Game Changers

My teenage grandson, looking at international issues, comments, “Everywhere you look, there’s a problem.”  That’s true, and we tend to see them just that way, as a multitude of messes, too much some days to even think about.  But let’s look at them another way.  Let me posit two groups, side by side, each historically convinced it has a culture superior to its neighbor’s, one prosperous while the other struggles, the struggling one seeking, sometimes violently, to share the prosperity of the richer, the richer disdaining the other’s economic and perceived cultural failures.  That could describe the Germany/Greece, or Arab/Israeli, or Latin America/U.S., or a myriad other neighbor relations around the world, or, increasingly, a world divided between a prosperous “North” and an emerging “South”.  The trouble spots have a common thread to them that we have a hard time admitting.  What do you do about the poor who are always with you when they live next door?  Many would say that extensive aid is simply “throwing good money after bad.”  It's better to battle for territory or resouces every step of the way.  Winning is what counts.  Yet the losers, the aggrieved poor, people or nations, in our globally linked, high-tech world, replete with destructive capabilities, are more and more capable of dragging the world down with them to share their misery.

There will of course always be the poor, individuals and nations, just as there will always be the selfish, con artists and corporations and other nations, who exploit them.  The situation as presented seems to have no solution.  It constitutes what game theorists and strategic planners call a “zero sum” game.  In such games (like chess or horse racing or football) a win for one side is always balanced by a loss for the other.  Foreign policy analysts are fond of describing power relationship dynamics between nations as “a chess game.”  Such zero-sum games, chess for example, typically begin on an orderly field or playing board and proceed through slaughter until only one side, itself badly mauled, remains, and the field is a total mess.  Thus, they constitute a process of sub optimization.  Each participant winds up with less than they had or could have had at the beginning, and the consolation is that the other party is worse off than they.  That describes much of our world today.

But there are other games.  One of my favorites is a jigsaw puzzle.  There, the total mess is at the beginning, and the object is to put the pieces together in a way that produces a coherent and beautiful result.  At the beginning, unless someone has sneaked a peek at the box cover, no one knows the final result, and what the intermediate steps will require.  The more complex the puzzle, the more participants are welcome, each putting together what they can, and the result is a picture satisfying to all.  The result is optimal for all.  That is the world as it could be.

What is required is the vision to see the situation in terms of larger projects in which the parties can cooperatively work toward solution.  I love the metaphor imbedded in the beginning jigsaw puzzle American toddlers play with, where they learn geography by putting together the pieces shaped as individual states into a picture of the whole U.S.  The reason the U.S. works as well as it does is because each state recognizes that it is not complete in itself, and must rely on the cooperation of other states.  That did not come easily; a civil war took place in the middle of the process.  But the result is greater than the sum of the parts.  Germany and Greece have a start toward the solution to their issues by having the vision to recognize the need to construct jointly a more viable EU.  Other trouble spots can share their own common vision.

The world contains many needed mega-projects these days, from climate change management, to modernization of the Middle East, to creation of a global solar power grid, to management of global food supplies, and on and on.  We need to begin organizing them in ways that invite the cooperative participation of parties currently in conflict.  Initially, they will be small, and riddled with conflict.  But the end result can become a beautiful world that fits together; the alternative is a field littered with the dead.