less than zero

When speaking about international relations, many have pointed out that it doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, where one team’s loss equals the other’s gain. That in itself is a profound truth, but only tells part of the story, because, in practice, a zero-sum conflict usually adds up to less than zero – sometimes much less – due to “friction”.

Any adversarial interaction is going to involve wasted energy. If two friendly parties sit down and try to find the solution to a problem, ideas will be compared and debated, and an optimum solution, benefiting both parties, will be found – a win-win. If one or both of the parties choose not to be friendly, two things happen: First, since they’re focusing on their own needs, the parties won’t be looking at the big picture, and may overlook a win-win that’s staring them in the face. Second, energy that could have been expended fixing the problem will instead be expended fighting over the problem.

Inventors, scientists, and entrepreneurs have made great strides in minimizing friction – in machines, institutions, and all sorts of human interactions. At the same time, humans haven’t lost their taste for it: we love competitive sports and conflict-filled movies and games; we love to battle against the odds. So there’s the paradox: Friction is what makes life interesting, fun, meaningful; and then, at some point, friction is what turns our life into hell.

Even if we’re not enjoying drama and violence, we tend to accept it as a normal and necessary part of life. Animals fight all the time, so why not us? We rationalize conflict by thinking in terms of “acceptable risk”, justifying energy expended in argument, litigation, or warfare as a “good bet”, because, if we win, the costs will (theoretically) be born by the loser. But in the real world, nothing is that simple: rarely does the winner come away unscathed, and, since some amount of wealth has been completely wasted through friction, the winnings will be diminished. And then there are the long-term costs – bad blood, and, eventually, payback.

The cost of friction is not trivial – in a zero-sum game, it’s often the case that both sides are losers. In warfare, this is painfully obvious, as it is in litigation, where an entire settlement can be eaten up by legal fees. But it’s true all down the line – even a petty family argument can leave both parties exhausted and disappointed.

While inventors make everything from cars to computers more efficient, and entrepreneurs find ways to make every sort of business interaction “frictionless”, in many areas we seem to be making no progress at all. Is it simply because some part of us truly craves and enjoys conflict and friction? Partly so, but I think it’s also because we don’t fully appreciate the cost and wastefulness of it all.

I sometimes dream about how much more pleasant life might be if our resources weren’t so consumed by friction. Imagine, if you will, a world with no armies, jails, locks, passwords – a world where no one would ever try to steal something from someone else. That’s a stretch, isn’t it? Then try to imagine how much energy would be freed – energy that could then be used constructively. We humans would suddenly become quite a bit wealthier.

We are slowly inching in that direction. The worst energy-waster – war – is slowly becoming less prevalent, though there may be a relapse at any moment. Techniques of conflict resolution are becoming more widely known and practiced. People are coming to appreciate the inherent disadvantages of a police state. It’s becoming better understood how social justice and and ethical wealth distribution benefits everybody. But a huge chunk of the world’s GDP is still devoted, one way or another, to conflict.

What might finally waken humanity to a realization of the folly of all this wasted energy? Sadly, bankruptcy. When you’ve all but exhausted your resources, that’s when waste starts looking really foolish.

Imagine, if you will, a world where our enjoyment of conflict is channeled constructively. Into sports, certainly, and into all sorts of healthy competition. If everyone “fights fair”, competition in ideas and activities can result in a net gain for everyone; but when bad faith creeps in, the costs quickly mount, til finally everyone’s losing.

Maybe what’s needed, then, is an appreciation of the difference between healthy competition and toxic aggression, and an acknowledgment that bad faith is never a good thing. Paradoxically, it’s in the arena of sports – a realm of pure competition and aggression – that bad faith is least tolerated. Myriad rules and regulations are strictly enforced, and “good sportsmanship” is universally admired. Meanwhile, in the realms of business, government, and politics, even the idea of regulation is hotly contested, “fairness” generally considered the strategy of losers.

Humans will always be prone to “losing their temper”, but this phrase aptly frames hostility as a failing, not a virtue. We can readily forgive someone for “flying off the handle”; we should not so readily forgive politicians and businessmen who cold-bloodedly plot and execute bad faith transgression and conquest. We should recognize such behavior for what it is: a fail – wasteful friction in the machinery of human life, a game plan that yields a sum of less than zero.

It isn’t really a stretch to imagine a world where business and politics exist in the same ethical realm as football. It isn’t even that much of a stretch to understand that we’re all, in fact, on the same team. Go team!

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