Another Double High who had not jumped to his feet stayed home throughout the game, but eventually led a revolution among his region-mates. They told their official Elite he would have to bring all his negotiated deals to them for approval. The Double High thus became the de facto Elite. (The seventh Double High, off in Latin America, was as quiet as a mouse all during the simulation. But six out of seven ain’t bad.)
In unmistakable contrast to the game the night before, this run featured intense interaction among the Elites. A constant “buzz” of negotiations could be heard as the world leaders visited one another, sometimes in groups of two or three, working out the best deals they could get with their resources and combined bargaining leverage. Trading partnerships developed and dissolved. “It was like the stock exchange” a facilitator commented afterwards.
Because of the wheeling and dealing, some regions made headway against their problems as their Elites traded things they did not need for things they did—again unlike the night before when everyone stayed home. But no charity appeared. Nobody got something for nothing. And no commitment to the planet as a whole ever materialized. When the ozone layer crisis broke out, a global conference was held, but nobody put a farthing into the pot to solve the problem.
Moreover the regions began increasing their military strengths, and the stronger ones started making threats against the weaker ones during economic negotiations. A lot of bullying suddenly appeared. Then the Oceana Elit e [13] bought nuclear weapons and declared war on vastly out-gunned India, which tried to get protection from North America. Getting none, India surrendered immediately and paid a tribute. Soon the Oceana Elite was making the same threats against Africa and Latin America. This time North America offered protection, for a price, and the world quickly rushed to one camp or the other and began buying nukes. The facilitators thought an all-out nuclear war was going to break out just as the forty year time limit for the game expired.
Even though no one had died from warfare, lots of resources had been devoted to increasing military power, and many regions lacked the necessities of life. And for the third high RWA game in a row, the “folks back home” had stumbled badly over population control, so the dwindling “social bucks” had to take care of more and more people. Consequently one billion, six hundred million people had died from starvation and disease by the end of the game. This was three hundred million less than the night before, and the improvement was attributable to the Elites’ trading skills. But the Elites also caused the militarization and nuclear confrontation, and if the game had lasted five minutes longer, everybody might well have died.
When he began the arms race, the Oceana Elite was operating entirely on his own hook. No one else in Oceana wanted to buy nuclear weapons or threaten anybody. But although they outnumbered him in their group, they let him do what he wanted. He was their leader. And he knew how to handle them. He simply declared war on India, and told them afterwards. After his bloodless victory, he skillfully won over a couple of his Oceana colleagues to the slogan, “War is good,” and that provided a base for his further military adventures. But still some of the folks back home remained unhappy with the way their region was driving the world to war, and on post-game surveys they described their Elite as “bad” and “evil.” But they did not have the gumption to stop him. They sat still and sighed and let it happen.
Remembering again that university students are not world leaders, that the Global Change Game is not the real thing, that people do not become world-class Elites simply by rising to their feet, and so on, I still found the experiment instructive —even though it was only a “two-night stand.”
First, the spectacular ethnocentrism of ordinary RWAs takes one’s breath away. Here they were again, as in Doom Night in 1994, in a room filled with people like themselves, and they simply made smaller in-groups. Assigning authoritarian followers to a sub-unit appears to automatically put blinders on them as to what was happening everywhere else. “We’re the (whatever) Team,” they seemed to say, and taking the concept of “team” much more seriously than most people do, they sealed themselves off from the rest of the world. They plopped down on their islands during the first night’s simulation and at best responded with charity now and then to the overwhelming problems they and the other islands were allowing to grow. They were not in the least warlike. But leaderless and rather unimaginative, they accomplished very little during the simulation. Although they started off with a lot of enthusiasm and drive, the disasters that resulted stole all the wind from their sails.
When one injected a few Double Highs into a high-RWA world, almost all of them grabbed power by hook or by crook. Although only a tiny part of the earth’s population, they made a huge difference in how the world developed because authoritarian followers basically just follow. And the world was agruably better than the one created the night before—assuming it would have survived a forty-first year. But everything depends on who leads high RWAs, and when the Double Highs took over and formed that lethal union, their strong need to dominate led to bullying, military build-ups, and warfare. They showed no signs of being guided by moral principles and they certainly had no interest in charity or in serving the common good of the planet. They thus proved as insular as ordinary RWAs, and their world failed almost as badly. A sample of ordinary high school students usually forges a better future than was shaped on either of these nights by authoritarian university students.
But there was one little wrinkle in this story. (There almost always is, in research.) Remember those private fortunes and “The World’s Richest Man”? I thought for sure that the Double Highs would squirrel away tons of dough in their own personal bank accounts. But almost no one did. In hindsight—always a winning perspective; try to find a race track that will let you place your bets after the races are run—the competition was so intense among the Elites that anyone who diverted funds into his own pocket might soon find his region wiped out economically or militarily. So the bucks stayed in the public purse. As I said, the game is not the real world, and if you knew this was going to happen you are smarter than I am and maybe you should stop reading this book and start writing your own.[14], [15](It’s real easy: you just get yourself a website, …)
Perspective and Application
Let’s play a game. I’ll describe a well-known American politician, the description being unceremoniously lifted from John Dean’s book, Conservatives Without Conscience. See if you can figure out who it is, and whether you can make a diagnosis of his personality, doctor.
“X” became a born-again Christian when he was first elected to Congress. He brought a strong drive for power with him to Washington, and he steadily worked his way to the top of the Republican caucus. Colleagues have described him as amoral. “If it wasn’t illegal to do it, even if it was clearly wrong and unethical, (he did it). And in some cases if it was illegal, I think he still did it” said another Republican Congressman. “X”is opposed to equality, and Newsweek commented that he has never been subtle about his uses of the power of Love and Fear. He kept marble tablets of the Ten Commandments and a half-dozen bull-whips in his office when the was the party whip. He earned the nicknames, “the Hammer,” “the Exterminator,” and the “Meanest Man in Congress.”