The Defaults
Dec15,2013
The Defaults
In a program, a default is the value of a something before it has been set. Integers might default to zero. Strings might default to an “empty string”. Or, the default value might be undefined, for example, whatever happened to be in memory at the exact place assigned a variable.
In humans, our defaults are what we do and think habitually and what we expect from others. They are that which takes an effort and/or consciousness not to do or think or be or expect. These defaults can change over time, but at any one time, they exist and are a part of each of us. Defaults exist for every social value we hold. In other words, our minds are full of defaults for everything we already believe and know.
Defaults can change over time; the defaults are the current beliefs or state of our belief system. If someone is racist, or sexist, it is based on their value system. They might overcome it on a one-person-at-a-time basis, but their default is the recreational hatred in which they indulge. It is up to anyone caught on the wrong side of such beliefs to overcome those beliefs if they want to be valued and treated fairly. Of course, it isn’t fair to have to overcome someone else’s unfair beliefs, but that is obvious. What isn’t as obvious is that the defaults apply only when they match expectations. Break the sense of matching and the same defaults no longer apply. The kind of match that allows racism or sexism is a very, very simple and broad one: all people of a given race or gender qualify. That is one root of the issue: Broad defaults lump together things of increasing difference and set for them the same expectations and beliefs.
Straightforward opposition of someone’s beliefs engages them in their most defensible, entrenched position. The insidious, side-door way to undermine negative beliefs is to show how the current situation, person or thing doesn’t match the assumptions of the defaults and to therefore derail the long train of them that ultimately leads to recreational hatred.
The defaults wouldn’t actually matter if we were able to treat each experience as wholly new. Habitual, familiar thinking patterns are the basis for our defaults. If we could avoid those we would not worry about defaults. But, that isn’t very practical. It is precisely because we are capable of defaults that we are able to navigate the complexity of life without being paralyzed by endless analysis. We cannot live each moment like a scientist. Sometimes we must simply act in the moment to the best of our knowledge and beliefs. Sometimes we must simply be who we are and behave as we do because we do not have time or interest in any more. I think it is just living.
The defaults are a part of us, and we’re not going to let them go.
Defaults might allow us to approach near perfection of thought an action, if we cared to practice enough. The only problem is that Chaos won’t allow it. Chaos ensures that no two distinct events are perfectly the same, and differences matter. This isn’t just an esoteric edge case. I’m afraid the burden of proof is upon anyone who claims that two different events are the same to justify it, especially if the second one hasn’t happened yet.
As we navigate through our relationships with other people we encounter what I call conflicting defaults. These defaults are our current beliefs about the relationship and how it works:
I could certainly go on, but this is enough to begin.
If we were a mythical being that saw each event with new eyes (no defaults) then it would require quite a lengthy conversation with each new person we meet to understand these expectations in ourselves and each other. Obviously, we don’t do that. Even people who marry might not have ever discussed more than some of these things openly. I don’t think very many people are very good at this in general, but perhaps the fact that we can discuss it at all is simply amazing.
We learn through interactions with others which defaults are accurate and which aren’t... maybe. If we do recognize that a default is wrong, we may or may not change that default. I think we often cling to our defaults long past any shred of supporting evidence. We do this because changing a default can be sometimes perceived as having a cost or a risk:
These fears are real. Because defaults build upon defaults, perhaps many levels deep, one default changing casts doubt on all defaults that depend upon it. To the extent we understand this hierarchy of defaults we understand what else might be affected by changing a default. And, if we don’t understand the hierarchy of defaults, we are left only to fear or ignore what it might mean to change them.
Our own defaults become the basis of our own personal social contract we make with the rest of the world. Each of ours is as unique as we are. As we gain more experience this social contract takes on more and more detail and the depth of the hierarchy of defaults can increase.
Some people’s spiritual or philosophical beliefs guide them in the practice of reducing defaults and keeping the hierarchy of them flexible and shallow. However, this requires effort and persistence to learn and to practice. One would have to see value in it. Value is of course based on what a given person values, and it obviously varies from person to person.
If a person sees value in a faster reaction time, one would probably prefer more defaults. The more of them one holds, the deeper hierarchies are likely to be.
If a person sees value in more accurately perceiving and appreciating the people and things then one would probably prefer fewer defaults.
I don’t think people become “set in their ways” their ways so much as their defaults become too complicated and uncomfortable for them to change. I would go so far as to say that as time goes on we each have an increasing chance of falling into a state where we become biased against changing defaults, like a ball on a peaked roof: once on one side it can no longer roll to the other side. It takes something tremendous to kick the ball over the peak. A breeze will only roll it around this side of the peak, but never over the top to the other side of the roof.
So, whether we hold more or fewer defaults we all develop our own personal social contract with the world based on our unique experiences with others and the world around us. Circumstances make each of our value systems different: even twins raised in the same family do not value everything equally.
And so each of our social contracts is unique, and we already aren’t in the habit of negotiating the terms with others. In other words, we all have a different different defaults and a different idea of whether we even want defaults and we encounter each other and we each rely on our own social contract to determine what is and isn’t acceptable behavior in others.
I’m sure you see the problem here: it just doesn’t work.
One of the most famous and understated sentence ever written about software engineering is this by Dennis Ritchie (I think):
If we don’t expect our social contracts to actually benefit us, then really any convenient one would do. And of course whatever we happen to have in mind is awfully convenient.
The problem is that these social contracts are invisible to each other: we cannot see them or the difference between ours and someone else’s. It just isn’t apparent. They are therefore implied social contracts.
Before completely laying bare the pain we all feel when our social contracts are violated, I wonder if you have ever loved and been loved by someone so thoroughly that your social contract with them was not implied? I don’t necessarily mean the kind of love between lovers, but also between good friends, business partners, family and people who have lived together through a difficult time. I call it love because I believe that is the closest approximation in my language for the kind of connection that can form without implied social contracts. Having few defaults makes it easier to love others, I think. I believe the converse is also true: having more defaults makes it easier to hate others.
An implied social contract based on many defaults is a blade we use to carve the world and each other into a shape we expect. How we react when our expectations are not met is part of the damage we do. Our choices do the rest of the damage. And everyone suffers. Not only do others suffer at our hands and we theirs, but inflicting suffering on an unwilling other is bound to be as painful as one’s empathy allows.
You could call it our human condition to suffer, or perhaps it would be fairer to say that our implied social contracts lead us to suffering. How often is that? Perhaps, all human suffering involving any kind of disappointment is due to implied social contracts, or at least a great deal of it. Do you ever feel disappointed? Does anyone around you ever feel disappointed with you? About anything? Perhaps we are all a constant disappointment to each other. Or at least, there are none of us who are not a disappointment to at least someone else. With the disappointment that comes with violated implied social contracts comes the ammunition for the wars we wage on each other. We wage war over everything from gender and spiritual choice to resources, class and time. The endless disappointment of violated implied social contracts provides an endless supply of energy and weapons to carve and hack each other in a futile attempt to carve the same lump of clay into two different sculptures at the same time.
It is far, far worse than simply the failure to achieve our goals in reforming everyone else to our standards or suffering the disappointment of their failure to follow our implied social contracts. The worst part of the damage is the whittling away of ourselves until the fear, chaos and damage drives us to live within boundaries we can adequately defend, by which time we are so hardened and inflexible that we are imprisoned by our defaults.
Even people who care to conform are carved into something they were not already. Whereas those who chose not to conform face an endless struggle simply to be who they are. The opposition may seem endless, but it is not uniform. There are also allies and people with whom many of our defaults are compatible. These more or less act as supporters, to the limits of their own implied social contracts.
The kind of suffering that comes from implied social contracts is unlike the innocent suffering of an accidental injury: being entirely without a suspicion of malice. Just as a communication problem belongs to both parties, a violated social contract is a problem that belongs to both parties. One person’t default is not necessarily correct simply because it is theirs. The other person is not necessarily wrong because they violate our implied social contract or because their default is different. This kind of suffering lacks even consensus on who is victim and perpetrator among those directly involved.
So we’re left with wondering whose default is right? Is the one who feels violated justified in holding the default they had? It quickly devolves into a comparison of values, except that one person already feels harmed by the other (or they both feel harmed). And the harm only begins there. From that moment the rift becomes a real thing, regardless of who is right. It doesn’t matter who is right from the standpoint the clash of defaults, this conflict over an implied social contact breaks one or more of the expectations we each value. Suddenly we are pulled apart. Our separateness is emphasized and we keep score in painful demerits to be cashed in later, or to be forgotten in our increasingly heavy backpack of painful memories.
Not only are we harmed by the process, we’re robbed of any sense of certainty about what actually happened and why, because disappointment isn’t a clear lens through which to see defaults of another. The ambiguity about what is right and wrong galls us. It unsettles a deep part of us that hopes that the world can be understood. We often have neither closure nor clarity about the other person’s defaults as a result of the experience.
Misunderstanding each others’ defaults makes it easier to demonize them, oppose them, question their intentions or hold them in contempt. The process of perception can be gamed to the point where selecting a worse assumption about of another’s defaults has significant if unfair advantages. It is possible to capriciously misinterpret the defaults of another and use that as a basis for choices. It is not only possible, it is fairly difficult to avoid. How many of us recuse ourselves or provide full disclosure or transparency in our decision making processes... to anyone else? And, if you do, how often and under what circumstances?
The rest of the time you float in the sea with the rest of us.
In a zero-sum game one person winning implies the other(s) must lose. Winning and losing are mutually exclusive.
If you’re building a military the hard core that remains is probably useful as a killing force. For anyone whose deepest wish is to be loved, this core lacks many footholds for love to use to reach us. Invulnerability means love can find nowhere to enter, for love cannot survive without vulnerability.
We are all in this together, but I don’t mean we’re all here to help each other. I mean we’re all floating in the same sea of implied social contracts whether we like it or not. Of course I think things would be mutually easier if we also agreed to help each other along the way. But, it seems fairly easy for individuals to take unfair advantage of each other by adjusting their value system to preclude fairness. The status quo is a mighty enemy because it sets so many defaults.
I do believe we all get better over time:
Or, not.
The ball is on the roof, and it rolls either to the side where we help each other as we float in this sea, or it rolls to the side where we stand on each other’s shoulders and the one on the bottom drowns. In short: is our life together a zero-sum game?
If is a self-fulfilling prophesy to believe that life is a zero-sum game, because if nothing else it creates a contagious sense of scarcity and separation between people that reinforces people’s perception in life being a zero-sum game. A self-reinforcing behavior does not in itself lend credibility to underlying idea that life is a zero-sum game. However, the predictability of the reinforcement might seem comforting. It might even be mistaken for a shared, agreed-upon social contract, such as the law of the jungle: each person for themselves is rather easy to define. So, it appeals to animals of all kinds.
The problem is, we don’t all agree that life is a zero-sum game. And, for those of us who share the burdens of our communities, we kind of feel like the zero-sum-game people are ruthless. And, the zero-sum-game people feel like the “in it together” people are thieves. But, we float in the same sea and some of the people are trying to stand on the shoulders of others who feel violated by it. The water boils with our suffering.
The notion that life is a zero-sum game is meme that can infect any group of people willing to believe that their social contracts are right and someone else’s is wrong. Because, we need to understand right and wrong and we want always to feel right, the natural outcome is that anyone who doesn’t agree with us is wrong. As soon as people can accept the idea of ambiguity in social contracts that can be understood and resolved people can no longer hold onto a zero-sum-game attitude, because resolving differences is the exact opposite what a zero-sum-game person would ever want to do: differences are to be exploited, not wasted by giving away the chance to use them.
Believing that as one social contract can be right and another wrong begins us on our journey to the polarizing belief that life is a zero-sum game.
So, what do you want? A jungle or a civilization? Suffering or freedom to be ourselves? Separateness or mutual understanding? Safety by mutual support, or escalating investments in military, law-enforcement, and incarceration? Education as a privilege or education as a right?
People who believe life is a zero-sum game might actually treasure their defaults. Whereas in-it-together people reduce defaults and cope with the defaults of others. The in-it-together approach probably isn’t as immediately gratifying as the zero-sum-game approach, but it builds over time to be far, far better. A rising tide raises all ships, as they say.
I think only fear is powerful enough to drive the ball over the crest of the roof to the side where life is a zero-sum game. I think only love and compassion are strong enough to drive the ball to the in-it-together side of the roof, and both of those are vulnerable and sometimes rare. So, they need to be nourished wherever you find them.
I can’t tell you how to change someone’s mind who is convinced life is a zero-sum game. But, you can love them anyway. Otherwise, they’ve convinced you that it is.
In a program, a default is the value of a something before it has been set. Integers might default to zero. Strings might default to an “empty string”. Or, the default value might be undefined, for example, whatever happened to be in memory at the exact place assigned a variable.
In humans, our defaults are what we do and think habitually and what we expect from others. They are that which takes an effort and/or consciousness not to do or think or be or expect. These defaults can change over time, but at any one time, they exist and are a part of each of us. Defaults exist for every social value we hold. In other words, our minds are full of defaults for everything we already believe and know.
Defaults Represent Momentum or State in our Belief System
Defaults can change over time; the defaults are the current beliefs or state of our belief system. If someone is racist, or sexist, it is based on their value system. They might overcome it on a one-person-at-a-time basis, but their default is the recreational hatred in which they indulge. It is up to anyone caught on the wrong side of such beliefs to overcome those beliefs if they want to be valued and treated fairly. Of course, it isn’t fair to have to overcome someone else’s unfair beliefs, but that is obvious. What isn’t as obvious is that the defaults apply only when they match expectations. Break the sense of matching and the same defaults no longer apply. The kind of match that allows racism or sexism is a very, very simple and broad one: all people of a given race or gender qualify. That is one root of the issue: Broad defaults lump together things of increasing difference and set for them the same expectations and beliefs.
Straightforward opposition of someone’s beliefs engages them in their most defensible, entrenched position. The insidious, side-door way to undermine negative beliefs is to show how the current situation, person or thing doesn’t match the assumptions of the defaults and to therefore derail the long train of them that ultimately leads to recreational hatred.
Straightforward opposition of someone’s beliefs engages them in their most defensible, entrenched position.
The defaults wouldn’t actually matter if we were able to treat each experience as wholly new. Habitual, familiar thinking patterns are the basis for our defaults. If we could avoid those we would not worry about defaults. But, that isn’t very practical. It is precisely because we are capable of defaults that we are able to navigate the complexity of life without being paralyzed by endless analysis. We cannot live each moment like a scientist. Sometimes we must simply act in the moment to the best of our knowledge and beliefs. Sometimes we must simply be who we are and behave as we do because we do not have time or interest in any more. I think it is just living.
Habitual, familiar thinking patterns are the basis for our defaults.
The defaults are a part of us, and we’re not going to let them go.
We Each Create Our Own Personal, Invisble Social Contract with the World
Defaults might allow us to approach near perfection of thought an action, if we cared to practice enough. The only problem is that Chaos won’t allow it. Chaos ensures that no two distinct events are perfectly the same, and differences matter. This isn’t just an esoteric edge case. I’m afraid the burden of proof is upon anyone who claims that two different events are the same to justify it, especially if the second one hasn’t happened yet.
As we navigate through our relationships with other people we encounter what I call conflicting defaults. These defaults are our current beliefs about the relationship and how it works:
- what we expect the other person to already know
- what we expect the other person to do (and not do) and how they should behave
- what we expect the other person to be able to perceive
- what we expect the other person to think
- what we expect to be the other person’s intentions toward us
- how we expect the other person to communicate (or not)
- how much effort we expect the other person to make on our behalf
- how much sacrifice we expect the other person to make on our behalf
- how supportive we expect the other person to be
- how honest we expect the other person to be
- how careful we expect the other person to be with things than matter to us
- how available for communication we expect the other person to be
- how much we expect the other person to respect us
- how much empathy we expect from the other person
I could certainly go on, but this is enough to begin.
If we were a mythical being that saw each event with new eyes (no defaults) then it would require quite a lengthy conversation with each new person we meet to understand these expectations in ourselves and each other. Obviously, we don’t do that. Even people who marry might not have ever discussed more than some of these things openly. I don’t think very many people are very good at this in general, but perhaps the fact that we can discuss it at all is simply amazing.
We learn through interactions with others which defaults are accurate and which aren’t... maybe. If we do recognize that a default is wrong, we may or may not change that default. I think we often cling to our defaults long past any shred of supporting evidence. We do this because changing a default can be sometimes perceived as having a cost or a risk:
- we may feel shame or embarrassment for having it in the wrong place
- we may feel a need to apologize or make amends
- we may suffer repercussions of what is retroactively considered misbehavior
- we may have to admit we were wrong and therefore imperfect
- we may have to ask for forgiveness
- we may feel vulnerable
- we may feel like others might exploit the event to attempt to adjust our other defaults
These fears are real. Because defaults build upon defaults, perhaps many levels deep, one default changing casts doubt on all defaults that depend upon it. To the extent we understand this hierarchy of defaults we understand what else might be affected by changing a default. And, if we don’t understand the hierarchy of defaults, we are left only to fear or ignore what it might mean to change them.
...if we don’t understand the hierarchy of defaults, we are left only to fear or ignore what it might mean to change them.
Our own defaults become the basis of our own personal social contract we make with the rest of the world. Each of ours is as unique as we are. As we gain more experience this social contract takes on more and more detail and the depth of the hierarchy of defaults can increase.
Some people’s spiritual or philosophical beliefs guide them in the practice of reducing defaults and keeping the hierarchy of them flexible and shallow. However, this requires effort and persistence to learn and to practice. One would have to see value in it. Value is of course based on what a given person values, and it obviously varies from person to person.
If a person sees value in a faster reaction time, one would probably prefer more defaults. The more of them one holds, the deeper hierarchies are likely to be.
If a person sees value in more accurately perceiving and appreciating the people and things then one would probably prefer fewer defaults.
I don’t think people become “set in their ways” their ways so much as their defaults become too complicated and uncomfortable for them to change. I would go so far as to say that as time goes on we each have an increasing chance of falling into a state where we become biased against changing defaults, like a ball on a peaked roof: once on one side it can no longer roll to the other side. It takes something tremendous to kick the ball over the peak. A breeze will only roll it around this side of the peak, but never over the top to the other side of the roof.
I don’t think people become “set in their ways” their ways so much as their defaults become too complicated and uncomfortable for them to change.
So, whether we hold more or fewer defaults we all develop our own personal social contract with the world based on our unique experiences with others and the world around us. Circumstances make each of our value systems different: even twins raised in the same family do not value everything equally.
And so each of our social contracts is unique, and we already aren’t in the habit of negotiating the terms with others. In other words, we all have a different different defaults and a different idea of whether we even want defaults and we encounter each other and we each rely on our own social contract to determine what is and isn’t acceptable behavior in others.
I’m sure you see the problem here: it just doesn’t work.
Implied Social Contracts are a Source of Human Suffering
One of the most famous and understated sentence ever written about software engineering is this by Dennis Ritchie (I think):
If a program is not expected to work we can write it any way we wish.
If we don’t expect our social contracts to actually benefit us, then really any convenient one would do. And of course whatever we happen to have in mind is awfully convenient.
The problem is that these social contracts are invisible to each other: we cannot see them or the difference between ours and someone else’s. It just isn’t apparent. They are therefore implied social contracts.
Before completely laying bare the pain we all feel when our social contracts are violated, I wonder if you have ever loved and been loved by someone so thoroughly that your social contract with them was not implied? I don’t necessarily mean the kind of love between lovers, but also between good friends, business partners, family and people who have lived together through a difficult time. I call it love because I believe that is the closest approximation in my language for the kind of connection that can form without implied social contracts. Having few defaults makes it easier to love others, I think. I believe the converse is also true: having more defaults makes it easier to hate others.
Having few defaults makes it easier to love others, I think.
An implied social contract based on many defaults is a blade we use to carve the world and each other into a shape we expect. How we react when our expectations are not met is part of the damage we do. Our choices do the rest of the damage. And everyone suffers. Not only do others suffer at our hands and we theirs, but inflicting suffering on an unwilling other is bound to be as painful as one’s empathy allows.
You could call it our human condition to suffer, or perhaps it would be fairer to say that our implied social contracts lead us to suffering. How often is that? Perhaps, all human suffering involving any kind of disappointment is due to implied social contracts, or at least a great deal of it. Do you ever feel disappointed? Does anyone around you ever feel disappointed with you? About anything? Perhaps we are all a constant disappointment to each other. Or at least, there are none of us who are not a disappointment to at least someone else. With the disappointment that comes with violated implied social contracts comes the ammunition for the wars we wage on each other. We wage war over everything from gender and spiritual choice to resources, class and time. The endless disappointment of violated implied social contracts provides an endless supply of energy and weapons to carve and hack each other in a futile attempt to carve the same lump of clay into two different sculptures at the same time.
With the disappointment that comes with violated implied social contracts comes the ammunition for the wars we wage on each other...in a futile attempt to carve the same lump of clay into two different sculptures at the same time .
It is far, far worse than simply the failure to achieve our goals in reforming everyone else to our standards or suffering the disappointment of their failure to follow our implied social contracts. The worst part of the damage is the whittling away of ourselves until the fear, chaos and damage drives us to live within boundaries we can adequately defend, by which time we are so hardened and inflexible that we are imprisoned by our defaults.
Even people who care to conform are carved into something they were not already. Whereas those who chose not to conform face an endless struggle simply to be who they are. The opposition may seem endless, but it is not uniform. There are also allies and people with whom many of our defaults are compatible. These more or less act as supporters, to the limits of their own implied social contracts.
The kind of suffering that comes from implied social contracts is unlike the innocent suffering of an accidental injury: being entirely without a suspicion of malice. Just as a communication problem belongs to both parties, a violated social contract is a problem that belongs to both parties. One person’t default is not necessarily correct simply because it is theirs. The other person is not necessarily wrong because they violate our implied social contract or because their default is different. This kind of suffering lacks even consensus on who is victim and perpetrator among those directly involved.
... a violated social contract is a problem that belongs to both parties.
So we’re left with wondering whose default is right? Is the one who feels violated justified in holding the default they had? It quickly devolves into a comparison of values, except that one person already feels harmed by the other (or they both feel harmed). And the harm only begins there. From that moment the rift becomes a real thing, regardless of who is right. It doesn’t matter who is right from the standpoint the clash of defaults, this conflict over an implied social contact breaks one or more of the expectations we each value. Suddenly we are pulled apart. Our separateness is emphasized and we keep score in painful demerits to be cashed in later, or to be forgotten in our increasingly heavy backpack of painful memories.
Suddenly we are pulled apart. Our separateness is emphasized and we keep score in painful demerits to be cashed in later, or to be forgotten in our increasingly heavy backpack of painful memories.
Not only are we harmed by the process, we’re robbed of any sense of certainty about what actually happened and why, because disappointment isn’t a clear lens through which to see defaults of another. The ambiguity about what is right and wrong galls us. It unsettles a deep part of us that hopes that the world can be understood. We often have neither closure nor clarity about the other person’s defaults as a result of the experience.
The ambiguity about what is right and wrong galls us. It unsettles a deep part of us that hopes that the world can be understood.
Misunderstanding each others’ defaults makes it easier to demonize them, oppose them, question their intentions or hold them in contempt. The process of perception can be gamed to the point where selecting a worse assumption about of another’s defaults has significant if unfair advantages. It is possible to capriciously misinterpret the defaults of another and use that as a basis for choices. It is not only possible, it is fairly difficult to avoid. How many of us recuse ourselves or provide full disclosure or transparency in our decision making processes... to anyone else? And, if you do, how often and under what circumstances?
The rest of the time you float in the sea with the rest of us.
We’re All In It Together vs. The Zero-sum game
In a zero-sum game one person winning implies the other(s) must lose. Winning and losing are mutually exclusive.
So, here we are: a crowd all made of clay who weep as we sculpt each other. And everywhere, the floor is covered with what remains of our original selves.
If you’re building a military the hard core that remains is probably useful as a killing force. For anyone whose deepest wish is to be loved, this core lacks many footholds for love to use to reach us. Invulnerability means love can find nowhere to enter, for love cannot survive without vulnerability.
We are all in this together, but I don’t mean we’re all here to help each other. I mean we’re all floating in the same sea of implied social contracts whether we like it or not. Of course I think things would be mutually easier if we also agreed to help each other along the way. But, it seems fairly easy for individuals to take unfair advantage of each other by adjusting their value system to preclude fairness. The status quo is a mighty enemy because it sets so many defaults.
We’re all floating in the same sea of implied social contracts whether we like it or not.
I do believe we all get better over time:
- We can learn about the defaults of others.
- We can change our own defaults.
- Perhaps we carve less and accept more?
- Perhaps we come to learn to value diversity and to encourage differences rather than homogeneity?
- Perhaps we minimize our defaults?
- Perhaps we can face surprise with wonder?
- Perhaps we recognize when our expectations are being disappointed and check our assumptions about the implied social contract we hold?
- Perhaps we can anticipate expectations we or the other person holds that may not be shared and to discuss them as early as possible and certainly before any commitment is made?
- Perhaps we can start to learn what are our own defaults?
- Perhaps we can build flexibility into our defaults, so they imply less when they match?
- Perhaps we can build limitations into our defaults, so they match less often and more accurately?
- Perhaps we can find compassion for the others and ourselves because we are all in the same sea of implied social contracts?
Or, not.
The ball is on the roof, and it rolls either to the side where we help each other as we float in this sea, or it rolls to the side where we stand on each other’s shoulders and the one on the bottom drowns. In short: is our life together a zero-sum game?
Is our life together a zero-sum game? Only if that is what you want.
If is a self-fulfilling prophesy to believe that life is a zero-sum game, because if nothing else it creates a contagious sense of scarcity and separation between people that reinforces people’s perception in life being a zero-sum game. A self-reinforcing behavior does not in itself lend credibility to underlying idea that life is a zero-sum game. However, the predictability of the reinforcement might seem comforting. It might even be mistaken for a shared, agreed-upon social contract, such as the law of the jungle: each person for themselves is rather easy to define. So, it appeals to animals of all kinds.
The problem is, we don’t all agree that life is a zero-sum game. And, for those of us who share the burdens of our communities, we kind of feel like the zero-sum-game people are ruthless. And, the zero-sum-game people feel like the “in it together” people are thieves. But, we float in the same sea and some of the people are trying to stand on the shoulders of others who feel violated by it. The water boils with our suffering.
The problem is, we don’t all agree that life is a zero-sum game.
The notion that life is a zero-sum game is meme that can infect any group of people willing to believe that their social contracts are right and someone else’s is wrong. Because, we need to understand right and wrong and we want always to feel right, the natural outcome is that anyone who doesn’t agree with us is wrong. As soon as people can accept the idea of ambiguity in social contracts that can be understood and resolved people can no longer hold onto a zero-sum-game attitude, because resolving differences is the exact opposite what a zero-sum-game person would ever want to do: differences are to be exploited, not wasted by giving away the chance to use them.
Believing that as one social contract can be right and another wrong begins us on our journey to the polarizing belief that life is a zero-sum game.
So, what do you want? A jungle or a civilization? Suffering or freedom to be ourselves? Separateness or mutual understanding? Safety by mutual support, or escalating investments in military, law-enforcement, and incarceration? Education as a privilege or education as a right?
People who believe life is a zero-sum game might actually treasure their defaults. Whereas in-it-together people reduce defaults and cope with the defaults of others. The in-it-together approach probably isn’t as immediately gratifying as the zero-sum-game approach, but it builds over time to be far, far better. A rising tide raises all ships, as they say.
I think only fear is powerful enough to drive the ball over the crest of the roof to the side where life is a zero-sum game. I think only love and compassion are strong enough to drive the ball to the in-it-together side of the roof, and both of those are vulnerable and sometimes rare. So, they need to be nourished wherever you find them.
I can’t tell you how to change someone’s mind who is convinced life is a zero-sum game. But, you can love them anyway. Otherwise, they’ve convinced you that it is.