and material existence, however they complement each other, are disparate. They do not account for or understand the other. It is this dynamic, this opposing of Goods and Evils, which destroys civilizations and builds new ones, which generates new theory and new technology.
As has been indicated, true incommensurability is difficult to obtain. As disparate as material existence and civilization are, there must be some relational that will tie them together. That relational is game score. Game score is more than money. It is vocabulary, money, paradigms, and databases. It is talent, taste, and physical person. It is not just a score but an index of scores and it describes a hierarchy of levels of existence. This index I call social purchase.
Game score as an index is, at its highest level, the stuff of civilization. This is maximum social purchase. Next are the operational aspects of material existence and the games of material culture. Here are talent and arbitrageur. This is the milieu of money. Thirdly, there are the games of the flesh market where the physical person generates social purchase. Last there is the milieu of marginality, of low utility. There is little or no social purchase here except talent.
Social purchase, which exists as the relative attributes measured in the game scores that compose it, is social existence. The phenomenon exists in no other wise.

Part 3  tomorrow