Cultural Game Theory (Immediacy & Interpretation Part 4)

1. Culture, Abstractly

2. Three Strategies: Culture, Concretely

3. The Meta Game: Absolute Self-Interest

Culture, Abstractly

Is there any situation where a Forever Trumper (FT) & a Black Lives Matter Activist (BLM) can co-operate? This happens all the time via wage labor. Occasionally they (FT & BLM) are the same person. Culture, abstractly, becomes moot when subjected to a game.

Categories of culture war belief are effortlessly sublated into finite games. The game of wage labor makes ideology non-functional in-itself. The game becomes the game of wage, promotion, & survival. At the job, can FT & BLM co-operate to create for themselves the maximum amount of pay? Or are they incentivized to not co-operate?

Three Strategies: Culture, Concretely

Culture becomes particular & concrete when subjected to a game between people.

Let’s say there is one boss who decides wages & that there are four FTs & four BLMs who work under the boss. Let’s consider strategies based on economic & political ideology. The payoff is your salary two years from now which is the metric that will be judged.

Strategy One: Domination via Belief System. (Non-Cooperative Strategy, Democratic Socialist to Fairly Fashy)

The FTs or the BLMs play on the boss’ ideology in order to create a hierarchy which favors one or the other based on their FT or BLM related belief system. Immediately there is high conflict. There are possibilities that everyone becomes a lower performer, there is already a clash & a fight without reference of what it is you are trying to get in the game. Abstract Culture war determines the Concrete Culture. The payoff is your salary for the next year, but that is less important than the belief & culture war. It is easy to see why people don’t like culture war itself, it collapses games & their possibility for high rational & strategic outcomes.

A strategy now has to account for prejudice, which makes the game have to bend towards a certain prejudice. In a non-cooperative strategy, all FT & BLM strategies would now benefit from deepening the divide between the two groups in order to rid notions that the FT & BLM group should not Dissolve (D). The D strategy can be used by each individual member of the group, & could turn into Strategy three, individualist-capitalist as outlined below.

A strategy one strategy here could be called, “Woke Capital” or “The Elon Game.” Get the members of the other groups to dissolve the group so only you can collectively bargain. FT & BLM can get each member group to dissolve so that only they have the power to use collective bargaining. This is probably where you here complaints about “woke capital,” where in fact Trump-adjacent beliefs are not very HR friendly, besides having other problems. Similarly, the FT group could speak all about how certain people’s dissent is actually not really valid, but in fact about not doing work & hurting the company. This is the “Elon Game,” which makes all BLM signifiers into a sign of low-value.

A game appears of making others low-value in order to make one’s self high-value. In two-years time, the company favors your belief system & you are promoted & get a higher salary.

Strategy Two: The Union Game, Birth of the Union Leader (Cooperative Worker Game, Communist-Socialist)

Let’s discuss the Bargaining Model in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Strategic Management, a book that was shown to me by a very well-dressed cat on a unicycle who said, “ah, you don’t have this 1500 dollar book? Don’t bother chap, here’s mine!” Then I said thank you. Anyway, let’s get into it.

“Bargaining theory…examines interactions between rational individuals who pursue their own interests & must agree about how to divide the surplus that results from their cooperation.”

The problem here is of course, why would the boss want to bargain? It is much easier to not involve the workers in the discussion of the surplus. Thus, a union leader emerges after making the decision that the workers should organize after making two determinations:

The first determination that the BLMFT Worker Union would make more money in two years by organizing & bargaining rather than by sitting back & letting the bosses determine salaries. The Union Leader could research the company’s policies on raises & discuss how Unionization would be a higher benefit. If they find that certain metrics give raises, they could decide to make those metrics, but this might dissolve the union.

The second determination of the BLMFT Union would be if they could make a long-term strategy on an individual basis which would be better than a union. (Dissolve, pursue strategy 3, individualist-capitalist written below).

A Union Leader would be born out of the decision 1) the company’s policies on raises & promotion is not sufficient as is & 2) individual bargaining is less ideal than collective bargaining.

The Union Leader ideally makes other Union Leaders who make other Union Leaders, which are people certain of these two determinations regarding the company pay not being sufficient as well as individual bargaining not being sufficient. The Union Game thus against creating individual bargaining positions.

The game of unionizing & preventing Dissolve (D) from workers is simultaneous with bargaining for monetary incentives.

Strategy Three: The Corporate Culture Ladder Climber, “Corporate Couture” (Non-Cooperative, Individualist-Capitalist)

De-humanizing, bootlicking, corporate suit making, this one has it all! But maybe I like the Union Game too much. I am prejudiced against corporate culture because it makes me want to throw up! But let’s be rational here. Is it a valid strategy? Simple enough to say, of course it is! Side note: did you know couture means “sewing” in French?

Strategy: Dissolve all unions & alliances, align with corporate goals themselves, establish personal value, climb the corporate ladder.

Establish that you are valuable because you care about making the company valuable. Strive to establish metrics which prove this. Or create non-essential metrics that prove this, whatever works! This has an almost Hegelian logic to it, we all are joined through the honest pursuit of the rational whole corporate body.

Risk: this doesn’t actually work, you have no co-worker support, & you get kicked around since your alignment with corporate goals value is trumped by other individualists who understand the game is to rise high in the corporation & get paid more than others.

The Meta Game: Absolute Self-Interest

What can each game inform us about? The first strategy speaks to our Immediate desires, & how they can turn into culture war games which lose sight of any particular goal. The second strategy hints at a mode of being which becomes invasive & prevents individuals from analyzing optimum strategies. The third is isolating & seems to lose sight of any point besides the expansion of one’s own power in a very particular context. All together, the shadow of the games hint at prejudice, isolation, & invasiveness, all as side effects of self-interested gaming.

The Culture Game Theory hints at a game beyond the game of salary, it is the game of the surrounding style of life that one inhabits. Different people choose different games, in reality, two or three of the above games are played simultaneously.

I want to form relationships with other people, I want to care about creating a just & fair environment where I myself thrive. This is the context in which this Culture War game theory is to be understood. We have to consider our desires for the type of world & environment that we want to inhabit.

I don’t want to inhabit a dog-eat-dog world where the meaning of life becomes getting promoted as high as possible. These three possible games are in fact reflections of what we do anyway. We don’t operate on the level of game theory logicians, we act impulsively. But if were to rationally comprehend our choices, what would this mean for our ability to make decisions? We can make systems around ourselves which reflect our beliefs, our sense of justice, & our individual goals. This is the harmony game which is born out of the games which belief, positionality, & our individualism based on our desires, beliefs, & cultural ideals gives us.

Self-interest in a particular game thus becomes a subsection of our Absolute Self-Interest, which is the creation of our enviornments, ideas discussed, & interaction styles we prefer as well as any particular game for a salary increase. This Absolute Self-Interest tends to make it difficult to think of strategy games in isolation with their true impact on our person & our general sense of well-being & satisfaction. Games can be played with this meta-game in mind: The well-being & satisfaction of any person is the unconscious meta-game behind all games.