A Dictatorless Dystopia

Do we though?

A Dictatorless Dystopia?

October 14, 2021

It's always hard to get a complete sense of one's time while living in it. We don't see the world for what it is, we see the world through a set of belief systems we have. What that also means is we see only a small part of what is happening around us and what we see is not with our eyes but with our brains making the interpretations even more inaccurate and susceptible to all kinds of biases.

Having said all that there is still something deeply satisfying in an attempt to get a better understanding of the world around us. Maybe, but for no other reason but to stroke one's own ego. Recently I came up across a passage that blew my mind.

Here is the game theory for a dictatorless dystopia, one that every single citizen including the leadership hates but which nevertheless endures unconquered :

Imagine a country with two rules: first, every person must spend eight hours a day giving themselves strong electric shocks. Second, if anyone fails to follow a rule (including this one), or speaks out against it, or fails to enforce it, all citizens must unite to kill that person. Suppose these rules were well-enough established by tradition that everyone expected them to be enforced. So you shock yourself for eight hours a day, because you know if you don’t everyone else will kill you, because if they don’t, everyone else will kill them, and so on.

What's shockingly scary about this analogy is how well this explains a lot of what is happening around us. Let's take a case for the pandemic and vaccines.

The only "scientific" answer on vaccines and coronavirus that seems to resemble anything close to the truth is "We don't know". We don't know if we will ever get rid of coronavirus, we don't know if the risk of vaccines is worth it, we don't know if masks work anymore or ever did, we don't know and we are scared. But we can't afford to not do anything about it or at least not to be seen as not doing something about it. So we pretend to have things under control by telling storylines around it and spamming "Believe in Science".

But the byproduct of this is nothing different from a dictatorless dystopia that we ourselves have put us in. This time there is no leader, no common enemy to scapegoat to get us out of this situation. How the hell do we get out of this Catch-22?

No, this article is not my 10 step program to fix the world. Let's go back to our game theory case and apply it to few other things:

Money:

What always bothers me when I listen to economists whether they are subscribed to Austrian or Keynesian or Classical is this sleight of hand to make it look scientific. There is nothing scientific about economics. Money is a social construct. It is only successful if enough people believe in the story of money. This is the reason why crypto exists today. People have started to realize we can separate currency from the state. Instead of saying "The federal reserve prints money", we can just start saying "money is printed by miners using ASICs and there is only a max supply of 21M". If enough people start believing the second story over the first one, BOOM!.

Now let's take this to an even meta-level. Why have money at all? One of my favorite Bollywood movies (Tamasha) has this monologue that starts with

"Wahi kahaani fir ek baar, majnu ne liye kapde faad, maar tamasha beech bazaar. Ruk ke socha, aisa kyun? Aisa waisa jaisa taisa paisa. Paisa! Paisa na hota toh fir kaisa hota. Socho."

Translation: The same story once again Majnu (Romeo) tears apart his clothes and starts drama in front of the market. Stops for a moment and starts asking why? Why does this happen? Money. Imagine how the world looks like if there was no money.

Take the game theory we have been talking about, replace "shock" with "money" and "country" with "company" and "kill" with "fire":

Imagine a company with two rules: first, every person must spend eight hours a day trying to make money for the company. Second, if anyone fails to follow a rule (including this one), or speaks out against it, or fails to enforce it, all employees must unite to fire that person. Suppose these rules were well-enough established by tradition that everyone expected them to be enforced. So you work for eight hours a day, because you know if you don’t everyone else will fire you, because if they don’t, everyone else will fire them, and so on.

How well does this scenario explain life inside a corporate company? Government is also a company only difference is instead of the money government plays for power. Inside the Government, every person must spend 8 hours a day doing things to keep the ruling party in power. If anyone fails to follow a rule (including this one), or speaks out against it, or fails to enforce it, all employees must unite to fire that person. Suppose these rules were well-enough established by tradition that everyone expected them to be enforced. So you work for eight hours a day, because you know if you don’t everyone else will fire you because if they don’t, everyone else will fire them, and so on. You get the point, the same analogy can be applied to education, marriage, most things in culture. But not all of this can be bad, can it? Aren't some of these necessary for a stable society? Even if these systems are human constructs aren't they necessary for maintaining order and stopping people from cutting each other's throats? Nobody wants a return to paganism in the 21rst century. Right?

Kafkatraps

What's a Kafkatrap? Let me give you an example. Try answering this question:

Do you know the fact that you are an idiot?

Answer yes and you'll admit you are an idiot. Answer no and you'll admit that you are an idiot but you just don't know it yet. There is no way to escape a Kafkatrap without outside intervention. Unless you can get the person to change the question there is no escape. You can remain silent but you will lose if you try to answer the question without avoiding it.

Behind every social construct is a Kafkatrap like this. But it's safe to say that some Kafkatraps are necessary and unavoidable. But what happens when these Kafkatraps stop working?

Education:

People ask why we can’t fix the education system. But right now students’ incentive is to go to the most prestigious college they can get into so employers will hire them – whether or not they learn anything. Employers’ incentive is to get students from the most prestigious college they can so that they can defend their decision to their boss if it goes wrong – whether or not the college provides value added. And colleges’ incentive is to do whatever it takes to get more prestige, as measured in College rankings – whether or not it helps students. Does this lead to huge waste and poor education? Yes. Could the Education God notice this and make some Education Decrees that lead to a vastly more efficient system? Easily! But since there’s no Education God everybody is just going to follow their own incentives, which are only partly correlated with education or efficiency.

From a god’s eye view, it’s easy to say things like “Students should only go to college if they think they will get something out of it, and employers should hire applicants based on their competence and not on what college they went to”. From within the system, everyone’s already following their own incentives correctly, so unless the incentives change the system won’t either. So the reality is that the system is not broken, you just don't know the incentives yet.

Media**:**

Everyone hates media for its intense focus on clickbait and hate speech. It is not that nobody came up with an idea for a "positive" media that focuses more on good things happening in the world. Unfortunately, negative news brings in more clicks and reactions from people than positive ones. If something good happens there is nothing to do other than smile at the headline. If something negative happens you need to know more about it in case you need to prepare for some unexpected event or just to satisfy your curiosity (The title of this article makes this an oxymoron xD). So media continues to write more pessimistic stories while users continue to click on them. The cycle gets repeated again and again.

From a god’s eye view, it’s easy to say things like “Users shouldn't fall for clickbait or media should stop focussing on negativity”. From within the system, everyone’s already following their own incentives correctly, so unless the incentives change the system won’t either. So the reality is that the system is not broken, you just don't know the incentives yet.

Theist and Atheists:

A joke from the early 1960s nicely renders the paradox of the presupposed belief. After Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut, made his visit to space, he was received by Nikita Khruschev, the general secretary of the Communist Party, and told him confidentially: “You know, comrade, that up there in the sky, I saw heaven with God and angels — Christianity is right!” Khruschev whispers back to him: “I know, I know, but keep quiet, don’t tell this to anyone!” Next week, Gagarin visited the Vatican and was received by the pope, to whom he confides: “You know, holy father, I was up there in the sky and I saw there is no God or angels …” “I know, I know,” interrupts the pope, “but keep quiet, don’t tell this to anyone!”

Escaping Kafkatraps

Like I said in the beginning, there is no 10 step program to fix the world. There is only saving yourself from it. The first thing to do is to ask yourself if you are in one of these traps. I will close off with this joke that I first heard from Slavoj Zizek that pretty much summarises everything:

In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends:

“Let’s establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter, written in blue ink: “Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theaters show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair — the only thing unavailable is red ink.”

And is this not our situation till now? We have all the freedoms one wants — the only thing missing is the “red ink”: We “feel free” because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict — “war on terror,” “democracy and freedom,” “human rights,” etc. — are false terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it. The task today is to give the protesters red ink.

The game is rigged but you can't lose if you don't play.