Identity Politics, Dark Artists, & The Infinite Games Imperative

Happy Holidays Fam! Who's excited for 2024? Better question...do you know how to get excited about the future anymore? Is that even a coherent question one can ask these days?

If you're anything like me, you're experiencing recurring and escalating bouts of deep uncertainty, disaster fatigue, and (mis)information overwhelm... and adding insult to injury are the impending political pissing matches and AI-fueled misinformation campaigns (with or without the @sama saga) we know to be on the much-too-near-term western horizon.

One minute you're watching hurricanes, floods, wars and wildfires, and the next you're reading posts mocking the climate concerns as a Davos psy-op and painting good ol' Greta as a deep-state puppet for "bogus big green."

And what about presidential candidates like Vivek (I really wanted to like him) confidently declaring that "human flourishing requires fossil fuels," or reading boastful breakdowns of how Teslas are more environmentally harmful than Humvees, or discovering how offshore wind farms are killing seabirds and whales (btw, they're definitely not). When exactly did rationality and sound science go out of style? 

Given the current state of the world, nihilism is more than understandable, but if you're like me and take your mental clarity, media literacy, and responsibility to be an informed citizen seriously, you keep pushing for the truth until you eventually come to a third wave of "expert" opinion. 

Good hard "facts" from ambivalent folks like Bjorn Lomborg, the "skeptical environmentalist," Vaclav Smil, the "crusty carbon" analyst, Nate Hagens, the "energy blind" professor and host of The Great Simplification, Tom Murphy, the “Do the Math” physicist, or my personal sense-making sensei, Sam Harris of Waking Up and Making Sense fame. On the surface, this contingent offers up facts that seem indistinguishable from the conservative naysayers and skeptics. Namely, that we are well and truly hooked on oil, venturing toward the brink, and any notion of cutting ties cold turkey just isn't an option.

At which point, we all might (and more often do these days) throw up our hands and say, "I don't know whether to be terrified or relieved, but what seems clear is that knowing anything for certain today is impossible! Time to tune it out, live my best oblivious life, and leave the political bickering to the experts. I'm sure they'll figure it out if it's really so important."

Which is a deeply tragic mistake (one I've made), and exactly what those in control are hoping for as the jargon jungle and theology thickets get increasingly dense and impenetrable. In the words of D.Thomas, don't you dare go gentle into that good night. 

Ok, onto the problem at hand.

Arthur Brooks recently wrote a piece in the Atlantic “The Sociopaths Among Us: And How To Avoid Them.” Bari Weiss just published an essay simply titled, End DEI. Greg Lukianoff (Jonathan Haidt’s Coddling co-author ) dropped How American Colleges Gave Birth to Cancel Culture.

All worth reading and all take cuts at trying to parse the modern phenomenon of social justice becoming mob rule (i.e. weasels in sheep’s clothing infiltrating the public square). When equality of opportunity slips into tyranny of outcomes, you should expect choppy seas ahead. Each time we violate shared notions of fairness, of a commitment to uphold some version of a shared reality, we risk massive pushback by those who sense that violation at a primal level. (see Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory for a full breakdown of the five core cultural values we tend to hold so near and dear).

Look no further than the recent NYT poll putting DonaldJ absolutely routing Biden in key battleground states. We have to presume there’s something more fundamental at work than simply putting the twice impeached, four times indicted, big orange oaf back in the oval.

I’d suspect that a meaningful chunk of voters swinging his direction are doing so out of a persistent sense of unfairness. The feeling that we’ve somehow lost the plot on the American experiment. As highlighted last quarter (scroll down for the archive), it takes little more than a single Appalachian jam like Rich Men North of Richmond (now with over 100M views) to paint the picture.

Said more simply: every time a strident Ibram Kendi acolyte slings a hot take on HuffPo, or marshals forth a cancel campaign on a college campus, a little red MAGA hat gets its wings. So what in the actual fuck are we to do?

The values of deep-seeded social justice are seemingly unimpeachable. Everyone, regardless of race, class, creed, gender, or abilities clearly deserves a fair shot at the good life, but the methods as an ideological movement have become (not unlike Kurtz in Apocalypse Now) deeply unsound.

It seems in the past thirty years, identity politics—the idea that your race, gender, ethnicity, or ideology constitutes a certain irreducible essence of your being and experience, and that the only path to justice is to seek redress from those who have denied you your due—comes undone at a structural level if one other thing is also true: that the next century is going to include more instability and hardship for all of us than can be represented by any specific group’s outstanding IOUs.

So the first undeniable truth we need to face head-on is that we’re simply not stepping up to the occasion. You’d think that if we assessed the situation and concluded we’re in for a biblical flood, we’d get to work stacking sandbags and setting up our bucket brigades, but that’s not what’s happening. Not in the slightest. The sheer enormity of everything—from climate, AI, geopolitics, pandemics, war, and unrest on one hand, to the culture war and collapse of meaning on the other—is short-circuiting both our cognition and our emotions... and without those, what do we have left? We might as well hand over the keys to Elon (or maybe Optimus) while we still have a fighting chance.

It’s a toxic combination that’s metastasizing into rage and reclusion. Right when we need to be at our best, we’re at our worst. Welcome back to the rural/urban culture wars of the roaring twenties. We should be careful not to make the mistake of assuming that time passing means forward progress. 

Culture, as conservative publisher Andrew Breitbart observed, is upstream of politics, but he neglected to mention that biology sits firmly upstream of both. So whatever social trends we want to defend today, we tend to look for in our evolution and past civilizations—as positive proof that the Laws of the Jungle and the Laws of Man are built from the same natural and biological truths. We then cherry-pick patterns from the past to justify and explain our present, which always has, and will continue to have, deeply destabilizing political ramifications.

Both the far-left and alt-right correctly intuit that controlling the narrative around both the Western legacy and evolutionary biology are strategically important for their larger goals of social change (and reelection). Tell the story of the way things have always been, and you own the high ground on also framing how (and why) things are the way they are now, and what's most reasonable to do next.

The left wants to tear down the western canon because they see it as the foundation of historic and contemporary oppression. They want to censure biology in case contemporary findings on race or gender become weaponized (to be fair, the past few hundred years have a tarnished record of propping up “scientific” arguments. Social activists aren’t wrong to suspect that science hasn’t always been a pure pursuit of knowledge free from ideology. Venture down the Douglas Murray rabbit hole to get a taste of what is at least an unapologetic version of one man's truth).

And the alt-right agrees, but rather than fearing those defenses of white male logic and ingenuity, they’re cheering them on. Trolling the libs, melting the minds of the snowflakes, and shoring up their fever-dream Aryan patriarchy one semi-ironic Reddit post at a time. In this race to the bottom, both sides might be missing the most critical insight of all: that a careful study of biology highlights how fragile, rare, and precious the human experiment really is.

Evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein (no stranger to the culture war) notes that there are really two ways in which cooperation evolves. The first one is very ancient and based on genetic relatedness; the other on reciprocity, and it is much newer and more fragile [starting ~10k years ago]. When reciprocity-based cooperation breaks down, we default to gene-based cooperation. History tells us that backing people who have a genetic basis for cooperation against the wall is dangerous, if not perilous. 

That’s what puts the power in White Power. More often than not, biology beats psychology (much in the way culture eats strategy). So when we advocate for more inclusiveness, or the righting of societal wrongs, we need to pay attention to the fuzzy foundation our individual and social lives are built upon.

So how might we start to make sense of these fuzzy complexities? A good place to start is the neurochemistry of connection—and what happens to it in times of crisis. While evolutionary biology looks at these dynamics playing out across hundreds of generations, neurochemistry (be it transistors or neurons) maps the bedrock of our actual experience day to day.

When people undergo sustained chronic stress due to loss of social status, economic hardships, and general dislocation (again, cue Mr. Anthony), their serotonin levels get depleted and they’re more likely to behave vengefully. As Oxford researcher Molly Crockett shared, “[when] serotonin, a neurotransmitter involved in self-regulation, levels are low, people become more focused on immediate rewards and they become more impulsive and aggressive.”

While most people entrenched in culture wars these days will insist that they are taking stands for justice, ethics, or some other moral principle, Crockett found that subjects with depleted neurotransmitters (and serotonin specifically) took revenge on others even when it came at a personal cost. And vindictiveness persisted even when the other person had no idea they were being punished. It feels incredibly good to get our licks in, even when our own interests are compromised. Kinda wild right? And good to keep in mind, both on Twitter and with family during the holidays :)

When we meet in large crowds (political rallies, protests, concerts, or sporting events), something else happens—both serotonin and dopamine surge. We just feel good. That’s a huge part of emergent murmurations and the power of crowds, but the dopamine spike kills our hyperaltruism—or kindness to strangers. If you’ve ever had to endure someone coked up at a party, that’s this effect in extremis. All doped up on dopamine, we feel better, but we behave considerably worse.

Of course, there’s a final layer of neurochemistry that drives group bonding—oxytocin. While oxytocin has been touted as the “cuddle drug” or “love hormone,” and even the “moral molecule” because of its ability to prompt generosity and bond mother to child and lover to lover, it, like most explanations of the biology beneath our psychology, isn’t quite that simple.

As Crockett explained at TED, "these studies [showing the positive effects of oxytocin] are scientifically valid, and they’ve been replicated, but they’re not the whole story. Other studies have shown that boosting oxytocin increases envy and gloating. Oxytocin can bias people to favor their own group at the expense of other groups, and in some cases, it can even decrease cooperation. So based on this, I could just as well label oxytocin the immoral molecule.”

In all of this, there’s a vital implication we should be sure not to miss: Tribalism is the last level of social identification and belonging we are hard-coded to support. After genes and oxytocin do their work to bond us to the ones we love, and intensify our willingness to “other” the others, everything else we aspire to is elective and not at all guaranteed.

Left to our own devices, we regress under stress. Put simply, tribalism is destiny; humanism is optional. 

In a nutshell, that’s the peril of identity politics. The evolutionary instinct to bond with and protect those who look, smell, act, and talk like us is genetically encoded—it’s quite literally foundational to our survival as tribal primates. The kind of reciprocal cooperation based on mutual interest beyond our kin groups—that’s incredibly recent (and fragile) in historical terms.

And unfortunately, that fragility is easy to exploit. It’s an age-old cliché that politics make for strange bedfellows, but in the case of identity politics, it's even stranger than that. Anyone seeking to smash the system and stick it to their enemies—no matter how righteous or seemingly justified—is, at a profoundly important structural level, on the same team. Alt-right neo-Nazis actually have more in common with far-left radicals than either would be willing to admit. We just never move upstream far enough to realize it.

And a recent study at the Queensland University of Technology proved that it’s not just a tribalist philosophy they share, it’s a troubling psychology as well.The researchers compared over five hundred diversely representative U.S. residents whose opinions all diverged from the mainstream. They divided them into three categories: radical left, progressive liberal, and white identity. Then they assessed how prone each group was to favor authoritarian tendencies and what psychiatrists call the Dark Triad of personality types—narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.

Interestingly, the centrists—those who held pro-social values but also valued the choices of others—showed no correlation with the Authoritarian Dark Triad, but both the radical left and alt-right did. That’s the simple contrast worth our collective attention: omni-considerate win-win, versus self-interested win-lose.

Even though those two groups are thought to reflect opposing ends of the political spectrum, the authors wrote in the journal Heliyon, they held remarkably similar psychological orientation: “Our study indicates that an emerging set of mainstream political attitudes—most notably [Radical Left and Alt-Right], are largely being adopted by individuals high in Dark Triad traits and entitlement. Individuals high in authoritarianism—regardless of whether [they] hold politically correct or rightwing views—tend to score highly on Dark Triad and entitlement...[they’re] statistically more likely than average to be higher in psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism and entitlement.”

This study puts in sharp relief what’s at stake for all of us. It provides a twenty-first-century update to Yeats’s poetic observation that “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.” Those with a cold will to power can readily infiltrate and hijack otherwise well-intentioned movements. Even the noblest philosophies can get captured by sociopaths. Perhaps Robespierre is the poster boy for the Dark Arts, warping the ideals of the French Revolution into a reign of terror.

By peddling end-of-times ideologies cloaked in the language of identity and belonging, dark artists can capitalize on unrest to advance their own agendas... and they do it (knowingly or not) by hacking into our tribal physiology.

As cathartic as it may feel to not just be right but righteous. As justified as that rage and disillusionment may be. If we succumb to the pull of the dark artists, it will be our undoing. Blockchain futurists, seasteading libertarians, alt-right accelerationists, and social justice advocates often fantasize about demolishing our current system so they can have a blank slate upon which to build their utopia, but that's a naïve and dangerous delusion. Unleash the dogs of war and they’ll almost certainly come back to bite us.

To put what’s at stake into perspective, after the Vandals sacked Rome, it took until the Declaration of Independence (that's ~1,300 years) for us to claw our way back to the same standard of living. In the complacency of prosperity, we forget the fragility of our foundations; take not for granted the pillars of society, for their neglect invites the quick whispers of collapse.

So where the hell are we to find a helpful perspective on the current culture wars? Let's go back a few decades to 1986 when theologian James Carse wrote a short book called, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility (Shh, free version HERE). In it, he described most of human history as consisting of finite games (i.e. discrete contests with clear winners and losers). These would include war and conquest, but also transactional business, sexual negotiations, and national politics. Anything with an I win, you lose outcome.

According to Carse though, there was another game, the Infinite Game—one which, instead of having winners and losers, created conditions where the purpose isn’t to end the game victorious, but to continuously tune the game so everyone can keep playing it indefinitely.

We all experienced some version of this game as children—where a bigger brother/sister or neighbor who was dominating a game of kickball or hide-and-seek would agree to amend the rules when facing mutiny by the dispirited and naive. She would give head starts, spot points, or award first pick of teammates so it was closer to a fair fight. The big kids still loved winning but were willing to concede just enough to the losers to entice them to keep playing rather than quit the game altogether. That’s essentially infinite games via relatable nostalgia.

Although Carse’s book didn’t come out until the last decades of the twentieth century, a deeper version of the Infinite Game he was describing had been in play for at least three hundred years. It started with the French Enlightenment and a radical commitment to the inalienable rights of Man: liberté, égalité, and fraternité (liberty, equality, and brotherhood) for everyone, regardless of race, color, or creed.

It gained traction in the American experiment and its lurching movement toward an open, inclusive society. This messy, contradictory legacy––the one that includes the heady idealism of the Enlightenment with the bloody and tragic realities of power, oppression, and reconciliation– is the story of our fumbling efforts to move beyond the tribal imprinting of evolution and biology.

Make no mistake: Those with a home court advantage typically pull out every trick in the book to keep their upper hand. Change comes hard fought, or not at all. Abolitionists, suffragettes, unionizers, black panthers, stonewallers, migrant workers, antiwar pacifists, farm workers, truck drivers, pro-lifers, pro-choicers, occupy protesters, tea party activists, BLM demonstrators... all of them have had to sacrifice deeply and take their grievances to the public square to be heard.

Crucially, the Infinite Game also includes Frantz Fanon’s withering critiques of European colonialism. It includes Noam Chomsky’s half-century of dismantling American hegemony as a tenured professor at MIT. It includes Cornel West railing against the racism embedded in American culture while teaching at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. It includes Ta-Nehisi Coates winning the National Book Award and a MacArthur Fellowship while testifying to Congress about the need for reparations.

The Infinite Game includes all these perspectives—traditional, progressive, and radical— provided they commit to expanding the game to include everyone—whether their side wins or loses. If we turn our backs on that notion, we don’t just tear down the dead white men who happened to be in the right place at the right time in history to first put it into words and deeds, we tear up the best blueprint we have for a future that works for everyone.

"Because let’s be real," wrote Pulitzer Prize–winning author Junot Díaz. "We always knew this shit wasn’t going to be easy. Colonial power, patriarchal power, capitalist power must always and everywhere be battled, because they never, ever quit. We have to keep fighting, because otherwise there will be no future—all will be consumed. Those of us whose ancestors were owned and bred like animals know that future all too well, because it is, in part, our past. And we know that by fighting, against all odds, we who had nothing, not even our real names, transformed the universe. Our ancestors did this with very little, and we who have more must do the same. This is the joyous destiny of our people—to bury the arc of the moral universe so deep in justice that it will never be undone."

Which brings us back to our current moment and the question of how we find excitement in the future. Cynicism is so deep on all sides that it has become incredibly tempting to conclude that the whole system needs to come down. To break this stalemate we might have to give up our search for common ground, to meet each other on higher ground.

“The dream of the 18th century was that a single, coherent set of values, rooted in rationality, could make a heaven on Earth,” writes UC Berkeley philosopher Alison Gopnik, “But more- recent philosophers...sobered by the 20th century’s failed utopias, have argued for a more modest liberal pluralism that makes room for multiple, genuinely conflicting goods. Family and work, solidarity and autonomy, tradition and innovation are really valuable, and really in tension, in both the lives of individuals and the life of a nation. One challenge for enlightenment now is to build social institutions that can bridge and balance these values.”

While that kind of split-the-difference compromise is often held in contempt by revolutionaries, there is a subtle genius, not towards destruction, but mutually assured dissatisfaction. At its worst, this kind of strategic stalemate leads to stagnation and frustration. At best, this sort of agonistic liberalism leads to the kind of hard-won compromises that delight virtually no one, frustrate nearly everyone, and perversely expand our chance of playing an Infinite Game. It's what Vitalik Buterin refers to as defensive (or decentralization, or differential) acceleration (d/acc) in his rebuttal to Marc Andreessen's techno-optimist manifesto.

What’s better—supply side economics à la John Keynes, or libertarian free markets à la Milton Friedman? Safety nets or bootstraps to build a just society? Big sticks or carrots to preserve international order? Federal or states’ rights to gracefully guide the governed? Investing in education or employment to empower a more capable citizenry? Separation or integration of church and state? Multicultural melting pot or national identity? Revolution or evolution?

The only honest answer imho is "yes" and “it depends.” If all of life on Earth was compressed into one twenty-four-hour day, anatomically modern man shows up at four seconds before midnight; cave paintings at one second. We’ve only been playing this game of civilization for the last fraction of a second. To put how little we know in perspective, we’re still not settled on the simple facts of whether eggs, butter, canned foods, and coffee are the best things ever, or are going to give us cancer and murder us in our sleep. We best do better to embrace the liminal my friends. 

So this remains our present and most pressing challenge: Can we take Gopnik’s advice, and dust off the battered and bruised Enlightenment experiment—the one that stops the regression into tribalism threatening both sides of the political spectrum these days—the one that aspires to get us past win-lose game theoretics and into the sustainable realm of the infinite?

Because here's the thing: every time we’ve repaid oppression with oppression, it’s ended in bloodshed and suffering. The few times our better angels have met oppression with compassion, we’ve remade the world into something just a little more pluralistic and beautiful. If we fracture now, when we should be urgently uniting, if we dig in our heels and say, “I refuse to cooperate or acknowledge our shared humanity until I get mine,” then we're in for a world of hurt.  

If we conclude that the regression into violent win-lose tribalism as the planet strains to support 8 billion humans is a catastrophically bad thing, then we must also conclude, as Muhammad advised, that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” At least for now, and maybe forever.

Ok, on to the good stuff...

Taykentots I'm currently snacking on:

• Read: MyTechno Optimism (Vitalik Buterin)

• Write: ETHDenver: A Tale of Three Cities + Learning Economy EoY Update (shameless self-promo)

• Watch: People Aren't Good (C. Bukowski) + Data Dignity & The Inversion of AI (Jaron Lanier) 

I love hearing back and always reply, so don't hesitate.