Woden's Day Thing: 12/28/22

Prisoner's Dilemma: Age of Empires edition

I’m gonna make you suffer through at least one of these every time now. Unless you’d prefer more of the medieval tapestry thing. In other news, Ukraine has all your money now.

Unrelated announcement: Brothermouth and I just finished the first season of Andor. I immediately bugged him to make these, now available in the Gutter store:

Don’t forget, Gutterballs (subscribers whose email addresses I’ve got) can always use the code BUTTHOLE for 15% off.

The game theory concept of the Prisoner’s Dilemma is such popular fodder for Internet smartasses and midwits (please keep to yourself whichever one you think I am) that I’m probably boring everyone, but in case you’ve missed it or aren’t familiar with the name, here it is in brief:

A and B are being interrogated separately by the police. They want at least one of them to roll on the other.

• If A betrays B (or vice versa), the betrayer gets off, and the betrayed gets 10.

• If both betray each other, both get 5 years.

• If neither betray each other, both get 2 years.

There are other ways this is presented, including a positive version (one of the ways it has been more commonly experimented):

A and B are each given some money (let’s say $5).

• If A chooses to steal from B (or vice versa), they get all the shimoleons.

• If both betray each other, nobody gets anything.

• If neither betray each other, they keep the original $5.

There are endless iterations of this and tons of ink and pixels have been spilled discussing the various ways this can be manipulated, tweaked, and observed to play out in the real world. But you get the basic concept.

For the record, whenever I’ve been stuck in a Prisoner’s Dilemma game (which, if you go to grad school for psychology and later in life get involved in the game industry, happens more often than you think), I always cooperate until betrayed, and then I always betray. I’m predictable that way.

I have lately been noticing a consistent undercurrent in the Substack communities most of us tend to move in- to characterize it as broadly inclusively as possible, I’ll just call it the “dissenting community” because there’s a huge amount of incompatible diversity in there (e.g., evangelical Christians and anti-woke Marxists are very often aligned against COVID biofascism but start swinging when abortion or homosexuality enters the room). One thing a lot of these disparate elements have in common is speaking with vehemence about the idea of Empire.

Empire, when it happens, is bad and gross and leads to tyranny and immoral wars of conquest and colonialism and so forth. America- and sometimes some other places but mainly America- is or has become or always was (depending on who you ask) an Empire and that’s very bad, and so we need to dismantle America As We Know It into a bunch of disparate balkanized states or some other form that isn’t an Empire.

My gut reaction to this is very similar to when I hear political discussion about X country having or acquiring nuclear weapons and Y idea about disarmament, which is something along the lines of,

“Sure. Give up yours first.”

I want to be clear- and I probably should have prefaced with this- that this is intended to be more of an intellectual inquiry than an assertion of a strong position. I am not trying, by this discussion, to argue to anyone that imperialism et. al is good. I’m attempting to reconcile what I see as a big problem of reality vs. principle when it comes to practical solutions.

The definition of “empire” that America, probably rightly, owns, is not unique to the modern world- China and Russia are absolutely empires in the same sense of the word, and probably a few others. America and Friends are also only the latest in a long, long line of empires stretching back to some of the earliest days of human civilization.

My instinct tells me that empires are inevitable and the idea of creating a world where something with such a definition doesn’t or can’t arise is probably incompatible with human social reality and is impractical idealism.

It seems a natural consequence of human social accumulation that a community will eventually become a tribe which will claim some kind of permanent territory and will eventually grow beyond the limits of its space or resources and seek, if it is able, to relieve that shortage with some form of conquest against its neighbor. It either succeeds at this and expands or fails and contracts or is absorbed by its neighbor.

The Westphalia philosophy of state sovereignty that I’ve touched on in the past was an attempt to enforce collective will against this, with a rough ideal that the borders of European nations would change nevermore and attempts to conquer one’s neighbors would be met with the deterrent force of a dogpile against the transgressor. Whether this played out successfully or was simply always a show of high-minded intentions like the League of or United Nations is questionable.

If the United States broke into fully-disparate states that- unlike the original conception of its founders- didn’t share a collective defense but were just balkanized self-contained nations, like many people in the dissenting community seem to advocate, I don’t think this state of affairs would persist for very long.

Which brings me back to why I brought up the Prisoner’s Dilemma in the first place. I have no problem agreeing with the many dissenting arguments that the United States, especially at the hands of its federal government, has become an ugly, grasping thing at war with its own people and hypocritically engaged in endless wars for influence and treasure.

And yet if we “dismantle the American empire,” I see no shortage of other powers ready to fill that void, including at least one that has literally stated it would like to dominate the entire world and achieve a global hegemony of its interests and is okay with that involving force. (And has a culture I find horrific and would not prefer to be imposed upon me or my loved ones.)

I’ve been told that I’m a sucker and a midwit and worse things for believing the propaganda that China and Russia and other global powers are dangerous imperial states and that I’m not actually a proper dissenter because America is the one true bad guy and so on.

But I would prefer not to be conquered, by my own government or by anyone else’s, especially one that views me as being outside of itself and therefore simply as kafir (so to speak) to be assimilated or destroyed.

The assumptions/caveats to the Prisoner’s Dilemma as an exercise are that both prisoners understand the nature of the game, have no loyalty to each other, and will have no opportunity for retribution or reward outside the game. It’s also generally understood that iterative play- many successive sessions with the same players- is the more useful/interesting for its real-world implications.

Obviously, the assumptions of the model fall completely flat with this and lots of other real-world examples- show me a stand-off with no cultural influences or opportunity for retribution or reward outside of the stand-off anywhere that matters.

The pragmatist in me is left with a few conclusions:

• there’s always going to be at least one thing going that’s an empire, and if there isn’t, one is naturally going to arise from the ordering and accumulation of power;

• there are sometimes maybe (here’s where I’ll lose you) good consequences to the behavior of empire;

• it’s probably better if there’s more than one of them to constrain the inevitable consequence of unchallenged power;

• America has become a shitty entity to itself and to others but so have other, at least equally powerful entities become at least as shitty;

• An empire that somehow abdicates its role as an empire will be almost immediately cannibalized by the empires smart enough not to draw down;

• we’re realistically better off trying to make empires as unshitty as possible than trying to create some state where they’re “illegal” or where an equally imperial (globalist) force gets to police that for everyone.

I don’t have an answer I can stick to. Do you?