Always Go To the Funeral
August 23, 2017·4 comments
American politics has shifted from a game where both sides could cooperate toward shared goals to one where every issue becomes zero-sum conflict. But this transformation wasn't driven by genuine public passion emerging organically. It was engineered through narrative construction, converting issues nobody cared about into political imperatives overnight. Once this shift happens, politicians and citizens lose the ability to step outside the game they've been forced to play.
• A non-issue became politically mandatory overnight. Confederate statues had near-zero public salience until framed as something being taken away. Once narratives shifted, politicians couldn't stay neutral without appearing to capitulate to perceived enemies.
• Neither party wants the role assigned to them. The game shifted from cooperation to pure competition, and in competition, staying neutral gets you destroyed. Politicians are strutting and fretting in a script written by political entrepreneurs, not their constituents.
• This strategy predates modern politics by centuries. Richard Nixon did it with the Silent Majority in 1968. But today's version scales differently because the technology is more effective and the entrepreneurs don't want to preserve the system but to reboot it entirely.
• Once a cooperation game becomes a competition game, it never reverts. You can't uninvent mustard gas in trench warfare. The Stag Hunt equilibrium—the stable cooperative state—is permanently dead. Both parties are now locked in a dynamic they didn't choose and can't escape.
• Both parties are showing the posture of dying animals. The real question isn't survival. It's whether we can design a competing operating system before the reboot happens, and who you want standing with you in the meantime.
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