To just survive … or live a life(Part 1)
This week’s podcast topic: When the meta-crisis activates our survival mode, we live and act predominantly out of fear. And we forgo the qualities that enable us to live a good life. How can we live well in the face of the meta-crisis? We begin by understanding our situation as the result of several intertwined causes.
Besides knowing the economic, technological, and political causes of the metacrisis, we also need a psychological understanding. The psychological functioning of our minds, our understanding of the world and ourselves, and the narratives in which we live, condition and reinforce the metacrisis. Why are we destroying our world on a scale that no one wants?
Daniel Schmachtenberger, co-founder of the “Consilience Project,” offers a profound understanding of this in many ways. He is one of the most visionary thinkers of our time. We can only refer to a few of his works here. It’s worth watching and listening to his lectures on YouTube. We also highly recommend the Consilience Project’s excellent, groundbreaking feature article on “Development in Progress” from summer 2024, which is available here.
We’ll go into this in more detail in our next podcast episode. Here we’ll highlight a particular and important aspect of Daniel Schmachtenberger’s work.
Game Theory and “Multipolar Traps”
How van game theory help us to better understand the dynamics of the meta-crisis?
Daniel Schmachtenberger first defines game theory as a branch of mathematics that focuses on optimal strategic decision-making under uncertain conditions. He emphasizes that game theory essentially models strategic thinking in competitive situations with incomplete information, similar to what is already practiced in chess or global military strategy – in our world, we must make optimal strategic decisions under conditions of uncertainty. We do this constantly, usually without being aware of it.
In our competitive economy, every actor acts in their rational but short-term interest. If everyone does this, it leads to collective behavior that harms everyone in the long run – the public suffers. This failure of strategy, decision-making, and coordination is referred to as “multipolar traps”:
Multipolar traps mean that there are powerful forces and incentives that drive civilization toward negative developments, even when no one desires these developments and their outcomes.
For example, the climate crisis would be easier to manage if governments, companies, etc., could agree on simultaneous, coordinated measures to reduce CO2 emissions. However, without this agreement, it is in the short-term self-interest of all individual companies and states to continue polluting the environment: we are dealing with a failure of coordination.
The concept of coordination failure
The concept of coordination failure provides a clearer view of the intertwined crises we face in modern societies. When a powerful “player” decides to gain disproportionate advantages, everyone else must follow suit to avoid losing and being defeated or exploited. Thus, one overreaching party can completely dictate the “course of the game.”
A very current example is the arms race between nations: Large countries spend between 5% and 30% of their budgets on defense. This happens even though they lack funds for infrastructure, health, education, or economic growth then. And even though these countries have largely been free of war for the past 50 years. But any country that doesn’t spend enough money on its defense, risks invasion by a neighboring country that has rearmed. Therefore, almost all countries try to spend enough money on defense.
If one country develops better new weapons, other nations must develop good counterweapons. And then every nation needs weapons against these new weapons, then it needs improved weapons, and then weapons against these improved weapons, and so on… Even though the individual actors would certainly fundamentally favor allocating more money to social security, education, healthcare and the arts instead.
Another example: If a fishing company starts building larger vessels and longer nets to achieve short-term profits, it’s changing the rules of the game – it’s sacrificing the value of sustainable fishing. Now competitors must also give up this value of sustainability in order to remain competitive and not be eliminated from the market. And even if they continued to fish sustainably, it wouldn’t do any good anyway, because the others would simply take their fish away – which of course, in both cases, leads to overfishing and ecosystem destruction: a bad outcome for everyone in the long run.
The “Tragedy of the Commons”
This phenomenon is called the “tragedy of the commons.” It is the problem of resources that are, on the one hand, limited, but, at the same time, freely available. This means that if one actor exhausts these resources, less or nothing remains for others. In the Middle Ages, the commons was a pastureland that belonged to everyone. The commons was therefore communal property, used by everyone – and thus often overexploited. The tragedy lies in how these resources are handled. Without regulations or higher authorities, individual actors will acquire as much of this resource as possible before others do. This naturally leads to the depletion of resources.
As in the example above: Overfishing of the world’s oceans leads to the extinction of various species in the medium term and thus to permanent loss for everyone.
The Infinite Game
Daniel Schmachtenberger highlights another aspect: All the games we usually play are finite – once you win or lose, the game is over. So we play to win; it’s all about winning.
But our “game” here on earth is not finite: it is infinite. And in an infinite game, all participants should naturally agree on rules for a happier, mutually satisfying game, because it’s not about one defeating the other. We would try to live a healthy and good life together: sustainability would immediately be essential.
But we unconsciously apply these rules for finite games to our “infinite game” in this life: We destroy long-term values for short-term gain, and all common goods and essential values suffer as a result. Daniel Schmachtenberger argues that this game-theoretic logic, in which profit at any cost trumps long-term sustainability, underlies many of the global crises we face. An extreme and very vivid example of this is provided by Douglas Rushkoff’s book “Survival of the Richest. Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires” which we discussed here.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma
The “prisoner’s dilemma” is a basic game theory example, of which we present only the following variant: A company is faced with the problem of whether to invest in advertising – while a competing company in the same industry is also considering doing so to increase sales.
The expected sales development depends on the behavior of the other company:
- If only one company advertises, a strong increase in sales can be expected for that company, while the other company’s sales are likely to decrease.
- If both companies advertise, only a moderate increase in sales can be expected for both.
- If neither company advertises, the sales of both companies increase within the usual range, and they both have lower expenses because they don’t have to spend money on advertising.
If we don’t know the other person´s decision, we tend to be mistrustful and base our actions on it. In this example, both companies decide to advertise, but the sales of both companies only increase slightly. If neither company had advertised, the increase in sales would have been higher for both companies, thus maximizing their respective benefits.
The Crisis of Meaning and the Need for Wisdom
Daniel Schmachtenberger emphasizes the limitations of a purely scientific-technological worldview in addressing the existential challenges we face. He argues that while science excels at describing the physical world (“what is”), it struggles to provide guidance on values and ethics (“what ought to be”). He suspects that the lack of “what ought to be” has led to technological progress, guided by market forces and game-theoretic logic, often lacking a moral compass (morals and values also cannot be translated into objective and measurable data, such as profit analyses, and are therefore more abstract and less present).
When neither a greater meaning nor values exist, hedonism appears to be a legitimate rational perspective in which market dynamics and game theory prevail. In science, we lack guidance for what should be. Who then decides which technology is developed and which science is funded? The market. And game theory.
Schmachtenberger advocates a rediscovery of wisdom, a quality that presupposes the virtue of restraint and is linked to a deep understanding of the interconnectedness of life. True progress requires a shift in values that prioritizes the preservation and conservation of our planet and recognizes the beauty and meaningfulness of all life forms.
