Reasons to be glad we're ruled by a bunch of hypcritical morons.

Let me show you this completely incomprehensible table, which effectively shows an example of what game theory would call ‘the prisoner’s dilemma’.

	B
A	-1, -1	-1,000,000,000,001, 0
	0, -1,000,000,000,001	-1,000,000,000,000, -1,000,000,000,000

If you already know game theory, you might want to skip this paragraph. That’s called a payoff matrix. A can choose the top row or the bottom row, whilst B can choose the left column or the right column. These choices are combined to pick a cell (A chooses top, B chooses right, the top right cell is selected, for example), and the payoffs in the selected cells are given – A gets the 1^st number as a payoff, and B the second. Therefore, B wants to make the 2^nd number as high as possible (regardless of what A ends up with), and A wants to make the 1^st number as high as possible (with likewise disregard for what happens to B). So, it should be pretty obvious which is the best cell, which cell A wants to end up in, and which cell B wants to end up in. Here’s the unfortunate thing – no matter what B does, A gets a better result by choosing the bottom row. Only slightly better, true, but better nonetheless. Likewise, no matter what A does, B gets a better result by choosing the right column. Thus, despite how bad of a result it is, if both A and B are at least somewhat logical, they’re going to end up in the ‘we are both incredibly screwed’ cell in the bottom right.

Sorry for a bit of a boring explanation. Let’s talk about something that couldn’t possibly be seen as being boring. Nuclear war!* Let’s assume that we’re back in the Cold War. There are only two sides**, and both of them have enough nuclear weaponry to utterly destroy the other one. Furthermore, let us assume that the decision about whether or not to nuke the other side is going to be made by two people who are entirely logical, but who don’t know about the existence of the other one***. Let’s take a look at their thought processes:

If the other side launches nukes at us, that’s really, really bad. So let’s assign it a value like negative one billion****, to symbolise the fact that we’ll all be dead – probably something we want to avoid. We can’t give it –infinity, though, since if we’re going to be nuked anyway, we’re still going to want to do everything else that’s in our best interests, and a negative infinity would eliminate all the differences between courses of action†. Furthermore, I want to act entirely in our best interests. Having the other side around is bad for us. They’re all annoying and wrong and trying to impose their values on us. Plus, they’re using up resources which, frankly, we could use. All in all, it would be better for us if they just went away. So let’s assign a negative value to their continued existence. Just a negative one, since it’s infinitely less important that they die than that we survive, but a negative value nonetheless.

Now look at the table above. Yeah. A logical person with the ability to end the Cold War in nuclear apocalypse would probably have done so. The only possible reason why they might not have done so is if they thought that their enemies in the Cold War existing was actually better than if they didn’t exist. Now, that’s a possibility. That must be considered. But in that case there is no situation where nukes would be launched. This leads to several conclusions. Firstly, scrap the nuclear deterrent, secretly replace it with gigantic novelty piñatas. Second, why exactly bare we fighting the Cold War in the first place? There is one decent reason to value the other side in the middle of the Cold War is that you value the people on the other side – after all, the people can’t really be blamed for the actions of their rulers, and killing them all might be seen as the greater of two evils. But that throws question on what, exactly, the purpose of the Cold War even is. The Cold war was fought by economics and by proxy, and when banks fail, it is seldom the bankers who starve. You’re doing the same thing on a smaller scale. Obviously, there’s still a case to be made for fighting defensively, but not for any kind of attack.

And even if you can justify that to yourself, if you’re one the Capitalist side††, you’re being a complete hypocrite. Democracy is government by, with, and for the people. The main thing here is that it’s government ‘for’ the people – you should be following entirely the interests of your people. That’s how democratic theory works. And as for by/with the people, I’m guessing that, sadly, if you’d asked every American whether they wanted all the Communists to just die, they’re is probably at least one point in the War where they would’ve said ‘yes’. Plus, ‘for’ does seem to trump ‘by’ and ‘with’, since ‘by’ and ‘with’ are pretty much covered by ‘being elected’, and judging by the tendency of governments to ignore what the people want’ in favour of ‘what’s actually good for them’†††.

What’s my point, you may ask? I have no particular point (except that, whilst you could use game theory to program a computer to run the country, you probably shouldn’t). A national government acting only in its country’s interests relies on its own stupidity for the survival of the planet, and if they’re all acting in the global interest, it’s probably going to be better to be entirely replace them with a global government (though the ‘global governance’ thing is something that deserves rather more direct examination – this is part of it, but it’s a bit tangential). It’s just something that’s fun to think about.

I have a strange mind.


*At least one person has probably already worked out where this is going.
**Because no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get Word to draw an seven***-dimensional table, and because this starts to get a lot more complicated if we have more sides.
***Of course Israel doesn’t have nukes, silly. What on earth are you talking about? And North Korea’s nuclear weapons are too pathetic to count.
****Because if they did know anything about each other, everything gets a lot more complicated, and because it is (fortunately) the middle of the Cold War, and information about the other side’s methods of deciding whether or not to fire nukes probably isn’t going to be made public.
*****I am British. I use British billions. I believe that’s the equivalent of a trillion in America.
†This would still work, incidentally, even if you replaced the negative one billion with a negative infinity.
††Socialism, incidentally, has a significant advantage here, in that it can fight the Cold War without compromising their principles. It has its principles compromised in other ways, instead.

†††Greece