Gaming the System

tinyurl.com/gaming0system

I have been thinking about examples of “gaming the system” — twisting it from general benefit to personal profit at general cost — I’ve seen either on large, very public scales, or in smaller, less publicized contexts (in the late 1970s and the 1980s I saw it being used to change social groups away from mutual-benefit to self-aggrandizement for some at the cost of abusing others, enough times to make the pattern clear — like hornets persuading honeybees they belonged in the hive, long enough to consume it); and about a sort of “system analysis” to anticipate what sorts of systems are more or less likely to BE so gamed… as Frédéric Bastiat so pithily commented in his 1850 pamphlet “The Law”:

See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals. If such a law — which may be an isolated case — is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system. … In fact, this has already occurred.

One of the longer-term worst cases I’ve seen is vulture capitalism, whose core concept was apparently taught senior-to-junior by students of Harvard Business School starting last century: join companies, get an influential position [that HBS MBA helps!], loot it, and take a golden parachute away. Some formed entire companies to take control of other businesses and loot them more efficiently; Bain Capital (led by Mitt Romney, who’d taken the joint JD/MBA program at Harvard Law and Business Schools) is one exemplar. (I pause to think of the SF film John Carter, with the roving city of Zodanga looting other cities, gradually killing off Barsoom.) The barbarians are inside the gates, but no shots are being fired, because no-one thinks of it as a war: it’s called “business as usual”. Honeybees now seem more likely to recognize and repel hornets which invade their hives; so many of the bees that could be fooled have already died, their young become hornet-food.

In this light, the Trump-led but lawyer-advised effort to change the 2020 election result by process tricks, like fake electors and having the VP send state results back to red legislatures (which the J6 insurrection was intended to push by intimidation), should be seen as another example of “gaming the system”, using some of its provisions *against* its own overall purpose of letting the people choose their leaders. The 2016 election’s manipulation by Russia, to change the Electoral-College outcome, was yet another such example. We can think back further, to 2000’s Florida debacle and the Bush v. Gore decision; the 1980 October Surprise; Nixon’s 1968 deal with South Vietnam to withdraw from the Paris Peace Accords and discredit LBJ, extending the war at the cost of millions of lives. Zodanga would approve.

I’ve long since lost any tolerance I might have had for system-gaming. We can write computer software to resist backdoor attacks, worms, and viruses — we should write our social, business, & governmental rules and laws with similar care against malevolent manipulations.