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The Ravers' Dilemma

by Deadly Buda

Review and commentary on: The Selfish Gene By Richard Dawkins 0xford University Press (c)1989

The purpose of this article is to provide a sound moral base for any new mutations of the “rave scene” or “teknival culture” that may develop as a result of this journal’s efforts. Some may be surprised by the very use of the word “moral” within the pages of “The Deadly Type!” After all, in some ways this journal is dedicated to eradicating preconceptions, legislation and foundations of, what we often perceive as, a twisted social morality and agenda. Furthermore, many would be legitimately fearful that we are simply replacing an old decaying social conditioning with a new and improved flavor of individual repression, complete with a new set of laws and ‘guidelines’ for limiting individual freedoms and expression. Such things are for you, the reader, to decide as you read this article.

The focus of this issue of the DT is to help establish methodologies of action. Setting up events in order to champion various multi-media creative expressions is the most obvious item on the agenda. But in doing this, we run into a myriad of political and social difficulties, most obvious being repression by police forces - related to gatherings with sound systems or, simply inviting some people over to your crib and plugging in a stereo. In order to address the myriad of difficulties facing us, some form of co-ordinated action is required, and therefore, some form of methodology is also required to interrelate within this developing organism.

Our situation is interesting because we don’t really agree wholeheartedly with any of the previous social or religious models. In fact, most are disillusioned to the point that the very concept of moral subscription seems as if it is the basis of evil itself (assuming we are even validating evil as a concept)! The original rave scene and its current incarnation, on some level was and is rejecting the existing Judeo-Christian culture, primarily in its seeming resistance to ecstatic states. Of course, most people in the rave scene just reject the old school religions entirely because of its lack of relation to their existing world and dismiss anything that remotely smacks of it. Fair enough, in my opinion, it seems like you must really dig deep to get any of the good stuff out of most religions and cults. The really helpful stuff they might contain never gets any play.

What these religions do have is organization and cohesion, which was naturally lacking in the original rave scene. The result being that the scene was divided and then conquered easily by commercial and legal forces. The most obvious result was the re-naming and specialization of genres, the division of the crowd along racial and class lines disguised as music formats, and the events and music being forced to exist almost entirely within in the existing commercial, corporate, social structure. (For details, check out the article “The Hardcore Situation” in issue #1 of the Deadly Type, or Massive #20 -ed.).

To say that the rave scene had rejected morality is not altogether true. The concept of peace, love, unity and respect (P.L.U.R.) was ever present. This is a utopian concept that implies or even sub-consciously begs for some sort of morality to achieve this state. The Judeo-Christian model wasn’t going to work for the aforementioned reasons, Eastern religions hadn’t made much headway in your younger participants, and For lack of anything else, and it seemed as if the ethics of Western corporate business circa late 1980’ early 90’s filled in the gap.

As I recall, during the rave scene’s formative years, unity was happening on a number of levels, and a significant development was business and creativity seemingly merging to the benefit of both. Many waxed philosophically about the “Zen of making money’” and various other materialistic pop psychology dribble that is so in vogue at your major suburban bookstore chains today. This was a natural goal for the scene, because we live in a materialistic culture, we are raised our entire lives, as Ralph Nader says, “growing up corporate”. The businessman envies the artist’s creativity, spontaneity and freedom, and the artist envies the businessman’s possessions, creature comforts, and somewhat predictable lifestyle. There is a natural desire for this relationship between the two in our culture in order to make more material, so we can be materialistic.

This relationship should work. But why has it not in the case of the rave scene, or in many other social avenues for that matter? Why has the creative and innovative side of Western life almost invariably been ghettoized into an impoverished existence? Why are the widely available material items ultimately unsatisfactory? Their vacuous qualities looming just a short way in the distance after the initial purchase? Quite frankly, it is more advantageous for the corporation and the individuals within it to make a cheaper, worse product, charge more for it and spend money on advertising to convince people they need it. Generally, the cost of advertising and management pay raises is offset by; downsizing, cutting worker’s pay or moving production to third world countries. A million pages could be written on this phenomenon-and has- but we will concentrate on one particular aspect of this phenomena- the role of trust in such a climate.

Trust, is vital to accomplish any project or undertaking, primarily for cooperation on various levels. Yet, many times, it seems as if we can personally of advance and profit more readily by actually betraying trust. Our corporate society encourages betrayal in the case of downsizing and worker relations. Competition seems to demand betrayal on some level within the corporation and outside of it towards the consumer (mislabeling food ingredients is a good example). Many gloat when they successfully screw people over, even bragging about it. Many cry out when they are the victim of betrayal, often the same people who screwed people over previously and gloated about it. We have all been on both sides of the situation, and we will be constantly faced with issues pertaining to trust and betrayal in the future. The issue of “Trust”, which is, after all, the basis of morality, is perhaps the most fundamentally important issue facing any growing social organism.

A few years ago, I had run across a “pop science” book, The Selfish Gene, originally written in the seventies by Richard Dawkins, of “Free Inquiry” fame. Free Inquiry or “FI” as it is billed on the cover, is edited by Richard Dawkins, and is kind of a religion-bashing rationalist, atheist theory festival bordering on the exceptionally bleak. I mean, I’m a fan of Dawkins writing and writing style, but FI, from the issues I’ve read, is like a wrestling match where the magazine has you in a figure four leg-lock, demanding you renounce any last vestige of spirituality before the match ends. They should almost call it “FG” for “Fuck God”. Well, I think that this actually qualifies Dawkins for writing on the subject of “trust”, because he can objectively analyze if “trust” has any value on the physical plane altogether, devoid of the fear of otherworldly punishment, or vague promises of generated karma. After reading the book I thought it related not only to moral issues I had been debating within myself since my adolescence, but also could be extrapolated to the semblance of a social movement the rave scene had struggled unsuccessfully to become.

In “The Selfish Gene” Dawkins takes a rational scientific approach to questions of co-operation among various life forms all the way down to the sub-atomic level. Granted, the book was written a while back, but I doubt the basic conclusions from any new data would have changed that much, save a few new examples drawing from the animal kingdom that would really tell us more about the narrator’s psycho-sexual Freudian hang-ups than that of biological nature. So, I decided to paraphrase and borrow liberally from Chapter 21 of “The Selfish Gene” in order to address some of the major issues we face in our social lives...

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

American Political scientist Robert Axlerod, collaborating with W.D. Hamilton was fascinated by the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a rather simple game pertaining to reciprocal altruism. The game is inspired by the case of two men, Peterson and Moriarty, in separate cells, suspected of collaborating in a crime. Each man is invited to betray his colleague by turning King’s Evidence against him. What happens depends upon what both prisoners do, and neither knows what the other has done. Should one blame the other, and one stays silent, the one who betrayed will go free, and his colleague will receive a heavy jail sentence. Should they both blame each other, they will get some credit for co-operating, but still receive very stiff sentences. If they both remain silent, and refuse to blame one another, they will be convicted of lesser crimes and go free shortly thereafter, as there is not enough evidence to convict them of the main crime.

The game this spawned is different in that it deals with money, and has a banker moderating it. Essentially the two players have the opportunity to either COOPERATE or DEFECT. Should both cooperate, they each receive $300.00 from the banker. Should they both defect, they are each fined $10.00 by the banker. Should one Defect, while the other cooperates, the defector is awarded $500,00 and the cooperator is fined $100.00. The temptation to defect must be better than the award for mutual cooperation, which must be better than the fine for mutual defection, which must be better than getting hit with the “Sucker” fine. The dilemma is that it is really safer to ALWAYS DEFECT, but each player knows perfectly well that if they had both cooperated, they would each have a relatively substantial reward. Apparently the game is so paradoxical that laws have even been proposed against it*.

The game gets much more interesting when it is repeated, (“The Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma”) as more complex strategies than ALWAYS DEFECT come into play.

Axlerod decided to run a competition and he advertised for experts in game theories to submit strategies. The strategies (14 submitted) were pre-programmed rules for action written in computer language, and then fed into a computer to run the strategies against one another, and once against itself. Axlerod threw in a strategy called Random, which simply played COOPERATE or DEFECT indiscriminately. It served as a non-strategy, so if a strategy could not do better than Random, it was pretty bad. After each strategy had gone through 200 moves of the game, (there were atotal of 225 separate games) the winnings were totaled up and the winner declared.

The winner was a strategy called Tit for Tat, submitted by Prof. Anatol Rappaport, a well-known psychologist and game theorist from Toronto. Tit for Tat started out playing COOPERATE on the first move and then replicated the other players actions thereafter. No matter how many times the game is played and which strategies submitted, this is usually the winner. That being said, there are some interesting strategies worth noting.

Naïve Prober—like Tit for Tat but it throws in a random DEFECT to cash in occasionally. When confronted with TFT though, Naïve Probers defection invariably starts a string of retaliations.

Remorseful Prober—like Naïve Prober except with memory, it remorsefully allows “one free hit” if it has defected previously. Its main problem is that it doesn’t do as well against TFT as TFT does against itself.

Tits for Two Tats—lets the opponent two defections before retaliating. This was not played, but Axlerod worked it out that it would have won the initial tournament as it avoided runs of retaliation.

The winning characteristics of the first tournament was niceness and forgiveness, and this of course came as a surprise, so Axlerod announced a second tourney, which he received 62 entries, and he also threw in Random again. The game was not fixed at 200 moves, and the programmers had the results from the first tourney. Two camps emerged, one figured niceness and forgiveness were obviously the winning qualities, and the other figured there would be lots of softies, and set out to exploit them mercilessly. Once again TFT won, and in fact the nice strategies did generally better overall winning the top 15 spots, and the bot-tom 15 save one (probably that wuss Tit for Two Tats) were all nasty.

Axlerod then took the same 63 strategies and changed the rewards into offspring. The points became replication of the parent, added or subtract-ed to the game. Some strategies became more numerous, and some became extinct, as the proportions changed, so did the ‘climate’ of the game. After about 1000 generations, there were no change in proportions, and stability was reached. The nasty strategies did not survive much past generation 200 and good ol’ TFT ended up winning 5 out of 6 of these tourneys.

The climate of the game is interesting because it is certainly feasible that the strategy of ALWAYS DEFECT could easily gain a foothold for an extended period of time, establishing a stability of sorts exploiting any strategies that dare cooperate, until there are no survivors left save the DEFECTORS. Of course, the game quickly ends soon after that because there is nothing left but defectors. Conversely, if TFT starts to dominate the game, eventually a stable infinite environment of cooperation emerges.

Whichever stable point comes to dominate the population first will tend to stay dominant. In the mathematical computer simulation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, this clustering of strategies is left to chance. But how does this happen in ‘real life’? There have to be enough people cooperating on some level in the same area in order to reach a critical mass of reproduction to survive in the midst of defection. Once a critical mass is accomplished, there is a very good chance TFT will out live the always defect strategy. The Always Defect strategy works horribly when clustered together, and eventually gives way to the TFT cluster. Axlerod noted that TFT is ‘nice’ and for-giving, meaning that it has a short memory for past misdeeds. Furthermore, Axlerod noted that TFT is not ‘envious’. To be envious in this case means to strive for more money than the other player, rather than an absolutely large sum from the banker. You are quite happy if the other player wins just as much money as you do. TFT never actually ‘wins’ the game, it just strives to draw and win money from the banker. The word opponent is almost inappropriate with strategies such as TFT. Strangely enough, when psychologists set up games of Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma between real humans, nearly all players succumb to envy and do relatively poorly in terms of money. Perhaps without even thinking about it, many people would rather go down with the other player than cooperating and doing the banker in. Axlerod’s work shows what a mistake this is.

Of course, it is only a mistake in certain kinds of games, the nonzero sum game. Game theorists call a game where one player is the winner and one is the loser a ‘zero sum game’. Prisoner’s Dilemma is a nonzero sum game as it is possible for the two sides to prosper at the expense of the banker. This important fact should not go overlooked. The players will have a perception as to how long the game will last. As it draws to a close, invariably the temptation to DEFECT will be greater, so as to get that last shot at the big money.

Dawkins goes on to relay some stories from the First World War that further demonstrate the “Tit for Tat” social strategy (again I’m paraphrasing his writing)... Historian and sociologist Tony Ashworth has written about the non-aggression pacts of German and British troops on the front lines of World War One. During the first two years after 1914 there were many unofficial and unspoken non-aggression pacts that flourished up and down the trenches. Mutual cooperation was bad from the viewpoint of the generals. But for an individual soldier, it was good. Sure, he wanted to win the war, but he also wanted to stay alive. His individual life had no real affect on the outcome of the war, especially the ridiculous trench warfare of World War One. On the other hand, the soldiers on the other side of the battlefield had a lot to do with his fate and future. Every soldier knew he would be in the trenches a long time and so it serves as a great example of Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma.

It is important to note, that for TFT to be a workable strategy, the threat of retaliation must be present. Much like the cowboy shooting out the candle flame in a Spaghetti Western film, the other side must be well aware that they will be dealt with harshly should they dare defect. Of course, TFT is also a forgiving strategy, and this is a very important aspect of its success for it avoids very long runs of recrimination. From the memoir of a British soldier...

“I was having tea with A Company when we heard a lot shouting and went to investigate. We found our men and the Germans standing on their respective parapets. Suddenly a salvo arrived but did no damage. Naturally both sides got down and our men started swearing at the Germans, when all at once a brave German got on to his parapet and shouted out “We are very sorry about that; we hope no one was hurt. It is not our fault, it is that damned Prussian artillery.’

In addition, Axlerod emphasizes predictability and ritual in maintaining a stable pattern of mutual trust. A good example is the ‘evening gun’ fired buy the British Artillery with clock-work regularity at a certain part of the line. In the words of one German soldier:

‘At seven it came-so regularly that you could set your watch by it... It always had the same objective, its range was accurate, it never varied laterally or went beyond or fell short of the mark... There were even some inquisitive fellows who crawled out... a little before seven, in order to see it burst.’

The German artillery did the same thing...

‘So regular were they (the Germans) in their choice of targets, times of shooting, and number of rounds fired, that...Col. Jones... knew to a minute where the next shell would fall. His calculations were very accurate and he was able to take what seemed to uninitiated Staff Officers big risks, knowing that the shelling would stop before he reached the place being shelled.’

Axlerod remarks that such ‘rituals of perfunctory and routine firing sent a double message. To the high command they conveyed aggression, but to the “enemy” they conveyed peace.’

I think that the “moral conclusions” that are gleaned from a strategy like Tit-For-Tat are ideally suited to any social cohesion, so much so that it seems embarrassingly obvious to even convey the information. Yet, if we look at our lives and the people around us, it so obviously needs said. Of course, if such an article as this gains it’s adherents, and people really think in such terms as “Tit for Tat”, I can assure you that a not-so-new betrayal technique to be brought out by the “Defectors”. It will be that they will falsely accuse others of “first betrayal”, thereby allowing them to “reciprocate”. This brutally simple technique usually takes the form of unsubstantiated rumors, and I would warn everyone to be wary and on the guard for such tactics.