The Serious Mirth Society

Hands down, my favorite book last year was Fredrik Backman’s Beartown. It’s about hockey, sure. But it’s really about humanity, and what happens when we base our identity, our worth, on something outside of ourselves. And how, if we do, we tend to need that thing to succeed, to WIN, in order for us to feel good. To be good. To be right. At any cost.

Backman has this great talent for including short, seemingly-offhand commentaries in his books, reflections on the nature of humanity that have all the beauty and heft of a thousand-pound feather. Delicate, but heavy. Oh sure, it looks like just another innocent paragraph, floating there on the page—until it thuds down right at your feet and sinks a 100-foot hole in the ground. Then you find yourself staring down into that abyss for an hour wondering what just happened, grateful your tiny toes are still intact. As was the case with this one:

“There are few words that are harder to explain than “loyalty.” It’s always regarded as a positive characteristic, because a lot of people would say that many of the best things people do for each other occur precisely because of loyalty. The only problem is that many of the very worst things we do to each other occur because of the same thing.”

– Fredrik Backman, Beartown

You officially have my permission to stop reading this post now and just go get the book. I understand. No hard feelings. In fact, I may go do the same thing. It’s worth reading at least twice. (And did I mention it’s a trilogy?) See you later.

But seriously, his keen observation on loyalty keeps me wondering:

What teams are we cheering for? And why?

I suppose we could ask ourselves these questions about a number of game-like things we do: sports, politics, tradition, religion, war, etc. They all request a sort of team loyalty from us. And if we say yes, whether we’re key players or fans, we’re all supporting the continuation of the “team” in some way. But how did we join these teams in the first place?

• Do we just need to feel like we belong to something?
• Did we decide our loyalty ourselves?
• Was it because of tradition? If our family cheered for a team, does our continued loyalty honor them?
• Was it because of location? If a winner is from where we’re from, are we winners too, by association?
• Why do we get so upset if our team loses? By association, do we become losers, too?
• When the “winners” riot, is the destruction an earned display of power?
• When the “losers” riot, how is that framed?
• Does our view of that depend on which one of those we were?
• Does a financial connection, a personal gain or loss, influence our loyalty?
• Is loyalty temporary? Or permanent?
• What happens if we change our loyalty? In us? To us?

There are forests worth of books on the ramifications of all of this, the meanings of our loyalty to team, family, tribe, country, religion. A lot of them frame those games as zero sum outcomes needing a winner and a loser. There’s a book I love with a different idea, though: philosopher James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility.

“A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”

– James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

You are also pre-emptively forgiven if you stop reading this and just go read Carse. It’s a short, practical, wonder-full book. He writes that the finite games we’ve made up—like sports or anything with sides—were built specifically to define winners and losers. The goal is to divide the conquerors from the conquered, with variations of trophies and moral judgments awarded.

Carse suggests that our approach to life could be a very different kind of engagement, an infinite game with very different “rules.” Infinite play is not just making the same brutal games last longer. Infinite play is engineered to expand positively, allowing the players and rules to adapt and change, without the short-term “team” mentality. The hope of playing is for everyone to enjoy the playing, even to improve the playing. It’s not based on teams “winning” and “losing” in the finite sense. It’s about creating possibility and longevity. And maybe even joy.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if we chose loyalty to that kind of game? Where we each carefully chose what kind of player we were going to be and what kind of play we were going to support? Where we could make sincere choices supporting a more vibrant kind of life on a greater scale? And maybe beyond just Team People? Maybe “Team Earth” with no opponents? Maybe we could play so everyone who’s spinning on this waterball could enjoy being part of Game Universe?

Though post-humorous (typo intended), we’d like to make Professor Carse an honorary member of The Serious Mirth Society, because he knew what large-scale play could be, and we love this kind of play. He wrote that “infinite players prepare themselves to be surprised,” and how that indicates a dedication to “ceaseless growth.” Infinite play isn’t locked in to what has been, and it doesn’t need to control what might be. It doesn’t need one team to lose for another one to win. It lets everyone play, and hopefully even thrive.

And on that note, in the hope that “growth” could mean “for everyone to thrive,” when you vote this year (and PLEASE everybody, every body do the voting thing), look past loyalty to a team, and consider a more infinite game.

Can we make up more infinite games? We would really cheer for those. We could even, maybe, be loyal, even as we keep improving the game.