GAMES people play

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No games please


With information hiding or distortion I meant to cover all competitive games, which includes all of the above.

I you think about it logically, all forms of competition between two or more individuals or groups amount to social gaming. Society calls itself 'civilised' if the competition does not involve physical violence.


The analogy is perhaps too crude. The dynamics at work in a social hierarchy are royghly the following:

- Competition is the basis for typical interaction at all levels and between levels.
- Within a specific level there is only a very pragmatic and limited form of cooperation. There is a shared interest in fighting off intrusions from below. Nothing better for creating groupthink than a common enemy.
- Otherwise, within a specific level, there is intense competition for breaking into the next level above, between individuals and between temporary cliques formed specifically for the purpose of making it to the next level.
- The continuous competition leads to a certain level of mobility between levels. I would not call these small changes a 'collapse'.
- If one level succeeds in suppressing mobility from below over an extended period, the system undergoes the equivalent of a phase transition, the cliques in the layer below may consolidate, and part of or the entire pyramid can collapse as a result of the 'exploding pressure cooker'. This is one type of collapse.
- If all levels ensure mobility is adequate to prevent a pressure cooker explosion, then the hierarchy survives as long as it is able to feed the constantly growing demand of resources and energy from the natural environment, or able to conquer new territories from other hierarchies by brute force. Eventually however, all such 'well-managed' hierarchies exhaust their supply of resources and energy, and the entire system collapses. Joseph Tainter has systematically analysed the rise and fall of human societies over the millennia, and written an excellent book on this topic. This talk is a good synopsis:


1. From the perspective of an individual towards the bottom of the system, the system is seen as precariously dynamic, due to the observed level of limited local mobility upwards, and the possibility of being completely crushed.
2. From the perspective of an individual towards the top of the system, what matters is that the principles governing the system remain intact, often over somewhat longer periods of time. If such an individual drops one level, it does not lead to a precarious situation. The competitive game is 'good fun' or perceived as 'healthy' competition, as long as there are sufficient levels below. The system seems quite stable, sometimes for several human lifetimes, but sometimes only for a few years.
3. From the perspective of an outside observer over periods of hundreds and thousands of years, the total system collapses described by Joseph Tainter are a regular feature, and each time a new society invents a new set of arbitrary rules for constructing a hierarchy (=culture), and the process repeats.


The culture building process is always hijacked by a few psychopaths to ensure that it becomes a hierarchy building process.

What I am postulating is not that psychopaths will magically disappear, but that peer-to-peer networks are more resilient than hierarchies, because they can make much better use of the new technological infrastructure of society, i.e. digital nervous systems and immune systems.

The socio-technological environment has changed significantly, and in this new context, psychopathic memes are no longer the silver bullets that they used to be. As you correctly point out, techniques such as deception do not create new insights and knowledge.

In biological evolution, one of the main forces at work is niche construction, over the periods of multiple generations, rather than raw and direct competition within one generation. The psychopaths and social Darwinists are of course preaching a different story, for obvious reasons.

Which structure is more agile and resilient: a social peer-to-peer network that contains individuals neurologically wired to strive for knowledge (which may need to evolve over several generations), or a hierarchy of individuals in the business of deception and direct competition, and often don't even recognise knowledge about reality, even if it stares them in the face?

I don't have a crystal ball, and don't know when the old hierarchies will lose their powers.

There is an interesting article on the new technological infrastructure of society in the March edition of Scientific American. The authors also use interesting analogies with biology, and come to the conclusion that society may be heading towards diversification, and potentially much smaller social forms of organisation.


Will respond to that in a PM.

The psychopaths and the psychopathic memes you mention have had a role in society comparable to a grow hormone. Today however humans have conquered the entire planet, and we're degrading the environment we live in. The human population has 'grown up', and has reached a size that is possibly already beyond the maximum that can be sustained over longer periods of time. The growth hormone or its effect needs to be switched off. Biology has found ways to do do this for multi-cellular organisms. We'll see whether cultural evolution is capable of the same feat.

If you ask me, the connection is very direct. It shows the extent to which psychopathic memes are perfectly 'mainstream' and accepted by society. Your example relates to memes traveling via popular entertainment, but the same semantics are found in memes traveling in other forms of packaging, such as
- the principles baked into the global monetary system and into national currencies
- all forms of patriotism and nationalism
- so-called democratic forms governance, where the most power resides at the top of a hierarchy of structures, and the least power resides with local communities
- the education system that is designed for the production of compliant citizens that will never question established power structures

Noam Chomsky does a really good job at holding up a mirror to society. Here is a good example:

When I woke up this morning my internal echolalia had this jewel playing in my head.
I think I heard it a couple of days ago on the radio while driving.
I'm sure the new crops of psychopaths and narcissists will be more numerous and brutal than ever.