Quotes from James P Carse

It may appear that the prizes for winning are indispensable, that without them life is meaningless, perhaps even impossible. There are, to be sure, games in which the stakes seem to be life and death. In slavery, for example, or severe political oppression, the refusal to play the demanded role may be paid for with terrible suffering or death.

This means that a particular burden falls on property owners. Since the laws protecting their property will be effective only when they are able to persuade others to obey those laws, they must introduce a theatricality into their ownership sufficiently engaging that their opponents will live by its script.

Whoever is unable to show a correspondence between wealth and the risks undergone to acquire it, or the talents spent in its acquisition, will soon face a challenge over entitlement. The rich are regularly subject to theft, to taxation, to the expectation that their wealth be shared, as though what they have is not true compensation and therefore not completely theirs.

To be fully compensated for what one gave of oneself in the struggle for a title is to be restored to the condition one was in prior to competition.

Property is an attempt to recover the past. It returns one to precompetitive status. One is compensated for the amount of time spent (and thus lost) in competition.

Our social existence has, therefore, an inescapably fluid character. This is not to say that we live in a fluid context, but that our lives are themselves fluid. As in the Zen image we are not the stones over which the stream of the world flows; we are the stream itself.

Propertied persons typically have large estates and freedom of movement through the society. At the same time, the property of the rich has the effect of crowding and confining the less propertied. The very poor are typically restricted to narrow geographical limits and are regarded as aliens outside them.

Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition.

What is at stake here for owners is not the amount of property as such, but its ability to draw an audience for whom it will be appropriately emblematic; that is, and audience who will see it as just compensation for the effort and skill used in acquiring it.

If society is all that a people feels it must do, culture "is the realm of the variably free, not necessarily universal, of all that cannot lay claim to compulsive authority (Buckhardt).

One reason for the necessity of a society is its role in ascribing and validating the titles to property. "The great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the preservation of their Property; to which in the state of nature there are many things wanting

The world is elaborately marked by boundaries of contest, its people finely classified as to their eligibilities.

The intuitive principle here is that we cannot be justified in owning what we do not need to use or plan to use. One does not earn money simply to store it away where it will be protected from all possible future use.

We display the success of what we have done by not having to do anything.

The time of an infinite game is not world time, but time created within the play itself. Since each play of an infinite game eliminates boundaries, it opens to players a new horizon of time.

It is apparent to infinite players that wealth is not so much possessed as it is performed.

Finite games can be played within an infinite game, but an infinite game cannot be played within a finite game.

If one of the reasons for uniting into commonwealths is the protection of property, and if property is to be protected less by power as such than by theater, then societies become acutely dependent on their artists-what Plato called poietai: the storytellers, the inventors, sculptors, poets, any original thinkers whatsoever.

Infinite players regard their wins and losses in whatever finite games they play as but moments in continuing play.

The power of a society is determined by its victory over other societies in still larger finite games. Its most treasured memories are those of the heroes fallen in victorious battles with other societies. Heroes of lost battles are almost never memorialized. Foch has his monument, but not Petain; Lincoln, but not Jefferson Davis; Lenin, but not Trotsky.

The more effective policy for a society is to find ways of persuading its thieves to abandon their role as competitors for property for the sake of becoming audience to the theater of wealth. It is for this reason that societies fall back on the skill of those poietai who can theatricalize the property relations, and indeed, all the inner structures of each society.

Infinite players have rules, they just do not forget that rules are an expression of agreement and not a requirement for agreement.

If wealth and might are to be performed, great wealth and great might must be performed brilliantly.

A society is defined by its boundaries, a culture is defined by its horizon.