Sources:
To the extent that each of us buys and accumulates what we want but don’t need, in response to a demand that has been manufactured for profit, we are complicit. Levels of complicity vary widely and take us down a rabbit hole of values, value, identity, wealth, employment, and developmental worldview (we’re not going there right now).
Briefly, in the prisoner’s dilemma, each of two prisoners has the choice of remaining silent or confessing, which would implicate the other prisoner and grant the confessor a lighter sentence for cooperating. Neither knows what the other will do, and game theory predicts that the prisoners will act in their own self interest (confess for a shorter sentence) even though if neither confesses, they will both benefit. Here’s a quick look:
For more detail: https://www.britannica.com/science/game-theory/The-prisoners-dilemma
Most current day multipolar traps have even more moving parts and are more complex than the above example. For an overview of multipolar traps:
Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, (Doubleday, 2024), 1.
We’ll return to the details of what Applebaum calls Autocracy, Inc. in future posts.
Either number, or any number in between them, works to make the point. Regarding what a trillion means, remember that a million seconds account for 11.6 days; a billion seconds account for 31.7 years; and a trillion seconds account for 31,710 years.
The language of metacrisis, superorganism, and Moloch, especially if they’re new for you, may require some effort to learn, and such learning is, or has been for me in recent years, essential for understanding our current time and place.
From the 1953 “Chance for Peace” speech. The five precepts are:
1. No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice.
2. No nation’s security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only in effective cooperation with fellow-nations. [Compare with McNamara, In Retrospect, #9]
3. Any nation’s right to form of government and an economic system of its own choosing is inalienable.
4. Any nation’s attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is indefensible.
5. A nation’s hope of lasting peace cannot be firmly based upon any race in armaments but rather upon just relations and honest understanding with all other nations.
Share this post