Freud was now getting tired, and
also found it hard to steal an hour for the work; so to force himself on, he announced a paper at the Society.
-- Ernest Jones, Freud: Years of
Maturity (1955), p. 352
In my youth, there were a handful of incidents, not
especially dramatic on the face of it (for the children of that time led a largely placid life, in the bosom
of Eisenhower) but of which I was long ashamed, and mentioned to no-one. Yet with the passage of years -- now
decades -- these shrink in perspective, and fade to a uniform sepia hue. They become …. almost picturesque. And I shall share one with you now.
It was the summer of 1963. I was visiting a Norwegian boy who had been my best friend
for a time, while his family lived in our village in New Jersey. In 1963 the father -- a shipping
executive -- was recalled to Norway, and the family moved back
permanently. But before young
Peter (we were both 13 at the time) had quite settled in to his new home -- new
customs, new language -- nor quite said good-bye to his American
interlude, his family invited me
to stay with them over the summer, first at their pleasant home in Oslo, and
later at their even more pleasant fjord-side cottage in Lom. I fear I did nothing for Peter’s
acquisition of the Norwegian language, but it was a fine and memorable shared
summer.
[Cue ominous music]
The scene shifts to the countryside around that fjord. It was dramatically hilly, with
challenging terrain for hikers.
Peter and I were energetically out and about, huffing and puffing a
bit since we were neither of us
normally all that athletic.
And at one point we came to a sort of ledge, or mini-cliff, that simply
defeated our attempts to scale it.
It didn’t look all that
imposing -- no vertical rock-face or anything like that -- and we felt foolish at our impotence
before so apparently paltry an obstacle. Now, I was durned
if we were going to simply retreat with our tails between our legs -- surely,
with a bit more effort, we would be up and over the top. And so … I … (pause) … (the analyst, who had been writing quietly in the
background, is now poised with his pen) …
I, taking my hiking-hat in hand ---------
[… and here I shall take a breather. There simply is not time to
develop all the ideas that are flowering in my head these days, as time’s
winged chariot hastens on, and the Reaper nods knowingly. So I’ll post down-payments, and
finish-up those that excite reader interest. The rest will “remain torsos”, to use a favorite
expression of my teacher Yakov Malkiel.]
... To resume]
-- I … hurled the
hat up over the lip of the ledge.
“Now we’ll have to climb it,”
I said to Pete.
To make a sad story short: we tried mightily, but failed. And withdrew, licking our bruises. For all we know, the hat may lie there still. God willing it served as a refuge for
voles.
As mentioned, this trivial incident long seemed
shameful. Not so much because we
plucky lads were unable to scale the face of Mount Miniature, but because the
loss of the hat seemed so foolhardy.
Yet now, it would appear, I am in good company. For in an excellent essay in this week’s
New Yorker, James Surowiecki (the spelling of whose surname can serve as
a sobriety test) reports a burgeoning new trend: pre-commitment. Not a very catchy name, but the idea
is: You commit to doing something
(losing weight or whatever), and add some backbone to your spineless will by offering a hostage to fortune: Should you fail, sanctions will
automatically kick in, at the hand of your referee or sponsor.
(By a happy coincidence, The World of Dr Justice runs just such a public service. Now, y’all need to lose five pounds by
next month, y’hear? If you
fall short, send me a hundred dollars.)
Now, the logic of the thing requires that the sanction be
neither too trivial nor too grave.
Sure, I could have motivated us even more by locking one end of a long
chain to my ankle, and the other to a ticking bomb (defusible by hand), and
tossed the bomb up instead of the hat. But we still would not have been able to scramble up.
This game-of-Chicken-style logic was classically captured by
Stanley Kubrick in “Dr Strangelove”. The Soviet Union has created a “Doomsday machine”,
which could not be defused, and would automatically blow up the planet if triggered by a nuclear attack of
anyone on anyone else; it is still
a secret. Complications (as
you might imagine) ensue. A rogue
element in the U.S. (an increasingly prevalent domestic species) launches such
a strike. The U.S. President
plaintively admonishes his Soviet counterpart: The whole point of such a device is that knowledge of its
existence be made public. “We had
wanted to unveil it at the next May Day,” the Soviet leader miserably explains.
Surow… rowo…. (heck, it’s late; you know whom I mean) points out that Congress has recently
embarked upon a similar pre-commitment:
the fiscal cliff. If, by midnight on the last day of this year, Congress has
not come up with so&so much savings in (carefully considered) budget cuts,
then sequestration kicks in with the
new year: automatic massive cuts
across the board, without regard to which make sense. Now, true, I tossed an old hiking-hat irretrievably up
a cliff; but Congress is about to
dump a trillion dollars over one.
The author further (for he is a connoisseur of social logic)
observes that most House Republicans had already made a pre-commitment -- never
to raise taxes -- that clashes with the broader pre-commitment to balance the
budget. In short, folks,
we’re f*cked.
~
There’s a strategic, game-theoretical perspective to be
taken on this thing.
Right now, the Dems and the Republicans are playing chicken
with respect to the fiscal cliff.
And in any game of chicken, whoever is perceived as most reckless, most
careless of consequences, wins.
Now, certain character-traits make the freshmen Republican
Congressman absolutely unbeatable at that game: they’re fanatics; they’re bonkers. Very scary guys to drive towards head-on in your little
deuce coupe out on the county-line road.
Their strategy (if we can dignify that stance as a strategy) might be
dubbed
The Samson Gambit
“Fiat avaritia et ruat
respublica”
 |
| Republican freshmen, fine-tuning their fiscal policy |
Thus, if these clowns have their way, we’re double-f*cked.
~
Not everyone in Congress, however, is a freshman House
Republican. So, setting
aside the bitter-enders, what game-theoretic considerations will appeal to the
rest?
Throughout Obama’s first term, the wrecker strategy appealed
to virtually all Republicans, for the
simple reason that they figured (quite correctly, the public being clueless)
that this would help them in November 2012; and for that high prize, they were willing to bear the
psychic pain of watching other people
(the lowly 47%) shuffle miserably along the unemployment line. This pain they bore with remarkable
stoicism.
Now, however, November is upon us. The strategy splits in twain.
(Case 1) Romney wins.
Contra-intuitively, we
may actually be more likely to obtain the necessary revenue increases (including
raising taxes, and nixing some of the welfare payments that oil companies and
agribusiness now enjoy) prior to the
fiscal cliff if Romney wins in
November. For, if they drive
off that cliff, the nation goes back into recession, and Romney will look very
foolish with the mess he inherits.
(Case 2) Obama wins.
At first glance, here too the
outlook is for a happy compromise in December, the main doubt having been
removed. True, the result,
in helping the nation’s economy, would make Obama look good. But after all, he’s won anyway, it’s too
late, there’s no point. Surely
they wouldn’t keep up their wreckers strategy for four whole years? -- Well, thing is, they just did.
All things considered, the only favorable scenario is if one
party or the other captures both the Presidency and a whopping majority in both
houses of Congress. Then we can
actually have action on policy and
strategy, instead of deadlock.
True, if’s the Republicans, they’ll spend a lot of time catering to
gambling magnates, speculators, and miscellaneous fatcats, but at least their goal won’t be to wreck the economy as a
whole.
Ditto the Dems.
True, there might be an upswing in transgender marriages among
amputee-wannabes, but hey, to each
his own.
~
With this game-theoretic perspective, it is interesting to
take a second look at the more common and less dramatic phenomenon that opens
that essay of James Sur-o-wieki (you
see, it’s Sunday morning now, and I have had my coffee), the scenario where a
dieter locks in future sanctions against herself should she fail to shed those pounds. What effectively is going on is, her ego is playing a game of chicken with
her own id.
Remarkable.
Personally, I see an id as a risky thing to get in the ring
with.
~
At a simpler level, any oath or promise is a kind of
pre-commitment, in the sense that, if you break your promise, a sanction does
kick in: namely, you acquire the
reputation of a four-flusher, someone whose word is worthless. (The difference of this everyday
example from the more elaborate
ones above, is that you needn’t set up the sanction yourself in advance: society has done that for you.)
Now, in the case of the competing pre-commitments of the House
Republicans -- balance-the-budget BUT no-new-taxes -- the oaths were simply at variance, betraying cognitive
disorientation. But it is possible
to stack pre-commitments in a more structured way, such that one trumps the
other. Let a noted psychoanalyst
tell it:
Those ancient Jews were afraid of
themselves and of the intensity of their passions. They had a solemn religious formula in which they asked God
to consider oaths spoken in moments of rage as invalid. They
anticipated such outbreaks in themselves, and asked God not to oblige them to
keep those vows … That formula is
called Kol Nidre.
-- Theodor Reik, The Search
Within (1956)
Reik’s observation occurs in the midst of a long
associational analysis, ranging the length of his well-stocked literary larder,
one link of which was the name Jephthah,
which at first had no resonance for him, until placed in this larger
context. For Jephthah’s daughter
was the victim of her father’s ill-considered pre-commitment: in return for God’s granting him
victory over the Ammonites, he had vowed to slaughter in sacrifice the first creature that he should meet
on his return. And who should rush
up to greet him but his blushful daughter? “Hi, Dad-ddyyyyy!” (“Oh…. shit.”)
This tale of Jephthah, judge of Israel, illustrates the truth,
that not only vows made in blind anger should be excused of fulfilment, but
also vows made by complete idiots -- village simpletons and House Republicans.
~
A curious sort of pre-commitment is seen in infant baptism
or the bris. Here the child is covenanted to the faith of his
forefathers. However, only
the one baptised or circumcised can develop this vicarious pre-commitment into
a genuine commitment of his own;
this occurs via ceremonies like the Bar Mitzvah or First Communion.
No comments:
Post a Comment