Why Win-Win Games are a Crock

we need to treat losers better

(Quick update to readers of HomeGrown Humans. I’m offering a super fun course for speakers and writers that shares a bunch of techniques to nail everything from a TED talk to a full length non-fiction book. We’ve had overwhelming interest on our other channels, but wanted to share it hear, cuz you’re readers, and they tend to make the best writers! Check it here if upping your communication and storytelling game is in your tea leaves).

Onto the topic du jour…

***

There’s quite a bit of talk these days about going beyond Win-Lose games into some more hopeful, egalitarian Win-Win games.

This, advocates suggest, will deliver us from evil, and usher in a new era. We will finally figure out how to minimize suffering and unfairness, and equitably distribute resources for the greater good of all.

“Omni-Considerate Win-Win Games” is one of the fanciest names for this jam.

Say it a few times at your next cocktail party and see if you don’t feel both smarter and a bit more saintly.

But here’s the thing about those Win-Win Games.

They only work when there’s an excess of resources. There has to be more energy in the system than is required for the survival of the dominant party.

Otherwise, it’s knives out.

And on the road ahead, we’re looking at a bunch of potentially diminishing resources–from arable land, to water reserves, to habitable real estate, to government budgets, to barrels of oil, to stable nations to seek refuge within when all the rest go pear-shaped.

Because at its rooty root, life is binary. Life/Death. Friend/Foe. Food/Famine. Lion/Gazelle.

Sure, there’s cooperation among and within ecosystems. There’s even “coopetition” where the terms of our relatedness depend on the season–sometimes we support each other and sometimes we thwart each other.

But those still come down to, at the level of the species or individual organism, a life/death binary. It’s either adaptive or it’s fatal.

Even our more advanced or convoluted social status games, where we try to earn prestige, money, power, fame and sex–all come down to some version of accruing enough energy credits to either stay alive or boost our mating fitness so that our genes might.

That puts us squarely back into Win-Lose games. Because when there’s not enough to go around, there’s always going to be winners and losers.

“Ah!” you might say. “That’s because (checks inspoquote.com), you can’t solve the problem at the level of consciousness that created it!”

#cheesyeinstein

”What we really need to do is to expand our awareness so we realize we’re really All One, and that harming our fellow humans is no different than harming ourselves!”

Great! Let’s grant full enlightened status to a hypothetical woman from Poughkeepsie.

She now realizes, beyond all doubt, the unity of consciousness and the inseparability of all living things.

Like Shiva and Buddha before her, she is so beyond identifying with her ego and even her body that she willingly offers her meatsuit to nourish hungry orphans.

Buddha feeding a starving tigress so she wouldn’t eat her own cubs

Well, we’d give that woman a sainthood! Holy martyrdom. Gandhi and Mamma Theresa move over, there’s a new BodhiSattva in town.

#thisismybody

And that’s fine as far as it goes.

An individual consenting adult, consenting to put their own survival drive behind another’s because they have seen through the illusion of separate self-hood.

Noble sacrifice.

But what if that woman from Poughkeepsie offered to sacrifice her own daughter to feed the starving children on the other side of the world?

We’d lock her up as a psychopath (and a bad mother).

Which brings us back to the Win-Lose Game.

Even if you were willing to leave competition behind yourself, no one in their right mind would enforce that on their own children.

So rather than aspiring to find some Win-Win secret decoder ring that lets us all off the hook for this pesky human condition, how ‘bout we try something a little simpler?

How about we accept that Win-Lose contests are an inevitable part of life, and we vow to learn to treat the losers a bit better?

Because counterintuitively, one of the most viable paths to getting us to play the Infinite Game, is to be more decent when we’re playing all of those Finite Games first.

Let’s switch up from individual examples to international ones.

Imagine for instance, what U.S. foreign policy might look like if we just laid our cards down and acknowledged that despite the rhetoric of being leaders of the free world and defenders of democracy (Win-Win), we’re engaging in some bare knuckled real politik most of the time (Win-Lose).

We, the United States, value:

the lives of our citizens more than yours

our allies more than our enemies

Western Europe more than Eastern Europe

Christians more than Muslims or Hindus

IF we’re gonna help you out beyond paper pronouncements, we will likely do so because there’s a commercial or strategic (or both) interest in your region

ONCE we’ve helped, we will offset the costs for doing so by negotiating favorable conditions for ongoing military and corporate presence

IF we loan you money it will be to build what we need in your country, not what you want

IF you can’t pay, we will extract additional concessions that are favorable to us or install someone else who will do it

IF we have some combination of the above incentives, we might come to your aid when you’re begging for it.

IF not, then we’ll probably stay on the sidelines and see how it all plays out. Sorry, it’s not personal!

The rest of the world already knows these unspoken rules of playing with the United States–from Afghanistan to Guatemala. Many of its own citizens do not. It would save a lot of bitterness (and blowback) if we all did.

***

But what about some other examples on the global stage? An obvious choice are the Geneva Conventions (and really, all honorable codes of combat from the past).

• Distinguishing between combatants and civilians.

• Granting some minimal standard of care to prisoners.

• Accepting surrenders.

• Banning rape and torture

• Prohibiting the worst kinds of weapons (like chemical and nuclear).

• Avoiding destruction of civilian infrastructure (dams, power plants, hospitals, schools etc)

• Granting international aid organizations, diplomats, medics and journalists safe passage

Treating losers, even within a kinetic war, with some inalienable humanity and dignity.

As you were reading this, your brain may have been firing with all of the recent violations of those norms-from water boarding prisoners at Abu Ghraib , to nerve gas in Syria, to the Russian targeting of power stations, water, and use of rape, to the atrocities on both sides in Gaza.

And it’s that sensitivity that we all have to fair play, even amongst the chaos and destruction of armed conflict, that is one of our best indicators of our core and common decency.

We know what it’s been like when benevolent victors have offered defeat with dignity. When truces are honored. When arms a laid down. When enemies can become neighbors again.

It happened at Appomattox Court House, when General Grant allowed General Lee’s officers to keep their horses and sidearms and issued blankets and rations to the starving Confederate soldiers.

We know what it’s like to beat the shit out of an opponent on the court or in the ring, and shake their hand afterwards.

It just happened when Carlos Alcaraz smoked Novak Djokavic at Wimbledon in straight sets, and was profoundly gracious in that passing of torches.

We know what it’s like to enjoy victory and accept defeat with some awareness that today, the score is what it is, but tomorrow could always be different.

Kipling’s words hang above Centre Court at Wimbledon for a reason:

“When you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two imposters just the same…”

That’s how we get to Win-Win Games.

Not by pretending that there will always be enough to go around. Or by abandoning the scorekeeping. Or melting down the trophies.

But by playing full out, with as much care and decency for ourselves and our opponents as we can muster.