(Photo by Robert Keane on Unsplash.)

There’s a set of stories and social science models that I group together in my head, because the interplay of concepts is interesting to explore. I have a group for kinship/big man theory and political fantasy books, in particular the growth of social contracts from tribal families, to villages, then into cities. Basically, how and why do people move from social contracts enforced by kinship (including marriage), into to more complicated social structures like cities, where people don’t have to know each other to know that they can trade without cheating each other?

I recently read a low fantasy book about a woman coming into a group of farming families where the non-related families didn’t have much to do with each other. Basically, it wasn’t really a community. That is, until bandits sacked the place. None of the other families would help when one family was sacked (“a man’s responsibility is to his family”), which resulted in all the families in that area suffering an uneven matchup of husbands/sons vs many bandits. After that defeat, the remnants of the families had to cooperate with each other.

I liked that story because in many cases fantasy stories implicitly echo a central authority (“Houses” in Westeros, royalty, etc.) while not fully exploring that part in history where serfs or even guildsmen/craftsmen had a relationship with each other and not only to a knight, count, baron, duke, or king. I feel like a lot of fantasy leans into House royalty because we, us modern humans, grew up with authority (parents/media/law) handling many of our relationships. In short, when we consume hierarchical political fantasy (stories about the power plays between nobility), it is relatable to our own lives, distanced by some set dressing, and dolloped with some power fantasy since all the main characters are kings and queens when many watchers are the equivalent of modern-day serfs. Employees far outnumber employers, do they not? What people fantasize about when they watch typical fantasy, reinforces “the wheel” including the part where we pretend to want to break the wheel, but really what we want is to be the boss of the wheel.

Analogous to this, I believe that many people who claim to want reform only want reform until they become the boss. The true reformist, someone who sees the pyramid and says “no” instead of trying to climb it, is a rare creature. To engage in the game is to perpetuate it - the only way to win is not to play the game. That’s why the ending in Ursula K Le Guin’s “The ones who walk away from Omelas” is all about walking away. They can’t change the game. The game will always change them.

(Disclaimer: I’m not really talking about Locked Tomb here, because Locked Tomb explores character relationships. Social contracts might be coming up in the next book, but I recognize that LT is not about power plays.

So then, what “game” should people play, if we want to have equal relationships between people, where no policeman or auditor can expressly forbid another person from trickery, sabotage, theft, or murder?

There are already players of that kind of game: the players are countries. Can the US enforce the Soviet Union and prevent it from invading Ukraine through authority? It cannot. The game that these guys are playing is a cooperation/defection game. What that means is that there are conditions where the US and Soviet Union gain “enough” to cooperate rather than destroy each other. For example, when countries cooperate, they are able to trade. Because they are able to trade, they are able to indefinitely generate income. If they destroyed each other, then 1 winner would be able to invade, but in the short term, it would have no trading partner, and other future trading partners would know not to trust them. There are a whole set of variables that determine the ability to make other countries cooperate, and a formal theory (Cooperation theory) that determines what “moves” can create cooperation. One of those important mechanisms is “swift retaliation” - in the case of the US and Russia, Cooperation theory posits that it was incorrect for the US not to sanction Russia harshly for its annexation of Crimea, as that would have taught Russia that actions have consequences.

What’s exciting about history and cooperation theory is that it means the human race can move forward, assuming we don’t blow ourselves up. And to me, what is even more exciting, is that history happened (it was true, it can happen), and that cooperation theory also has a lot of sound examples. (Many of those examples are “horrible” - for example, monopolies in deregulated countries cooperate with each other to screw the consumer over. In this context, cooperation is not a virtue, and is called collusion - but it’s fascinating that it’s one of the hardest things for policy to destroy. Imagine if factory workers could have that level of cooperation, and not just uh, duopoly telecom companies lol) In short, the future need not be taken on blind faith.

The other interesting thing about cooperation theory is that it concretely explains how naive marxism is. Why do normies “compete for jobs”, or why do workers lack solidarity (In office settings, we don’t share our salaries, so we don’t have a collective bargaining agreement), while rich monopolies shake hands not to compete with each other? Why do the non-rich fight for scraps (limited job slots) while the rich agree on which territories they own? How were the mafia families able to stop shooting each other and instead agree that “chicago belongs to X family”, like kings cutting up a serfdom? Cooperation theory + theories on inequality are able to model these behaviors. The models are validated via accurate predictions. I love it when a model produces accurate results. That is the closest to Truth with a capital T that we are going to get. We know we’re going to hell, but we also know how to avoid getting there.

Small aside: Mafia families were murdering each other on the reg, they knew each other (they were all italian immigrants), they interacted a lot, and were faced with extinction if they kept shooting each other dead what with the police coming in and picking them off. Because of that, they met in a fucking mafia villain conference (1929, 1957, etc.) and didn’t shoot each other long enough to make a deal with each other, and they wouldn’t stab each other in the back because

  1. Mafia families knew each other and would continue to know each other
  2. They could make deals (i will transport booze, you will distribute, we split x deal) that mutually benefited each other
  3. They already saw what murdering each other had done - they’d lost enough “soldiers” that the police could pick ‘em off.

Why is this so fascinating to me? Because they cooperated just in time to survive while India shot itself in the foot when the Brits came around, and same thing in the Philippines and many other countries. (The Phils obviously did not satisfy requirement 1 and 3 before it was too late - we were too big and scattered, same thing with India. Japan fended off colonialism because they unified just in time before the west could really fuck them up.)

Returning to marxism, mind you I’m not saying I shit on marxism, in terms of absolute wrongness many social/political theories were just as trashy lol, they were all shots in the dark. What I like is that there is a refinement of our social modeling. A few hundred years ago, we just made a fucking guess. Reciprocity? Idk where it comes from. Altruism? No idea what could motivate a person. Now we have science and computers to explain to us the conditions for altruism, reciprocity, and cooperation (and its negative forms, such as collusion between politicians and industry monopolies). That means we can recreate those conditions and spread that kind of behavior where we want it to, and try to break up “bad” cooperation (collusion).