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Stardate 20011022.1614 (Crew, this is the Captain): Netiquette be damned. The email exchange I just had is too priceless to ignore, since it is an absolutely perfect example of the kind of reasoning (sic) coming from the Postmodern Left. In response to my essay on why pacifism cannot work, I received the following email:

You wrote:

OK, let's imagine it. You have a world where no-one is ever violent. Everyone lives in harmony with their neighbors, no-one lifts a hand in anger. Love prevails.

What's wrong with this picture?

Your well deserved answer:
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"If men had been forbidden to make porridge of Camel's dung, they would have done it, saying that they would not have been forbidden to it unless there had been some good in it."
         --Muhamammad

I'm darned if I can even understand the point of that quote, but that's as may be; must be my narrow Western mind. The subject on the letter was "Do you really hate peace?" That was confusing, because no-where in that essay did I say anything of the kind. It was not a condemnation of the idea of universal peace, rather it was an analysis of it using Game Theory, demonstrating that it was fragile and would fall apart eventually. I responded as follows:

I believe you misunderstood me.

I don't hate peace. I think that idealistic image would be a very nice place to live.

I just don't think it is possible. Irrespective of its morality and its desirability, it fails on a strict analysis by game theory. It doesn't matter how nice it would be; it would fall apart.

It's a marble balanced on the tip of a needle; a breath of air will disturb it and it will fall into the abyss.

Let's posit that the "everyone at peace, no-one is ever violent" image is a good one. I don't think we disagree about that. The question I have for you is how it would be maintained in the face of any one man who refused to be that way and got violent anyway.

Or two men, or a thousand, or a million, or an entire nation.

Here is the response from my correspondent:

It's an Anthropocentric folly that you believe in. Before YOUR western mind of greed and conquer destroyed the world's unique cultures---> there were plenty of cultural examples of how one could cooperatively maintain societies free from violence or harm from one another.

The disease of violence, the disease to raid and conquer other tribes, the disease that ostracizes and imprisons instead of loves----> it has only been around for six or seven thousands years. Of course your anthropocentrism is in such advance stages of this disease that I'm willing to bet that your going to now try and tell me that it can't be "proven."

I'm not going to waste my time proving anything to you. I know the traditions of the people of the indigenous people of North America as well as Tibet and the Amazon---> I know the lineage of successful peaceful tribes free from sociopaths, free from self-destructive neurotics.

Go ahead and drown in your own narrow view, if your way of life was worth saving you would of shown you had an open mind towards peace along time ago. May your limitations be released and freed from you before your next incarnation. :)

Is this what passes for reasoned discussion now on the left? Truly they will fail in the marketplace of ideas. For one thing, the idea that any tribe has ever lived completely free of violence is romantic nostalgia, based on the now discredited cult of the "noble savage". But even if some groups were capable of doing so, creating a world peace would require that everyone do so, all six billion of us. Even one person refusing to play makes the whole system collapse.

Oddly enough, he proves my case. Even if the peaceful cultures he posits did exist in America or in the Amazon, they were indeed conquered by warlike cultures from elsewhere. Even if at one time every culture was peaceful, a warlike culture did eventually appear one place, and that spread to consume the world. That was precisely my point: in the competition between peaceful and warlike cultures, the warlike cultures will win and will annihilate the peaceful ones. As long as any warlike culture exists, peaceful cultures cannot survive. And yet he never seems to realize the inherent contradiction of his position. He demonstrates that the transition from peace to war that I described actually did happen, within his worldview.

Note the accusation of "anthropocentrism" and his mention of "YOUR western mind"; he's not saying that my analysis based on game theory is wrong, he's saying that it's not universally applicable; it's local. While my argument was not rigorously presented (though I thought I made a convincing case), game theory is in fact a branch of mathematics, and the Prisoner's Dilemma, on which I base my analysis, has been amply explored and long since validated, as has the "Tragedy of the Commons" (which is a derivative of the Prisoner's Dilemma). There's every reason to believe that these things are universal. Von Neumann's proposal of the Prisoner's Dilemma was as important an advance in Economics as Russell's Paradox was to Set Theory, or Arrow's Theory was to Politic