by Nathan Smith

The ACT Party’s policies to ensure equality before the law would have been fantastic 50 years ago. But in 20XX, they can only be handcuffs for anyone stupid enough to abide by them.

This week, ACT Leader David Seymour announced his desire to strengthen parliamentary sovereignty, limit judicial interpretation and prevent vague Treaty of Waitangi clauses in legislation. Seymour said he wants legislation to be interpreted according to its original context and that Cabinet should be in control of defining the meaning and obligations of new bills, not the so-called “activist judges” using “tikanga” to camouflage their nakedly ideological decision-making. Seymour’s wants to nip this potentially parallel legal system in the bud by doubling down on equal rights.

“Today’s policy is about ensuring New Zealanders can move forward under one law for all with one future together,” Seymour said.

The problem with this thinking is that I have asked countless people what makes them a New Zealander, and they never give me the same answer. The only consistency is that anyone can become a New Zealander. But if you can choose your identity, then you can also choose not to be that identity, which means you were never that identity at all.

Seymour’s policy would have worked 50 years ago, when about 88% of New Zealanders were of European ethnicity. Today, the proportion of Europeans in this country barely reaches 64%, and Stats NZ forecasts that only 52% will be European by 2040. And that’s probably including the half- or quarter-European population. The true proportion of people with full European heritage in New Zealand will likely be much lower by 2040.

Demographics is important here because even to begin to talk about the concept of equal rights assumes the presence of a European mind. Rights, like truth, are a technology that only the Europeans managed to invent. Every other group adopted these technologies only after Europeans introduced them into their cultures. Unfortunately, like fish in water, Europeans often assume equality and truth are universal. They aren’t.

Because of this, Seymour can pass all the laws for equality he wants. But if he doesn’t also include a strong enforcement mechanism that punishes tribalism and nepotism, then his laws will only hurt those who respect equality and truth – Europeans.

When a culture that has not yet invented equality and truth mixes with one that has, the former will dominate the latter. Why? Because without equality and truth as the default assumption, humans revert to tribalism and nepotism. In such a world, you don’t want to be the only person who believes in equality. And that is precisely the world that New Zealand is entering.

This is where a bit of game theory might help Seymour create better policy. Aumann’s theory, for example, is a classic of this genre, because it assumes not only common priors, not only objective rationality, but most importantly, mutual trust between the disagreeing parties. Talk about assuming a can opener! The entire theory relies on the participants having the same default assumptions. If one believes in equality while the other believes in tribalism, that’s not a game. That’s called conquering.

In a multicultural society, people’s assumptions are not drawn from data or ideologies, but from deeper sources such as inherent traits and biology. Simply put, people groups are not equal, and many of these fundamental inequalities can create clashes on both the micro and macro scales. If these clashes are allowed to follow their normal pathway (leading to voluntary separation), then they aren’t so bad. It’s only when a centralised power forces various groups to live together that these differences can spiral into serious clashes and even violence.

Game theory offers a useful way to show why groups with unsolvable problems and irreconcilable assumptions might act. Society is essentially a long-term game with a series of fluid, dynamic and uncertain situations of shifting relative strength. If you want to preserve a situation in which groups are deterred from trespassing on each other’s key interests, then there is usually a narrow range of “strategically correct” reactions that, if mutually expected by all players, creates a kind of Nash Equilibrium.

Many of our deepest social instincts have their origin in the evolutionary mental firmware (brains) that calculate solutions to game-theoretic problems that are adaptive to the social needs of coordination and rivalry. Many of our strong moral and ethical impulses emerge out of those biological intuitions, which is why concepts like equality and truth are not universal technologies. Over time, a particular set of circumstances created evolutionary pressures on Europeans that, for whatever reason, didn’t happen to other groups, leading to the development of different ways of interacting with one another.

What happens when various people groups with distinct ethnic strategies which are pre-verbal and pre-intellectual are forced to live together? Well, there are some excellent strategically correct reactions to social pressures. But these don’t exactly line up well with the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about how to rationalise those reactions. In fact, these reactions are gigavolt-charged third-rail topics about which it is totally impossible even to have an honest conversation, ironically because the strategically correct move is to display outrage if anyone mentions them.

For example, every human operates according to Lenin’s “Who, Whom?” matrix. The default approach is to look at who is doing what to whom. So, depending on one’s social position, the strategically correct decision most of the time is to accept the reasoning from high-status and/or helpful friends, and to reject the reasoning from low-status and/or enemies. What looks like a double standard is really just a single standard (my tribe first). The ugly details are just laundered through plausibly justifiable opinions about exceptions to this rule.

Because Europeans are wired differently, they developed the technologies of rights and truth. This allowed Europeans to have a different Nash Equilibrium set of strategies. Rather than get bogged down by tribalism, Europeans agreed to a rigid set of abstract rules by which the game can be played. It is to these rules that every European is bound and must refer to justify their behaviours. Seymour wants to maintain these rules.

But in the fast-approaching world, abstract rules governed by technologies like equality will clash with the more concrete rules of “my tribe first.” These two ethical constellations cannot be harmonised or reconciled. You have to pick one, or one has to win out. To use the boring language of game theory, you can’t have a working system of protocols of interaction, pre-verbal rules for behaviour and social ethics without Aumann’s common knowledge and expectations of how people will react.

Said differently, good traffic conditions are impossible if you mix people from different driving cultures. Similarly, no one can predict what an Indian judge might do when a fellow Indian is standing in the dock. Whose rules will the judge follow? The abstract rules of equality that are alien to him, or the concrete rules of tribalism that speak to him on a biological level when engaging with one of his own people? You have to pick one, or one has to win out.

Seymour knows that only one of these systems is compatible with equal justice under law. But what he refuses to understand is that not all groups are wired to choose that one. And you can’t talk the differently-wired groups into respecting rival systems. Could Seymour be convinced that equality is silly? Of course not, he’s a (mostly) European. So why should he expect groups to reject their biological instincts? What if they don’t? What exactly is stopping tribal groups from being tribal, other than Seymour’s empty pieces of paper that basically wash out to “come on guys, let’s play fair”?

This kind of thinking is simply unsuitable for the coming multicultural world. It would have been fine 50 years ago. But it’s time to realise that the things you think are normal and universal aren’t. Not by a long shot. And if you choose to keep following rules that an increasingly smaller number of your neighbours also follow, then you are living dangerously indeed.

Originally published on The Good Oil.