The Zero Sum Game
I am not optimistic the war is about to end. Also this week: why old manuscripts have so many S’s that look like F’s; and a map of England’s “natural” internal borders.
There’s a thought experiment I’ve seen versions of online for literally decades. The numbers vary, but the gist is this: Imagine there’s a button you can press that’ll immediately give you £100,000, but simultaneously give the person you hate most in the world £200,000. Are you pressing that button?1
The reason this makes for a good thought experiment is that a lot of people do, in fact, have to think about it. From a utilitarian point of view, I benefit from the money, and am not affected even slightly by the fact a terrible human being who, for the sake of argument, we shall call Matt Goodwin benefits even more. In practice, something catches in my brain. I do, at least, hesitate. It’s not always enough to benefit. Sometimes we need to win.
This is not entirely rational, but from conversations with others I gather it is not especially unusual.
This shouldn’t, of course, tell us anything about the war in Iran, a conflict that’s been on the cards for years, in which there are more than two players and which no one can truly win. I fear it does, though – because one of the key decision makers is a man who genuinely seems to believe the entire world is a zero-sum game; and because both sides, now, need to be seen to have won.
By now, it’s surely obvious even to Donald Trump that the war is a disaster. There’s been no rally round the flag polling boost, of the sort such things normally offer a sitting president. And from both the way he keeps announcing it’s almost over – immediately before suggesting he might just commit the odd war crime first – and the way he periodically suggests it was never really his idea anyway, you get the impression even he wants out.
So: the obvious route is to walk away and say he’s achieved everything he wanted to anyway. Trump saves face, as he has before, by just pretending that he won.
The problem is that – both for reasons of national pride, and to make clear there are costs to attacking it, and reducing the chances of the same thing happening again – the Iranian government needs to do the same. We’re straying into territory I really have no business writing about, I know, but consider what that means for the Strait of Hormuz. To credibly claim victory, the Americans need to show they can keep it open. To claim victory, the Iranians need to show they can keep it closed.
Both sides now clearly want to stop this. But both need the other to lose. The two outcomes are incompatible.
The good news here is that it feels like this might genuinely hurt Trump and his movement. A presidential administration can do horrible things to foreigners or even lose small wars without paying any particular domestic price. But the things American voters do care about include significant increases in fuel prices or large numbers of their neighbours coming back in bodybags, and in the Gulf right now that seems to be the choice. That, I’d guess, is why Trump keeps pushing for a third option, in which countries even more dependent on that oil supply step up and open the Strait for him: he’s looking for a way out in which someone else bears the cost.
The bad news is that, whatever happens, the rest of us will be bearing the cost. Even if the war doesn’t spread, we’re all living in the same global economy, one in which everything from food prices to plastics is also driven by the availability of fossil fuels – and as things stand they’ve just become a whole lot less available.
In the meantime, if anyone out there with deep pockets and loose morals wants to conduct an experiment, well, you know where I am.
So, why do so many old manuscripts make their S’s look like F’s?
In a recent piece, I described an old manuscript as having “delightfully odd capitalisation and italicisation choices and S’s that look like F’s”. This was obviously just some offhand snark, but as so often happens when I engage in snark, offhandedly or otherwise, it got me wondering – why do old documents make one letter look like another?
You do, after all, find this phenomenon in some pretty notable places. In the first edition of the Dictionary of the English language, Samuel Johnson self-deprecatingly describes himself as a “harmleſs drudge”. One text of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII has Katherine of Aragon tell her husband, “I am ſorry.” Even the heading of the US Bill of rights seemingly refers to “Congrefs”. What is with that?
