the Pale Child and the zero-sum game

A response to Roger’s Bacon

Roger’s Bacon

wrote Behold the Pale Child, reviewing George R.R.Martin’s story And Seven Times Seven Never Kill Man and the fictitious cult of Bakkalon, the titular Pale Child, the god of xenophobia who commands his followers to obliterate all rival civilizations and colonize everything, which gives them an objective advantage from a purely pragmatic survival viewpoint¹.

He goes onto argue that unless stopped, zero-sum competition will lead every surviving society to such cultural norms, simply because they’re effective and therefore any society without them will be outcompeted.

See also, David Wong’s worries that our Collective Idea Of Happiness Is Just Wrong.

If you hear somebody lamenting that society is descending into "degeneracy," you now know what an asshole sounds like. To that guy, everything that doesn't fit into his specific tastes and values, from furries to vegans, is a sign that civilization is in decline. How fortunate for him that the behaviors that make civilization work happen to align perfectly with his own personal preferences.

But while I'm disagreeing with his specific examples, behind them is the unspoken question that keeps me up at night: What if the things that make individuals happy, and the things that help a culture survive long-term, are not the same things?

This was the undercurrent of the Red Scare ("What if the Soviet method of crushing dissent and restricting economic choice is just more efficient in the long run?"), the War on Terror ("What if religious zealotry is more powerful than secular indifference?") and our fear of a rising China ("At the outset of COVID they just physically locked citizens in their homes by force and it totally worked!").

What if it turns out that oppressive traditions like arranged marriages, blind patriotism, and blasphemy laws actually give a culture an advantage over an enemy that has abandoned them? What if all of the morals we value most today -- freedom to choose your fate, to follow your dreams, to fall in love -- are, in fact, the product of Disney screenwriters, feel-good junk food crafted to sell merchandise? What if we really have, as a culture, grown soft? I can't prove otherwise. Can you?

And to be clear, I'm not pointing the finger at anyone but myself here. I don't have children, even though I have a yard, a spare bedroom, and a penis that almost works too well. Shouldn't I be forced to raise at least two replacement kids and train them in some high-value task? Shit, am I even doing a high-value task? I make a good living writing escapist novels with increasingly stupid titles. Isn't that a frivolous inefficiency in the system? Shouldn't somebody be forcing me to write patriotic propaganda or cautionary tales about climate change?

I spent thousands of dollars on vet bills when my dog got cancer; would that be allowed in a perfectly just and efficient society? In fact, should people capable of treating cancer even be allowed to waste their talents on dogs?

It's entirely possible that a century from now, the dominant superpower will look back at our movies and TV shows and cringe just as hard as we do when watching racist old cartoons. "Look how they gave food and shelter to the unemployed artists, instead of simply exterminating them and freeing up resources for military conquest!" Maybe everything I'm doing, from this article to my stupid book to paying for doggie daycare, is just one more example of the shameful excess made possible by a wayward and doomed society.

Not necessarily saying this is wrong unfortunately, just that Bakkalon’s theology is a bad example.

The cult of Bakkalon originates with an alien invasion and humanity militarizing in defense against it, in accordance with Dark Forest Theory, dressed up in religious arguments claiming justification².

We’re probably not in a Dark Forest, for two reasons:

1. For the past 2.33 billion years, earth’s atmosphere has been full of oxygen, clearly visible to any alien spectroscopy. This is an obvious sign something’s going on here, since without continual active replenishment it’d have reacted out of the atmosphere. Nevertheless, despite our location being marked³, nobody’s killed us.

2. We see no evidence of anyone else’s presence. The stars are silent of alien radio transmissions, there are no signs of megastructures, the solar system wasn't colonized by aliens or their von neumann spaceprobes millennia before humanity evolved, etc. The Great Filter looks to either be civilizations never evolving or going extinct of their own accord before they can colonize the galaxy, not some external threat killing them.

Our Great Existential Threats have more to do with Peak Resources and homegrown competitor species than aliens.

So a much more likely dystopian theology would be the Turingists from /tg/’s Raiders & Radon.

Basic Turingist premise, deconstruction of post-apocalyptic machine-cults and

John Michael Greer

and

Ahnaf Ibn Qais

-brand DOOM. In that they’re living in a post-peak-resources world such as those two envision, they know there’s no hope for improvement as those two envision and they hate it and blame us for it.

They're a post-apocalyptic christianity spinoff in the Canticle for Liebowitz style, if their sacred documents were a bunch of fifties space science concepts instead of a shopping list, who ended up believing that the pre-apocalyptic world was Eden⁴ and Original Sin was when we, who had a paradisaical living standard compared to them, ate all our seed corn by wasting all the resources that would’ve been required to keep getting more resources⁵.

Ignition by alexandreev

Think the smug civilization-hating smarm of Claire North's Notes from the Burning Age and Sandra McDonald’s Fleet only instead of being upset with the modern world's society for being unsustainable and polluting, they're upset with us for not taking measures to keep it running so they could've lived in it.

"Obviously, the rationalists will lose. The Barbarians believe in an afterlife where they'll be rewarded for courage; so they'll throw themselves into battle without hesitation or remorse. Thanks to their affective death spirals around their Cause and Great Leader Bob, their warriors will obey orders, and their citizens at home will produce enthusiastically and at full capacity for the war; anyone caught skimming or holding back will be burned at the stake in accordance with Barbarian tradition. They'll believe in each other's goodness and hate the enemy more strongly than any sane person would, binding themselves into a tight group. Meanwhile, the rationalists will realize that there's no conceivable reward to be had from dying in battle; they'll wish that others would fight, but not want to fight themselves. Even if they can find soldiers, their civilians won't be as cooperative: So long as any one sausage almost certainly doesn't lead to the collapse of the war effort, they'll want to keep that sausage for themselves, and so not contribute as much as they could. No matter how refined, elegant, civilized, productive, and nonviolent their culture was to start with, they won't be able to resist the Barbarian invasion; sane discussion is no match for a frothing lunatic armed with a gun. In the end, the Barbarians will win because they want to fight, they want to hurt the rationalists, they want to conquer and their whole society is united around conquest; they care about that more than any sane person would."

1. -Bayesians vs. Barbarians by Eliezer Yudkowsky

“The birth of a new civilization is the formation of a new morality.” He removed the first safety lock on the H-bomb warheads. “When they look back in the future on everything we’ve done, it may seem entirely normal. So, we won’t go to hell, children.”

2. -Zhang Beihai

A hunter in a dark forest, stalking with bated breath, suddenly notices that a piece of bark has been stripped from a tree in front of him. On the eye-catching bit of white wood that’s been revealed is a position in the forest, written in characters all hunters can recognize. What will he think about that location? He’s certainly not going to imagine that someone has laid out supplies for him there. Out of all the possibilities, the most likely one is that the blaze is informing everyone that there’s live prey at that location that needs to be eliminated. It doesn’t matter what motivated someone to leave the mark. What’s important is that the dead hand has stretched the nerves of the dark forest to the breaking point, and it’s the most sensitive nerve that’s most liable to make a move.
Suppose there are a million hunters in the forest—the number of civilizations on the billions upon billions of stars in the Milky Way could be thousands of times that. Perhaps nine hundred thousand of those will disregard the marking. Of the remaining one hundred thousand, maybe ninety thousand of them will probe the location, and, after confirming that it has no life, disregard it. But one of the remaining ten thousand hunters will surely make a choice to fire on that position, because fore civilizations at a certain level of technological development, attacking may be safer and less of a hassle than probing. If there’s really nothing at that location, then it’s no loss.

3. -The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin

4. Based off its paradisal material richness for everyone compared to post-apocalyptic scavenging and “sustainable” post-peak-oil solarpunk technologies.

5. There's plenty of untapped solar energy for hypothetical powersats and ore/rare earth metals in the asteroid belt to rebuild civilization, but without an existing technological infrastructure itself requiring materials earth long ago ran out of, they'll never be able to acquire it.