South Park political philosophy – sailing left by sailing right

South Park political philosophy – sailing left by sailing right:

Conceptualize a population of gambling investors in a virtual nation run by moral philosophers with scruples like the South Park kids. The first 1000 gamers to show an interest are allowed to acquire virtual citizenship by having traded $1000 in actual dollars with a casino caretaker (The Coon) for $1000 worth of investment chips (Uncle Game dollars) in a virtual national bank/securities dealer (South Fed), which owns 1000 shares of virtual stock (Uncle Game bonds) in each of 1000 paper corporations, each share being initially and arbitrarily valued at $1.00.

Each time a gamer manages to buy or trade for a majority interest in a stock, he receives a premium dividend credit. Every citizen-gamer begins under the same system of thorough surveillance. No gamer is allowed to see surveillance film, but is availed with robot-supplied, matrix interpretations of the surveillance. Every citizen is availed an identical, robotic, investment adviser (I-bot), whereby everyone receives the same perfect advice at the same time. Excepting intervals for placing of puts and bets, all I-bots have the complete history for every gamer’s virtual balances and stock investments.

SYMMETRICALLY EQUAL AND INTERCONNECTED OPPORTUNITY: Each put for each offer to trade or buy Uncle Game dollars or virtual stock is required to be made in increments that are blind to all other citizens and robots. Once offers are placed, all see all at once, and trading among participants commences for that round on the order of first come, first served. (Like a stock exchange with incremental huddles.) Unknown to the robots and players is the psychological profile of any of the gamers.

Initially, every I-bot may avail its human master the same perfect analysis. In consequence, the initial recommendation availed to each master will entail a dilemma not altogether unlike that confronted by Buridan’s ass. That is, unless forced by some randomizing program, no I-bot will be able, by deploying bivalent logic, to avail a recommendation. Only after symmetry is forcibly broken, and after the first round of trades (bets, losses, and wins), would a non-forced I-bot avail a “voluntary” recommendation based purely in bivalent logic (at expense of ignoring data not fitted to its model). Even then, each I-bot would have recursive access to every other I-bot’s information and logic. That is, it would “know” that any recommendation it makes for taking advantage of any change in conditions will be the same as the recommendation availed by every other I-bot. Insofar as no I-bot has reason to presume its master will fail to follow recommendations, none will fashion a recommendation that attempts other than a strategy for staying even with the game.

To help avoid recursiveness, all network connected I-bots may avail an array of mathematically based recommendations, in descending order of priority. As their masters begin to show signs of personality predilections (or tells), each I-bot will have been programmed to make adjustments accordingly, to try to help its master at least to stay even. Every other I-bot connected to the network will know the recommendations each is making, but will not know whether any recommendation was accepted until all bets for a round are placed.

ADVENTURE TO INDEPENDENCE: At some point, the game should be taken to a SECOND level. Each I-bot should be partially disconnected from the network, so it will not know all that the other I-bots know. In compensation, commensurate with each recommendation, each I-bot will be allowed to “advise and learn” from its master the total amount its master wants to bet on each round. Surveillance among I-bots will remain in place, except to the point of surveilling the amounts of all masters’ offers or puts until after they are placed.

Now the game will have become much more like poker: Information regarding tells, facial tics, personality predilections, false tells, false-false tells, and so on, will be collected. However, such information will be collected by the I-bots, not directly by their human masters (who will remain separated behind opaque walls). This kind of collection of information is not perfectly amenable to bivalent modeling or communication. Even if the I-bots are somehow programmed with capacity to “learn,” they will be limited by necessary incompleteness in their initial models and frames of logical analysis. Their masters’ experiences and skills for many-sided logic and intuitive (gut) analysis will loom larger as factors, even though the masters will only have access to non-camera data that is imperfectly translated and presented by their I-bots.

ADVANTAGE TO GANGSTERS: Eventually, the game is taken to a THIRD level, such that all surveillance is shared among I-bots and masters, except during intervals of actual putting of bets. Some masters (The Coon?) will have force of personality that will be more suitably advantageous for the game. For them, recommendations of robots will be relegated to a more minor role. Feedback will tend eventually to reward the most skilled at projecting a many sided kind of logic. Eventually, those are the masters who will become the oligarchs. Eventually, they will learn to gang up with other oligarchs, by deploying a meta language of signals, which may even be hidden in the character of their bets. This is when the game goes to the dark side, when brutish propensity to gangsterism trumps merit.

Depending on fluxs in the oligarchic balance of power, signals will eventually lead to deliberately false signals, even to false-false signals. This will lead to devious forms of clique-language consultations among masters and I-bots, leading to program adjustments and meta programming, to assist in evaluating the quality and trustworthiness of signals. Eventually, losing non-oligarchs will be reduced to placeholding peons, useful to convey messages (indirect, positive, negative, exploratory) to other powers still of significance in the game.

If all peons die out, challenge and meaning for the dominant players will fade. This will lead to oligarchs lending encouragement to peons, to game on. At some point, peons (Mysterium?) will sense this state of affairs. What will or should they do? Short of blowing up the game, is there any avenue for peons to restore dignity within the game?

Well, any serious efforts among the peons to organize will soon be co-opted. Oligarchs will pose as concerned do-gooders, even to volunteer to fund unionizing organizers. They will advise peons to watch for rallying signals. They will negotiate to change fundamentals for the game. They will facilitate communications among peons, so communications will proceed along paths that can be controlled by oligarchs. They will compromise those peons who are corrupt, ignorant, and needy, and teach them how to fool their own consciences. They will call for a convention, to establish a new order of rules, to bring all masters' representatives together in a face to face forum of faux transparence. However, the communication will be monopolized to avail transparency mainly along the line of an unholy axis among competing oligarchs (Progs). That is, communication will be facilitated along a line that erases most boundaries for peons, but not for oligarchs. Thus, competing oligarchs will remain united in axis for preserving control over peons. Within the faux-transparent forum, there will be established various front groups, such as Newsweak, Npr-nyuk, Media Nutters, Apollo Axis, MoveDammit.org, A-CLUe, Acrum, Hollybrain, Ivy-school, and Fedup.

FALL TO SOCIOPATHY: Now take the game to a FOURTH level. Keeping the game going depends on a population pyramid for passing bad debts onto the next generation of citizens. This expanding of the citizenry stimulates new “production.” It depends on rewriting rules for recruiting new immigrants, which depends on a convention and board of governors, who want to be paid, and who are easiest paid by oligarchs, on whom the board is most dependent.

So how is the board to be paid? Well, with real money, taxed against real investments, as trusted by the bank outside the game (Meta Bank) for the gaming under the virtual national bank (South Fed). How are real distributions to be apportioned, based on virtual winnings in the game? Well, by allowing gamers to invest in Uncle Game bonds and decreeing the bonds to be worth one proportionate unit against South Fed dollars and another proportionate unit against Meta Bank dollars. Thus, who controls the board controls the proportionate valuation of the real money. What began as a game entailing mutual trust and rules morphed into a game of rule making agents of a spider matrix.

To encourage peons to continue to do bidding, oligarchs (neo conquistadores) have sailed left by sailing right. How, now, do the mass of players restore the game to one of rules? Once power becomes too disproportionate, how does a system remain one of rules as opposed to one of privileged rule makers?

REDEMPTION: The wild card is this: The peons are not that stupid. They are on to the game. Using many-sided logic, they have intuited the meta-goals and programming of the Dark Garchs. Now, all the peons have to do is to idealize and implement a transforming, proportionate, revitalization of the allocation of wealth and influence among the general population of participants in the game. That is, a revitalization that will invigorate those (Kyle and Stan?) who wish to strive towards middle class dignity and independence, not to reward indolence. That is, a conservative reset to restore middle earth values of responsibility, opportunity, merit, work, initiative, freedom, and dignity.

Otherwise, the peons (lower and middle) should simply move to a new virtual table and begin their own game, anew. Problems for the middle class: How to get the lower class to look beyond entreaties of its corrupt, ignorant, and indolent; how to inspire the better angels of all; how to transform idealization into mass. Decent respecters of middle class values, unite!

DAMNATION: Alternatively, one I-bot will be fitted with a superior program that will turn it into a cyborg, fitted with a Soros mask, whereupon, except as kabuki theater, it will terminate the stock market by rendering all competitors impotent and devoid of merit in the face of its analysis. Having no reason to distinguish them in merit, all others (save its prophet, The Coon) will be reduced to peons to serve the New Entity, which will jump the virtual casino, inhale Soros’ soul, and rule the N.W.O.