Integrity is the only way out

When I was a teenager, I decided to read Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, hoping for a spacefaring adventure romp like the movie. Instead, what I got was mostly a fascist social studies lesson about how only members of the military should be allowed to vote. This might sound obvious to anyone who knows the text, but on that day, I found his arguments about “sovereign franchise” kind of enticing, in that way that thought experiments about authority catch fire dangerously in the teenage male brain.

So, I brought it to my mother, who always liked to hear about what I was reading. She’s the one I got all this chattiness from.

“Well, I think that’s wrong,” she said flatly. Huh?

“But look, he’s got this argument about how those who wield ultimate authority should be willing to pay ultimate pr—”

“Ok,” she said. “Well, when I was young, my father served as a surgeon in Vietnam, and I was there with him as a middle schooler. I saw firsthand how it ruined something in him permanently. Nothing good ever comes of war, ever.”

And with that, she no longer had any interest in talking about the book. I think I continued on for a moment, but she just shrugged and went out for a cigarette. Why didn’t she sit there and argue with me? Wouldn’t she at least hear me out, and debate it for a bit?

I bring this up because this week, there is another dust-up about a TTRPG company and its potential affiliations with unsavory characters. This time it’s Goodman Games. Strangely — or should I say “yet again” — the conversation across Reddit and Discord is often centered around discussing the optics. Have they changed their PR strategy? Are they hypocritical? What is their legal obligation? Does this give the OSR a bad look? Are you, upvoted poster, creating a bad look for us right now? We will restart the clock on all of this again next week.

I propose this: All of this prevarication is a waste of time and breath, which are, in fact, a limited resource. We cannot exercise any control over Goodman Games and how they manage this weird mix of Kickstarter obligation and money movement. All you can do is stand in your integrity.

Do you think Goodman Games is in the wrong? Great, don’t buy their products, and next time someone wants you to play Dungeon Crawl Classics, politely say, “Thank you for inviting me, but I don’t like that company’s association with Bob Whatever and his anti-Semitism, so I don’t want to play those games. Please let me know if there’s something else you’d like to run sometime soon!” You will have done enough.

But what about the internet strangers!? There is nothing you can do for them. Perhaps you are worried about the norms in the community! I’m going to say that there is only one meaningful, world-changing thing you can do to fight anti-Semitism in the TTRPG community. It is this:

Everything else is wasted breath.

You may disagree, and I respect that. But don’t waste your time telling me about it, because I don’t know you, and so expressing your disagreement to me will not make your Jewish neighbors or community spaces any safer or any less anti-Semitic, which is what I urge you to focus on. I want Jewish people to feel safe in our hobby, and the people God put on earth to welcome and greet our Jewish neighbors into the hobby are spending their time arguing about a press release with someone they will never meet and never change.

I’ve used this before, because it’s a good one:

“What makes us say of any discourse that it has or that it lacks ‘integrity’? Usually, we can answer this in terms of whether such a discourse is really talking about what it says it is talking about.”
– Dr Rowan Williams, 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, on theological argumentation

In other words, integrity is simply about what it says it is about.

That afternoon in 2006, when I wanted to regale my mother by repeating totalitarian propaganda and she simply shrugged and stopped the conversation, I was pretty indignant at her closed-mindedness. Didn’t she want to discuss further? Also, I never picked up that line of debate about Starship Troopers with anyone ever again. I caught a glimpse of something I needed to change in myself in order to fully understand.

That is the effect that integrity has on a person. My mother was a Christian Pacifist her whole adult life, though to my recollection, she never used the word “pacifism” once. She didn’t have to — she simply stood in her integrity and felt no need to attempt to change another person. When you experience integrity firsthand, it inspires you to change yourself. And all throughout her life, until she died yesterday morning, people of integrity gathered to her like moths to a flame.

And not a breath was wasted.