Sometimes, rarely, you stumble upon someone and realise — whether by the artefacts they leave in their wake, or by the impressions they nail to the board — that this person you’ve encountered is not only weird and agentic, but also unapologetically ambitious. You realise that they’re someone who seems able to craft things with prudence, care, and love in their heart, even under contemporary conditions of domination; that they seem capable of creating, too, with an eye to scale and audience. Virginia Woolf was such a person, I think. The Waves is evidence enough.

When I was “on the cusp of leaving the remaining bits of home I still clung to”, I figured that this rare ‘weird+agentic+ambitious’ combination was nothing more than a product of random luck. A consequence of someone with congenital weirdness (and natural agency) who’d been protected from the Real World for long enough to make it work.

“So you’re someone who struts and frets on a larger stage and you’re not obviously an asshole?” I’d think, “Wow, growing up must have been nice.”

More recently, however, I’ve started to grapple with a different explanation. Perhaps this tendency is instead more akin to a skill that has been cultivated into a lifeway. Not a product of artificial protection from The Real, but a deliberate consequence of encounters with it. You need a predisposition for weirdness, sure. You certainly also need help if you’re going to shelter the flickering campfire of agency in the midst of rain, and wind, and relentless angst. But I think there may also be deliberate practice here, coupled with a deliberate attitude.

(Tentatively,) I want to call the lifeway that results ‘dwarf mode’. I want, also, to explain it and, in so doing, chart a path towards it.

Consider this an extended riff.

§ 1. Goblins

For the benefit everyone who has blanked the pandemic years, ‘Goblin Mode’ is

a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations. (OUP, as quoted in The Guardian)

In essence, goblin mode is a strategy of retreat, of ‘degeneracy’, as self-protection. You experience shitty circumstances. You get burned out. You take the black pill you’re offered. And then, black pill swallowed, you respond to the circumstances by letting yourself get weird and feral. As Venkatesh Rao explains,

the primary characteristic of goblin mode is that your relationship with your physical self degenerates from an I-you to an I-it condition. Your sense of yourself as a person unravels, just as it does for many homeless people, except you still happen to be housed.

When you enter goblin mode, you begin to relate to the material circumstances of your existence — including those of your own own physical body — through a lens of radical objectification. More critically, however, you also grasp your powerlessness in relation to those objects. Nothing under your stewardship feels truly your own. (Not even the shiny little rocks you acquire.) And so you neglect everything. Essentially, the vibe is here is: “fuck it, let the things fall apart; it’s the natural tendency”.

‘The Things’, I want to stress, includes ‘yourself’. At the extreme, the goblin’s body has become an object to itself, and not an object which the goblin can have power over. Let yourself fall apart, insists the person in goblin mode, because it’s the natural tendency anyway.

§ 2. Gnomes

Venkatesh Rao responded to this by theorising what he called “a potential antithesis” from @deepfates (via @secretxsnake): ‘gnome mode’.

Whereas goblin mode is “the completely rundown, degenerate condition of normie striving in fully burned-out retreat” (Rao), the ‘gnome-pill’ offers a tentative recovery from the same. The gnome is a jolly little fellow. Someone who ascends from the depths by way of hyper-local agency.

When you’re in gnome mode, as Rao figures it, you see everything under your stewardship as something you own, use, and maintain. The world outside remains just as fucked as before, of course, but now you have a response: “All that is very well,” as Candide puts it, his gnome mode speaking, “but let us cultivate our garden.” As a gnome, you find a kind of mischievous joy in such work of maintenance and care. It’s a cautious resolution to the meaning crisis — a recovery from principal-agent crisis that took hold of your soul — that arises from a decision to constrain your attention and sense of agency to the domesticity of your own small garden (or workshop, or body, or whatever). The resulting vibe, as the gnome presents herself to others, is one of a “jolly tinkerer” or a “village weirdo”. While we’re so fucking back, now our adventures and projects are strictly neighbourhood-scale. In his present form, YouTuber and ‘backyard adventurer’ Beau Miles is a great example of someone who has adopted gnome mode in maximally public display. Only a gnome would run a marathon in a luxury hotel, or plant a tree every minute for 24 hours (in a neighbour’s spare paddock). This is the oddball logic of the so-called ‘Great Weirding’ made natural, high-energy, and fun.

All well and good. However, as you know, I play perhaps too much D&D. As a result, I also have a more complete taxonomy in mind.

§ 3. Bugbears

On the one hand, there’s what I want to call bugbear mode. The path to bugbear mode begins roughly the same. You experience exactly the same shitty circumstances as the soon-to-be-goblin does above: similar burnout; similar run-down conditions of objectification. (And, of course, the same black pill.) Whereas the gnome recovers by reducing ambition and agency projects ‘in the garden shed’, however, the bugbear finds a road to ‘recovery’ by leaning into a kind of joyfully destructive potential that’s latent in the objectification itself. This is a dark enlightenment of reduced ambitions as feral-physical scaffolding. You let yourself get weird and feral, just as before, but then you begin to find energy precisely in that which is darkest and scariest: the sense that the close-to-hand physical body-as-object can itself be reformed for use as a tool or, more specifically, as a hammer. From this, you generate a new (and arguably perverse) virtue-ethical framework. You steer towards becoming yourself hairy, scary, & jacked. You win localised dominance games, and are rewarded for it. You restructure your sense of prestige and identity to fit. This is the reason that there’s so much commonality in the peculiar (hypermasculine) presentations of both outlaw motorcycle gangs and special forces cultures. (It’s also no mistake that special forces selection processes place so much emphasis on traumatising via resource constraints.) The bugbear lifts heavy, grows a beard, and covers himself a very particular kind of (shitty) tattoo. The vibe becomes: things fall apart, but you can also break things in ways that feel kind fun, agentic, and strength-producing. More critically, the right contexts, you’ll be rewarded for such acts of deliberate and targeted violence.

§ 4. Dwarves

On the other hand, there’s the thing I endorse: dwarf mode. This is my framework, so I am biased, but as I see it, dwarf mode combines the ‘strength’ of bugbear mode and the ‘jolly tinkering’ of gnome mode with scale and sustainability.

To get into dwarf mode, you respond to the depths of the darkness with two simple realisations. First, you realise that — on a very fundamental level — nobody has power over you. In the language of the New Age gift card: “You are enough.” Second, you decide that, with sufficient craft and thoughtfulness, the world as it is is enough. Everything in your environment, even and especially the stone and dirt and rubble, can be a resource for creating beautiful things.

Sure, you can’t be as immortal or ethereal as the elves. You can’t be fully immune to the black pill. You can’t really pursue a spiritually-coded dissolution of the Self into the World in most domains. Yet none of that matters (says dwarf mode) because your work can last. With care, and craft, and stewardship, a few resources can last for generations.

As I see it, this isn’t so much a denial of the actual terrain as it is a radical acceptance of it.

It’s clear that the ‘human’ (read: default modern) reflex of empire-building is missing its ethical targets. Robust infrastructure is deployed as a weapon for conquest. It’s fucked.

It’s also clear that things do in fact fall apart. The world is in fact pretty screwed on a lot of dimensions. You have in fact retreated into a cave, and rightly so.

And, yes, the self — absent intervention — tends strongly “streaks and patches”.

Importantly, however, dwarf mode rejects the very possibility of violence against the self. There is no narrowing. No binding or coercion. No defection against the future selves (or against the others like you). If you want to prevent that most intimate catastrophe — to “fall like snow and be wasted” — all you need, instead, is two things:

1. A wider account of subjectivity which doesn’t deny the radical objectification you’ve already experienced. This is essentially a materialist reënchantment of the world, coupled with a recognition of (some version of) the political ecology of things. (“I eat an apple,” as Mol would have it).
2. A sense that hard work and craft is virtuous when rooted in care/love/etc.

The first is natural. We have never been modern. Really, the sharp-edged Cartesian dualism is the unintuitive thing to have adopted.

The second thing is the hard one. In the wrong light, “hard work backed by love” can seem either too pollyannaish or concerningly German. Neither could be further from the truth. Love is hard (though not that hard). As Milton’s Satan reminds us, you always have “faithful friends,” companions, and the “associates and co-partners of [your] loss” (1.264-5). And in dwarf mode properly construed, you are always already free. There is no condition of domination, even against yourself, because it doesn’t even make sense.

More critically, from the standpoint of someone deep in dwarf mode: the work that one ‘must’ undertake is always optional, and the next actions of craft are always pretty easy to grasp. (It’s hard, at times. It’s never mysterious.) If you’re writing, “sit down and start making the clackity noise.” If you’re making boots, pick up some cobbler’s pliers and a last. Pursue the projects as they present themselves. On inspection, “craft” is nothing more than obsessive interest in solving problems for their own sake as those problems arise. If you like puzzles, then the logic of “the reward for solving this problem is that I get to solve another problem” is actually pretty intuitively appealing.

With a little bit of ingenuity, any cave can become the entrance into a hidden city. You can always carve — from any rock — beautiful infrastructure that’ll last as long as the mountain. No matter how much infrastructure is built, too, such a hidden city is always capable of supporting generations of weirdos to come. Even as a ‘raw’ cave, it makes safe trade with the ‘outside’ world on your own terms feel possible. It already makes coördination feel safe.

All of this leads us to two footnotes to dwarf mode, in ascending order of weirdness —

§ 5. Craft is Spiritual

Mythkeeper gives a shockingly good description of the ‘Dwarf’ culture in the Pathfinder setting:

So what does it mean to have craftsmanship and toil be at the centre of your being? To understand this, we have to enter the domain of the spiritual. For dwarves, the act of creation is inherently virtuous. What I mean by this is: when other peoples think of the qualities that make a person good, they think of things like prudence, temperance, charity. For dwarves, virtues are hard work, dedication, attention to detail. For a dwarf, one can be considered ‘a good dwarf’ merely because they are a dwarf who makes beautiful things. Dwarves treasure built things because they are showcases of the virtue of the builder. It’s as a derivative of this quality that we get the unfair stereotype that dwarves are greedy, or that they love gold. On its own, gold is not interesting to the dwarf, nor is silver or mithril. But all ore has raw potential, and that is attractive. And gold that has been sculpted into chalices, rings, or amulets is truly prized, for it is that virtue of the builder distilled to visible form. Not every dwarf is a blacksmith, but every dwarf is dedicated to a craft, even if that craft is the craft of battle. Most are likely to dabble in a few different crafts because, as discussed, the act of creation is inherently spiritual to the dwarf.

When dwarves commit to something, they see it all the way through. It’s a rare dwarf that begins a project and then moves onto something else before finishing it. This, too, is tied to the spiritual connection they feel with the act of creation. Once something is begun, it must be brought to completion. This has an interesting effect on the dwarf psyche: dwarves have an incredible sense of resolve. Like their love of built things, this has also conferred upon them a slightly negative stereotype: the stereotype of being stubborn. When a dwarf sets their heart to something, it’s very difficult to change their mind. They are said to be ‘as immovable as the mountains in which they make their homes.’ One of the positive aspects of this strong resolve is that dwarves are among the bravest people in Golarion. When a dwarf tells himself that he’s going to enter a valley of the undead to retrieve something, it doesn’t matter how impossible the task is. The act of verbalising this commitment has secured his resolve. He’ll first die than turn back. It is for this reason that dwarves make the most steadfast ally for a group of adventurers — a reliable bulwark against the terrors they might face.

The thing being crafted isn’t just the self, whatever that means, but rather (a piece of) the project that transcends the self. “Have you never read this in the writings? The stone that the builders rejected becomes the cornerstone.” Strip away the Christian scapegoating theology, and this becomes the basis of stubbornness-as-virtue, and of stubbornness-without-self-coercion: good means ‘good for self and others’. It’s also how the dwarves generate honesty and ‘right speech’ from first principles.

As you admit,

I’m afraid that sometimes when I feel like I’m defecting, it’s actually necessary in order to be able to keep getting up in the morning on all those future days. Not always, perhaps not even often, but that the violence would be existentially destructive.

The degree to which you are divided is the degree to which you are conquered, so don’t play games with yourself in which you will need to defect. The game is one of affordances, not chains, except in exceptional circumstances. Paradoxically, that’s how the dwarves get a reputation for inhuman resolve.

§ 6. Thou Did’st, Not I

I’ve written elsewhere about existential verbs, but trying to think take this tentative notion of ‘dwarf mode’ seriously — and write from inside it, as above — reveals a more interesting issue with first person pronouns.

In the last season of these letters, both of us wrote a lot about the self. The parliament, naïve and stilted. The ethics of an ethical distortion. Now, through Woolf, you give us a more mature question: “what fragments, what images … still resonate?”

It occurs to me that what we haven’t written about, nearly as much, is the pervasive weirdness of being ‘in dialogue‘ with oneself both synchronically and diachronically. I get the sense sometimes — I think you do, too — that it’s possible to discover yourself only as a moving target; that the self exists only in motion, affect, and sensation, in the perpetual act of becoming.

Though they’re often misread and misunderstood, Dulce & Gabbana — that most fashionable pair of French theorists — were always the ones who thought most deeply about becoming.

In his preface to D&G’s Anti-Oedipus, Foucault warns us that it would be a mistake to read the book “as the new theoretical reference” (xli). No, Foucault continues, the work is itself “an ‘art,’ in the sense that is conveyed by the term ‘erotic art,’ for example”. It is, moreover, “the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time” (xli), because it aims to answer a set of pressing questions:

How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behaviour? The Christian moralists sought out the traces of the flesh lodged deep within the soul. Deleuze and Guattari, for their part, pursue the slightest traces of fascism in the body. (xiil, emphasis added)

Fascism does indeed leave its traces in the body. Among other things, it is necessarily and inherently a mode of action — a totalising set of contractions and dispositions of the muscles — which directs the attention of its subjects. To be a victim of fascism is to have fascism inscribed on your body. To become a fascist is to have the grip of fascism within you.

Generously, you might say that the dwarf mode I described above is an attempt to live in radical-but-practical opposition to the collectivist-antinormativity/antinomianism-which-disguises-itself-as-law (ie, fascism); that, to develop the skills entailed by such a perspective, you must necessarily “pursue the slightest traces of fascism in the body”.

More abstractly, though, I wonder whether it’s (at least partly) about refiguring the way that one stages the most intimate and private dialogues with oneself. Rather than the first-person “I”, or even the (now universal, once formal) second-person “you”, choose the (now archaic) singular second-person informal declensions: thou, thee, thy, thine. The Quakers pioneered it. It seems valuable to turn the reflex inwards.