Nihilism: Signs & Symptoms

Baudrillard, Jean wrote:

One always aspires to something more than mere existence, and something more than an equivalent value – and this something more, the challenge's immoderation compared to the contract, its intemperance compared to the equivalence of cause and effect, is clearly the result of seduction – that of games and magic. If we have experienced this in amorous seduction, why not in our relations with the world? Symbolic efficacy is not an empty concept. It reflects the existence of another form of the circulation of goods and signs, a form far more effective and powerful than economic circulation. What is fascinating about a miraculous win at the gaming tables is not the money: it is the resumption of ties with these other, symbolic circuits of unmediated and immoderate bidding, which concern the seduction of the order of things.
In the last analysis, there is nothing to prevent things from being seduced like beings – one simply has to find the game's rules.
The entire problem of chance appears here. Magic, as a wager, is similar to our games of chance. What is at stake is the particle of value thrown in the face of chance considered as a transcendent instance, not in order to win its favours, but to dismiss its transcendence, its abstraction, and turn it into a partner, an adversary. The stake is a summons, the game a duel: chance is summoned to respond, obliged by the player's wager to declare itself either favourable or hostile. Chance is never neutral, the game transforms it into a player and agonistic figure.
Which is another way of saying that the basic assumption behind the game is that chance does not exist.
Chance in its modern, rational sense, chance as an aleatory mechanism, pure probability subjected to the laws of probability (and not to the rules of a game) – a sort of Great Neutral Aleatorium (G.N.A.), the epitome of a fluctuating universe dominated by statistical abstractions, a secularized, disenchanted and unbound divinity. This kind of chance does not exist in games; they exist to ward it off. Games of chance deny that the world is arranged contingently; on the contrary they seek to override any such neutral order and recreate a ritual order of obligations which undermines the free world of equivalences. In this manner games are radically opposed to the economy and Law. They question the reality of chance as an objective law and replace it with an inter-connected, propitious, duel, agonistic and non-contingent universe – a charmed universe (charmed, in the strong sense of the term), a universe of seduction.
Thus the superstitious manipulations surrounding games, which many (Caillois) view only in terms of debasement. The resort to magical practices, from playing one's birth date to looking for recurrent series (the eleven came up eleven times running in Monte Carlo), from the most subtle winning formulas to the rabbit's foot in one's coat pocket, they all feed on the idea that chance does not exist, that the world is built of networks of symbolic relations – not contingent connections, but webs of obligation, webs of seduction. One has only to play one's hand right. . .
The bettor defends himself at all costs from the' idea of a neutral universe, of which objective chance is a part. The bettor claims that anything can be seduced – numbers, letters, or the laws that govern their distribution. He would seduce the Law itself. The least sign, the least gesture has a meaning, which is not to say that it is part of some rational progression, but that every sign is vulnerable to, and can be seduced by other signs. The world is held together by unbreakable chains, but they are not those of the Law.
Here lies the ‘immorality’ of games, often attributed to the fact that they encourage one to want to win too much too quickly.
But this is to give them too much credit. Games are more immoral than that. They are immoral because they substitute an order of seduction for an order of production.
[Seduction]

Baudrillard, Jean wrote:

This is why there are no ‘rituals of transgression.’ The very expression makes no sense, especially when applied to the festival. The latter has proved very problematic for our revolutionaries: is the festival a transgression or regeneration of the Law? An absurd question, for rituals, including the ritual liturgy of the festival, belong to neither the domain of the Law, nor its transgression, but to that of the Rule.
The same applies to magic. We are constantly interpreting what falls under the rule in the terms of the law. Thus, magic is seen as an attempt to outwit the laws of production and hard work. Primitives have the same ‘utilitarian’ ends as us, but in order to realize them, they would rather avoid rational exertion.
Magic, however, is something very different: it is a ritual for the maintenance of the world as a play of analogical relations, a cyclical progression where everything is linked together by their signs. An immense game, rule governs magic, and the basic problem is to ensure, by means of ritual, that everything continues to play thus, by analogical contiguity and creeping seduction. It has nothing to do with linear relations of cause and effect. The latter – our way of understanding the world – is objective but unsettled. For it has broken the rule.
Magic does not seek to fool the law. It doesn't cheat – and to judge it as such is absurd. One might just as well dispute the arbitrariness of a game's rules in terms of the ‘objective’ givens of nature.
The same simplistic and objectivistic misunderstanding occurs with gambling. Here the objective would be economic: to become rich without exerting oneself. The same attempt to skip steps as in magic. The same transgression of the principle of equivalence and hard work which rules the ‘real’ world.
The claim, then, is that gambling's truth is to be found in the tricks it plays on value.
But one is forgetting here the game's power of seduction. Not just the power one experiences when momentarily carried away, but the power to transmute values that comes with the rule.
In gambling money is seduced, deflected from its truth. Having been cut off from the law of equivalences (it ‘burns’) and the law of representation, money is no longer a sign or representation once transformed into a stake. And a stake is not something one invests. As an investment money takes the form of capital, but as a stake it appears in the form of a challenge. Placing a bet has as little to do with placing an investment, as libidinal investment with the stakes of seduction.
Investments and counter-investments – they belong to the psychic economy of drives and sex. Games, stakes and challenges are the figures of passion and seduction. More generally, all the stuff of money, language, sex and affect undergo a complete change of meaning depending on whether they are mobilized as an investment or transposed into a stake. The two moments are irreducible.
[Seduction]

Kvasir wrote:

I'd like to see a man accused of raping and killing a child and then use “Causal Determinism” as his defense, and see how that works out.

This is why scientists perform trials on random samples. An idea isn't good because you think it might be. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]