RPG Philosophy--Traveller and Psychology

Everyone has their thing.  Mine, more or less consistently since I was 12 years old, has been tabletop rpgs.  For those not familiar, the best known (and first) tabletop rpg is Dungeons and Dragons, but there are thousands of similar games out there.  The basic concept is that all of the people playing save one take on the role of a protagonist character, usually one that the player has created.  The remaining person (known variously as the "gamemaster," "dungeon master," "storyteller," and a host of other titles) defines and plays out the rest of the world--the environment, the other people in the world, the antagonists, etc.  Imagine a play or a movie where the main characters, instead of being given a script, were allowed to improv everything their characters do, and the script writer responds in real time in reaction to the actions of the main characters, and you have some idea of what a tabletop rpg is or can be.

As I said, tabletop rpgs got their hooks in me early and never really let go.  Some may see this as pretentious, but I believe tabletop rpgs are a distinct art form, able to engage with and express certain parts of the human experience in a way that no other art form can do.  Fiction allows the reader or viewer to engage with ideas in a new way, but tabletop rpgs allow you to actually play out those ideas.  And the diversity of games and game settings allow for an enormous variety of ideas to be explored.  In particular, tabletop rpgs have given rise to an enormous variety of fictional settings, and those settings raise particular ideas for exploration and consideration.

It's those ideas, and in some case the game mechanics that line up with those ideas, that I want to explore.  I want to focus on games with original IPs in this series--there is a great Star Trek game, for example, but it allows you to explore the ideas that are present in the Star Trek TV shows and movies, so the rpg really doesn't add anything new to the discussion.  And the first one I want to talk about is Traveller.  Traveller is the original sci-fi tabletop rpg, releasing just on the heels of Dungeons & Dragons in 1977.  Over the course of a number of versions and editions, Traveller has developed a complex and nuanced sci-fi setting that explores a number of interesting concepts.  I definitely want to talk about Traveller in the context of capitalism, but first I want to discuss one of my favorite antagonist factions in tabletop rpgs--the Zhodani.

In order to understand the Zhodani and why they are such fascinating antagonists, a brief detour in Traveller's lore is needed.  About 300k years ago, Earth (known as "Sol" in Traveller-speak) was visited by an alien race known to the people in-universe as the Ancients.  The Ancients took early homo sapiens and seeded them on a couple dozen other planets throughout the galaxy.  The Ancients then proceeded to wipe themselves out in an apocalyptic conflict, leaving humanity (or, in Traveller-speak, "humaniti") to thrive in multiple independent locations.

One such location where humaniti thrived was on the planet its inhabitants called Zhdant.  The inhabitants of Zhdant, the Zhodani, are distinct in three respects.  First, because of their isolated location in terms of galactic geography, they developed without really interacting with the other branches of humaniti until very late in galactic history (a fact shared, notably, with humans who remained on Sol, i.e. "the Solomani," i.e. us--I might do a third Traveller post on them).  Second, the Zhodani developed faster-than-light travel technology on their own, and built a large multi-system polity before encountering the other branches of humaniti.  And, finally and mostly importantly, they built a society on the basis of psychic abilities.

Predisposition to psychic abilities in the Traveller universe (known in-lore as "psionics") are, as best as I can tell from the lore, genetically linked by not exclusively so, so that the children of psychics are likely to be psychic, but the children of non-psychics can manifest psionic abilities.  As a result, Zhodani society has a permeable caste structure, with a psionic upper and middle class, a non-psionic lower class, and extensive testing of children in the lower class to see if they should be "promoted" to the upper classes.  Only the psionic nobility have political power, and relative position within the nobility is determined by periodically-held psionic competitions.

A thousand years before the default setting of the Traveller-universe, the Zhodani encountered the rest of humaniti in the form of the Third Imperium (the default political setting for Traveller games--more on that polity in the next post) and the two immediately engaged in Great Power conflict.  In part as a reaction to the Zhodani, the Third Imperium became to a greater or lesser extent anti-psionic, outlawing psionic power usage among the population.  From a Third Imperium perspective, the Zhodani are a nightmarish totalitarian state, in which the government is constantly on the look out for deviant thoughts among the populace and use psionics to rework the minds of dissenters to insure conformity.  Particular focus of Imperial propaganda is a Zhodani institution called the Tavrchedl', translated by the Imperials as the "Thought Police," who are responsible for monitoring the populace and enforcing mental compliance.

Now, if you ask a Zhodani about this take on the Tavrchedl', they would laugh.  The Tavrchedl' are not police, they would say.  The Tavrchedl' are doctors, or more specifically, psychiatrists.  They have a unique set of tools that allow them to detect and treat mental illness, and that's what they do.  Most Zhodani who get a visit from the Tavrchedl' are happy to receive help in becoming a happier, better adjusted person.  Sure, one of the consequences of mental illness is that the folks suffering from it may not want treatment, but that doesn't make it wrong or abusive to treat people.  After all, people suffering from, say, schizophrenia often believe they don't need treatment, as they believe their delusions are real.  But, just as one doesn't indulge that fantasy, neither should one indulge in the objections to the Tavrchedl', as they are all coming from a similar place.

"Now, what a minute," an Imperial might say to our Zhodani interlocutor.  "Are you saying that the Tavrchedl' would not come to visit someone who had political or social ideals that were outside of the norm of Zhodani society?  Say for example, a non-noble advocating for a society in which they had political power?" "No, of course they would," the Zhodani would reply.  "Dissatisfaction with one's state in life is a problem of mental adjustment, and so it would be treated just like any other problem of mental adjustment."

The Zhodani are fascinating to me, not really because of the psychic part (which is cool sci-fi, but conceptually just a tool), but because they show how psychology can become a totalizing discourse.  If human society is the product of the mental states of each of the members of society (which, at least at a certain level of generality, is unquestionable true), then all social science can be reduced to psychology.  And if you had a sufficiently robust set of psychological tools, then any social problem is really a psychological problem, solvable using those tools.  And since the Zhodani have a particularly powerful set of psychological tools, psionics, it follows that psychology has become the totalized paradigm within their society.

I saw a Tweet the other day that argued that Kanye West's anti-Semitism is a product of his bi-polar disorder, and so we should not be dunking on him.  Now, that (extremely bad) Take is a product IMO of the "ablest" discourse run amok.  But let's for a moment focus on the idea that bigotry toward a distinct racial or cultural group is a psychological condition.  If we had some therapeutic technique to cure people of racism, at least in the same way we have therapeutic techniques to help with depression, then presumably we would want to deploy those techniques on racists in order to reduce racism in our society.  I mean, cognitive behavioral therapy is about re-wiring your brain to look at the world in a different way.  "Anti-racism" therapy would, in principle, be exactly the same thing.

Or, let's take a more controversial example--conversion therapy.  Now, the key thing with conversion therapy is that it doesn't work.  But let's imagine that it did--surely, some group of people who are LGBT would voluntarily seek out a therapeutic technique that would make them non-LGBT, for all sorts of reasons.  And there would equally be a group of people who would still oppose such therapies on the basis of the idea that there is nothing wrong with being LGBT and you shouldn't change that reality.

All of which points to the fact that all psychology is backstopped by an a priori framework of what is or is not psychologically normative.  Psychology cannot, in and of itself, answer the question of whether it is or is not one should make people not be racist or not be gay if one could.  Even references to essentially utilitarian principles like "happiness" or "adjustment" are problematic when it's basically impossible to tell if the condition itself or the reaction to it by other members of society are driving happiness and adjustment.  In other words, whereas it was once common to say that gay people were unhappy being gay, it now turns out that they were (in general) unhappy with the social and cultural stigmatization around being gay.  On the flip side, conservatives are at least partially correct that the changing of the DSM manual to remove homosexuality as a mental condition is at least in part about changing moral and philosophical ideas that don't really have to do with psychology as such.  A society that defines racism, or homosexuality, as a mental illness is by definition going to oppress those who are racists/homosexual and who disagree with the normative judgment of the morality of those statuses.  They want to view the world according to a different paradigm, and that paradigm has been medicalized out of society.  

I think we are seeing this play out, in perhaps a less charged but not insignificant way, with regards to so-called autism spectrum disorders.  We have built a society that is predicated around a certain baseline level of socialization, one that is difficult for people with ASD to meet on a consistent basis.  Some folks will argue, and not without reason, that the problem is not any kind of "ASD," but that society is structured in a way that favors people with certain personality traits over those with different traits.  In a society that did not privilege certain kinds of social interactions as normative, they would not be stigmatized and pathologized.  On the flip side, I know a number of people on the other end of the social spectrum who experienced fairly severe psychological distress as a result of the lock-down, which had an effect of "de-socializing" society.  One friend of mine framed the lock-down as the "revenge" of the ASD folks, imposing their social preferences for lesser personal communication and interaction on the "normals" (i.e., the more social people, more specifically him).  This was, and is, kinda unhinged, but it speaks to the level of psychological distress he experienced during first half of 2020.  Is my friend the one who needs treatment to help him deal with social isolation, or the ASD folks to deal with greater social interaction?  It depends on what is considered to be the normal human interaction in social spaces.

Along the same lines, the Zhodani also point to how psychology can swallow politics, or at least certain sorts of politics.  The Zhodani state is totalitarian in the sense that it doesn't allow for any competing formulations of politics.  The fact that it views dissenters as mentally ill and in need of treatment and sympathy may make it much nicer than the sort of jack-booted totalitarianism we see in the real world.  But the Imperials have a point--at the end of the day, anyone in Zhodani society that advocates for a different politics is going to get a visit from the Tavrchedl' and made to no longer think that way.  That's not to say that the Zhodani don't have politics, but it is politics that are bounded by the fact that no re-evaluation or questioning of the system is allowed, because such questioning is no longer politics, but a medical issue.  The lore claims that the Zhodani have had the same governmental structure for 8,000 years, which seems implausible until you consider how a revolutionary movement would come into being in the Zhodani context.  It's not that revolutionary ideas are snuffed out; it's that the low-level dissatisfaction that gives rise in time to revolutionary ideas are snuffed out.  If everyone is happy, you likely never get to the point where anyone considers regime change.   

The key point that the Zhodani raise is that psychology and politics are actually far more intertwined than we might initially think.  And, maybe the line really is driven by pragmatic concerns.  The argument could be made that much of our political life is driven by our relative paucity of reliable psychological tools.  We hear this point raised in the context of things like homelessness often being "really" a mental health issue, but it potentially goes far, far deeper than that.  At a certain sized psychological hammer, everything really does become a nail.

Finally, I think the Imperial reflexive fear and loathing of the Zhodani is realistic.  The lore makes clear that much of the anti-psionic sentiment in the Imperium is propaganda stemming from the Great Power conflict between the two powers, but like most things of that nature there is some pre-existing, inchoate fear that the propaganda grows out of.  The idea of someone being able to change your mind to make you think different thoughts is inherently scary, because it goes to right to the heart of identity.  As we will see in the next post, the Third Imperium's basic ideology is very, very current (as opposed to some sort of future-looking position, a la Star Trek or Eclipse Phase).  I think everyone reading this post would be very unhappy to be hauled in to the Tavrchedl' and made to look at their situation and their politics in a different way.  There is something very violating about the idea of your mind being forcibly changed. 

And, yet, as someone who has engaged with cognitive behavioral therapy and emerged out the other side a happier and better adjusted person, I can't dismiss the Zhodani perspective out of hand.  Yes, I voluntarily sought out this treatment as opposed to having it forced upon me, but the overwhelming majority of Zhodani would equally be grateful for the intervention of the Tavrchedl'.  As with my experience, at the end of your visit to the Tavrchedl', you are going to be a happier and better adjusted person.  That's a good thing, right?  Is protecting one's sense of identity from alteration by outside forces worth the price in terms of psychological pain?  I'm not sure I would resist a visit from the Tavrchedl', to be completely honest.

All of the best antagonists are those who make an at least somewhat compelling argument, while at the same time having obvious reasons to oppose them.  The Zhodani are absolutely committed to manipulating the minds of anyone who is outside of a very narrow vision of acceptable behavior to enforce compliance.  They also genuinely believe they are doing it for the benefit of those being manipulated, and it's not obvious that they are wrong.  And their narrow vision of acceptable behavior, while different from ours, is not all that different if you think about it.