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Learning the Lessons of the Prisoner’s Dilemma
B3P0S0 In order to fix things, it is necessary to understand what went wrong, Björn Merker writes in Book 3 of Perishing Promise.
First of all, there is the morality of “other-regard” that goes all the way back to the founding of Christianity. Then there is a lack of understanding of “how wealth is created in an industrial mode of production”. The combination promotes assistance to victims in need of help over the day-to-day needs and contributions of ordinary people, and devalues, due to lack of understanding, the economic relations of the modern economy.
Merker does not argue that the West is being “captured by a new ethos that serves the error-laden ideological agenda of the partisans of overthrow and enemies of promise”.
Rather, he asserts, the Enlightenment, in its various guises, did not have a solid understanding of how “a nation, its culture, and its institutions can be built”. The Enlightenment thinkers eagerly sought to cure the evils of “religious intolerance, monarchical absolutism, and aristocratic privilege” with “motivational reasoning”. But there was no “science of man” to guide them.
And the Enlightenment was split between the “English-Scottish (Continuity) variant”,
with its emphasis on constraint on government, rights as immunities rather than entitlements, and respect for the proprietary ideals of privacy and property[,]
and the Continental Enlightenment with its emphasis on emancipation. When the partisans of overthrow mounted their offensive against the Victorian economic and cultural model, the supporters of the Victorian model lacked the ideological and cultural means to defend themselves.
The question is what kind of ideas would have been needed for the Victorians to defend their “mores and commitments” from the enemies of promise. The issue is the resentment of Karl Marx, cut off from his allowance by his widowed mother, against the “exertions of ordinary people… channeled in socially constructive directions by being held to ideals of personal responsibility/accountability, prudence… earnest work… reliability and rectitude”. These ideals have been marginalized by the partisans of overthrow as extreme. But Merker proposes them as nothing more than the “stance of the middle” that goes all the way back to the “Eastern Gangetic Planes of the fifth century BCE”.
What was lacking in the Victorian ethos? First off, it lacked a full understanding of private property, beginning with John Locke’s incomplete definition of private property, with “labor” the critical ingredient.
Merker insists that
The ultimate moral foundation of proprietary ownership is personal investment.
The justification of this principle is the truth of its opposite.
[When] that in which you have invested your efforts is taken away from you or damaged by others, you experience a sense of personal violation as if you yourself were under attack.
Locke, of course, was influenced by the Enclosures controversy, in which “common land” shared by peasants in common was privatized by the government in London and awarded to the well-connected.
Merker attacks the “labor theory of value” that asserts that it is only invested labor that makes an object valuable, and thus, properly, the property of the laborer. He points out that the industrialist invests in raw materials, machinery, the organization of factory and work. The laborer merely exchanges “the labor he or she exerts… for wages, for a paycheck.”
Merker proposes a three part justification of ownership:
Effort invested by owner “in resources unowned by others”.
Voluntary exchange with other owners.
Free gift from other owners.
If all three are satisfied then “the ownership is legitimate”. Obviously fraud or state subsidies violate this principle.
Merker advances a notion of “self-ownership”. We all begin as the creation of our parents. But each life is a “path of self-acquisition” that culminates in full self-ownership. But,
to the extent that your life becomes the beneficiary of non-reciprocal aid of subsidies by others, whether as persons or institutions, the principle of ownership through investment gives them a partial stake of ownership in your life[.]
And this:
[The] wealth and resources if the state, obtained and administered in reliance on the state’s powers of compulsion are by definition not part of the economic relations that define private property.
Thus the meaning of private property.
Now morality.
The definition of morality as “other-regard and self-sacrifice” goes all the way back to Jesus of Nazareth. Curiously, the morality of other-regard seems to value distance.
Distance implies disinterest, and disinterestedness… lies close to the heart of other-regard.
To Merker, “[this] is a gross inversion of the logic of moral responsibility.” Foremost on the scale of morality should be face-to-face and personal and long term, “namely family, friends, and associates”. Indeed the valuing of distance in other-regard can result “in outright neglect of those who are closest to you”.
So what should be the ground of morality? Merker proposes the results of Robert Axelrod’s experiments with the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In any transaction with another person should you cooperate or should you cheat (or “defect”)?
In a single transaction, it pays to “defect.” But in a long series of transactions it pays to cooperate, and if you are faced with a relationship in which the other person “defects” the correct strategy is to copy the other person’s action and “defect” right back. First time you interact you are “nice”. But if they cheat then you are “provoked” and cheat right back. If they stop cheating and start cooperating then you “forgive” and cooperate right back. This is the way to reward a good actor and reform a bad actor.
[In] order to do well against a nice, provokable and forgiving player you have to cooperate with him or her.
This illustrates the problem with other-regard morality. Its niceness rewards cheating and people that take advantage of us, and thus
The “nice” ones give “nasty” ones a lease of life[.]
Merker suggests that, if the Tripartite Golden Rule — to be nice, provokable, and forgiving, as appropriate — were consciously understood in the Victorian age, it might have empowered society to resist the advance of the partisans of overthrow.
The world is full of people that believe in “other-regard,” from Christians to Marxists. Merker believes in a better world where people reward each other for cooperation, punish others for cheating, and forgive those that stop cheating and start cooperating.
So it would really help if people consciously lived their lives by practicing and celebrating the Tripartite Golden Rule.
More to come.
| Mon, 07 Sep 2026 23:41:25 GMT |
Lots of People Believe That...
You and I are flummoxed by the rise of the DSA and its promises of rent freeze, free groceries and all the rest of the socialist pablum.
You wonder: are they serious?
But then I read this piece by Michael Barone about a biography of Stalin by Stephen Kotkin. It’s a quote from Zinoviev, one of the top leaders in the Bolshevik Revolution.
“We go forward to the complete elimination of money,” Grigory Zinoviev explained to German socialists in 1920. “We pay wages in commodities. We introduce trolleys without fares. We have free public schools, free, if temporarily poor, meals, rent-free apartments, free lighting. “We are realizing all this,” he went on, “very slowly, under the most difficult conditions. We have to fight ceaselessly, but we have a way out, a plan.”
Yeah and after the whole thing failed utterly, Lenin had to reintroduce capitalism.
Compare with NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign promises:
Free and fast city buses
Rent freeze
Free universal child care
Public groceries
Taxing the wealthy
I read a related piece recently on “The Long Slow Death of Social Democracy” by Ruy Teixeira. What does Ruy mean by social democracy?
a politically managed capitalism… to raise workers’ wages, with unions helping them capture a larger share of the gains, and a wide array of social programs that could guard against sickness, old age, and unemployment—the so-called welfare state.
Know why social democracy is dying, Ruy? Because it doesn’t work.
Now exactly when Zinoviev was promising socialism in 1920 Ludwig von Mises was writing his “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.” He argued that socialism could not work because it could not compute prices. And, of course, Social Scientist Vladimir Lenin proved him right in 1921, abandoning the fantasy proposed by Zinoviev above with his New Economic Policy with
A Mixed Economy
Agricultural Reform
Private Enterprise
Reintroduction of Money
Whatabout the decline of Social Democracy mourned by Ruy Teixeira above? We have F.A. Hayek to advise us on that. In The Use of Knowledge in Society in 1945 he argued that
society’s vital information is too dispersed among millions of individuals for any central authority to ever collect and use it efficiently[.]
Curious, isn’t it. Mises put out his scholarly article on prices in 1920 just as social scientist Vladimir Lenin was proving that socialism did not work. And Hayek put out his scholarly article in 1945 just as the Attlee government began to conduct a social science experiment that showed that administrative social democratic Planning could not work.
The fact that the fantasies of the mid 20th century are erupting again among our educated young people is not, I think, a proof that kids are idiots. It is rather that it is very human to believe in a world of perfection, where everything works and I don’t have to suffer.
We have politicians to thank for identifying all the fantasies that flesh is heir to, because that is how they get elected. And we have Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt to explain what is happening. On the one hand, it is The Enemy — Jews, Robber Barons, Billionaires, Oligarchs — that are to blame. On the other hand we could salve all our sorrows with free stuff, from housing to buses to food to child care.
But there is another contributor: feminism. It promoted the idea that women were born to be independent and free, and would be, but for the patriarchy. In Simone de Beauvoir’s classic The Second Sex there is a whole chapter on “The Independent Woman.”
So what’s all the present fuss about “safety” and “unwelcome attention” and all the rest? Do you see the point? It is that the role of a human woman is not to have a career or be creative or liberated. It is to have children and keep them alive with the help of the father of the children.
I say that “women have a culture of complaint.” What do they complain about? That their needs are not being met. I say that “women expect to be protected.” From male aggression and all kinds of danger.
And then we have a whole sector of American womankind that wants to excuse Lindsay Clancy murdering her three children. What Is Their Problem?
Listen: the world is always going to the dogs and the world is full of people that just want the bad news to go away.
And so the world depends on people like George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke:
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Yes. George Eliot had sweetie pies like Dorothea. But she also gave us tigresses like Mrs. Poyser of Adam Bede and the incomparable Mary Garth in Middlemarch — even if Dorothea Brooke was the official heroine.
| Fri, 04 Sep 2026 22:08:16 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Home is anywhere that you know all your friends and all your enemies — Orson Scott Card
Justice is the absence of force.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: List of Topics
