GoT and the democracy of selfish stories
Yes, GoT = Game of Thrones. Have you ever wondered what exactly you vote for when you (hopefully) exercise your democratic right and duty ?
In our modern world, an obvious pragmatic answer is “a political party”. But that is very vague. What is it, exactly, about that party that makes you vote for it ?
Perhaps the ideas / ideologies that stand behind that party ? That would be a nice theory, however it has been known since decades that most people not only don’t vote ideologies, but a vast majority of them can’t even reliably assign the core political ideas to the different parties involved in elections [1].
Alright, then maybe you vote for the people, the faces of those parties ? Certainly there must be some truth to this. It is well known that the charisma of politicians play a crucial role in the election. People vote for politicians they like — something that has become very concrete and quantifiable as a feature on most social networks. But do you really vote for these people as they are in person ? The truth is, you don’t really know them or what they are up to. You only ever know a partial view of those people and parties. This brings me to the central point of this post:
What you essentially vote for is a selfish story. Let me explain with a bit of “Game of Thrones”.
In one of the last scenes, not only do we see an election, but Tyrion Lannister makes an explicit reference to the power of stories: it is because he is the keeper of all the world’s stories that Brandon Stark should be King in Westeros. That is what unite people, says Tyrion: stories. His meta-story is convincing and it does unite people into electing Bran the Broken, First of His Name, blablabla. Well, there was not much competition anyways.
But what do we actually know about Bran ? The winning story is that he’s an know-it-all three-eyed raven just perfect to rule as a King — an idea that is strikingly similar to some people suggesting that Artificial Intelligence would be better than human governments. But a competing story would be that he’s turned into a cold-hearted b*tch that seems to have zero empathy towards everyone around him and would not hesitate to sacrifice them if the logical circumstances required. Is the seemingly empathy-free Bran good as a ruler ? This is debateable at best. Still, everyone votes for the first version. Why ? Because it is winning in the selfish story space of GoT.
I talk extensively about selfish stories here [2], but the basic idea applied to democracy and the electoral system goes like this: parties are telling stories about themselves, their political ideas and program and, of course, their people. They spread these through media and — be not mistaken — measure and optimize their virality. In the end, what matters is how many people believe these stories. That’s it.
As I’ve noted in [2], selfish stories spreading is only loosely related to “truth”, or verifiable facts. That can be called “epimemetics”, in analogy to the way genes of a living organism express (or not) depending on environmental factors, which is called epigenetics. For stories, facts are an environmental factor. Nothing more. There is no such thing as “the most factual story wins”.
Want an example ? Let’s look at Brexit. The story of Brexiteers has been “we’d be better off out of EU”. Most claims of that story have been proven factually wrong or, in the best case, highly debateable. But, to paraphrase the prosecutor played by Jamie Foxx in “Law abiding citizen”, “it’s not what you know, it’s what you can succesfully sell as a story” (the original was “it’s what you can prove in a court of law”, which is not so much different, really). Selfish stories only care as much about the facts.
Or Donald Trump. Arguably every second thing he says is laughably idiotic. But it does not matter: the story of the anti-establishment Donald Trump “making America great again” is more selfish than the competing stories, so it wins at the moment. That’s how virality works.
Sometimes viral story do get blown away by — you wanted to say “facts” ? No, by other stories. In Austria, the head of the far-right party (FPÖ) has ever since built a story around himself and his party of “defending Austria” and being incorruptible. That story was torn to pieces last week. In a video that has been setup especially for the purpose, H.C. Strache can be heard negotiating influence and state contracts to a Russian offering dubious money. We don’t know all the facts, but the new story is the precise opposite of the old one and had a devastating effect. But — guess what ? — even after that many of his former voters still keep to the old story, arguing that he is a victim and relativizing all facts to support the old story: the very definition of a selfish story.
As I argue in [2], we can’t hope to ever have stories that are 100% factual because stories are selfish. All we can probably ever hope for, with the help of tools like facts-checking AI, is to make those stories win that are in the best interest of humanity.
Electoral stories are one of the most impactful and selfish ones (next to religious stories that I discuss here [3]) . So next time you vote, make sure you fact-check the selfish story you vote for.
If you want to change something about the world, you need to start by changing the story about that something. But that is a story for another time.
[1] https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~hoganr/Soc%20312/The%20nature%20of%20belief%20systems%20in%20mass%20publics%201964.pdf
[2] https://medium.com/@liviucoconu/the-selfish-story-1-dbe1fb5aebb1