The Infinite Game

How to Live Well Together

Niki Harré

• Publisher: Auckland University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781775589877
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Interpersonal Relations in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Whether we are competing for a job, building a business or championing a good cause, some days it can feel as if we are trapped in an endless competition for status, wealth or attention. Maybe if we learn to play the game and follow the rules we'll come out on top. But is life really a finite game – a game of selection and rules, winners and losers, players and spectators? In The Infinite Game, Niki Harré asks us to imagine our world anew. What if we are all part of a different type of game entirely – a game in which playing matters more than winning, a game that anyone can join at any time, a game in which rules evolve as new players turn up – an infinite game? Harré looks at our society (are people pawns or participants?) and ourselves (what kind of player would you like to be?) to offer an inspiring vision of how we might live well together. Deeply informed by psychological research and a life of social activism, Niki Harré's provocative book teaches us all how we might live life as an infinite game.

Part One

Society and the Infinite Game

Society is, in large part, a slow-forming magic trick. It is a trick that sweeps up aspects of human experience, adds liberal doses of bluster, and transforms it all into a story of ourselves that makes just enough sense to keep people playing along. Most of the time, the trick is performed so slowly, and with such finesse – the finesse of multiple players who work hard to keep the illusion alive – that we don’t realise it is a trick. And so we find ourselves living within the rules society offers and even cajoling others to play along, being reminded whenever we waver (and reminding others when they waver) that this is just the way it is.

In the first part of this book I will attempt to crawl under this trick and flip it over – showing the messy underbelly of the finite games that turn so many of our actions into replications of the status quo. I will also argue for an infinite game alternative: one that digs into our nature as people, finds it full of unexpected treasures, and insists that these become the focus of our play – even when, especially when, almost everyone appears convinced that there is a battle to be fought and we must stick to our old, familiar guns.

The five chapters to follow are structured around the 15 pairs of statements given in the Introduction (see p. 8). Chapter One concerns the overarching principles of the game and covers pairs 1 to 3; Chapter Two is on people (pairs 4 to 8); Chapter Three is on setting (pairs 9 to 11); Chapter Four is on knowledge (pairs 12 and 13); and the final chapter is about time (pairs 14 and 15).

Chapter One

Overarching Principles

All games have a fundamental structure that allows players to identify the game at hand. At the most basic level, the infinite game is an opening towards life – towards ongoing play that encourages people and other life forms to flourish. We, as people, hold this game deep inside us. Its values are what we know really matters. Finite games, on the other hand, restrict, and in some cases shut down, life in their effort to limit the field of play. Finite games are essential to our quest to create the good society, but they carry the risk of obscuring infinite play and creating idols in its place.

1. Continuing the play versus winning

The purpose of the infinite game is to continue the play;
The purpose of a finite game is to win

In one of my early Infinite Game workshops, a man I greatly admire discussed afterwards how he could not get beyond the use of ‘infinite’ in the title of the game. It reminded him of his mother’s religious beliefs and in particular her passivity in the face of illness and injustice. For his mother, ‘the infinite’ was a future space in which all the sorrows of life evaporated into a blissful afterlife. He felt its promise had encouraged her to exist with suffering instead of attempting to resist the suffering. This passivity repulsed him. It represented, he felt, a fertile ground that fed human cruelty by its meek tolerance of all that is bad.

He had a point. If the infinite becomes a destination that numbs us to life then it is surely repugnant. Here, however, ‘infinite’ is an adjective. The adjectival form of infinite means: ‘limitless or endless in space, extent, or size; impossible to measure or calculate’. When used in this way, then, ‘infinite’ is not something, but it is a qualifier that extends in all directions and across any dimension that we care to conjure up.

The infinite game most obviously extends infinitely in time. Although we sometimes talk as if we are facing the one time in history in which human life is truly in peril (usually due to climate change), this is simply not the case. I remember the bone-chilling, mind-numbing, life-supressing dread that accompanied my teenage years in the 1970s because there was going to be a nuclear war. My worried little mind was filled with images of mushroom clouds, burning flesh, and worst of all a seeping, invisible radiation that would end life on Earth (especially my own!). Indigenous people in New Zealand, Australia and other parts of the world have been subject to the threat of annihilation through the myriad of processes that make up colonisation for several hundred years. If you are not an indigenous person yourself, try to imagine what it would feel like to lose the ancestral land that is fundamental to your identity, familial relationships, and spirituality; or to be the one remaining speaker of your mother tongue. Further back in history (and still in some parts of the world today), there were massive famines, devastating epidemics, and chronic wars that put whole populations at extreme risk.

In other words, profound threat is nothing new to people. We have always been highly vulnerable to natural disasters and our own capacity to damage each other and the systems on which we collectively depend. But, closely accompanying this ever-present destruction, there has also always been an impulse amongst us towards the life-giving, the compassionate, and the forgiving. The nuclear threat, for example, spawned a peace movement that straddled national boundaries – the very boundaries the weapons were supposed to be defending. There is even evidence that Kennedy and Khrushchev, who were leaders of opposing sides in the Cold War, were simultaneously communicating in an attempt to avert the military conflict they seemed headed towards.⁶ Here in New Zealand, a history of resistance and renaissance by Māori sits alongside the colonial story. This includes the establishment of a community based on non-violent principles at Parihaka pā in the province of Taranaki in the 1870s that became the home of hundreds of Māori families.

Disruption and rebirth, therefore, are an inevitable part of the human story. The issues of today may be unique, but the cycle is not. When we act for justice or peace or the natural environment, we enter a community of such actors: a long line of people who have gone before us, and will come after us. The infinite game never ends.

Once you understand that there is no end to the game, then it becomes obvious that to sacrifice the present for the sake of the future is a risky move. If we do this we become, as the philosopher Alan Watts has described, caught in a ‘hoax’ in which we are never actually alive, but always preparing for the next stage when we will finally be able to spread our wings.⁷ On a personal level, school is preparation for work, work for retirement, and retirement for . . . death? Or, from the perspective of those of us trying to usher in social structures that promote human and ecological flourishing: if we can just get an ambitious international agreement on climate change / stop deep-sea oil drilling / prevent the latest free-trade agreement / get rid of the current government, then . . . what? Then we can relax and actually nourish what is around us? Even if our analysis is spot on and we do win the game of the day – with a hefty sum on retirement or a ban on deep-sea oil drilling – our life has still largely happened through the details. And if we have swept others along with us, so have their lives. All lives – actual, lived lives – count.

We have a right to seek beauty, creativity, good company and joy in the present. This may mean having children, spending time in nature, caring for pets, getting fit, learning art forms, working part-time or studying. We also have a right to be repelled by arguments that others’ time will come: The conditions of clothing workers in Bangladesh are not ideal, but labour-intensive factories are a necessary step towards the industrial development that brings prosperity. Their time will come. Well, no, their time is now – just as is your time and my time. An infinite game perspective puts the onus on us to live and ensure others can too.

By contrast, the purpose of finite games is to win. Winning is used broadly here to mean any sort of acquisition; be it the food needed to survive or the throne of the Seven Kingdoms.⁸ It may even include amassing a fortune and setting up a philanthropic foundation that aims to (one day) improve the conditions of workers in countries like Bangladesh. These games are finite because they are about the pursuit of a single-minded aim over a fixed period of time. The play has boundaries: applying only to select people, circumstances, and places. And the game has rules that may include procedures, rituals, contracts or personal habits.

To be clear, we need finite games. They structure our collective lives and are a form of quality control. Bus and train schedules, training and ongoing development for medical professionals, building standards, anti-pollution laws, food distribution networks and school curriculums are all essential finite games in Western societies. What we don’t need, however, is the plethora of competitive finite games that have become our default formula for getting the best out of people and sorting out who gets what and who is in charge. Competition that singles out and elevates ‘winners’ is our Achilles heel, our toxic magnet, our idol that all too often pulls our finite games out of shape; luring us, taunting us, confusing us, and silencing us into playing the way we are told, rather than keeping the infinite game in view. It is our version of the oppressive traditions or vengeful gods that other eras and cultures have developed to keep people under control. To really understand ourselves and to effectively reshape social institutions for the common good, we need to look hard at the winning-worshipping society we have become.

Numerous authors and scholars have written about the tidal wave of competition that has flooded so much of the Western world.⁹ As with any truly powerful idol, competition, and in particular the creation of winners and losers, is endemic and held in multiple sites – our psyches, our assumptions, our practices. We take it for granted that politics involves contests in which opponents mock each other with verbal venom; that our young people must compete for educational programmes and jobs; that universities proudly display their world rankings; that houses are sold to the highest bidder; that small retail outlets will fail due to the competitive advantage of big retail outlets; and that winning – even (especially?) if it means the accumulation of astronomical wealth – is an honourable pursuit. Our formula in brief: Competition = The Good Life. If you look up synonyms for ‘competitive’ on Microsoft Word, you will find the following options: modest, good, inexpensive, cheap, viable, reasonable, and economical.

So the assumption that competition is an appropriate way to distribute social goods ripples through us in myriad forms. Two core ideas, however, are particularly central to this assumption: the theory of evolution (as it is commonly understood) and the market economy.

The theory of evolution – at least the prevalent Western version – tells us that individuals are destined to compete.¹⁰ Competition is fundamental to ‘natural selection’ because those who win the race for survival and for mates will procreate more successfully and their genes will be passed on through the generations. Such a view is captured by slogans such as ‘survival of the fittest’, and ‘the selfish gene’, the title of one of Richard Dawkins’ books. ‘Survival of the fittest’ turns altruism into a biological puzzle: surely it makes little sense for living beings to ever act in favour of another and against their personal interests? Indeed, when viewed through an evolutionary lens, even acts of apparent generosity are explained by the personal advantage gained by having a good reputation, or by the urge to protect kin who, as carriers of our genes, are the next best thing to our individual selves.¹¹

Such an approach turns human history into a story of struggle in which certain groups are victorious over others either through warfare or through having superior social and technological structures. According to the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, widespread competition is itself one such superior social structure – a ‘killer app’ that helped the West become the wealthiest of them all.¹²

In fact, current evolutionary theory shows that survival and successful reproduction involves cooperation between individuals and species as much as it involves competition between them. As the evolutionary theorist Martin Nowak wrote, ‘creatures of every persuasion and level of complexity cooperate to live’.¹³ According to Nowak, this includes bacteria that form strings in which some die to provide their neighbours with nitrogen, slime moulds that group together when food is scarce, and mole rats that eat each other’s droppings. Some trees exchange nutrients and carbon with trees from another species through fungal networks.¹⁴ In humans, cooperation exists within our bodies – inside which we have ten bacteria cells for every human cell, many of which are critical to good health – and within our social structures.¹⁵ We regularly get together, figure out the best way forward from the options available, and create extraordinarily intricate systems of cooperation. Such systems allow us to exchange food and services, fly around the globe, and sometimes even oust destructive finite games and put something better in their place.

That we emphasise the times when life forms struggle against each other, rather than the (many more) times when life forms support each other, is not ‘science’, it is a distortion produced by our enchantment with competitive finite games.

Free-market economics is the second competitive game at the heart of contemporary Western societies. Laws and international networks protect competition as an intrinsic part of our economic structures.¹⁶ Free-trade agreements are promoted with the notion that removing tariffs and other barriers to a supposedly ‘level playing field’ between nations will produce greater efficiency and, that magical elixir, increased material wealth for all.¹⁷ The highly controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is an example. In late 2015, New Zealand signed the TPP agreement with eleven other Asian or Pacific Rim countries, including the USA. According to John Key, New Zealand’s prime minister at the time, the removal of tariffs would earn the country ‘at least $2.7 billion a year by 2030 . . . that’s more jobs, higher incomes and a better standard of living for New Zealanders’. The official position of the US government was that the TPP would increase ‘Made in America exports’ and ‘support well-paying American jobs’; and Australia’s Minister for Trade was quoted as saying it would be of ‘enormous benefit to Australia’, making ‘Australia’s mining-driven economy more competitive, create jobs and boost living standards’.¹⁸ One might be excused for wondering how a more competitive structure turns every player into a winner, but there you go.

It may indeed be that the West has generated innovations associated with wealth due, in part, to sufficient social mobility and laws that allow new players and ideas a look-in – if this is what we mean by competition. In their book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson discuss the benefits of the relatively ‘inclusive’ economic institutions that tend to exist in Western nations.¹⁹ They contrast these with the ‘extractive’ economic institutions that tend to exist (or have recently existed) elsewhere, three of their examples being Colombia, Egypt and North Korea. According to Acemoglu and Robinson, one feature of inclusive institutions is their openness to innovation that carries widespread social benefits. By contrast, extractive institutions serve to channel wealth towards existing elites.

It is almost certainly true that innovative ph...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction – Welcome to the Infinite Game
• Part One – Society and the Infinite Game
• Part Two – The Infinite Player
• Postscript – Welcome to the Infinite Game
• Author’s Note
• Appendix – Infinite Game Workshop Outline
• Notes
• References
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright