Game Theory & Civilization: EQ, Cooperation and Containment

When people hear Game Theory, they often become overstimulated or intimidated and stop listening. But Game Theory is simple. It’s not about being smarter than others; it’s about playing for long-term outcomes and leading people toward good behavior in a cooperative game.

Short-term thinking makes for a bad game. Game Theory is essential to human survival. It’s the rule book for how cooperation actually works, and not the idea of cooperating. Rather, what matters is the structure and behaviors inside that makes it succeed. What matters is holding people accountable to those good behaviors and not excusing them as human or emotion when they fall short of them.

EQ is not being emotional and making room for that. EQ is self-awareness and control of our emotions. It's often the people who are emotional talking about EQ that ironically have the lowest EQ value among all of us.EQ defined as controlling our emotions is essential to good cooperation and trust building inside that game. This is life and death important because cooperation is why humans rose above the animal kingdom; Game Theory explains why that worked.

Understanding Game Theory isn’t enough. It has to become who you are: imprinted behind your eyes in a permanent lens for how you see the world and make decisions.

Some people can’t see far ahead, especially those with dark triad traits. Whether that’s nature or nurture doesn’t matter. What matters is that they often can’t play the long game. Identifying them is important so we can engage in a containment strategy with them. The goal is to prioritize collective society through Game Theory as the justification, and over that individual defector and their well-being.