If a lone, unkempt, person, standing on a soapbox were to say that he
should become the Prime Minister, he would have been diagnosed by a
passing psychiatrist as suffering from this or that mental disturbance.
But were the same psychiatrist to frequent the same spot and see a
crowd of millions saluting the same lonely, shabby figure - what would
have his diagnosis been? Surely, different (perhaps of a more political
hue).
It seems that one thing setting social games apart from madness is
quantitative: the amount of the participants involved. Madness is a
one-person game, and even mass mental disturbances are limited in
scope. Moreover, it has long been demonstrated (for instance, by Karen
Horney) that the definition of certain mental disorders is highly
dependent upon the context of the prevailing culture. Mental
disturbances (including psychoses) are time-dependent and
locus-dependent. Religious behaviour and romantic behaviour could be
easily construed as psychopathologies when examined out of their
social, cultural, historical and political contexts.
Historical figures as diverse as Nietzsche (philosophy), Van Gogh
(art), Hitler (politics) and Herzl (political visionary) made this
smooth phase transition from the lunatic fringes to centre stage. They
succeeded to attract, convince and influence a critical human mass,
which provided for this transition. They appeared on history's stage
(or were placed there posthumously) at the right time and in the right
place. The biblical prophets and Jesus are similar examples though of a
more severe disorder. Hitler and Herzl possibly suffered from
personality disorders - the biblical prophets were, almost certainly,
psychotic.
We play games because they are reversible and their outcomes are
reversible. No game-player expects his involvement, or his particular
moves to make a lasting impression on history, fellow humans, a
territory, or a business entity. This, indeed, is the major taxonomic
difference: the same class of actions can be classified as "game" when
it does not intend to exert a lasting (that is, irreversible) influence
on the environment. When such intention is evident - the very same
actions qualify as something completely different. Games, therefore,
are only mildly associated with memory. They are intended to be
forgotten, eroded by time and entropy, by quantum events in our brains
and macro-events in physical reality.
Games - as opposed to absolutely all other human activities - are
entropic. Negentropy - the act of reducing entropy and increasing order
- is present in a game, only to be reversed later. Nowhere is this more
evident than in video games: destructive acts constitute the very
foundation of these contraptions. When children start to play (and
adults, for that matter - see Eric Berne's books on the subject) they
commence by dissolution, by being destructively analytic. Playing games
is an analytic activity. It is through games that we recognize our
temporariness, the looming shadow of death, our forthcoming
dissolution, evaporation, annihilation.
These FACTS we repress in normal life - lest they overwhelm us. A
frontal recognition of them would render us speechless, motionless,
paralysed. We pretend that we are going to live forever, we use this
ridiculous, counter-factual assumption as a working hypothesis. Playing
games lets us confront all this by engaging in activities which, by
their very definition, are temporary, have no past and no future,
temporally detached and physically detached. This is as close to death
as we get.
Small wonder that rituals (a variant of games) typify religious
activities. Religion is among the few human disciplines which tackle
death head on, sometimes as a centrepiece (consider the symbolic
sacrifice of Jesus). Rituals are also the hallmark of
obsessive-compulsive disorders, which are the reaction to the
repression of forbidden emotions (our reaction to the prevalence,
pervasiveness and inevitability of death is almost identical). It is
when we move from a conscious acknowledgement of the relative lack of
lasting importance of games - to the pretension that they are
important, that we make the transition from the personal to the social.
The way from madness to social rituals traverses games. In this sense,
the transition is from game to myth. A mythology is a closed system of
thought, which defines the "permissible" questions, those that can be
asked. Other questions are forbidden because they cannot be answered
without resorting to another mythology altogether.
Observation is an act, which is the anathema of the myth. The observer
is presumed to be outside the observed system (a presumption which, in
itself, is part of the myth of Science, at least until the Copenhagen
Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics was developed).
A game looks very strange, unnecessary and ridiculous from the
vantage-point of an outside observer. It has no justification, no
future, it looks aimless (from the utilitarian point of view), it can
be compared to alternative systems of thought and of social
organization (the biggest threat to any mythology). When games are
transformed to myths, the first act perpetrated by the group of
transformers is to ban all observations by the (willing or unwilling)
participants.
Introspection replaces observation and becomes a mechanism of social
coercion. The game, in its new guise, becomes a transcendental,
postulated, axiomatic and doctrinaire entity. It spins off a caste of
interpreters and mediators. It distinguishes participants (formerly,
players) from outsiders or aliens (formerly observers or uninterested
parties). And the game loses its power to confront us with death. As a
myth it assumes the function of repression of this fact and of the fact
that we are all prisoners. Earth is really a death ward, a cosmic death
row: we are all trapped here and all of us are sentenced to die.
Today's telecommunications, transportation, international computer
networks and the unification of the cultural offering only serve to
exacerbate and accentuate this claustrophobia. Granted, in a few
millennia, with space travel and space habitation, the walls of our
cells will have practically vanished (or become negligible) with the
exception of the constraint of our (limited) longevity. Mortality is a
blessing in disguise because it motivates humans to act in order "not
to miss the train of life" and it maintains the sense of wonder and the
(false) sense of unlimited possibilities.
This conversion from madness to game to myth is subjected to meta-laws
that are the guidelines of a super-game. All our games are derivatives
of this super-game of survival. It is a game because its outcomes are
not guaranteed, they are temporary and to a large extent not even known
(many of our activities are directed at deciphering it). It is a myth
because it effectively ignores temporal and spatial limitations. It is
one-track minded: to foster an increase in the population as a hedge
against contingencies, which are outside the myth.
All the laws, which encourage optimization of resources, accommodation,
an increase of order and negentropic results - belong, by definition to
this meta-system. We can rigorously claim that there exist no laws, no
human activities outside it. It is inconceivable that it should contain
its own negation (Godel-like), therefore it must be internally and
externally consistent. It is as inconceivable that it will be less than
perfect - so it must be all-inclusive. Its comprehensiveness is not the
formal logical one: it is not the system of all the conceivable
sub-systems, theorems and propositions (because it is not
self-contradictory or self-defeating). It is simply the list of
possibilities and actualities open to humans, taking their limitations
into consideration. This, precisely, is the power of money. It is - and
always has been - a symbol whose abstract dimension far outweighed its
tangible one.
This bestowed upon money a preferred status: that of a measuring rod.
The outcomes of games and myths alike needed to be monitored and
measured. Competition was only a mechanism to secure the on-going
participation of individuals in the game. Measurement was an altogether
more important element: the very efficiency of the survival strategy
was in question. How could humanity measure the relative performance
(and contribution) of its members - and their overall efficiency (and
prospects)? Money came handy. It is uniform, objective, reacts flexibly
and immediately to changing circumstances, abstract, easily
transformable into tangibles - in short, a perfect barometer of the
chances of survival at any given gauging moment. It is through its role
as a universal comparative scale - that it came to acquire the might
that it possesses.
Money, in other words, had the ultimate information content: the
information concerning survival, the information needed for survival.
Money measures performance (which allows for survival enhancing
feedback). Money confers identity - an effective way to differentiate
oneself in a world glutted with information, alienating and
assimilating. Money cemented a social system of monovalent rating (a
pecking order) - which, in turn, optimized decision making processes
through the minimization of the amounts of information needed to affect
them. The price of a share traded in the stock exchange, for instance,
is assumed (by certain theoreticians) to incorporate (and reflect) all
the information available regarding this share. Analogously, we can say
that the amount of money that a person has contains sufficient
information regarding his or her ability to survive and his or her
contribution to the survivability of others. There must be other -
possibly more important measures of that - but they are, most probably,
lacking: not as uniform as money, not as universal, not as potent, etc.
Money is said to buy us love (or to stand for it, psychologically) -
and love is the prerequisite to survival. Very few of us would have
survived without some kind of love or attention lavished on us. We are
dependent creatures throughout our lives. Thus, in an unavoidable path,
as humans move from game to myth and from myth to a derivative social
organization - they move ever closer to money and to the information
that it contains. Money contains information in different modalities.
But it all boils down to the very ancient question of the survival of
the fittest.
