The combination of zero-sum impulses and VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) is deadly. Playing nonzero-sum under VUCA basically amounts to giving others the benefit of the doubt when fear makes you want to give it all to yourself.
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What allows you to do so is empathy. The advice about wild animal encounters “remember it is more afraid of you than you are of it” gets to the heart of it. Under VUCA, the situation threatens all parties, and being more powerful doesn’t make you in charge/on top of it.
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Any idiot can be nonzero sum when it’s pure upside potentiality, and all doubt and ambiguity is on upside. It is easy to be generous when all are winning.
The hard version is when there’s downside doubt to0, and you have to give others the benefit of that. That’s vulnerability.
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Any idiot can be marginally compassionate and kind when only the other party is suffering and you’re fine. That’s just feelings of power and nobility from safety.
The hard version is being kind and compassionate when you’re suffering too.
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There’s no general principles here afaict. It’s not an ethics thing or a morals thing. It’s not even willpower.
It’s just practice. The more you practice being kind and generous when *you* are suffering or afraid, the stronger you get.
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In fact that’s the only kind of kindness/empathy that actually makes you stronger. From a position of weakness, fear, vulnerability, and even contempt from the people you’re trying to be kind to. It’s totally thankless but it does increase strength against future VUCA.
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Being kind/empathetic from a position of power, confidence, security, and pity is nice, but doesn’t help you grow much. That just makes you feel better about yourself and can also feed a peculiar kind of moral egoism and smarm/smugness which fragilizes you against VUCA.
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This might be the biggest growing weakness of the US at all levels. The inability to be kind, empathetic, compassionate even from a position of weakness and inferiority on all fronts. It kills the golden goose of nonzero sum growth and win-win outcomes under VUCA.
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This is a kind of strength only weaker parties can bring to a situation. It’s asymmetric guerilla peacemaking. The opposite of guerilla warfare. Guerilla peacefare?
When you’re weaker, you won’t be judged for being pitiless. Which is why that’s when it is most valuable.
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The strong have strength blindness, which they may be exacerbating with active cruelty and sadism. In the best case they may do some zero-sum kindness out of pity. In the worst case, they become sadists. In neither case can they drive nonzero sum growth under VUCA.
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In the great weirding, the more powerful and protected people are, the less I expect of them. They are best positioned to ride out long periods of VUCA, and intellectually, they will always give themselves 110% of the benefit of the doubt, believing negative sum is positive sum.
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But to the extent the arc of the moral universe bends towards anything better, they aren’t going to do the bending. They’ll do just enough to convince themselves they’re the good people doing all they reasonably can.
All growth out of VUCA comes out of what the weak do.
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I’ll add: this is not abstract for me. Money is often the lead indicator of power/weakness under relatively normal conditions, and I’ve been broke or flush multiple times in 23 years of post-college adulthood. I’ve seen both extremes of the normal range of $-VUCA.
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Being kind under $-VUCA has been the 2nd hardest challenge in my life and most of my growth has come from such periods. I’m still quite unkind under such conditions, but better than I used to be
(the hardest has been visa-VUCA, and I expect health-VUCA will eventually take gold)
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All this growth btw has been unpleasant and not something I would ever sign up for if I didn’t have to. When I’m on top of things , the growth stalls completely, and if I had an opportunity to make enough big money to get of the need to grow this way entirely I’d grab it.
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Unlike say the eustress of exercise, which is both good for you and you sometimes actively choose because it is pleasurable under some conditions, VUCA-stress is almost pure distress that hurts you by default unless you decide to experience it in a way that makes you stronger.
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This sort of thread is almost completely useless. I do them just to lay things out clearly for myself. People who get it don’t need it, people who need it will likely never get it. They’ll just navigate VUCA with fear, anger, contempt, cruelty, and multiply and spread rage pain.
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It’s not really maturity, though maturity refines the basic instinct. I’ve seen the raw trait in children. Some kids seem to decide they’re going to put out 1.5x any pain they experience, others try to contain it, and try to comfort others even when they’re hurting themselves.
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