Wrestling & the power of deception in human affairs

[JackRiddler]

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Looking at this year's Edge World Question, "What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everyone's Cognitive Toolkit?" Some pretty good answers about things like networked causality, some true but predictably naive science-guy ideas like, "if only everyone knew about cognitive bias..." Why, if they did, most of them would be even more unbearable for thinking they but not you had overcome their own! Just look at how the bedunkers abuse that concept, not to mention "Occam's Razor" (whatever I consider simplest is right!) and "pattern recognition" (the ones I see are real, the ones you see are apophenia!).

Speaking of naive, Dawkins thinks if people only understood the concept of the double-blind controlled experiment, they would stop believing in homeopathy and hell. How divorced is this guy from real people? Without a doubt, on the order of half of all professional scientists currently conducting double-blind controlled experiments believe in some variety of the religious hobgoblins Dawkins seems to think would be wiped out by superior education. Please!

But then, THIS -- the most RI post I've yet to see on Edge.org:

http://edge.org/responses/what-scientif ... ve-toolkit

Kayfabe

Eric R. Weinstein

Mathematician and Economist; Principal, Natron Group...

The sophisticated "scientific concept" with the greatest potential to enhance human understanding may be argued to come not from the halls of academe, but rather from the unlikely research environment of professional wrestling.

Evolutionary biologists Richard Alexander and Robert Trivers have recently emphasized that it is deception rather than information that often plays the decisive role in systems of selective pressures. Yet most of our thinking continues to treat deception as something of a perturbation on the exchange of pure information, leaving us unprepared to contemplate a world in which fakery may reliably crowd out the genuine. In particular, humanity's future selective pressures appear likely to remain tied to economic theory which currently uses as its central construct a market model based on assumptions of perfect information.

If we are to take selection more seriously within humans, we may fairly ask what rigorous system would be capable of tying together an altered reality of layered falsehoods in which absolutely nothing can be assumed to be as it appears. Such a system, in continuous development for more than a century, is known to exist and now supports an intricate multi-billion dollar business empire of pure hokum. It is known to wrestling's insiders as "Kayfabe".

Because professional wrestling is a simulated sport, all competitors who face each other in the ring are actually close collaborators who must form a closed system (called "a promotion") sealed against outsiders. With external competitors generally excluded, antagonists are chosen from within the promotion and their ritualized battles are largely negotiated, choreographed, and rehearsed at a significantly decreased risk of injury or death. With outcomes predetermined under Kayfabe, betrayal in wrestling comes not from engaging in unsportsmanlike conduct, but by the surprise appearance of actual sporting behavior. Such unwelcome sportsmanship which "breaks Kayfabe" is called "shooting" to distinguish it from the expected scripted deception called "working".

Were Kayfabe to become part of our toolkit for the twenty-first century, we would undoubtedly have an easier time understanding a world in which investigative journalism seems to have vanished and bitter corporate rivals cooperate on everything from joint ventures to lobbying efforts. Perhaps confusing battles between "freshwater" Chicago macro economists and Ivy league "Saltwater" theorists could be best understood as happening within a single "orthodox promotion" given that both groups suffered no injury from failing (equally) to predict the recent financial crisis. The decades old battle in theoretical physics over bragging rights between the "string" and "loop" camps would seem to be an even more significant example within the hard sciences of a collaborative intra-promotion rivalry given the apparent failure of both groups to produce a quantum theory of gravity.

What makes Kayfabe remarkable is that it gives us potentially the most complete example of the general process by which a wide class of important endeavors transition from failed reality to successful fakery. While most modern sports enthusiasts are aware of wrestling's status as a pseudo sport, what few alive today remember is that it evolved out of a failed real sport (known as "catch" wrestling) which held its last honest title match early in the 20th century. Typical matches could last hours with no satisfying action, or end suddenly with crippling injuries to a promising athlete in whom much had been invested. This highlighted the close relationship between two paradoxical risks which define the category of activity which wrestling shares with other human spheres:

• A) Occasional but Extreme Peril for the participants.

• B) General: Monotony for both audience and participants.

Kayfabrication (the process of transition from reality towards Kayfabe) arises out of attempts to deliver a dependably engaging product for a mass audience while removing the unpredictable upheavals that imperil participants. As such Kayfabrication is a dependable feature of many of our most important systems which share the above two characteristics such as war, finance, love, politics and science.

Importantly, Kayfabe also seems to have discovered the limits of how much disbelief the human mind is capable of successfully suspending before fantasy and reality become fully conflated. Wrestling's system of lies has recently become so intricate that wrestlers have occasionally found themselves engaging in real life adultery following exactly behind the introduction of a fictitious adulterous plot twist in a Kayfabe back-story. Eventually, even Kayfabe itself became a victim of its own success as it grew to a level of deceit that could not be maintained when the wrestling world collided with outside regulators exercising oversight over major sporting events.

At the point Kayfabe was forced to own up to the fact that professional wrestling contained no sport whatsoever, it did more than avoid being regulated and taxed into oblivion. Wrestling discovered the unthinkable: its audience did not seem to require even a thin veneer of realism. Professional wrestling had come full circle to its honest origins by at last moving the responsibility for deception off of the shoulders of the performers and into the willing minds of the audience.

Kayfabe, it appears, is a dish best served client-side.

Lots of applications... clearly here's a guy who wouldn't simplistically use the term "conspiracy theory" as a thought-stopping device.

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[Sounder]

Our culture is largely Kayfabe, being that it is built on incorrect assumptions that become deeply embedded because they are source of status.

Ours is a cult(ure) of Nine.

[semper occultus]

reminds me a bit of a recent interview on Max Keiser with Michael Betancourt "agnotologic/digital capitalism" :

http://auntsally2point0.blogspot.com/2011/03/living-under-laputa.html

Sunday, 20 March 2011
Living under Laputa
I watch The Keiser Report on RT. They have guests in the second half – sometimes fascinating sometimes less so – and discussions you just don't get on the BBC or Channel 4. Last Thursday I was intrigued by what guest Michael Betancourt was saying. I wrote some things down... “confusion of fact and reality”, “disinformation”, “misinformation”, construction of facts to deceive and creation of doubt about reality, inability to make informed decisions... in so many words. All familiar stuff. He seemed to be talking about the departure of the economy from any solid reality and its drift off into the realms of pure fantasy, and the parallel fight by people around the world for the continuation of their own entrapment. I see these things. So I checked out some more and printed off his essay Immaterial Value and Scarcity in Digital Capitalism.

It explains to me why I can't afford to buy a house for a start, and in fact why I should never even think of it. In fact it explains everything – just about everything I've been thinking in my non-economic way about “the economy” since about 2008, when I accepted the fact I would never have a house and life was a series of ever decreasing circles regardless of any effort you put in, and no means of escape. I stopped at the point of actually fighting for the continuation of my own entrapment.

This fantasy's bad enough – or “semiotic manipulation” as he calls it – the fiat currencies and ponzi schemes – and the ongoing concentration of wealth at the top and enslavement and impoverishment of everyone else, which isn't even based on anything real or concrete. It's all just numbers, shiny computer programs and fancy sales talk. It's the “agnotologic capitalism” bit – and we see people actually fighting for the continuation of their own entrapment – based on the production and maintenance of ignorance and even of all the underlying structures hidden from view. But I think capitalism's the wrong word now. I don't think it has anything to do with capitalism in the way it was meant originally, as in the production of goods and services for profit – physical stuff people need! This is something else. It's like the giant flying island of Laputa in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, which hovers over a very small territory depriving the poor people that live there of warmth, light and rain, or can even be crushed by its weight, until eventually no life can exist there. Swift meant it to represent colonialism. It's worse than colonialism. I don't know the word for it. We all just live under it. Funnily enough, la puta means the whore in Spanish. It's a swear word!

So it's not just the economy, but all of social and cultural life, to the extent where even the quality and range of information is controlled and organised into a range of systemic unknowns, where any potential “fact” is already countered by an alternative of apparently equal weight and value, and renders any engagement with actual fact and reality almost impossible, for the ordinary person. It seeks, as he says to create “confusion, reflected by the inability of participants in bubbles to be aware of any immanent collapse until after it has happened”. You could extrapolate that to anything, not just economic collapse. Think of climate change. Think of wars “military intervention” and “no fly zones” blah blah blah. Think of nuclear power. It's all fine until it isn't. And nothing can go wrong until it does. And it works to eliminate any potential for dissent or even common sense. We live in darkness.

So is there any point? Or do we just sit back and wait for it to crumble into a zillion trillion pieces and go poof? He seems to think that will happen, because sooner or later it'll run out of capital to fantasise about. It's only a matter of time. I only hope that happens before it's too late.

Links

The Keiser Report episode 130
http://rt.com/programs/keiser-report/episode-130-keiser-max/

Michael Betancourt: Immaterial Value and Scarcity in Digital Capitalism
http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=652

Agnotology

[Harvey]

Two very interesting articles.

My first stirrings of serious unease probably came much later than you guys, somewhere in 2002 when war in Iraq was becoming inevitable. I just could not believe what was happening. It made no sense. And it made no sense so fundamentally that I was left with no choice but to start re-evaluating the events of 9/11. I'd reached the point where for me, the illusion was breached, and not only did events feel like theatre, it was bad theatre.

Perhaps Kayfabe may provide a cognitive toolkit for the rest of us, but I don't think so. I know a few people who are frighteningly intelligent, many more university educated, all equipped with every resource of logic and reason, but in the end, there is only so far they are willing to travel, with the kind of evidence that argument, intuition, circumstance, coincidence can provide.

You know what, I think that in the end, it's less a cognitive refinement than an aesthetic critique. It's just bad theatre.

[elfismiles]

Great find JR. Muchas gracias.

[Bruce Dazzling]

What makes it even more perverse is that they're fighting for the continuation of ... basically, their entrapment.

~ Michael Betancourt

I'm highlighting the Betancourt/Keiser discussion that Semper linked to because it really dovetails with Jack's OP, which is highly thought-provoking, btw.

Thanks for posting, Jack!

[Wombaticus Rex]

Spectacular find. Thank you. Ties in nicely to the DOD/DARPA metaphor project.

[82_28]

How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later
by Philip K. Dick, 1978

Well, I will tell you what interests me, what I consider important. I can't claim to be an authority on anything, but I can honestly say that certain matters absolutely fascinate me, and that I write about them all the time. The two basic topics which fascinate me are "What is reality?" and "What constitutes the authentic human being?" Over the twenty-seven years in which I have published novels and stories I have investigated these two interrelated topics over and over again. I consider them important topics. What are we? What is it which surrounds us, that we call the not-me, or the empirical or phenomenal world?

...

In 1951, when I sold my first story, I had no idea that such fundamental issues could be pursued in the science fiction field. I began to pursue them unconsciously. My first story had to do with a dog who imagined that the garbagemen who came every Friday morning were stealing valuable food which the family had carefully stored away in a safe metal container. Every day, members of the family carried out paper sacks of nice ripe food, stuffed them into the metal container, shut the lid tightly—and when the container was full, these dreadful-looking creatures came and stole everything but the can.

Finally, in the story, the dog begins to imagine that someday the garbagemen will eat the people in the house, as well as stealing their food. Of course, the dog is wrong about this. We all know that garbagemen do not eat people. But the dog's extrapolation was in a sense logical—given the facts at his disposal. The story was about a real dog, and I used to watch him and try to get inside his head and imagine how he saw the world. Certainly, I decided, that dog sees the world quite differently than I do, or any humans do. And then I began to think, Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. And that led me wonder, If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe, it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too diffrently, there occurs a breakdown of communication... and there is the real illness.

...

It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question "What is reality?", to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." That's all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven't been able to define reality any more lucidly.

But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it's all misunderstood. And the thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy to reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, Be passive. And—cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because Officer Beratta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.

So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

...

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. George Orwell made this clear in his novel 1984. But another way to control the minds of people is to control their perceptions. If you can get them to see the world as you do, they will think as you do. Comprehension follows perception. How do you get them to see the reality you see? After all, it is only one reality out of many. Images are a basic constituent: pictures. This is why the power of TV to influence young minds is so staggeringly vast. Words and pictures are synchronized. The possibility of total control of the viewer exists, especially the young viewer. TV viewing is a kind of sleep-learning. An EEG of a person watching TV shows that after about half an hour the brain decides that nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state, emitting alpha waves. This is because there is such little eye motion. In addition, much of the information is graphic and therefore passes into the right hemisphere of the brain, rather than being processed by the left, where the conscious personality is located. Recent experiments indicate that much of what we see on the TV screen is received on a subliminal basis. We only imagine that we consciously see what is there. The bulk of the messages elude our attention; literally, after a few hours of TV watching, we do not know what we have seen. Our memories are spurious, like our memories of dreams; the blank are filled in retrospectively. And falsified. We have participated unknowingly in the creation of a spurious reality, and then we have obligingly fed it to ourselves. We have colluded in our own doom.

And—and I say this as a professional fiction writer—the producers, scriptwriters, and directors who create these video/audio worlds do not know how much of their content is true. In other words, they are victims of their own product, along with us. Speaking for myself, I do not know how much of my writing is true, or which parts (if any) are true. This is a potentially lethal situation. We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur. And in all probability it is not deliberate. In fact, that is part of the problem. You cannot legislate an author into correctly labelling his product, like a can of pudding whose ingredients are listed on the label... you cannot compel him to declare what part is true and what isn't if he himself does not know.

...

If any of you have read my novel Ubik, you know that the mysterious entity or mind or force called Ubik starts out as a series of cheap and vulgar commercials and winds up saying:

I am Ubik. Before the universe was I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.



It is obvious from this who and what Ubik is; it specifically says that it is the word, which is to say, the Logos. In the German translation, there is one of the most wonderful lapses of correct understanding that I have ever come across; God help us if the man who translated my novel Ubik into German were to do a translation from the koine Greek into German of the New Testament. He did all right until he got to the sentence "I am the word." That puzzled him. What can the author mean by that? he must have asked himself, obviously never having come across the Logos doctrine. So he did as good a job of translation as possible. In the German edition, the Absolute Entity which made the suns, made the worlds, created the lives and the places they inhabit, says of itself:

I am the brand name.



Had he translated the Gospel according to Saint John, I suppose it would have come out as:

When all things began, the brand name already was. The brand name dwelt with God, and what God was, the brand name was.

...

Such is the fate of an author who hoped to include theological themes in his writing. "The brand name, then, was with God at the beginning, and through him all things came to be; no single thing was created without him." So it goes with noble ambitions. Let's hope God has a sense of humor.

Or should I say, Let's hope the brand name has a sense of humor.

[bks]

Very, very interesting article and video of Betancourt and Keiser. Have to say, though: the differences between Kayfabe and the financial system seem much more important than their similarities. Professional wrestling is a closed system of cooperation that faces only the ineradicable difficulties any cooperative effort faces in a competitive system [internal jealousies, power grabs, etc]. When that closed system is functioning well, competition within it is diminished. Its customers are ill-served only when internal competition grows so large that it negatively effects the product the audience consumes. In sum, the publication of wrestling's internal conspiracy changes the character of the activity into a benign one in which customers can still 'enjoy the show'. There's no predation here, and audiences are not 'trapped' by a hidden system.

The sine qua non of the system of financialization, however, is its predatory relationship to its customer base. The circulation of bogus financial products only pays off as long as new suckers can be brought into the game. That means not just investors who buy securities and derivatives, but also Joe Sixpack who gets a mortgage he can't carry. Unlike professional wrestling fans - who know they're watching actors when they enter the arena - customers of the big financial houses enter the financial arena to be competitive with other of its customers, and with the (now diminishing) expectation that the financial experts that advise them are on their side, per their fiduciary responsibility. The fakery at work in the financialization system is not a simulation of the activity the professionals seem to be involved in (as it is in wrestling, where it looks like punches are being thrown, but they're not); no, the fakery here is in the various relationships between the players: financial professionals "fake" concern for their clients' interests; ratings agencies "fake" opinions on the value of the securities and other assets they "inspect", and lenders "fake" doing their own due diligence on the loans they sign off on [and which they'll sell up the line to be securitized]; accountants "fake' the value of those assets on balance sheets, regulators fake surprise that they"problem" was as large as it was, Congress, certain members of which may have real concerns, nevertheless "fakes" imposing a true regime of regulation on Wall Street by passing a tough-sounding but pretty much toothless oversight bill, etc. etc.


The flow of money (digital or otherwise), and the redistribution of wealth in entails is not fake, however, even if we agree with Betancourt [and certainly Keiser] that the value of the currency is actively being faked by the Fed and others. All of these various forms of fakery contribute in their way to the destruction of civil society and responsive government.

[82_28]

Nice post, bks!

I wonder or should say I have been wondering what this "economy" is running on for going on 10 years -- like the rest of us and as a layman, such as myself. Like, when does "the bottom drop out" of this thing? What could possibly be fueling it's continual perpetuation? I feel like bks and the rest have kind of revealed what it is just by our short conversation here so far. And that is, is that it's fake. So much through the decades and generations was invested in the fakeness that now we're getting a return on said investment. The fakeness was like a savings account for the future, a rainy day fund when the real capitalism ran its course. There was only so much it could suck up and now that it's sucked up everything, it is now raiding its fake depositories for something "real".

Ultimately it comes down to the brutalization of Earth and her inhabitants. Brutalization, I fear, is to be increasingly commended. An iron clad USSR that could never be recognized by its denizens, because of idiocracy. But why? Why not solve it? Why not put forth an effort to make a free and beneficial "utopia" with all of this power? Because of psychopaths, period.

[JackRiddler]

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Ich bin die Markenname!

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[JackRiddler]

Years later I see bks' excellent comment on the difference in the kayfabes between finance sector and professional wrestling. Pretty clear, I think. Professional wrestling kayfabe is more of a model for politics (and media and celebrity systems generally), realms where reality is much more a matter of agreement among participants.

[PufPuf93]

In the Trump thread my thought was that kayfabe was an entirely made up term by JackRiddler so did not go immediately to an internet search.

Also have paid close to zero interest in professional wrestling but did realize the fake and showmanship inherent in the entertainment.

So perhaps when referring to kayfabe in politics is of kin to referring to politics as Kabuki in a most deep sense?

Reminds of Orson Welles "F is for Fake" and, as noted above, Philip K Dicks ruminations on the nature of reality.

I would claim that we in the USA are far into so the kayfabe of our politics in that we still believe and are told that our government is of the People.

Trump is cast as a kayabe Hitler as Trump is an ugly mess that plays to the most base and simplistic instincts among us but thankfully still does not have the malignant evil charisma that was Hitler.

In a real sense our political system today obscures why and who are making decisions. It is now a 1984 world. Peace means continuous war. Love is weak. Hate is strong. Lies are truth. Truthiness replaces fact. Justice is purchased. Free means at great cost and captivity. The wonder implied by the internet is the greatest social control tool ever conceived. There is a spell about the land that seldom cracks and cracks are swiftly addressed by the gas light or social rejection or economic annihilation or any of assorted ostracisms.

[PufPuf93]

oops my post echoed.

[Agent Orange Cooper]

Perfect thread for this:

At the end of SummerSlam 2016, Brock Lesnar opened up Randy Orton the hard way (intentionally drew blood) and the match was ended due to TKO. Shane McMahon (one of the GMs) got in the ring to check on his guy and Lesnar assaulted him, giving him the dreaded F5. The night after, Stephanie McMahon (Shane's competing GM) said that there would be "severe repercussions" for Lesnar's actions.

It was later announced that she had fined him $500 (a month after he made somewhere close to $10 million for a single UFC fight, so this is lunch money for him). It was actually pretty funny, but it's a certainly a sad state of affairs in 2016 when one of our major news networks (CNN) is reporting KAYFABE WRESTLING ANGLES as actual fact. I mean, what?!?!