Authoritarians and Politics

[Adam Strange]

Strange, I was interested by how people with RWA didn’t seem to much help others. While of course their game played out in average a lot better, my impression from your post was that they worked together due to self-interest rather than much altruistic motivation.

I feel that “self-interested” is a relatively low bar to set, even if the alternative is active aggression. In politics we need a little better than that. The Obamas and Clintons of the world have been fucking normal people over too (and if you don’t agree, lemme know and I’ll duke it out with you), and even if it isn’t quite as bad as when a Bush starts a war in the Middle East, they don’t have to be the alternative.

Freelance, the real world is more complicated than the Global Change game, and isn’t cleanly separated into Authoritarian and non-Authoritarian ranks of nearly-equal class status college students. In the real world, people of different economic classes war with each other, and can form mutually self-interested groups across political and national boundaries.

The politicians in the US all represent the ruling class, and as such, have been screwing the middle class pretty consistently ever since the oil-and extraction industry-funded Republicans destroyed the unions, which were where the Democrats got most of their campaign money. Now, the Democrats get their money from the parasitic Finance industry, and the Middle class is left without any say in the economy at all. The economic decline of the Middle class is a direct consequence of this.

But Altemeyer’s essay does illustrate the fact that Authoritarians will destroy the planet in the interest of their group. I’m absolutely certain that this kind of behavior has been selected for by evolution as being advantageous in certain situations, but those situations didn’t take into account the ability to end life on this planet.

I wonder if this is why we don’t see any other civilizations in the galaxy? They have all hit this Great Filter.