Warning: Discussion of Violence from a Favorable Viewpoint.
This is something I’ve been pondering for a long time, and I have no answers. But it bothers me; I feel like everyone ought to understand the dynamics of power and be able to resist people who seek to abuse the system for their own ends.
I suspect that this problem could be framed as an instance of a “prisoner’s dilemma” in terms of game theory, but I don’t think game theory results in useful advice for real-world situations. Imagine if you were playing some game in a social science lab, in which we were bidding unknowns for marshmallows. But when the opponent’s turn comes, they just reach across the table and grab your marshmallows, saying “don’t move a muscle. I win.”
That’s the nihilism gambit: you have been sucker-punched because you were playing by the rules, or even some rules. The nihilist ignores the rules and, I am going to suggest, always has an advantage over the player that is constrained by rules. It seems that any rule at all can be gamed to serve as an impediment, even if it’s a minor rule, it’s less efficient to obey rules than to simply use them as a smoke-screen for doing whatever you think you can get away with.
I have tried for some years to philosophize my way around this, and failed. My first attempts were looking at game theory constructs and trying to compose a sort of philosophical defense of retaliation. You’re probably familiar with the “tit for tat” algorithm in the prisoner’s dilemma, in which a steady (advantageous) state is achieved if one player simply plays the other’s move back at them: if they are cooperate, be cooperative. If they are greedy, be greedy, etc. I’ve seen humanists and skeptics point at this as an argument for cooperation in social dealings, but if the opponent has the first mover advantage they can always end the game ahead by one result. I believe it may also be possible to manipulate an opponent away from “tit for tat” by signalling cooperation and then choosing opportunism. In the armchair of philosophy, the dynamics are cleaner, so instead imagine you are negotiating with Mitch McConnel. When he’s weak, he whines for mercy and cooperative bipartisanship. When he’s strong he tells you you’re Melians who must endure what you must. If you give him anything when he is weak then he gains “more than zero” when he’s weak, but he gives you “exactly zero” when he’s strong. Basically, he’s winning the marshmallow game one marshmallow at a time, except for when he is grabbing huge handfuls of marshmallows.
So, I started thinking that, against such an opponent there is no value in negotiating or collaborating: you just try to obliterate them completely and end the game. When the other guy grabs your marshmallows and laughs, you stab him in the heart with the dagger you brought, because you’re more of a nihilist than they are. But that reasoning devolves to a Dalek-like strategy of pre-emptive obliteration. You can’t be sure who will shoot first so you stab your prospective opponent as soon as they walk into the social science department’s lab. Oh, they brought a gun.
The film War Games tackles this problem: the best move is not to play the game at all. But in real life, that doesn’t work: your opponent is ready to play a single-handed game of “global thermonuclear war” whether you are, or not, and they just took the first-mover advantage.
Once I started thinking about this, I see nihilists everywhere. Sometimes they masquerade as authoritarians (e.g.: christian evangelicals) but they reveal their nihilism as “moral flexibility”, i.e: “you didn’t really think I believe that shit, do you?” as soon as it is convenient or offers short-term advantage.
Another place I see political nihilism is when someone is able to hold hostages against their bad behaviour. “How can you hurt these poor hostages?” They cry, as they act with relative impunity. And the situation often winds up with the hostages as human shields – the allied strategic bombing campaign was mostly pointless until they focused on denying the Reich war materials. Hitler and his cronies didn’t feel bad. Other than the pain of losing WWII they were comfortable until the end. Right now, the Georgia vote suppression situation is nothing that will affect the republican leaders who caused the situation – so why do they give a shit who in Georgia suffers? They have money and security and they are old and don’t believe that anything will hurt them, except as some kind of abstraction.
Now I must quote Nietzsche, as he is appropriate to the situation: “as you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.” And “those who hunt monsters become monsters, themselves.” When I was an undergraduate I thought long and hard about Nietzsche and concluded that he was not really making an argument; it’s fine bloviation but it’s bloviation. If I decide to be an abyss-dweller, though, that means I can pull the nihilism maneuver and also stop playing by the rules. When Saladin allegedly said “kings do not kill kings” he was, I remind you, a king.
It seems to me, then, that because of the nihilist’s first-mover advantage, that they can seek to negate retaliation. The obvious answer to political nihilism, then, is the abyss option: murder them, without mercy or anger. They are dangerous and human history shows again and again how such people exploit the folly of man. They will never play fair, they have no feelings for anyone but themselves, and once they reveal themselves, they have probably bypassed some of the body politic’s defenses – they get more dangerous the more power they can accrue and they are more expensive to remove, later. Of course they protect themselves with guards and barbed wire, as innocent well-loved and respected leaders do.
So, that brings retaliation into our game theory game. The key may be to promote an ideology of the abyss-monster: you never know when your corruption will be summarily judged. Don’t feel bad for the political nihilists; they’d do the same to you without blinking. They just haven’t identified you as a threat, yet.
Another way I come to this conundrum is the behavior of the Proud Boys (henceforth “PB”) – they are playing a weird version of the marshmallow game, in which they sometimes find and beat a solo person or someone who is not MMA-trained and ready to fight. I.e: they are looking for unfair fights that are just unfair enough that they have an enjoyable edge. They are not interested in finding themselves lured into an alley and a crossfire of AK-47s; that, to them, would be unfair and they’d run blubbering for their mamas, as bullies are wont to do. So, the PB model is to beat up singletons and they are happy with that game because they got to set the rules and they only play (like Mitch McConnell) when they can define victory.
It’s a strange thing: they don’t expect to walk into a firesack because “good guys don’t do that” and good guys, honestly, don’t do that. Good guys don’t play games that are structurally unfair; that’s part of the definition of “good guy” – that’s why I see this as part of the Nietsche axis: they have arranged the game so that, to play without a built-in disadvantage, you have to stop being a “good guy” and become a monster.
Alexander Berkman was an anarchist who believed that industrial magnate Henry Clay Frick was a monster who abused workers and amassed his vast wealth thanks to their broken bodies and chemical-burned lungs. He was right, for what that was worth. He let himself into Frick’s house, stalked up to his office, shot at him, and caused a relatively minor injury. Berkman thought that shooting Frick would trigger a workers’ revolt, which was not the result. As it happens, even if Frick had been killed, he would have been replaced by a new capitalist exploiter, same as the old capitalist exploiter, etc. It’s a fascinating question to me how many capitalist exploiters would need to be gunned down before someone a bit more labor-friendly stepped up for the job. Arbitrarily, I will say 8.
Where I wind up, with all this, is that Berkman did not communicate effectively. Nor did the labor movement. Or progressives. I know it seems like the most un-progressive thing, ever, to say “Play fair or we’re going to treat your life as a chip on the table. Like you treat ours. That doesn’t mean I’m going to kill you, but you’re a monster and you are fair game for other monsters that are looking to hunt.” The same could be said to the PB: “We hear you don’t like fair fights. That sucks but you know what? Not all of us will only fight fair. Any time you follow someone into an alley you may be about to die so think twice.” The problem with Frick was that some progressive monster didn’t sit him down and tell him “I am not your nemesis but you need to re-think certain things because not all of the good guys shirk from being good monsters.” I wonder if Jeff Bezos would hear and learn from a conversation like that, or if he’d just ruin his own life out of fear of the consequences.
And that brings me to the end of game theory: it’s stupid. It’s a waste of time. Why? Because the games are specifically constructed scenarios in which there is no communication. There is no avenue over which a threat of retaliation can be carried.
Kings don’t kill kings, but pissed off peasants – it’s just another messy job for them. I wonder if someone would fuck Jeff Bezos’ day all up for $15/hr. This is personal, not institutional, the great criminals of our time hide behind institutions for their protection and to deflect the chance of confronting the consequences of their actions in person.
I see Berkman as the hero of his tale, but ultimately a failure. A better example might be Mevlüt Mert Altıntaş, the off-duty policeman who realized he was inside the security cordon of the Russian ambassador, who he blamed for attacking islamic forces in Syria. He had the badge and the gun and the badge got him into position behind the Russian ambassador, who he shot, then made some brief remarks, while smashing things. OK, maybe he was not a good guy, but I consider it a certainty that All Russian Ambassadors Are Bastards and anything that forces them to cringe behind their security helps reduce the quality of the life they sought to gain.
On 29 January 2017, Turkish prosecutors said the entirety of Altıntaş’ email had been deleted from his Gmail platform two-and-a-half hours after the assassination, by which point Altıntaş had been shot dead by police. I don’t even know if I’d consider Altıntaş to be a “good guy” but I am also willing to accept that Russian ambassadors almost certainly aren’t – was it a fair trade? When I started trying to figure such things out, I pretty rapidly developed a contempt for the peddling of consequentialist moral systems, which pretend to have a “moral calculus” that’s really just some guy reifying his opinion. How can a moral calculus take into account pre-emption and retaliation? And, if it cannot, then it’s vulnerable to the nihilist axis: sit there and reason about the greater good, and the nihilist grabs the first-mover advantage and does whatever they want.
So, what is my point, if I even have one? It’s that “good guys” are always going to get rolled because they implicitly cede the strategic initiative to the “bad guys.” That is a species-ending threat: imagine if we got some sore loser nihilist who starts a thermonuclear war to distract from their domestic politics? Don’t think for a second that couldn’t happen, because it can, which means it eventually will. I think we need to foster “good monsters” – people who are willing to look ahead, see who’s going to cause a problem, and head them off at the pass. I suspect it doesn’t mean a lot of guillotinings or shootings – the sociopathic nihilists in politics tend to be cowards when the chips come down. I think we need a cultural shift in which those people learn to fear the governed, again. It’s the nihilist axis that get the sole use of fear and intimidation, because “good guys don’t do that.”
I think “good guys” need to learn how. Whenever I see a bunch of cops beating unarmed protesters, now, I think that I would stand up and cheer if they were suddenly blasted flat with a massed barrage from hidden rifles. And I know they wouldn’t pull that shit again, so long as the “good monsters” communicated effectively: “you crossed a red line there, and you will be served the same every time you do.” Suddenly, police job postings would go unfilled and you’d see cops hunkering down in Ft Zinderneuf precinct houses, refusing to move. And, of course, corrupt and lying politicians are practically what guns were invented for.*
I’ve been choosing my words very carefully here. I am not trying to encourage violence. I am saying that I understand why otherwise “good guys” might resort to it. And, I’m surprised that the nihilist axis has been allowed to get away with the shit they have gotten away with, for so long. The history of humanity is chock full of examples of people who rose up, and said, “enough of your shit” and laid some smite on an oppressor. Generally, nobody cries for the oppressor.
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
I spent 4 hours lying on a gurney in Clearfield General Hospital last night, and I decided to write a blog posting, using the miserable text interface on my iPhone. That done, let me advise against it: keyboards rule.
At various times I have wanted to offer a full on defense of nihilism, in the vein of Robert Paul Wolff’s In Defense of Anarchism but I don’t know if I have the chops for it – and, also, I find that nihilism is a will o’the wisp: you can’t defend nothing. You can, however, defend other people’s radical skepticism, which is what I think we’re dealing with (in one form of nihilism, anyhow) I admit I am also terrified of the quagmire that is the “no true nihilist” argument – one problem with nihilists is that they’re often familiar with pyrrhonian tropes and can demolish any statement that takes a position. The end-game there is predictable.
* actually invented in order to play games of “my underclass can kick your underclass’ ass” by monarchs. Why did the men in ranks never figure this out and simply blast the bastards?
Should finish the rest, but: “Play fair or we’re going to treat your life as a chip on the table. Like you treat ours. That doesn’t mean I’m going to kill you, but you’re a monster and you are fair game for other monsters that are looking to hunt.”
This is also my conclusion. I’m not about to actively seek to kill out those monsters, but someone else does and I’m on the jury. I will refuse to convict arguing to my ‘peers’ it was self-defense.
Felt the need to comment, will finish the rest now.
I’ll just leave this here and point out the constitution has an amendment process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveling_mechanism
I should have said explicitly that killing kings is commonsense and desirable. If a politician is a threat to the people, don’t attempt to leverage them out of there: send a small kill team. The world would be a better place right now if politicians could not sit safely and use citizens as bargaining chips – look at what the republicans are doing right now – “you don’t get to enjoy it.” No “sorry.” Because we aren’t. Is someone here going to stand up and say Mitch McConnell is a worthwhile human being? He’d kill the lot of you through neglect and sadism. He should not enjoy the life he has arranged for himself, that just encourages more of his ilk.
One big problem I see with this is that people disagree on what makes a powerful person a monster. For a libertarian, for example, it could be anyone who wants to raise taxes. If you actually encouraged people to get rid of any politician or other influential person they viewed as a dangerous nihilist, it certainly wouldn’t be only leftists who would be doing the assassinations. There would be so many murders that it would be impossible not only to have a government, but to have any coherent society whatsoever. Maybe that kind of anarchy is desirable to some people, but I would consider it hell on earth.
Yet their strength, and their speed, are still based in a system built on rules. Because of that, they can never be as strong, or as fast, as you can be.
A kid at my school had his buddy hold my right arm to a board while he drove a Stanley knife blade into it, slowly, mainly watching my face while I bled. I regained the use of my hand within a month or two. And I’m left handed. After what I did to his right arm and shoulder with a scaffolding pole six months later, he never regained use of the arm. The bones were in a LOT of pieces. Ironically, this did not seem to stop him going into a life of crime, as I heard less than fifteen years later that he’d died in prison. I appreciated the irony that he’d been stabbed, and had a celebratory drink. “Fair” fights are for people who like fighting, rather than winning.
@Marcus
Now, I’m not saying that I should know, and I’m not saying no reason exists, but I’m honestly not at all clear what advantage there is for the US in not sabotaging the Russian GRU server farm that they identified as the base of operations for the assault on US elections. And when I say “sabotage” I mean more than just a hack that requires a bunch of hassle and restoring from backup. I mean burn the building down or blow it up or whatever. They’ve actually published that we know where the headquarters of these efforts is located. Why not physically destroy the servers and make Putin look weak in the process? What’s the downside? It’s not like we’re doing a lot of trade with Russia, and they’re already physically attacking our allies. They are literally at war with a country we’ve said is our ally. They’re literally attacking our democracy. Is Putin so fucked up that he might actually order a nuclear strike? If so, the world is better off if he is simply assassinated. If not, what? Why shouldn’t we burn the servers to the ground and then announce our success on VOA?
While there’s a ton about strategy and international relations of which I am utterly ignorant, so, again, I’m not claiming that there are no good reasons, it sure as hell looks to people like me that this is another example of what you’re talking about. And it’s not helping us at all.
There is a phenomenon is which the side which has suffered the most recent publicized atrocity gains public* sympathy. This was applicable in the Israel-Palestine conflict a couple decades ago. Israeli soldiers shoot 5-year old Palestinian child, Palestinians gain sympathy. Suicide bomber blows up a checkpoint, Israelis gain sympathy.
* By “public” I am talking about a typical American who might glance at the headlines but is not especially familiar with the situation in Palestine or how it developed over the last century.
Marcus Ranum @ # 3: I should have said explicitly that killing kings is commonsense and desirable.
The capital-A Anarchists tried that, circa 1880-1914. No observable benefits reported; some negative effects recorded.
CD @6: It’s a sad statement about me that I have no idea whether you’re being sarcastic. In case you’re not being sarcastic;
Act of war? “Collateral damage”? Playing into the hands of warmongers? Just generally making things far worse than they already are? Dunno, I’m no expert on international relations either.
So…by this argument the January 6 loony toons were (ineffective) heroes? In their eyes, the Proud Boys ARE the good guys, And as a nihilist, how do you deny them their self definition? I don’t find your prescriptions any more…useful…than some of the concepts you (rightly) attack.
Maybe its because I am a comfortable middle class (for the moment) white dude, living in a state of chaos does not sound very appealing to me.
bmiller @10: Yes but comfortable middle class white dudes also have the luxury to fantasize about violent remedies without actually using them, or thinking too much about their consequences.
Marcus wrote:
Eeek! – are you ok?
Ah, see next post… best wishes!
Ok, I don’t usually say this, but I think my own work will really interest you…. eventually!
Essentially, my take on all this involves a hell of a lot of understanding the capabilities and flaws in various cooperative and collaborative systems, all the way from two humans to billions, and showing the links between each level of systems.
A lot of stuff about first move advantage and being unpleasant gets baked in and dealt with just by talking about the capabilities of the systems involved, the nature of trust*, and knowing when different people will generally be advantaged by playing nice or not playing nice.
I’m still moving it to the web – want me to email you a link or something when it’s readable?
It’s a lot like your work, but I’ve had the luxury of slowly gathering perspectives from far and wide. Interested?
For years now I’ve been rolling ideas around regarding trust in large groups. The problem with all of the popular game theory is that in order to simplify things they are usually constructed as one-on-one interactions. This I think is part of the general trend in the US in particular to frame every problem as a personal one, and every solution as individual. The question of how I beat you is a distraction and a diversion. The better question is how you beat us.
This is because in any group, cooperation will always be more valuable than competition. Try your hand at competitive bridge building sometime and that should become obvious. In any trust based cooperative system however, as value created rises, so too does the incentive to betray that trust. In a society where everyone trusts everyone else a liar has near absolute freedom to do whatever they wish. As the number of liars rises however, trust becomes less viable and the value of lying decreases commensurately. Thus there will always be an equilibrium point at which more liars will lower the value of lying to the point where it’s no longer worth doing. If everyone ignores the rules and just takes the marshmallows, you are no longer playing a game, you’re just fighting over marshmallows and honestly, it’s not worth it.
If you’re talking about someone like Addison Mitchell McConnell Jr, it wouldn’t be hard to render him politically impotent in any functional governmental system. I’d even go so far as to say that a government which needs to do shit would not allow someone like that past the front doors. McConnell’s particular genius lay in realising that the levers of power had been disconnected years ago, and that therefore the game had changed. It’s hard to win at chess when your opponent is playing checkers. None of the things that people want and need the US govt to do are things that it actually can. Not any more.
What needs to be resisted are the forces of capital, which continue to slowly arrogate to themselves all the power and wealth of the world like some kind of inexorable inhuman tide. That is, oddly enough, something that almost everyone agrees on. Of the few people who will object, most owe their livelihoods to their defence of capital and a vanishingly small number are actually ideologically enslaved to capital itself like some kind of cult of cosmic power. As I understand it, so long as people are willing to take money to enforce the will of capital, none of the real problems will go away. Somehow people need to come to understand that every time you’re paid to evict someone from their homes because their landlord wants the rent, every time you take food away from someone who is hungry because they haven’t the money to pay for it, you are perpetuating your own enslavement to the rule of wealth.
aquietvoice@#14:
Essentially, my take on all this involves a hell of a lot of understanding the capabilities and flaws in various cooperative and collaborative systems, all the way from two humans to billions, and showing the links between each level of systems.
Sounds fascinating. I’d very much like to see whatever you are willing to expose.
It’s a fascinating topic.
Ian King@#15:
This is because in any group, cooperation will always be more valuable than competition. Try your hand at competitive bridge building sometime and that should become obvious. In any trust based cooperative system however, as value created rises, so too does the incentive to betray that trust. In a society where everyone trusts everyone else a liar has near absolute freedom to do whatever they wish. As the number of liars rises however, trust becomes less viable and the value of lying decreases commensurately.
I wanted to quote your entire comment, because I think it’s bang on and really interesting.
As a recovering infosec guy, the word “trust” has special meanings to me, which make me twitch uncontrollably, I don’t know a better word. But everything you say there makes sense to me – there are multi-way problems with how we organize ourselves. Your point about competitive, individual, bridge-building is really well-taken. Back when I was running a software company I had a problem – I realized that a single programmer cannot accomplish large projects but as soon as you divide a project up, you have to start trusting that other people will do their part correctly. All team efforts have the same problem – you cannot micromanage success but you cannot succeed through chaos either.
If everyone ignores the rules and just takes the marshmallows, you are no longer playing a game, you’re just fighting over marshmallows and honestly, it’s not worth it.
Right, and then it becomes Hobbes’ Marshmallow Field.
I’d even go so far as to say that a government which needs to do shit would not allow someone like that past the front doors. McConnell’s particular genius lay in realising that the levers of power had been disconnected years ago, and that therefore the game had changed. It’s hard to win at chess when your opponent is playing checkers. None of the things that people want and need the US govt to do are things that it actually can. Not any more.
I don’t think that very many people like Mitch McConnell come into power with a plan to “be a bastard” – what happens is that at some point the find a lever and give it a tug and, surprise, they win a round! Then, that lever becomes their “win” move and they become attuned to winning the meta-game instead of the game itself. He’s had a long time to evolve into his position (a completely amoral shambles) – what scares me is the clear-eyed nihilist who doesn’t need decades in congress to figure out where the levers are. Huey Long is an example of that, I think. It’s hard not to imagine that he actually believed what he was saying. The crazy part is we’ll never know. Maybe he didn’t even know. Did Lenin? What about Mao? That would be the one question if I could ask some of these historical figures a post-mortem interview: “did you really believe you were doing the right thing?”
What needs to be resisted are the forces of capital, which continue to slowly arrogate to themselves all the power and wealth of the world like some kind of inexorable inhuman tide. That is, oddly enough, something that almost everyone agrees on.
It seems that people are figuring that out. It’s possibly too late. What confuses people is the interchangeable nature between money, power, and yachts. If you have any of those things to a degree, you can exchange it for the other(s). So many of us go, “well, if rich people want yachts, they’re harmless jerks, whatever, let them” and don’t realize that those yachts are inefficiently tradeable for political power if the system is corrupt (and they all are) and, of course, if a clear-eyed nihilist has a pile of money and decides to get into politics or any other field look out! Have you noticed that? A talentless jackass can be a media superstar if they invest some capital carefully. I know that Edward Bernays was not really the inventor of public relations (arguably, Caesar was a bit ahead of him) but that bastard really helped make hell on earth.
Somehow people need to come to understand that every time you’re paid to evict someone from their homes because their landlord wants the rent, every time you take food away from someone who is hungry because they haven’t the money to pay for it, you are perpetuating your own enslavement to the rule of wealth.
Yes, Kant was right, that you have to imagine you’ll live in the world you help create. The problem is that there are also people who are not of good will, who’ll evict thousands so they can buy another yacht or run for the senate.
That’s the problem I grapple with endlessly: how is it that people can look at a Joe McCarthy, a Mitch McConnell, a Donald Trump, a Stalin and not go “that one’s gonna be trouble, let’s side-line him fast” Stalin wouldn’t have been a bad prison-guard at a gulag in Siberia. But he was a pretty bad dictator.
@ Crip Dyke
what advantage there is for the US in not sabotaging the Russian GRU server farm that they identified as the base of operations for the assault on US elections.
No casualties or software meltdowns in the USA ?
The Russian Federation is a major military power and just might retaliate if attacked on its home ground? The Russians lack a sense of humour that way.
BTW, that place in St Petersburg was a cheap click-bait operation with, almost certainly, no connection to the GU (GRU).
Ian King @ # 15: None of the things that people want and need the US govt to do are things that it actually can.
The US gov’t can’t implement better health programs, or a reduced-carbon economy, or full civil rights? Ya think?
Interesting post and great comments. Make me think of N.K. Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight”, collected in How Long ‘Til Black Future Month and written as a kind of “good willing to be monster’s” reproach to the passive attitude expressed in Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”.
The commentary above about “which monsters” and “who identifies them” is bang on. Brought to mind a recent thread tweeted by the excellent Zeynep Tufecki about the difficulties involved in identifying which experts to listen to amongst the din of opinion when trying to adhere to the sensible advice of “listen to the experts” and “follow the science”.
Pierce R Butler@#19:
The US gov’t can’t implement better health programs, or a reduced-carbon economy, or full civil rights? Ya think?
Nope. Not possible. No money. Spent it all on F-35.
Wow! I’m gonna dip a toe into the water here and see if I can keep from sinking. @6: We can’t do anything like that because we’re too vulnerable. Hell, the Russians have already penetrated our electric grid, the Pentagon, and hell knows what else we have. Until we can make our infrastructure invulnerable to attack, we’ll have to play defense. It may require waiting until we have a powerful, highly-functioning quantum computer network to oversee our national security apparatus. Marcus, as far as nihilism goes, nihilists don’t care about consequences as long as they get what they want. Nihilists believe that existence has no meaning; thus, whatever they do and the consequences that follow are meaningless. Whether the conflict is one-on-one or nation against nation, entropy will increase and anarchy will result. Even if all the “good guys” rose up and threw out all the bastards, the resulting social cataclysm would very possibly devolve into some form of anarchy, either immediately or soon after. As far as heading the ‘bad guys” off at the pass, this strategy fails to take into account the random element, the thing that nobody saw coming. Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy provides a sort of analog, though fictional. For all his ability to predict future actions, his equations never took into account “the Mule”. I don’t know if any of this makes sense. Maybe the best we can hope for is to muddle through.
@22: Those were Seldon’s equations.