Less is More. More is Also More.
By: Chris Jones
Tags: Social Media, Teaching, History, Debate, Coexistence

No teenagers were harmed in the making of this post, or the events that inspired it.

I spent last week essentially locked onto a small college campus with 100 teenagers, during which a majority of them spent time seriously arguing for the moral right to engage in human sacrifice.

Lemme ‘splain.

It’s an almost comically surreal event called Simulation Week, in which the students and invited guests of one of the schools I teach at spend Tuesday through Friday engaged in an emotionally, physically, and spiritually demanding set of challenges constructed by a Sim Team, a group of teenagers only a little older than their victims.

This year, the challenge was Clash of Cultures. In it, the kids were divided into four cultures — Aztecs, Romans, Scots, and Tang Chinese. They were mercilessly sucked through a time-manipulator by three scientists (played by three of the finest kids you’ll ever meet), plopped down into a dome sealed off by some nasty anti-bio tech, and given a mission: find a way to create a government that everyone can live with, or you’re never going home.

Along the way there were chip implants, manifestoes, assassination attempts, full-on kill-or-be-killed swordfighting brawls, a murder, three separate encrypted messages, a group martyrdom, and eventually a government that was so committed to religious freedom that it allowed the Aztecs to continue to perform human sacrifice. Which was then co-opted by the Aztec leader, who bathed the earth in blood and bones.

In other words, ridiculous fun.

Full disclosure: I was one of the leaders of the Roman group (pegged as roughly 100 B.C., or what I personally consider the height of the Republic).

It’s not LARP, except it is both live-action and role-playing, and it isn’t faithful recreation (despite the Roman commitment to the turtle — very effective — and the Tang commitment to tea — also effective), but it is an opportunity to get the kids out of their very comfortable middle-class zones and allow them to engage in the kind of thinking and working they really can’t do anywhere else.

And a couple of really funny things happened.

One, although we did not take the phones away from the kids, they didn’t get used a lot. Kids would leave them in their pockets and whatnot. Unlike their regular lives, what was happening in front of them was far more interesting than what someone was posting on Insta. Less technology — more connection. Less social media — more social interaction.

Two, the kids found out that making social choices never occurs in a vacuum. You say something about someone, she hears it. And you still have to spend three more days in the same building with her. So you best take care what you say, and keep a bagful of apologies handy.

Three, they discovered that rumor is both dangerous and powerful. In the frothy soup of Thursday afternoon, with kids running in and out of rooms saying breathlessly, “here’s what’s happening with the Tang”, it was impossible to know what was true. Nassim Taleb says, “Trust none of what you hear, some of what you read, and half of what you see.” I was (theatrically) stabbed in the back in an assassination attempt right in front of the entire sim population. The miscreant was never caught. At least six different versions of what happened floated around for days. And that was something they all witnessed with their own eyes. How confident will they be that what they were told by someone’s ex-girlfriend’s study partner is the truth? I hope not very.

Four, they found out that peer pressure is way more intense than they thought. Most of these kids are religious, and most of them are the same religion. You’d think that would make for homogeneity. No. It does not. Their tribal affiliations were far stronger than their commitment, for instance to the sanctity of life. Some of these kids understood, at the end, what they had done. They were horror-struck. Good.

Five, they saw that making moral choices also doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Your example matters, and other people’s example matters to you. When you have a crisis point in front of you, there won’t be time to consult Google or poll your friends. You’ll decide right then, or the decision will be taken out of your hands. There was an irreducible minimum of kids that could not abide sacrificial death as a permissible religious concept, allowable just because someone believed in it. Those kids voluntarily martyred themselves rather than participate in the government. They would not compel, but they also would not be compelled.

Along the way we discussed human rights, religion, conflict between concepts of human value, superior and inferior rights, governmental systems, leadership, Christianity, paganism, quiet vs. noise, the two-party system, individuality vs. collective action, sacrifice, and sanctification. They discovered that these are topics that have been debated for thousands of years, and that solving humanity’s problems couldn’t be reduced to a meme, or hammered out in an afternoon by getting representatives of every culture together in a room and listening politely. They thought they could.

Our world teaches them that they can. If the GOP wouldn’t be evil, if the Dems weren’t actually socialists, if Trump wasn’t bent on imprisoning half the population, if AOC weren’t dumber than a box of rocks, etc. Nowhere do we find that, you know, Ben Shapiro actually makes a couple of interesting points, and listening to John Oliver will make you smarter. Because the truth is, Shapiro isn’t just posturing, and Oliver isn’t just trying for ratings. These guys actually believe the stuff they say. And they have reasons for it. And they’ll resist your attempts to sweep them aside. It might be well to understand them, if you’re going to coexist.

If a hundred American teens can get together and seriously consider that the religious convictions of the Scots and the Aztecs might not be resolvable into one hand-holding group singing kumbaya, something good might come of that. Many of them went in thinking their world was boring, and their phones were more fun. None of them think that now.

Their lives were less, and now they are more. The false image of the world was more, and now it is less. Oddly, a week of fiction taught them more truth than all the reality TV they could consume in a lifetime.

Can’t wait for next year.

Chris Jones, alias Mr. C (and last week, Primus Crispus), is a wandering minstrel who teaches at five schools, both on- and off-line, in two states. His students range in age from 11 to 20. He is not good at swordfighting, but he can still bury the three from the wing. Fortuna audaces iuvat.