"This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games"
About this Quote
Burroughs doesn’t describe a battlefield so much as he diagnoses an operating system. “War all the time” is deliberately blunt, a deadpan that turns metaphysics into street talk. The shock is in the scale: he’s not arguing that humans like conflict, he’s implying the universe is rigged for it. That cosmic leap is classic Burroughs - paranoid, mordantly funny, and allergic to comforting narratives.
The line works because it slides between registers: “war” and “games” sit side by side, collapsing the moral distance we like to maintain between violence and play. Games are where rules are invented, enforced, and gamed; war is where the stakes become bodies. By pairing them, Burroughs suggests power is exercised through systems that recruit us as players and casualties at once. It’s not just that institutions fight; they also stage competitions - markets, politics, status, addiction - that keep people invested in the struggle, mistaking participation for agency.
Context matters: Burroughs wrote through World War II, the Cold War, Vietnam, and the rise of mass media as a control technology. His work is steeped in the idea that language itself is a weapon - a “word virus” - and that reality is edited, looped, and played back like tape. “Other universes” is the tease of an escape hatch, but it’s also a jab: imagine conditions not founded on domination, then notice how quickly this one drags you back into the match.
The line works because it slides between registers: “war” and “games” sit side by side, collapsing the moral distance we like to maintain between violence and play. Games are where rules are invented, enforced, and gamed; war is where the stakes become bodies. By pairing them, Burroughs suggests power is exercised through systems that recruit us as players and casualties at once. It’s not just that institutions fight; they also stage competitions - markets, politics, status, addiction - that keep people invested in the struggle, mistaking participation for agency.
Context matters: Burroughs wrote through World War II, the Cold War, Vietnam, and the rise of mass media as a control technology. His work is steeped in the idea that language itself is a weapon - a “word virus” - and that reality is edited, looped, and played back like tape. “Other universes” is the tease of an escape hatch, but it’s also a jab: imagine conditions not founded on domination, then notice how quickly this one drags you back into the match.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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