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It is a system of enslavement that encourages its slaves to fight each other for "table scraps" and never question the hand that withholds, the system that creates false scarcity and promotes antagonism over artificial stressors.
We are taught never to question the rules given to us in these game theory scenarios, but to react accordingly to what has been defined to us as a limited set of options in an artificial scenario.
Perhaps the best indicator to this is, ironically, the very creator of the prisoner's dilemma, John Nash. Nash had won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994 for his "landmark" work beginning in the 1950s on game theory. Although it is not clear whether he was suffering with paranoid schizophrenia when he developed the Nash Equilibrium, starting in 1959, Nash would go in and out of mental hospitals for over nine years.
In 2007, he was interviewed while still working at Princeton. Here is his very unselfish offering of his "enlightenment" (his words) on game theory after over 50 years of work in the field. Keep in mind he is using the definition of rational behaviour according to game theory, which is defined as a selfish self-interest:
"I have had some trouble myself on the psychological level; I've been in mental hospitals---I realise that what I had said at some time may have overemphasized rationality---And I don't want to overemphasize rational thinking on the part of humans---Human beings are much more complicated, the human being as a businessman ---Human behaviour is not entirely motivated by self-interest of each human---game theory works in terms of self-interest, but---some game theory concepts could be unsound. There is over-dependence on rationality. That is my enlightenment."
This article was originally published on Strategic Culture.
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