Death by Algorithm

All that being said about upholding the sanctity of the historical narrative, let’s pull a direct example from history and use it to prove my point about politics.

The Cold War crises which almost brought nuclear annihilation to us all and the means by which they were averted are offered by progressive thinkers as examples of free men rejecting authority to do what’s right. They broke the programming and saved us all.

Reactionaries tend to avoid the topic entirely. After all, hierarchy is good, but it was the military hierarchy that almost pushed the button. This is not the hill to die on.

But who wrote the programming? It wasn’t military doctrine that called for the blockades, or funded the construction and tearing down of missile batteries. No General dropped a dossier titled “Operation MAD” on the Commander in Chief’s desk.

In the field of international relations, the whole idea is to pick a small set of premises, assume that they are inherently true all the time, and build a framework from them to describe how sovereignties behave toward each other. Nearly all of these frameworks, especially the ones which have been widely adopted and embodied in political institutions domestic and abroad, presuppose “rational actors.” In this context, rationality entails doing what’s in an entity’s best self-interest using what information that entity has on hand. 

The wise IR theorist qualifies the premise somehow, admitting that not all actors will act rationally all the time. But he rarely ventures as to why or how--after all, irrationality is scary and never good, and to make such claims, he would need evidence because this is a social science, and he knows for every example he presents, there would be a counterexample because we’re talking about irrationality here. Consequently, IR theory has had near-zero predictive power since its inception.

At its heart, international relations theory is an attempt to algorithmically optimize anarchy. Since no sovereignty is willing to really, truly, submit to a higher power all of the time (thus relinquishing sovereignty), the frameworks provide ways for each state to not act against its best interest in its behavior toward one another: Communication, cooperation, and conflict resolution. Increase the quality of the inputs, set in place the right internal processes, and maximize the quality of the outputs. Supposedly, if all sovereignties utilized the means, followed the algorithm, and quit acting out all the time, we would arrive at the best form of world anarchy.

In the midst of the Cold War, Henry Kissinger or some other IR guy noted that rational actors almost blew us all up. I think we’re missing a step here. The US and USSR were not just competing superpowers on the world stage. They were two separate groups of people, and they were in formal, political opposition, sure. But more importantly, they hated each other’s guts. The USSR was a bunch of domino-toppling, freedom-hating commies, and the US was a bunch of decadent, imperialist, capitalist pigs, we were all bootlickers bending to the whim of our superiors, and we wanted each other to burn in nuclear hellfire for eternity if it’s the last thing we do. 

A deafening choir of zealous cries for death and destruction of the other before they get us please for the love of God drop the bombs was one of the inputs into the algorithm, took shape in the state’s utility function, and the algorithm optimized between that and self-preservation. So our rational actors were handed that whole mess and asked what to do with it. If the two groups hated each other a little less, I think they could’ve worked something out. That’s basically what ended up happening anyway; the Cold War kinda just...got old, right?

What you see in the aversion of crisis during the Cold War was a series of chance encounters with absolute sovereignty--Cincinnatus taking a brief stroll from his homestead. These men didn’t just reject authority. They placed themselves above authority, and their word became the state’s command. Even the simplest failure to report an anomalous blip on the radar screen, the momentary hesitation to send word up the chain of command, was the intentional use of absolute political power, as they had assurance by the structures surrounding them of what would happen if they cooperated. To defect was to take on total responsibility of what would occur by subverting the systems in place set forth by the amalgam of political power around him.

What if, instead, states acted better than rationally? What if they acted...prudently? What if there was a way to embody the good qualities of human nature in government rather than opting to abide by the algorithm?

Well, one way is to literally embody human nature in government. We put a free-thinking man, prudent and wise, in charge of the state all the time. He is above the authority of the institutions and behavioral frameworks of the state by definition. Well-accustomed to the charge, he could keep things running smoothly and use his goodwill to avert crises in whatever form they may come. If he doesn’t? Then someone else will take the matter into their own hands like they did and still do all the time and we just pretend like they’re not doing that. Centralize the state’s good graces so we can see they’re there and trust in them.

Two kingdoms stand opposed in a deadlock of mutually assured destruction. Neither king pushes the button because that’s a terrible idea, what kind of monster would do such a thing?