Finite and Infinite Games

by James P. Carse

Waste is the antiproperty that becomes the possession of losers. It is the emblem of the untitled.

Since the attempt to control nature is at its heart the attempt to control other persons, we can expect societies to be less patient with those cultures which express some degree of indifference to societal goals and values. It is this repeated parallel that brings us to see that the society that creates natural waste creates human waste.

Human trash is not an unfortunate burden on a society, an indirect result of its proper conduct; it is its direct product. European settlers in the American, African, and Asian continents did not happen to come upon populations of unwanted persons nature had thrust in their way; they made them superfluous by way of some of the most important and irreversible principles of their societies.

Whole civilizations rise from stories—and can rise from nothing else.

Myths, told for their own sake, are not stories that have meanings, but stories that give meanings.

Ideology is the amplification of myth. It is the assumption that since the beginning and end of history are known there is nothing more to say.

What ideologists are concerned to hide is the choral nature of history, the sense that it is a symphony of very different, even opposed, voices, each nonetheless making the other possible.