The Sad Power of Offence

I suspect people reading this will be familiar with the latest DriveThruRPG controversy. But in brief, a rather silly person or group of persons recently created and released a game with a controversy-courting title to do with rape; a fuss was kicked-up in various social media circles about the offensiveness of said title; and as a result DriveThruRPG now has an "Offensive Content Policy". In essence, this policy is to suspend titles from being sold if anybody reports them as "offensive", pending a review by staff.

I don't think there is a particular need to make arguments from a soap box about this. Anybody using words like "censorship" and "freedom of speech" in this context does not really understand the nature of those things; OneBookShelf is perfectly entitled to do as it sees fit with respect to its market and customer base - even if I personally disagree with the decision.

I am more interested in this case as a kind of paradigm example of how being offended has taken on great power in late modernity. In our age, there is almost nothing as rhetorically and politically powerful as the ability to say, with credibility, that this thing offends me. It defines what can and cannot be said on university campuses. It decides what companies can and cannot do to advertise their products and services. It gets Nobel Prize-winning scientists hounded out of their professions for making badly judged jokes. It gets politicians sacked because they said intemperate things when they were students. The rush to seek offence - and to demand action about it - is one of the most significant sociological developments of my lifetime. In the early decades of the 21st Century taking offence is a weapon and victimhood is a trophy. Battles are fought and lost through strategic applications of accusations of micro-aggression and trigger warning. The winners are those who feel a sense of outrage the most keenly and shout about it the loudest; the losers are humiliated and forced to repent. What matters is not truth, but whether words and opinions can be repositioned as sins.

The desire to have the world arrange itself to one's own needs and preferences, to never have to confront anything disagreeable and to be outraged at the prospect of doing so, is an infantile one. It's the desire of the powerless for protection - only somebody who lacks control of their emotions feels the need for it. An adult comfortable in his or her own skin knows that taking offence is a choice that you make. A child doesn't have the power to prevent himself making it.

So I view this latest development as sad, more than anything, because it shows the extent to which a large minority of people in the world of RPGs, just like in all walks of life, are not comfortable in their own skins. They not only aren't in a position of control over their emotions, they don't even want to be, or see anything wrong with that. I think that says something deeply troubling about the society in which we find ourselves - it's a society of people who don't aspire towards self-command but aspire towards ever-more ostentatious displays of outrage in order to exert power over those around them. It's like an inverted existentialism: Sartre's "we are left alone, without excuse" transformed to a world in which there is always an excuse - our emotions are never our own, but the fault of somebody other. Foucault would undoubtedly have had a field day with it, but I've never understood enough about him to figure out what he'd say.