I received a text message from
Gene Callahan, my new flatmate during the exam period, telling me that last night he dreamt of gutters. Being that his mind is usually firmly entrenched there, this came as no surprise, but I believe he was making reference to the fact that, this very morning, a builder arrived at our house at 8:30 to clean out a leaky gutter in the back of the house. As for me, his message got me thinking about my own dreams, normally surreal, intangible affairs that elude any attempts of recollection--at least compared to those of Zoe, who seems to remember everything quite clearly. Details of one of my dreams last night have been flooding back to me all day, and upon reflection, I have concluded, sadly, that if I were in an action movie, I would have an important role, but I would not be the fighter pilot who hits the ventilation shaft to destroy the enemy base, the bronze hunk of pectoral muscle that wields a sword to victory against impossible odds, or the detached ex-Marine with a heart of gold and an affinity for Buddhism who wages war on the local Columbian cartel after his woman's honor had been sullied. No, I would be Jeff Goldblum. To be precise, a combination of Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park and Jeff Goldblum of Independence Day, not the Jeff Goldblum that becomes half-fly or the insufferable homosexual ocean explorer Jeff Goldblum of recent Wes Anderson notoriety. And I wouldn't be nebbishly Jewish either.
(I'm the geeky guy behind the dudes who blow up the aliens. I wear glasses. I'm smart!)
So. My dream sequence began in a large gymnasium type place in the middle of some faceless city, where a fanatical Uzi-wielding Frenchman stood in the center of hundreds, even thousands of people lining the walls of the expansive square space.
(This isn't far off the mark)
He was shouting about the illegitimacy of society, how we had to crumble the foundations of civil intercourse, etc. He was clearly an anarchist for the sake of anarchy, which I think is even worse than being an anarcho-communist, but that's an argument for another time.
Few people wanted to move because they saw that he shot at anyone attempting to leave. Some people started ducking out through some of the scattered doors, but most people were far away from the exits and didn't attempt to flee. I was pretty far away, but when his back was turned I sprinted towards daylight, and as I reached the door he spun around and let fly a couple rounds in my direction. I managed to get out unscathed, and a massive exodus of people followed out the door behind me. We ran as fast as we could away from the scene of the carnage and when we were a few hundred meters away, we heard a terrible din behind us: the place had collapsed with hundreds of people in it. Whether or not the demented Gaul was inside or not, we had no idea, but people who were still fleeing approached us with grave faces and looks of terror: there was a new rule of order: the fanatical frog--Crazy Jacques, let us call him--converted the people who were still there to his anarchic ways, a code of conduct formally known as "The Game."
(Not this Game)
"The Game" consisted of trying to determine if the other person you were encountering was on your side, that being the anarchists. Considering the fact that a person could lie to you about which side he was on, and then shoot you when you were not looking, it was best just to shoot the other person regardless of what they did or said. Upon further reflection, the idea of sides in such a type of anarchy for its own sake doesn't really make that much sense, but come on...How many of your dreams are internally consistent? Anyway, we kept running away, and I ended up with a small group of people, sequestered in a hilltop cottage away from the scenes of violence, awaiting the approach of the death squad of players of The Game. While we were in the house, a shrieking wind and roaring thunderstorm swept in out of nowhere, and it was in this atmospheric setting where we, perhaps the only survivors of the carnage, were formulating our survival strategy. Being that I was the narrator of the story and had saved two of the people in the group ( a chest-puffing detail that I neglected to mention because it never really happened) I spoke first.
Rather than talking about fortifications, or secret passwords, or whatever, I began to break down the strategy of "the Game" in game-theoretic terms. I recognized the problem as being similar to the famous
Prisoner's Dilemma: if you have two options--to shoot or not to shoot--if you believe that the other person is going to shoot then your best option is to do him the same favor; but if under the conditions of anarchy you don't think the other man is going to shoot, you are best shooting first and asking questions later. Therefore the dominant strategy--the reasonable thing to do from the point of view of the individual--is to shoot first, a strategy through which society is going to hell in a handbasket. Now, unless humanity is just a bunch of mindless killers, we would probably prefer not having to shoot other people, so while individually it is rational to shoot the other person, collectively it is a poor outcome. Thus, I declared, the intention of the Game was to undermine the confidence of the people in one another which was consonant with what we could glean from the ravings of Crazy Jacques. I won't go into my learned exposition on Hobbes and the relevance of the Second Law of Nature to the formation of a civil society as I did to the crowd of people huddled in the confines of our safehouse, because that would just be showing off (but since I did it in the dream it doesn't count, right?) but I will say that I did find a solution. If we are only dealing with one play games--which would be the case unless we allowed reincarnation or immortality as endogenous variables--the equilibrium point (the "Warre of all against all") would be unstable. Eventually, most or all of the people playing by the rules of the game would die. The death squad would in that case be at worst one single man, whom we could take out with our superior force, or a bunch of immortal murderers, in which case we were screwed. Jason, the Chaotician/Computer programmer/Philosophy student recommended sitting tight until the dumbasses all killed each other or until they learned better, or we were murdered by the impervious imperators. Then we had a party.
In conclusion, while it felt cool to be the nerdy smart guy who figures out how to save the day, I still feel the tug of some primordial urge to be a strapping (and strapped) He-Man, testing my mettle (or metal, or both) against my enemies, and emerging victorious (perhaps with a couple of scalps). For whatever reason, Nash equilibria and Hobbes just don't seem quite as cool as an AK-47.
