I defined myself for a long time as a moderate or centrist, and despite my leftward march in recent years, it still feels weird to be aspirationally reading a book on anarchism. As Branson points out early in this book, there are plenty of people who would never identify with the word but agree with anarchist ideas in science fiction, and I guess that’s how I got here. Twice in 2023, I read Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway, and on the second read, I realized that there were some strong anarchist themes in that book. That led me to Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You, and that led me here.

This book took a while to finally get through. After two failed attempts at an ebook, I finally succeeded thanks to a LibriVox audiobook!

I have mixed feelings about the book, though I ultimately liked it. Tolstoy’s ideas are radical, and though I aspire to a certain radicalism in my faith and politics, that is certainly not my nature, so I brought some resistance with me into the text.

Even accounting for that, though, I don’t think Tolstoy’s argument is as self-evident or well reasoned as he thinks it is. He sometimes seemed to spend more time assuring the reader that his conclusions were sound than actually presenting an argument that led to those conclusions. Similarly, he has some views that smack of supersessionism and even racial superiority that need to be wrestled with.

What I like about this comic is the way it shows that we build values we don’t agree with into games because games are more fun with conflict.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about buying a copy of Lotus Dimension, an indie TTRPG that encourages players to find non-violent solutions to problems. I haven’t made my way through the whole rulebook yet—I’ve been busy, and frankly, it’s a bit dense. It’s a bit crunchier than I would have expected from an indie TTRPG focused on an interesting premise, and I’m frankly not sure if it will live up to my initial excitement. That said, I really ought to read through the rest of it before I come to any conclusions.