Games people play, public version

Or the agree-with-my-stupid-idea idea

Recently, the blogosphere gave me a book tip: Games People Play (1964) by psychologist Eric Berne. The book presents the idea that a lot of human communication is not about exchange of information, but games with a fixed outcome. Games can be constructive, like when people with superficial knowledge of each other talk about the weather or give each other compliments. But mostly they are destructive. People play games in order to blame each other, to appear innocent themselves while their partner seems to be at fault or to perpetuate a certain view of themselves and others.

Berne gave his described games names, such as Now I Got You, You Son Of A Bitch!, Why Does This Always Happen To Me?, Look What You Made Me Do, Ain't It Awful… 

People play games both in order to maintain superficial social relationships and in order to relieve their loneliness, according to Berne. Humans are social animals, so we need to talk to other humans. If all we can do to interact is to play a game with predefined rules and outcomes, that still feels better than no social exchange at all. 

According to this biographical text by his grandson Nicholas Berne Calcatterra, Eric Berne appears to have been a somewhat troubled person on a private level. He wrote instruction texts for couple therapy, but got divorced three times himself. The last time he got divorced was in 1970, when he was 60 years old and had married only three years earlier. He died of a heart attack shortly after.

Psychologists who can't apply their great insights to their own lives is something of a puzzle to me. A psychologist who is depressed or a marital counselor who gets divorced time after time, isn't that like a dietist who is fat? But however much Eric Berne managed to apply his insights in his own and other people's lives, they were indeed insights. 

Games, large scale 

One of the games in Eric Berne's repertoire is called Schlemiel. Schlemiel is a Yiddish world for a clumsy and incompetent person (I had to look it up). A person who resolves to play Schlemiel inflicts damage, but pretends to do so without purpose. Since the act was not offensive on purpose, their counterpart has to forgive it. Berne's example is a guest at a dinner party who spills a drink on the hostess's evening gown. Her husband initially becomes enraged, but senses that if he shows it, the apparently clumsy guest will win. So he pulls himself together and utters forgiveness. The guest then proceeds in inflicting damage on the host's property: He burns through the tablecloth with a cigarette, shoves a chair through the lace curtain and spills gravy on the rug. The host profits emotionally from the situation through forgiving it all with firm self control. 

I have never seen any adult person behaving like the dinner party guest above. Right when I started doubting the relevance of the Schlemiel anecdote, I glanced at the local news. There were controversies around Drag Queen Story Hour again, I learned. Some woke people had invited Lady Busty and Miss Shameless to tour libraries in southern Sweden. The usual, very predictable circus started: The events with the drag queens were announced. Some people mailed threats to the library. Local right wing politicians criticized the events. Woke people accused the right wing politicians and senders of anonymous threats of being anti-liberal and flat-out uncivilized.

It struck me that the whole concept of Drag Queen Story Hour is an act of Schlemiel, as Eric Berne described it, but in public instead of in private. It is almost embarrassingly clear that the whole idea of inviting drag queens to interact with children was invented in order to make people maximally upset without surpassing the limit to real scandal. Most people react like the host in Berne's example and mumble it is OK. Only a few protest aloud. Those few appear ungenerous and intolerant. 

That public version of Schlemiel could be called Agree With My Stupid Idea. The game is very simple. It goes something like this:

1. Pick an obviously stupid, harmful, illogical position. 

2. Show your power through defending that position in public. If you get away with that and even get people to ape you, you have proven your social status.

3. With your social status confirmed, attack all people who still call your position stupid. Those who don't get that defending Stupid Position is the thing people should be doing today are the outgroup, and get treated as such. 

I know, point 1 looks really biased. Why would anyone pick up a position that is stupid, harmful or illogical on purpose? Because if an idea is actually good, it doesn't serve the purpose to create an ingroup around. If an idea that is logical and beneficial to most citizens spreads, sooner or later people will just agree with it because it is good. Such an idea can't easily divide people into ingroup and outgroup. In order to separate the loyalists from those you can’t count on, a good idea won’t do. For that purpose you need an obviously bad idea. 

Drag Queen Story Hour is one of those bad ideas. No one even bothers to explain why Drag Queen Story Hour is better than for example Stripper Story Hour (if it existed). Drag queens have nothing to do with libraries. They also have nothing to do with children. For precisely that reason, the woke brigade combines drag queens, libraries and children. And predictably, the counter-elite feel they need to explain that drag queens have nothing to do with libraries or children. 

It is such a sad game. One team defends an obviously stupid idea. The other team needs to say that the idea is actually stupid, but without appearing provoked. Of course, they are provoked. Provoking people was the whole idea with obviously stupid idea. But if these same people reveal they are provoked they will seem unsophisticated and incompassionate. They need to show that they understand and accept the reasoning behind stupid idea but still disagree with it. A more or less impossible task. 

Eric Berne pointed out that the initiator of a game most often becomes the winner. That is certainly true for the Woke game. When a number of important people have positioned themselves as more-sophisticated-than-thou, those who disagree automatically find themselves in a defensive position. They can only defend themselves within the framework of the game’s instigators, an uphill struggle to say the least. As an added benefit they will also be so busy defending themselves that they will have limited time flaunting their own stupid ideas at the other team. In a world of polarized opinion, attack is often the best defense. 

In the beginning, long to time ago

Woke is a rather new game. Throughout history, the game Agree With My Stupid Idea has mostly been played within the framework of religion. More or less all religions build on implausible ideas that require adherents to believe. You can't build a religion around what is obviously true. The point of religion is to create a dedicated ingroup, distinct from the outgroup. The ubiquity of religion in human history says something about what has been the most important in human societies. Although sticking to a realistic view of the world has been good, keeping the ingroup together against the outgroup has been better. Knowing the difference between friend and foe has mostly been more important than being able to correctly analyze and manipulate the ambient environment.

The decline of religion in Western society did not imply the decline of the game Agree With My Stupid Idea. For example, in the 1970s, there were a lot of communists among young Westerners. Many of them defended communist China, others defended the Soviet Union. Why did they do that? Because they didn't know better? No, I think they did it precisely because they did know. They knew that defending Mao and Stalin was abhorrent and if they found a way to do that and still gather a following, then they would seem really sophisticated.

I don't claim those people did not believe in their own ideas, just as I don't claim that religious people do not believe in their religion. But I do claim that for some people, creating a belief is very easy. For one kind of people, believing something means they find that something probable. For another kind of people, believing something means they are committed to a cause. For the latter category, genuinely believing takes no more than a will to believe. 

Uncharitable indeed

In contrast to Woke, the extreme left wing ideas of the 1970s never reached the top of society. In the 20th century, tradition and traditional religion were still held in comparatively high esteem, so old stupid ideas crowded out new stupid ideas from the top. Only when disregard for tradition reached a certain point, there was room for a new kind of irrationality at the top.

The newness of Woke makes it very effective as a game. Most people don't argue against old stupid ideas. The old stupid ideas have been around for so long that we have gotten used to them. But the feeling that stupid ideas are created here and now creates a sense of urgency among their opponents: where will this all end? Someone actually made up the idea that drag queens should be moved from night clubs into libraries in 2015. So un-Woke people take the bait and get provoked right into the Woke-game.

Getting provoked is of course sometimes a necessity. If someone attacks your very living conditions, it is advisable to defend them. But conversely, the more our living conditions depend on Woke people, the more we will have to engage in the Woke people's Agree With My Stupid Idea game. Year after year, publications like Quillette lament that doctor X and professor Y were canceled and how wrong that was. It is wrong. But letting Woke set the intellectual agenda by focusing our energies on events like that makes us all more stupid. Spending years and years arguing over things we already know prevents us from exploring things we don't actually know. 

When Woke gobbles up more and more resources for research and education, fighting it is indeed tempting. But I think we need to think carefully about when it is worth it or not. We are all invited to play the stupid idea game, but we don’t have to participate. A provocateur needs someone to provoke. Like school yard bullies, players of the woke game know how to make life uncomfortable for those who refuse to play along. Still, accepting and handling that discomfort is usually better than joining their game. Holding the initiative in this little town is better than playing according to someone else's rule book in Rome.

If someone wonders why I’m suddenly publishing more than usual, it is mostly because I discontinued almost every attempt at marketing this blog. Before, I had the ambition to be an active Substacker who responds rapidly to posts from a number of blogs whenever they arrive. Since I'm a slow thinker, that took a lot of time and energy and was also not remarkably successful. That time and energy I currently use for research and writing instead. Special thanks to Mr Apple Pie for helping us with marketing through recommending us from his new blog. Since I have proven myself inept at the marketing task, such help is very much appreciated.