One comment on “Are Technocrats the Heroes with Walking Into Shadows”

1. Sur says:

   August 3, 2022 at 5:44 am

   I have not listened to the podcast much during the last year because of the unapproachable nature of the topics often discussed regarding random technicalities about niche topics within the WoM (World of Mage) with which I am very unfamiliar and inexperienced (it’s not you, it’s me). But this episode was for me catchy and interesting to listen. I do not know who looks at comments but I wanted to share an opinion about the topics touched here and some issues that have prevented me from fully immersing in the lore. It is likely a very disliked and critical opinion but I thought someone might share my problems with the WoM and so I share them here. (Also, ignore bad syntax and grammar please, I am not a native English speaker and I do not care enough).

   The Technocrats always have won, The technocrats wrote the books of rules and lore of Mage. When I look at the WoM, bluntly put, I see players as a “sad group of narcissistic technocrats in denial that wonder around playing make-believe traditions”. Read me out:

   They are technocrats because although they do “magic”, the way of accessing it is through rules described by the world of science. They grew up in the world of digestion, locomotion, mathematics and organisms, as well as among concepts like “function”, “reaction”, “economics”, and “logic”. This shapes them so much that even the spheres of magic are a classification of different forms of transformation of energy and matter. For example, Prime is just the concept of universal energy as a tradeable resource, Life is the separation of biological organisms in their distinct components that comprise them, Correspondence is just how we control the position of entities in a tri-dimensional plane, Spirit is just poking into another dimension (also a physics concept), and I think I do not have to say anything about Forces, Matter, Time and Mind (alteration of the brain’s perception of “reality”). Thus, it is not that the Technocrats use science as a veneer of magic but the other way around.
   This might seem like I am just using the perspective of the Technocracy to describe how they see magic and it is, but that is also how players and the books use them. Just by looking at the descriptions of each one and how to use them, you find concepts of heat, radiation, gravity, energy, canalization, age, sex, species, lifeform and so on. So whenever someone casts a spell, although how the player imposes their will might be through religious ideas, almost always the intentions and consequences, and how they “apply” their will is basically through science-derived logic (e.g. “I use correspondence to alter the gravity around me and float to the balcony”) and by the use of tools, codes, and rules defined by how they perceive reality (which again, is a technocratic perspective of reality from the start). This realization is unattainable to them because they are in denial of their technocratic nature, where they actually are not of Tradition-thinking but are seekers of rule-respect, order, classification and organization through dumbed-down moral and ethical ideas.

   They play make-believe because although they say to belong to traditions, they are most of the time lovers of the system, preservers of the status quo and champions of idealistic moral fascism where “my order is the good order” and everything in its right place. They do not want to follow their tradition’s desires, they want everything to stay as it is.

   This brings me to the point that the players are also narcissists, because they do not truly follow a tradition, but their own set of ideas about how the world should be and then roam around trying to impose them wherever they can instead of working for conciliation. At least science respects nature, where it is highly frowned upon to intervene in nature-derived conflicts, where we might have our own moral perspective but we do not impose it, where even though the male passerine bird is killing the baby chicks by chocking them in the nest, the spider kills their mating male, monkeys kidnap wild dogs, or any other form of parasitism, interspecies and predator-prey interactions we might witness; the scientist understands that it is not their place to impose their own emotional ideas of monodimensional good-evil valences but to understand their existence and instead of changing them, force their own will upon themselves to decide who THEY want to be in this world of chaos. Meanwhile, mages go around pushing, pulling, stepping, and tearing everything that does not align with them and only THEM (traditions are just a flavour to them, not a real philosophy).

   Lastly, it is sad because they are the “winners” of these interactions with the universe. It feels more like they are little kids out of control, full of emotions, with superpowers fighting the very same fascist force of action that they themselves are.

   And as if this opinion was not unpopular enough yet… also I dislike Marvel and all the toxic masculinity, aggression-as-a-valid-expression-of-male-emotion, games of power and dominance, abusive totalitarianism, good-guy-with-a-gun and twisted ideas of what heroism is (and just because they put something in a movie and do not explain all the incongruencies it does not mean it “works”).
   In heroism from my perspective, the hero actually loses. It is about the actual sacrifice of the self for the benefit of others. The more-than-altruism where you sacrifice something for others even when that actually goes against you, not only does not benefit you or affects you meaningfully but also hinders your own desires and will; yet you still -through pure willpower- do it for the others. Because otherwise the hero is just a person that can do more to impose a will than other people; mere “champions” and “enforcers” of some specific view of the world where some ideas carry “more good” than others. Also, not doing something like getting rich on your superpowers and instead doing something else is what I call “evil heroism”, where maintaining the baseline for a principle-driven person is considered heroic because “you did not do the bad thing” when that is actually the bare minimum; they confuse heroism and moral duty. It would only be heroism if the individual is actually or normally ill-intended and has a true desire for pure personal benefit. I also dislike economic heroism, where heroism is scored through the economic balances of life vs death or damage vs benefit. Then again, it seems like we are in an era where just not doing the bad thing is something to be thankful for.

   In my view, WoM is built on anthropocentrism, it places humanity as the centre and everything revolves around it, where reality is there waiting for us to tell reality how it is supposed to “be”. This in my view makes the universe -in my opinion- much smaller and ridiculous, and the plains and universe structure as they are described do not work for me. I instead feel the drive to take note from the idea of a multidimensional universe. Where I propose that magic is instead the imposition of other dimensions over ours, that we can act on them but it does not revolve around us nor is built FOR us, it just is. This instantaneously solves many issues with the ideas of deities, imposition of perspectives over reality, magical beings, the ideas of plains and different worlds and tons of other common concepts that contrasted too much with my reading of the WoM (e.g., the paradox is just the consequence of making to dimensions touch without knowing what you are mixing, like tearing a hole in a bag full of water and spilling all over). There, existence is purposeless and meaningless, and instead, players, as actors define their own purpose and meaning through their mage will, without lying to themselves with false anthropocentric “truths”. Here, the mages are individuals who feel a special bond with other dimensions of reality, that feel like they are in the “wrong” dimension and thus use their abilities to bring parts and create bridges from other dimensions that they feel like they actually belong to. This also tears up the traditions and technocracy and gives them the freedom to form their own cultural profile and perspective of the universe. In my system, all the traditions and technocracy included are the opponents trying to control the players, which makes it more fun for me. This solves the issue of spheres as a simple twisting of the rules of this dimension of reality by other common alterations that are known to the human brain, and puts an end to the separation between strict technocracy and sciency vs magic.

   I know I have very strong opinions but please do not take any of this personally, it is just an idea I wanted to put out there. I liked the episode and it was very nice to listen to all your opinions.

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