Faulty game model
Jan. 2nd, 2012 08:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
narcasse"Many have dreamed up republics and principalities which have never in truth been known to exist; the gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done learns the way to self-destruction rather than self-preservation."
- Niccolò Machiavelli (The Prince: ch. XV)
I’ve a tendency to revisit this quote time and time again, but it really hasn’t been until now that I’ve really sat down to look at how it honestly applies to my life. It’s all very well knowing how to address matters intellectually but actually putting that in to practice is something that I’ve been neglecting. On an academic level I’ve been well aware that I have a habit of attempting to live my life by idealistic standards rather than addressing the actual lay of the land. Invariably, this leads to disaster and each time I tell myself that I’ll do things differently next time. Unfortunately, that’s a half-hearted promise more often than not, and I fall back into my old patterns. My cousin has a theory that eventually, by way of Pavlovian conditioning, the dog starts to like the electrified bone. He’s proposed this theory for many years now in ongoing discussions of a dear friend’s love life. Being slightly more sympathetic, as I always am due to an incredible bias in regards to said friend, I’d suppose that the issues is less about enjoying the pain, rather than at least finding it predictable. There’s a comforting sense of familiarity if you repeat the same actions over and over again. Certainly, they won’t give you the results that you want, as you’ve proven time and time again, but at least you know how to perform them by rote.
The point then, isn’t the senseless repetition but rather the reason why you’ve hit upon that particular sequence of events in the first place. Obviously, there is some impetus to act in such a way but that impetus isn’t necessarily real world applicable. In my particular case the issue is less about any realistic grounding and instead about a prescriptive method of living. There’s a hefty dose of ‘magical thinking’, the sort of irrational code of conduct that children are taught in schools, that has little to do with actual life. It’s fairytale logic: the idea that if you follow a certain, preordained pattern of behaviours, then that with magically trigger a beneficial outcome. Its two parts of the equation don’t actually correlate and, in fact, have absolutely nothing to do with each other. This isn’t as simple as knocking over a wineglass and watching gravity at work, so that the consequence is, without any other external interference, that the glass falls to the floor. If I knock something over: it falls. This is a proven sequence of events and I can qualify that with repeated experiments that prove my point. If, somehow, that sequence of events doesn’t occur in one of my experiments then I can start to test new variables. All of this follows a logical progression that can be qualified at every stage by scientific evaluation. No so behavioural patterns for some reason.
With all the above in mind, it seems utterly ludicrous that I’m still modelling my behaviours on a framework that has been repeatedly proven to be false. The rules for that game model are absolutely worthless in real world application. It’s a fantasy scenario, the only real purpose of which seems to be to give children some hopeful fantasy to believe in. Being ‘good’ or ‘fair’ or any other number of things touted as laudable, doesn’t actually have the payoff that’s implied by the fantasy. Giving others the benefit of the doubt, constantly, does nothing but open you up to further manipulation that benefits the others involved. And so on. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short [1] enough already without attempting to behave as if it isn’t. And yet, the pretence of a supernatural justice is entirely compelling. It’s the sort of thing that allows you to suggest that any benefit that comes your way is due to your inherent, and indefinable, ‘goodness’. It allows you to believe in some nebulous quality of righteousness that elevates you above the common throng. In that sense, it’s right up there with believing in the divine right of kings or that the position of your birth is due to some greatness of character that you will come to express. All of which is patently ridiculous.
The person I am today is the end result of 32 years of social conditioning. I’m the product of my fears and aspirations, and all the lessons I’ve been taught along the way. I’ve clung to the notion of goodness, that would eventually provide a fairytale payoff, almost exclusively because of my experiences in early childhood. But, in retrospect, no amount of ‘good’ behaviour on my part ever improved my situation in the slightest. By believing that it did I could believe in there being something I could do to influence the situation. It gave me some small modicum of control over my life, even if everything around me proved otherwise. I’ve been clinging to this sort of thinking then in an effort to hold on to my illusions. I’ve been afraid that if I let go of this false logic then everything will crumble around me, everything I’ve ever wanted or thought I needed will be proven false, and, the person I currently am will cease to exist. Now there’s a grand conceit if ever there was one.
In the final analysis, no matter how making a conscious decision to shed my previous blinders will change me, it can only be for the, unqualified, better. Progress, regardless of the impetus, is always going to be better than stagnation. And perhaps, decision made, I will invariably find that things aren’t different: things are things [2].
- Niccolò Machiavelli (The Prince: ch. XV)
I’ve a tendency to revisit this quote time and time again, but it really hasn’t been until now that I’ve really sat down to look at how it honestly applies to my life. It’s all very well knowing how to address matters intellectually but actually putting that in to practice is something that I’ve been neglecting. On an academic level I’ve been well aware that I have a habit of attempting to live my life by idealistic standards rather than addressing the actual lay of the land. Invariably, this leads to disaster and each time I tell myself that I’ll do things differently next time. Unfortunately, that’s a half-hearted promise more often than not, and I fall back into my old patterns. My cousin has a theory that eventually, by way of Pavlovian conditioning, the dog starts to like the electrified bone. He’s proposed this theory for many years now in ongoing discussions of a dear friend’s love life. Being slightly more sympathetic, as I always am due to an incredible bias in regards to said friend, I’d suppose that the issues is less about enjoying the pain, rather than at least finding it predictable. There’s a comforting sense of familiarity if you repeat the same actions over and over again. Certainly, they won’t give you the results that you want, as you’ve proven time and time again, but at least you know how to perform them by rote.
The point then, isn’t the senseless repetition but rather the reason why you’ve hit upon that particular sequence of events in the first place. Obviously, there is some impetus to act in such a way but that impetus isn’t necessarily real world applicable. In my particular case the issue is less about any realistic grounding and instead about a prescriptive method of living. There’s a hefty dose of ‘magical thinking’, the sort of irrational code of conduct that children are taught in schools, that has little to do with actual life. It’s fairytale logic: the idea that if you follow a certain, preordained pattern of behaviours, then that with magically trigger a beneficial outcome. Its two parts of the equation don’t actually correlate and, in fact, have absolutely nothing to do with each other. This isn’t as simple as knocking over a wineglass and watching gravity at work, so that the consequence is, without any other external interference, that the glass falls to the floor. If I knock something over: it falls. This is a proven sequence of events and I can qualify that with repeated experiments that prove my point. If, somehow, that sequence of events doesn’t occur in one of my experiments then I can start to test new variables. All of this follows a logical progression that can be qualified at every stage by scientific evaluation. No so behavioural patterns for some reason.
With all the above in mind, it seems utterly ludicrous that I’m still modelling my behaviours on a framework that has been repeatedly proven to be false. The rules for that game model are absolutely worthless in real world application. It’s a fantasy scenario, the only real purpose of which seems to be to give children some hopeful fantasy to believe in. Being ‘good’ or ‘fair’ or any other number of things touted as laudable, doesn’t actually have the payoff that’s implied by the fantasy. Giving others the benefit of the doubt, constantly, does nothing but open you up to further manipulation that benefits the others involved. And so on. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short [1] enough already without attempting to behave as if it isn’t. And yet, the pretence of a supernatural justice is entirely compelling. It’s the sort of thing that allows you to suggest that any benefit that comes your way is due to your inherent, and indefinable, ‘goodness’. It allows you to believe in some nebulous quality of righteousness that elevates you above the common throng. In that sense, it’s right up there with believing in the divine right of kings or that the position of your birth is due to some greatness of character that you will come to express. All of which is patently ridiculous.
The person I am today is the end result of 32 years of social conditioning. I’m the product of my fears and aspirations, and all the lessons I’ve been taught along the way. I’ve clung to the notion of goodness, that would eventually provide a fairytale payoff, almost exclusively because of my experiences in early childhood. But, in retrospect, no amount of ‘good’ behaviour on my part ever improved my situation in the slightest. By believing that it did I could believe in there being something I could do to influence the situation. It gave me some small modicum of control over my life, even if everything around me proved otherwise. I’ve been clinging to this sort of thinking then in an effort to hold on to my illusions. I’ve been afraid that if I let go of this false logic then everything will crumble around me, everything I’ve ever wanted or thought I needed will be proven false, and, the person I currently am will cease to exist. Now there’s a grand conceit if ever there was one.
In the final analysis, no matter how making a conscious decision to shed my previous blinders will change me, it can only be for the, unqualified, better. Progress, regardless of the impetus, is always going to be better than stagnation. And perhaps, decision made, I will invariably find that things aren’t different: things are things [2].
[1] Thomas Hobbes - Leviathan.
[2] William Gibson – Neuromancer.
