"Cross the Rubicon. We dare you."

Game theory, egotism, and absolute madness

Detail from the cover of Josiah Osgood’s Uncommon Wrath.

Last Saturday I hosted the first of my off-the-record, paid-subscriber-only Zoom chats. Our next talk is scheduled for this Saturday at 12:30 p.m. EDT. The informal discussion will be led by Robert, an Ottawa-based intellectual who has been a regular participant in the class. In addition to ponerology he will bring insights from philosophy—especially inherent flaws in (Foucauldian) postmodernism—and democratic political theory to gain a better understanding of what is meant by “wokeness” and how ordinary citizens might respond. The meeting will not be recorded, so if you want to join in the discussion, you know what to do!

One of the topics we discussed during our first chat was absolute bull-headed arrogance of the Western political elites. I made the comparison to the lead-up to the Caesar’s Civil War (49-45 BC), pointing out that the conventional wisdom on that war is mostly nonsense.

If you read one book on Caesar this year, read Robert Morstein-Marx’s Julius Caesar and the Roman People. It’s long and somewhat academic, but if you’re not already Caesar-pilled, you will be after reading it.

Caesar may have won the civil war in question, but his assassins won the history books a year later (44 BC), and we can’t help but repeat their propaganda slogans today as if they were actual history. In fact, Caesar was no bloodthirsty Sulla, and he didn’t want to be king. He was only a tyrant in the eyes of those who couldn’t compete.

Before getting to the relevance of the Civil War to today, let’s set the scene with some quotes from MM:

Caesar, a patrician war hero already in his youth, had worthy models in the Scipiones both in military glory and in “popular” though by no means “seditious” politics combined with a proud aristocratic pedigree. … By the time of his entry on the highest stage of politics in 63, he was known as a popularis of a particular sort: one exceptionally skilled at cultivating the support of the Roman People but not a demagogue or a street fighter, or even a significant player in the classic popularis proposals for land redistribution, debt relief, or the like. (Certainly he was no “democrat,” as he has sometimes been called: such exotic creatures did not exist in Roman public life.)

… we are forced to conclude that it was Caesar who better represents the historical republican tradition in this struggle, not those who are so often held up as the hard-line defenders of the “constitution.” Rather, it is Cato and his followers who seem bent, at least from the execution of the “Catilinarian” conspirators in 63, on breaking from long-standing republican tradition and intent …

Cato, one of Caesar’s main opponents during the war and an “ally” of Pompey, wasn’t the upright conservative traditionalist everyone thinks he is; he was a radical egotist who broke with Rome’s patrician ideals and norms. Caesar, by contrast, was a paragon of Roman aristocratic virtues. I can’t help but think that the main reason a relatively smallish number of Roman oligarchs hated him is simply because he was better than them at pretty much everything he did. He was simply a better Roman. He won more battles, more votes, and more of their wives’ affections. And he was rewarded by achieving the heights of success in Roman political culture. He also happened to be a decent man.

MM highlights the conditions at play before Caesar “crossed the Rubicon”:

Put simply, Caesar demanded an honorific return from his (ultimately) victorious campaigns against Rome’s oldest enemy in keeping with Roman traditions, while his inveterate enemies, now joined in increasing anxiety by Pompey, rejected his demands for fear that, if they did not do so and failed to force him to pay a price for his refusal to yield to their radical obstructionism in 59, not only would he survive and be stronger than ever but the lesson would be passed to the future, and a central buttress for their vision of a Senate-dominated Republic would perhaps be toppled forever.

Had Cato not simultaneously taken up the cudgels against both Caesar and Pompey in 60-59 there is no very persuasive reason, and certainly no reliable evidence, to conclude that civil war would have been the likely outcome – in ten years, twenty, or more. The fact that he presumably did so in order to “save the Republic” is one of the many ironies of history that pique our tragic sensibility …

In the lead-up to the war, Caesar was remarkably lenient and reasonable, demanding only what was owed to him and offering several opportunities for negotiation and compromise. While Pompey at various junctures almost came around, every entreaty was ignored and rebuffed by the war party. As slumlord Cicero’s friend Atticus characterized Caesar during this time, he behaved with “sincerity, moderation, and prudence.” (And even his enemies never failed to avail themselves of his famed clemency, only to quite literally stab him in the back just a few years later.)

MM includes a prisoner’s dilemma game-theory analysis of the road to the civil war as an appendix in his book. The upshot of the dilemma is that in a geopolitical game of war escalation, “each country must rationally fear that if they choose to negotiate they will be ‘suckered’ by an unscrupulous opponent lunging for the big win, and thus end up with the worst result of all.” As MM notes, the only people who really act like game theorists suppose them to act are economists (and psychopaths). At the very least the abstraction tells us that cooperation cannot be presumed as a given. I would add that when the actual game plays out as predicted, you’re more likely to be dealing with economists or psychopaths, or both. A normal person caught up in such a game is probably more likely either to cooperate to their own disadvantage, or to see the actual untrustworthiness of their opponent and get pulled into the worst-case scenario.

This appears to be what happened in Republican Rome. For MM it all came down to the problem of trust: “specifically, the role of mutual (dis)trust in determining the outcome although arguably neither side was intent on provoking a conflict, whose cost both sides could see would be great.” In an iterative game, each time one party refuses to cooperate, trust is further undermined and the other party is less likely to be cooperative in future iterations. Caesar attempted to “reset the game” after several such iterations, offering to give up his provinces and nine-tenths of his army. He would have gotten a second consulship in return, his army would have posed no threat (the pretext for the oligarchs’ anxiety), and Pompey would keep his own much larger army in Spain. It wasn’t enough. In their intransigence, Cato’s obstructionists gave Caesar cause for war.

With the benefit of 2000 years of hindsight, it’s obvious that Caesar could have been trusted, and that his own mistrust was justified. But the pathological egotism of his enemies meant that they could not see or accept this. Psychopaths assume everyone is as Machiavellian and devious as they are. Even if Cato et al. did see that Caesar’s offers were genuine, cooperating would discredit their own radical political innovations and threaten their exclusive mutual hold on power. Their fear was in this sense “existential.”

These same games are at play today, whether it is the mainstream American political establishment versus Donald J. Trump, or the western “rules-based order” against Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Trump is perceived by the American oligarchy as an outsider who threatens “our democracy,” whereas he arguably embodies many principles of Americanism. Ruthless capitalist? Check. America is an always has been a plutocracy. Popular support? Check. America is nominally a democracy. He even embodies stereotypical American traits: he’s loud, arrogant, and rude. By all appearances, he is a perfect candidate. But he’s still not one of them. The establishment gives him no reasons to trust them, and they will never trust him.

Seventy years of communist pathocracy and forty years of cold war has given the American elites no reasons to trust Russia. Lacking any knowledge of secular cycles or the symptoms exhibited by a former pathocracy, there is nothing a Russian leader can say or do to both maintain a sliver of national sovereignty and establish friendly relations with the global hegemon. It’s client state or bust. Cooperation (i.e. acquiescing to reasonable demands, or at least those that should be seen as a fait accompli) risks invalidating the “rules” as they have been established over the past thirty-plus years. And those rules amount to “we do what we want to do, and anyone who challenges us will be destroyed.”

This arrogance when dealing with even a reasonably well-armed adversary is a recipe for increasingly chaotic iterative games and eventual worst-case scenarios. Their demands, red lines, or compromises will be ignored, further eroding any potential for trust, and their adversary’s history of back-stabbing and political egotism means they will have no good reason to back down. What will come this time from fighting to “save the republic”?

Morgoth

over at

Morgoth’s Review

recently put it better than anyone:

Red Lines, Reality And Retards

Read the whole thing, but savor the conclusion:

It is stated quite clearly by a left-leaning, neoliberal outlet that there should be no brakes whatsoever on action taken against Russia because they’re all talk and no punch. Yet, the entire reason we’re in this mess is precisely because Russia invaded Ukraine in the teeth of Western opposition and condemnation. The reality of what is being proposed here is bombing campaigns inside Russia, including Russian cities, using weapons and aircraft supplied directly by Western powers, including personnel.

However, if we just play fast and loose with the definitions and framing, it will lose its bite; we can spin it a bit so the Western public can consume it more handily. It is hardly novel to highlight the degree to which Western journalists and politicians exist within their own bubble; now, they’re convincing themselves, entombing themselves within a narrative, that they can treat Russia however they like.

… The more we in the West convince ourselves, or are told by our betters, that Russia can be attacked with impunity, the more it will be. The more Russia is attacked, the greater the chance of retaliation because the Russian people will demand it.

Yet, astonishingly, Western establishment politicians and journalists are unable to see and understand basic logic in the same way they managed to convince themselves or compartmentalise foreign rape gangs or that a piece of paper doesn’t make a Somalian Irish.

…

The Marvelisation of Western discourse has resulted in an infantilised intelligentsia that grants itself and NATO plot armour and narrative MacGuffins to get out of tight spots. It is inconvenient that a client state appears to be losing a war with a nuclear-powered nation, so if we just change the plotlines and switch around some words, we can write ourselves out of the problem. It would be really handy if we could just launch missiles into Russia without them ever reacting, so we will just rewrite the script to make it real.

It is madness, absolute madness.

It reminds me of this, which I quoted in my last piece on worldview warfare:

“(I)n the days of the triumph of materialism [i.e., socialism], matter turned into a concept and the question of ‘food supply’ and ‘fuel supply’ came to substitute for food and fuel themselves.” —Boris Pasternak

In the days of the triumph of western democracy (i.e., liberalism), facts turned into abstractions and the question of “plot armor” and “narrative MacGuffins” came to substitute for actual armor and causality itself.

It is madness, and this madness has a name. This is what happens when “conversive thinking” becomes endemic, when you start believing your own psyops and arrogantly assuming things will go your way just because you want them to and cannot imagine a world in which they don’t.

One final quote from MM. He notes that even if it was unlikely, it was at least possible that Caesar would turn out to be a rex with unchecked power:

But [Caesar’s enemies’] choice to risk the horrors of civil war to avert that possibility “by any means necessary” was one that turned out in the event very badly for the Republic. Under the circumstances, no reasonable person could have expected Caesar simply to yield quietly. Under such circumstances, as Thucydides had written long before, the formerly unthinkable becomes “prudent” and “necessary.”