In this episode, we explore why, for a post-possession world, we need a different view of win and lose.
“Okay, how we gonna win this one? Who we gotta beat?”
Actually, it doesn’t work that way. Sometimes, yes, maybe. But not with this one. Not with a whole world…
Perhaps the most useful distinction here would be James P Carse’s concept of ‘Finite and Infinite Games’:
A finite-game is a game with rules, with boundaries, with an end-condition of some kind - a time-limit, a winning-line for a race, something of that kind. And the purpose of any finite-game is to win. A game of football, for instance: it has rules, it has boundaries, it has a time-limit, and the aim is that, at the end, someone has won.
By contrast, an infinite-game is a game without rules, without boundaries, without an end-condition: it just is. Often an infinite-game is used to set the rules and boundaries and limits for a given type of finite-game: the rules and so on for ‘a game of football’ are defined within the broader infinite-game of ‘football itself’. And the purpose of an infinite-game is not to ‘win’, but to learn, to make the game better. Any attempt to ‘win’ an infinite-game is called ‘rigging the game’, and always makes the game worse for everyone, especially in the longer-term. A game in which only one person or one team will always ‘win’ is a no longer a game, but a pointless, tedious, task in which ultimately everyone loses: no fun at all. An infinite-game reminds us that, even in a finite-game, what really matters is the playing, not the ‘winning’: and as James Carse warns, “those who must play cannot play”.
Every finite-game requires an infinite-game to guide it. And each infinite-game is nested inside another infinite-game, and another, and another, and another. Ultimately there’s only one infinite-game: the game of life itself.
Where, if we’re wise, we’ll come to recognise that winning doesn’t require that anyone else must lose.
This is important, because there’s a very common delusion - unfortunately also a very common delusion - that asserts that winning does always require someone else to lose. Not merely lose, but forced to lose. Which is where a huge number of things can very badly wrong.
The delusion is perhaps typified by a mangled misquote that supposedly somehow goes back to Karl Marx, though I have grave doubts as to whether Marx ever did say any such thing. Anyway, whatever its source, this is what the misquote asserts: “It is in the nature of power that it is impossible for one to have more without others having less”.
At first glance, that might perhaps seem logical, or logical enough: after all, a football team only wins its game if it has a higher score than the opposing team. (If it only has the same score, it doesn’t win, of course - it only has a draw, in which neither side loses but also neither wins.) But the trap is in linking ‘win’ and ‘lose’ to a particular notion of power, and what ‘winning’ and ‘losing’ entail within that concept.
In essence, what it comes down to is two definitions of power: either power as the ability to do work (in particular, to do work as an expression of personal choice), versus power as the ability to avoid work (often framed as the ‘right’ to offload that work onto others without their choice or consent).
And it’s that latter concept, of power as the ability or ‘right’ to avoid work, where the notion of ‘winning’ and ‘losing’ goes really bad. If that’s the concept of power that our culture uses, then we don’t actually have to win at all: all that we need to do is ensure that someone else loses. That then gives us the supposed ‘right’ to offload our work onto the the supposed ‘losers’. In short, a slave-culture.
But the catch is that in any finite-game, the status of ‘the winner’ is only a temporary ‘possession’: there’s no reason at all why it shouldn’t change hands again at any time. Yet by that time, in that particular type of power-game, we’ll likely have become so addicted to the ‘rights’ from our previous ‘win’ that we dare not allow that type of game to happen again - otherwise the current ‘losers’ might win the next time, and then have the same ‘rights’ to force us to do the work we’ve previously forced onto them. Unsurprisingly, that often brings up a lot of fear about what the current ‘losers’ might do to us - especially if we’ve indulged in behaviours that are abusive, violent or worse, which happens a lot in that type of relationship. And maintaining that form of slavery will, ironically, require us to put in a lot of effort - effort that could otherwise have been put to more useful ends instead. Hardly efficient, then.
And the same is true for ‘losers’, for slaves - perhaps especially much-abused slaves. Without motivation, commitment or drive, there’s no reason to be efficient in their work. Especially if all of that work is only for others’ benefit.
In practice, in that form of win/lose, the only real outcome is that everyone loses. Almost invariably, the whole thing is held together by fear and violence - not just against the ‘losers’, but within the supposed ‘winners’ too. And so little gets done: so wasteful in the extreme, every time. No shortage of examples of this, either: endemic almost everywhere, unfortunately, not just in historical times, but even in the present day.
Oh well.
And yes, it might well be wise to put an end to that kind of mess, before it kills us all…
So to help with that, here’s the quick summary:
— The only place where ‘win/lose’ can make sense is in the type of finite-game in which people may choose to play, and where ‘win’ or ‘lose’ is a temporary status that may change with each iteration of the game.
— “Those who must play cannot play”: no-one may be forced to play, and only those who do choose to play can be assigned a status of ‘winner’ or ‘loser’ from the game.
— For anywhere outside of that specific type of contest, there are only two possible choices: either everyone wins (‘win/win’), or everyone loses (‘lose/lose’) - so-called ‘win/lose’ is merely an illusory form of lose/lose in which, again, everyone loses.
So in business, in politics, in just about everything else, if we do want to be ‘For the win!’, then it must lead to something that is in some way a ‘win’ for everyone - otherwise everyone will lose, including us.
That’s the reality; that’s way it works in the real-world. However much we might delude ourselves otherwise, that is, always and only, the way it actually works in the real-world.
Given that, then what can you do to help everyone win within this so-overstressed world of ours?