Revisiting The Dutch Uncle Game in preparation for a new challenge: Batman’s Bluff.

This week I find myself serially coming back to The Dutch Uncle Game, which I talked about last fall. The game itself is fascinating to me, and of course I’ve been playing it in my own way for all of my life. But the ideas I discussed when I invented the formal version of the game keep coming back to me: The notion of being a Dutch Uncle itself, along with the attendant moral leadership. The idea that butthurt is not contagious, the fourth rule of The Church of Splendor. The DISC elaborations I discussed this morning. And the Ayn Rand Institute, amazingly enough, since I talk about them in the video, too – specifically about Don Watkins, who was gracious enough this week to show me where his shoe pinches.

The DISC of Ayn Rand is interesting just by itself. She was a Ci rhapsodizing Dc’s. She tended to kill the Di’s, like Gail Wynand, and any Sociable she ever wrote about was either miserable in life (Steven Mallory) or dead by the end of the book (Cheryl Brooks Taggart, Eddie Willers). She crucified the Incandescents – mirthfully but never mercifully. Her post-Atlas Shrugged life was a Cautious tyranny composed of everyone who hadn’t abandoned her yet, with a tight cadre of mostly (brutally brow-beaten) Sociables hanging in with her to the bitter end – expressing a storgic love for her that she seems never to have expressed for anyone.

Leonard Peikoff, Ayn Rand’s intellectual error, is a Ci, maybe, but it’s hard to tell, taking account that he’s lived a lie – affecting to be whatever it was Rand demanded that he be, rather than his own man – for his entire adult life. The Ayn Rand Institute is run as a Cautious tyranny to this very day. That’s how I knew how they would react to the Planned Parenthood videos. The Cautious are too overwhelmed to be of any use in an emergency, so I knew they would be deer-in-the-headlights panicked. There hasn’t been a solid bowel movement at ARI headquarters in two weeks, and their misery is but barely begun.

I play empathy games like only a few people can play poker, and that’s fun for me, at least. This weekend at church I plan to talk about a brand new anarchy game I call Batman’s Bluff. It’s a peacemaker’s game, and just speaking of it that way illuminates the difference between me and everyone else: I’m a lot less interested in palliating losses than I am in engineering nothing but wins.

Here’s the video discussing The Dutch Uncle Game – along with everything else in the universe: