What is the Point of Society?

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This was the image that Encyclopedia Britannica had on their page for the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It doesn’t seem…quite right to me.

At the last in-person meeting of my classes, I did what I always do before spring break: we played a game called “The Prisoner’s Dilemma.”

In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, you and another person are arrested and interrogated. The police then give you the option: you can betray the other person, pinning everything on them, and go free; you can also choose to say nothing, but the other prisoner is being faced with the same choice. If they rat you out, you go away for ten years. If you both betray one another, you both go away for five. If neither party betrays, then both get two years.

I play a modified version with my students. I tell them to pull out a sheet of paper and write their name and whether they cooperate or defect upon it. Do they cooperate with their classmates? Do they try to go it alone?

If everyone cooperates, they receive ten extra credit points. If one person defects, then that person receives thirty and no one else gets anything. If two people defect, then no one gets anything.

I’ve done this fifteen times. I’ve awarded the thirty points twice. I’ve awarded the ten points five times. I’ve awarded nothing the other eight.

One of my classes this semester got the ten points and the other got nothing. In the former, one student said “I thought about doing it, but then I thought about coming back and having to look everyone in the eyes afterward.”

When you repeat the game it becomes the inverse of the Tragedy of the Commons.

In the other class, I asked what I always do as soon as someone betrays: “now, how many of you want someone else to have also betrayed?” This usually receives a chuckle and a series of mean smiles. No one wants a betrayer to do well. They want them to get jammed up by someone else pulling the same dirty trick.

“Gentlemen, there’s no fighting here…this is the war room!”

This exercise is why any of us are here today. During the Cold War, the major powers used it as the basis of their strategies. In that conflict, either party, at any time, could have chosen to attack the other and, if they were thorough, could have wiped the other party off the map completely.

But if you were less than thorough, they had the power and the motivation – the duty – to do the same thing.

If you have to come back and play this game tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, then there is only one sensible strategy: cooperate. Accept the lesser reward, and get it tomorrow. Because there’s no reason to trust a betrayer when they come back for another round of the game.

From my perspective, this is how society functions. You may be late, but you still stop at the red light, because if you don’t you could collide with another car. You may not want to do your job, but if you don’t then your coworkers have to pick up your slack and then they might leave you with extra work next time.

So that’s how society works. I’m still left with another question: what does it do? What is society even for?

What are we all cooperating with?

One possible answer is that it’s just an emergent property of all people cooperating with – and competing against – their neighbors, or all of us making the best of the situations that we find ourselves in and working together as it shakes out. This is a likely answer, but one that I’m not entirely satisfied with.

I’ll let this jerk speak for himself.

Because, you see, I woke up yesterday morning to hear that the Lieutenant Governor of Texas had basically said that elderly people (and, implicitly, immune-compromised people) should be willing to gamble with their health so that the economy does well. The sitting president said that we should be going back to work because America wasn’t made for this.

So, the answer from the American right wing (which, globally speaking, is more of a reactionary party than anything else,) is apparently that society exists to support “the economy.” Society is the foundation made to support an economy (which, increasingly, funnels wealth into the pockets of the already well-to-do. His presumptive challenger pays lip service to the working people, but he’s too beholden to his former President’s signature legislation, which was kneecapped to appeal to Joe Lieberman. Just remember: if you wish we already had a public option, you can thank Joe Lieberman for the fact that we don’t.)

Modern politics is a death cult.

I’m going to let Bernie Sanders off the hook, because he’s answered this question differently: the purpose of society is to make sure everyone has enough. I’m pretty sympathetic to this answer to the question.

But it doesn’t seem to be the widely-accepted answer.

The theocratic answer to this question is “to give glory to god” or something similar. The transhumanist answer is “to make a better person, for some specific value of ‘better.’” The fascist answer to this question would be “glory” – for a specific group, at least. It’s a shitty answer. I can’t help but feel that.

In fact, all of three of those are shitty answers, in my opinion. It’s why I didn’t give them their own paragraph.

The closest thing you get to an answer when you look at mainstream American society seems to be “to win.” But god forbid you ask for clarification on the nature of the game.

Taken from KnowYourMeme.

Our inability to answer this question – to say what this great common task which we are all contributing our effort towards is actually for in the long run – is a major issue. To reference a meme other than the most obvious one, why do we continue being nice? Why not just go ape-shit?

By this, I, of course, mean: why do we continue to abide by laws? Why do we pay bills? Why not just give in to every hedonistic and destructive impulse that crosses our mind? We obviously don’t give in to those impulses. Why not? We obviously agree that society is something that should exist. Why?

It really seems to me that the answer to “what is the point of society?” is tied up in the answer to the question of “what is the point of being alive?” Human beings naturally form societies. We’re wired to. But we need to have some kind of answer to “what is the point of society?” to make it so that the group dynamic isn’t dysfunctional. We’re living through that dysfunction right now and, I don’t know about you, but I hate it.

So what’s the point of being alive?

Albert Camus: what every college-aged smoker wishes they looked like. And a fair number of post-college smokers.

Here we have the same litany of alternative answers, but I think the most universal one is that the point of being alive – the meaning behind life – is the existentialist or absurdist answer. The point of being alive is to find a reason to be alive. We’ve been handed this condition – we should find meaning and try to make it worthwhile.

I say this is the most universal because it leaves room for the other answers without just saying that everyone is right. Do what fills your life with meaning.

So, ideally, society should be aimed at allowing the greatest number of people to find the greatest amount of meaning in their lives. For this, there needs to be a material space and a cultural space.

The “material space” is that society should make it possible for a person to acquire shelter and sustenance.

The “cultural space” is the ground upon which the self-created meaning can appear – a context for us to work in to find a meaning for our lives. For some people this can be the exercise of religion, or having children; for others it can be found in the arts or in study; for still others it can be the acquisition of things, or the pursuit of excellence in competition; for some the goal is so idiosyncratic as to be impossible to list here. I think that each of these can be exercised to healthy degrees, but they can each be pushed to extreme and unhealthy extents.

I think that the healthy degree is unique for each of them; the unhealthy one looks the same each and every time. It becomes unhealthy when you rob others of the ability to find a meaning.

A visual aid for our metaphor.

So here’s the purpose of society. A metaphor to demonstrate it, if you will: There is a great book of blank pages, and each of us is given the chance to write or draw or scribble whatever we wish on it, but there’s only enough pages for each person to have one, and filling this book is the purpose of society.

How unjust would it be to find that your whole page had been filled up with someone else’s footnotes?

I think this is something that most people can get behind. The real problem is who counts as a person. According to British Anthropologist Robin Dunbar, we can only have actual social relationships with 150 people, on average. I’m going to guess that there’s some flexibility there – some people are built for 145, some people for 155, some more, some less. About 150, though. This is called the Dunbar Number. Beyond this, I’m sure that people are people, but they’re not people you care about in particular: we most likely use some kind of heuristic to figure out whether we should really care about those people and their concerns.

In the book I’m reading right now, Cannibal Metaphysics, I encountered the story of the Taino of Puerto Rico drowning Spaniards and observing to see if they would come back to life or rot — if they were humans or spirits. The natives concluded that white people were people; the Spaniards concluded that the natives were not people. (image is a statue of Taino chieftain Jumacao.)

For most of our history, the questions asked by our lawmakers to determine this has been: Are they Anglo-American? Are they Protestant? Are they men? And Do they own land? As time goes on, these questions have been chipped away and rewritten and made, generally, more inclusive (possibly. I don’t think that the founding fathers cared a bit about homosexuality – mostly because the concept of “sexual orientation” is a largely Victorian concept.)

But it really seems to me that right-wing policy preferences only really make sense if you consider “personhood” to emerge at the level of small business owners (not sole proprietors. 1099 taxes suck for independent contractors.) There’s a seeming inability, at the level of the well-to-do, to see service workers of all stripes as people – which, if I had to identify any part of the current trash-fire-fed-grease-smoke-cloud as a silver lining, seems to be cracking: it should be apparent, to everyone, that those laboring to keep our lives on track are, indeed, people.

They’re people and they each have a blank page to scribble their own personal meanings on in that book.

And robbing them of that is a monstrous thing.

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