When you start digging into the mythology that underpins faith in the correctness of the existing order, you sometimes discover amazing things. For example, economics, game theory, and the social status quo. How are these things connected? Like this. In game theory there is a classic problem called the prisoner’s dilemma. Its essence is as follows. The police have caught two bandits. They suspect they were acting not individually but together, which carries a heavier sentence. The bandits are isolated from each other and offered this game: if you testify against the other, you go free, but your partner gets the maximum—ten years. If both testify against each other, each receives two years. If both stay silent, they each get six months. Game theory tells us that if each bandit seeks to minimize his sentence, he will testify against his colleague, hoping to be set free. And here (surprise!) it turns out that because each ratted out his partner, instead of freedom both get two years.
That’s the setup. However, it gets even more interesting. It turns out that this purely speculative construct is one of the arguments used to justify the existing world order—a world that requires a well-paid guy with a stick to regularly teach life lessons to reckless little people. Don’t laugh, I’m serious. In the age of science and all-knowing British scientists, that’s how it should be, right? After browsing forums for a year or two, reading a couple dozen books, you will discover with surprise that this problem is nothing more than one of the cornerstones in justifying our world order. Moreover, it turns out that even Rousseau and Hobbes, having no idea about game theory, nevertheless engaged in similar exercises when explaining how things work.
Actually, mainstream economics interprets the matter this way. The prisoner’s dilemma has a positive “cooperative” solution: both bandits stay silent and each receive six months. But since each bandit seeks to maximize his own benefit—that is, to get out free—each ends up losing. This, mainstream economists tell us, illustrates people’s inability to cooperate and, consequently, the necessity of the state. Each person’s striving to maximize profit can lead them to miss the cooperative solution, which—though offering less profit—nonetheless saves them from total disaster. Therefore we need a guy with a stick, who will point this stick at those who don’t understand their own happiness. Simply put, without the stick there is no social cooperation, and consequently, no peace, no progress, no fight against global warming.
Let’s set aside obvious questions—for example, how does the guy with the stick know what we “really need.” Let’s talk about something else. Namely, that upon closer examination, this problem shrinks to an amusing but useless-in-real-life mental exercise, and consequently, the conclusions drawn from it shrink to the same.
For example, the author of these lines has been familiar with this problem for many years, and for me the winning strategy has always been silence (and receiving a sentence of six months). But according to the problem’s conditions, getting out free is considered a win. This gap between the given conditions and my understanding beautifully illustrates what I want to say next.
The point is that the subjects in this problem are completely devoid of experience. This is acknowledged by those who work with such exercises; they specifically state that the prisoner’s dilemma is a one-shot game. When it becomes a repeated game, the results are different, and immediately, like a jack-in-the-box, the tendency toward cooperation pops out. There is enormous literature on this subject; strategies are developed, algorithms are written. But we are not talking about game theory as such now—we’re talking about its social interpretation.
Give it some thought and you will discover that in life we will practically never encounter “one-shot games.” Actually, throughout our childhood, parents and other well-meaning adults install in us systems for perceiving signals coming from other people. We receive various filters, learn to develop and recognize behavioral patterns, accumulate and analyze experience. That’s what upbringing consists of. Upon leaving the family home, a person is already ready to a greater or lesser degree to live in society, to interact with other people and use existing tools for this. Throughout the rest of his life, a person perfects these skills, gaining new experience and then passing it on to his children, and so on.
Any problem we face in life can be reduced to previous experience. It can be said that there is nothing at all for which we would have absolutely no experience. It may be greater or smaller, but it always exists. For instance, when facing aliens, most people will be guided by data received from science fiction. Possibly not the best decision, but at least it exists. I think that phenomena for which experience is completely absent will generally not be perceived as events—what’s outside our experience we simply will not notice. But that’s already unnecessary philosophizing.
To illustrate this, let me recall mowgli—people who grew up outside society and did not receive the specific social experience we receive from our parents in childhood. As far as one can judge, in most cases these people never managed to properly integrate into society.
So, the prisoner’s dilemma works perfectly precisely for such a mowgli—a person devoid of experience and communication skills, or more precisely, a purely biological, a-social person. And what’s interesting, all the conclusions about the necessity of the state are also valid for such a mowgli. Mowgli cannot form a society because they are completely devoid of the skills for living in it; they cannot perceive the social in other people’s behavior. Exactly this type will, according to the problem’s conditions, “maximize gains” without taking into account their partner’s behavior.
An interesting conclusion follows from this observation. Besides the fact that the state indeed perceives us as voiceless, antisocial mowgli and strives to reduce people precisely to this state, one should say the following. If, following the logic of the prisoner’s dilemma problem, one supposes that the state exists to point with a benevolent stick the way to cooperation for foolish mowgli, then it turns out that the state should appear before, actually, mowgli appears. Such a course of events, nevertheless, looks quite fantastic. A scenario looks much more probable in which there was no state at all on the path to cooperation and collaboration.