The Olympic Games
A blasphemous display of the true Game
“The devil isn’t coming at you with horns and a pitchfork, he’s coming at you with everything you want.”
The Olympics was the crescendo in the divine comedy about the fall of the west—the final act, if you will. What began with participation trophies ultimately culminated in the spectacle of that opening ceremony. The well-intentioned single mother who just wanted her kid who sucked at sports to believe they were good at something who appealed to school boards to turn team sports into an attendance-based outcome couldn’t have ever imagined her kid on the world stage singing in blueface. What a proud moment!
It’s the celebration of losers — the physically unfit, the unpopular, the untalented, and worse, the entitled. We used to have emo for that. In the absence of that outlet, they’ve spilled over into the mainstream — a mainstream that’s more than willing to prop up society’s colorful outcasts in a brilliant stroke of sleight of hand to generate complacency about the real sources of corruption.
At worst, it’s a message to humanity’s future generation to aspire to become the lowest common denominator. At best, it’s a distraction. The money scam is a sleight of hand designed by the transnational public-private banking conglomerate that is in absolute control over our lives.
Once you fully grok “money”, you go through a grieving phase only to come out the other end with a kind of acceptance that resembles this feeling of, “what a fucking scam.” It’s all monopoly money.
You watch people toil over this scam all their lives only to amass acorns by the end of it. Or, on the other extreme, you watch those who’ve optimized the hell out of the process of acorn collecting only to see that it’s not enough and they want more just as a means of keeping score, all while marginal happiness per hundred thousand dollars goes to 0 as time reaches infinity.
Once you perceive the scam, you can’t unsee it.
Throughout scripture, the gospel reminds us of this ad nauseum: that to get sucked into the money vortex is to bed with the whore of Babylon. Greed is a seven deadly sin, after all.
While claiming an airdrop this one time, I had an out of body experience. My body was mindlessly click, click, clacking away in front of the screen as my consciousness started hovering over me thinking, “What are you doing? Look at what you’re toiling with. You look like a lab rat collecting a bit of cheese that’s rewarded for your effort of clicking. Who does this help? When you’re dying and you look back at your life, would this be a proud moment?” As if jolted suddenly awake, I clicked my last “send” and shamefully claimed my iota of $EIGEN.
Ultimately, no matter how much you toil to make the monopoly money, there is yet a much greater force that you have no control over that’s even more motivated to take what you’ve built over decades in one fell swoop (see: global financial crisis). This is when you realize that you are The Game. The dollar milkshake is full of landmines. You’ll never be the hunter; only the hunted. [Cue Apocalypto archery practice scene.]
Once you realize this, you enter the grieving process. Don’t shy away from this pain though. Pain helps focus the mind and lets you see things for what they are. Once you reach the acceptance phase is when you truly become free — or unchained, as I like to call it. You can sleepwalk through life as Big Game without knowing it or you can opt out and defy gravity after you perceive the simulation for what it is.
None of this is meant to evoke nihilism. Quite the opposite. For Neo could only realize he was The One after he was shat out into the septic tank of the machine world.
This is not to say that money doesn’t have its place in the world. It’s to say that your relationship to it shouldn’t be one of living in servitude of it. Don’t get so caught up in the acorn collecting musical chairs that you trade off the quality of your life and the lives of people around you who would otherwise be enriched by your presence. Don’t get so caught up just trying to survive when the destination has always been the oasis of Creation. There’s no greater happiness that can be derived than being in a state of absolute freedom to create something worth birthing.
“Be in the world but not of the world.”
