The Prisoner's Dilemma: World War I, The Cuban Missile Crisis, the X-Men, and arms races

Two college students decide to go on a road trip and do a little partying on the weekend before one of their final exams on Monday.  They get a little carried away and end up missing the exam.  When they go to the instructor, they admit they were out of town but say a flat tire made them late.  The instructor graciously allows them to take a make-up exam the following day.  The instructor seats them in separate rooms and hands them the test, which consists of only one question: "Which tire?"

That's an old joke/urban myth, but it's a good lead in to this entry's subject: the Prisoner's Dilemma.  The PD is a situation in which a person must make a decision based on an assumption of another person's actions.  Here's how it works (most people already understand how the PD works, but I'm recapping it anyway).  The police arrest two suspects and place them in separate rooms, and each suspect must choose whether to confess or to stay silent.  The catch is that each suspect's choice affects the other.  If both suspects keep their mouths shut, they each get one year in jail.  If they both confess, they each get a two-year sentence.  But if Suspect B keeps quiet and Suspect A confesses (ratting out B), A goes free while B serves three years; and vice versa if B confesses and A doesn't.  Here's a quick and easy explanation in picture form:

The PD's effectiveness lies in how much the two suspects trust each other, because it's set up to incentivize betrayal.  It's a useful tool for understanding and analyzing decision-making in a broad range of topics, including arms races, economic and environmental treaties, preemptive war, and nuclear weapons tactics, among other things.  I'll lay out a theoretical scenario first, then mention a few real world examples. 

Pretend there are two countries that don't really like each other.  One country gets intelligence that the other country is buying up millions of dollars worth of state-of-the-art weaponry - tanks, fighter jets, artillery, and so on, and that it's growing its army's size by 100,000 people.  Assuming the intelligence is true, Country A just got much more powerful.  Now Country B has a choice: believe the intelligence and start its own military buildup, or not believe it and do nothing.  If the intelligence is wrong and Country B rejects it, then nothing changes.  If the intel is correct and Country B rejects it, Country A gets a strong military advantage.  If the intel is true and Country B believes it, both nations have a greater destructive capacity but they're evenly matched again.  If Country B believes the intelligence even though it's wrong, then it has the military advantage now.  Now think through the scenario again, only imagine the intelligence says Country A is about to invade. John Mearsheimer summed it up well when he said "Uncertainty about the intentions of other states is unavoidable, which means that states can never be sure that other do not have offensive intentions to go along with their offensive capabilities." (The Tragedy of Great Power Politics)

This scenario is called the security dilemma, and it has been the subject of a fair amount of scholarly work.  There's a school of thought within the international relations field called realism which is based on the premise that states must not trust their neighbors because international politics is anarchic (in a way, a scaled-up version of Hobbes' state of nature), a nation's survival is the ultimate goal, and other nations' motives cannot be known or trusted.  If you're interested in learning more about realism, I recommend reading some of Mearsheimer's stuff, along with works by Hans Morthenthau and George Kennan; and if you want to go way back, try some Thucydides, Machiavelli, and of course, Thomas Hobbes.

Now for a few real world examples:

• World War I: By the time the Great War broke out, warfare had changed dramatically from the days of foot soldiers carrying spears and shields.  Industrialization, mass production, technological advancements in weaponry, and railroads had made warfighting much more complex.  The speed with which a nation could mobilize its military and the firepower it could bring to bear meant that the first nation to be ready had a substantial advantage - maybe one that could decide the war's outcome.  Although both nations mobilizing rapidly made the war much bloodier, standing down was not an option because hesitation made defeat likely.  
• The 2003 invasion of Iraq: the United States had suffered a horrible terrorist attack about eighteen months before the invasion, and was obsessed with eliminating threats before those threats could attack the country.  The US government accused Iraq's ruler, Saddam Hussein, of possessing massive stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and the (since discredited) fear of being on the receiving end of a chem/bio weapon attack prompted the US to launch a preemptive invasion.  As the Bush Administration's National Security Advisor remarked, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

So where does the Prisoner's Dilemma show up in pop culture? (AKA, Where is the fun part?) It actually serves as a reliable plot device for creating a story's central conflict.  Here are two good examples:

• Crimson Tide.  If you don't remember what this 1995 movie is about, here's a brief recap.  A nuclear-armed submarine is deployed and given a mission to preemptively launch its nukes at a Russian nuclear missile installation, if Chechen rebels who seized control of the installation appear to preparing to launch.  The sub loses communication between its higher command, and must decide whether to launch or to stand down.  The central conflict is between the sub's CO, who wants to launch, and the XO, who dissents.
• Thirteen Days.  This movie is based on the Cuban Missile Crisis, from the point of view of the participants as the events were actually happening.  Hindsight is 20/20, but remember, the people making decisions at the time didn't have all the information.

The Prisoner's Dilemma also shows up in The Dark Knight (the Joker places bombs on two ferries and gives each ship's passengers a detonator to the bombs on the other ferry) and Thor (a trio of Frost Giants invade Asgard, and Thor argues with Odin about whether the trio is a rogue faction or a precursor to an invasion, and whether Asgard should strike back or let it slide).  It also forms a core element of my second-favorite Marvel movie series (The Avengers is #1), the X-Men, although it's an imperfect fit: go back up to that graphic I posted and imagine Suspect A is humanity and Suspect B is mutantkind.  The top left square represents a war between equally matched sides, the top right represents mutant supremacy, the bottom right is an uneasy coexistence, and the bottom left is the bleak future portrayed in Days of Future Past.  You could go a step further and say that the X-Men universe's two chief ideological adversaries (Professor X and Magneto) represent the PD's two courses of action: cooperation or betrayal. 

This has been a long entry, so I'll bring it to a close by linking to a clip from LA Confidential, to show what happens when someone exploits the Prisoner's Dilemma to produce a lose/lose outcome.  Watch how Guy Pearce's character manipulates two of the suspects to make them sell each other out.  You only have to watch the first minute of this clip.

So that's the Prisoner's Dilemma.  Pretty cool stuff, huh?

"Nasty, Brutish, and Short": Gotham City and the State of Nature

In my first blog post, I mentioned a concept called the State of Nature, by way of explaining Hobbes' Leviathan.  I'm going to circle back to that concept now, because it's this post's main topic.  The State of Nature refers to what people were like before sociopolitical structures like cities and governments existed.  These days, it's a question for anthropologists and paleontologists to research, but a few hundred years ago it was primarily a philosophical question.  Several philosophers and political theorists have offered up explanations of what the State of Nature was like, but I'm going to focus on two prominent ones: Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.

You might remember from the first blog post that Hobbes didn't have a very positive view of humanity, so it's not a big surprise that his description of the State of Nature was grim and brutal.  He saw human life in the State of Nature as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short", because people were in a constant battle for survival.  And I do mean battle.  Since Hobbes considered survival to be the ultimate goal, whatever got someone closer to that goal was justified.  In other words, anything goes and fair play is out the window.  Might makes right and everyone is at war with everyone else.

Now that you have an idea of what the State of Nature according to Hobbes looks like, you might be thinking it makes a good setting for an action/adventure story.  Well, as it turns out, a lot of people in Hollywood have had that same thought.  Hollywood loves a good fictional anarchic setting, and they've churned out a lot of stories straight out of a Hobbesian State of Nature: everything in The Dark Knight Rises after Bane takes control of Gotham; Lord of the Flies; Mad Max; and the hunger games (the contest within the books, not the books themselves).  Now, more than a few people have wondered why don't people just stop fighting, if the State of Nature sucks so much.  That's an excellent question, and I'm going to answer it by linking to a quick video (the same video used to provide an answer to me when I was a poli-sci student).  For those who didn't follow the link, it's the Mexican standoff scene from Reservoir Dogs.  It's a great illustration of why nobody stops fighting - they don't want to put down their weapons and leave themselves vulnerable.

On the somewhat opposite end of the spectrum we have John Locke, who laid out a more optimistic, less violent vision of what the State of Nature looked like.  Locke's concept imagined more cooperation and less combat, and mutually agreed-upon social structures that fulfilled societal needs in the absence of a government.  Locke didn't go so far as to believe people would behave ethically 100% of the time - he understood that some people would not feel like "playing nice", so some proportional punishments would sometimes be necessary to maintain society and deter these individuals.  Locke's idea of the State of Nature is less exciting, but it still shows up in this scenario: a diverse group of individuals with strong opinions have to put aside their differences for a greater goal.  The Avengers is a decent example.  The members of the team are (mostly) noble and heroic, don't fully like or trust each other, but have to work together despite their differences and manage to cooperate pretty well.  The Dirty Dozen, Top Gun, and most disaster movies adapt a Lockean concept of society as well. 

So how do these concepts relate to real life? Well, there are plenty of examples of both the Hobbesian and the Lockean versions of the State of Nature throughout history and the modern world.  Under the "Hobbes" column, you have Afghanistan, Russia (to a certain degree), and parts of Mexico and Albania under control of drug cartels.  Anywhere a lawless and violent enclave or region exists, basically.  On the "Locke" side of the ledger, you have New York after Hurricane Sandy and post-civil war Lebanon (this one might be a stretch). 

So there's a quick look at the State of Nature concept.  We'll revisit it in a future post, and will take a look at the Social Contract next time.

Loki and the Leviathan

"Is this not your natural state? It's the unspoken truth of humanity that you crave subjugation. The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life's joy in a mad scramble for power.  For identity.  You were made to be ruled.  In the end, you will always kneel." - Loki, The Avengers

Who should rule over a population? Why do people create societies? How do people behave when there's nobody in charge? Loki alludes to these three questions while he gives the usual "I'm a megalomaniacal villain" speech; he doesn't answer the last two, and his answer to the first one is (of course) "me." His little spiel is a throwaway scene that firmly establishes him as an over-the-top bad guy, in case the audience missed everything he did up to that point.  But let's look closer at what he said in this scene, along with those three questions at the top of this paragraph.

Loki's basically saying, "People are a pack of uncivilized animals who can't be trusted to rule themselves.  Leave them to their own devices, and they'll spend their time fighting each other for a higher rung on the social ladder.  They need someone to control them, and deep down they all know it." He's saying all this because he's the bad guy and wants to be in charge, but he's copying his ideas from a 17th century philosopher named Thomas Hobbes.

One of Hobbes' biggest contributions was Leviathan, the work that most people know him for.  In Leviathan, Hobbes argued that:

1. People were basically warlike and self-interested
2. Because of #1, people were constantly fighting each other (for food, land, resources, etc)
3. People eventually formed societies because they got tired of the constant fighting
4. A sovereign with near-absolute authority was appointed to run society, to keep citizens safe from external threats and to prevent them from reverting to their warlike natures

Sounds a lot like Loki's speech, right? Almost like something Hobbes could have written himself.  This concept comes up a lot in pop culture, especially sci-fi: some entity with extraordinary abilities takes control of society, or tries to, on the premise that people aren't able to rule themselves.  Here are a few other examples: I, Robot, Demolition Man, Equilibrium, and The Hunger Games.  It's also a common plot gimmick in cartoons and comic books: the heroes develop authoritarian attitudes for one reason or another, and make themselves absolute rulers.  Marvel and DC have both made stories about it, and it's even shown up in a Simpsons episode.  

So why does this all matter? Well, honestly, this is something I wrote for fun - to make a classic philosophical idea relatable by linking it to something most people are familiar with, and to get people thinking about deep political questions.  Those three questions mentioned earlier have been at the center of a lot of political writing over the centuries.  Thinking about them is supposed to change how you think about society, government, and the world in general.  Hobbes gave just one perspective; there were political theorists before and after him who had different takes on those questions.  We'll get to them in time.  For now, I want to restate the three questions I raised earlier, to you think about them as you finish this blog post.  I'll be revisiting them in the future.

Who should rule over a population? Why do people create societies? How do people behave when there's nobody in charge?