Zero Sum Thinking is just 'Intelligence'

The Burckhardt Doctrine

“... the fundamental principle of Greek life has already been established, and remains valid for later times: ‘Always to be the best and to outdo the others.’”

— Jacob Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilisation

The utilitarian argument is that if two parties are cooperating in a game where both derive some benefit, it is always irrational for one party to defect (stop cooperating) on that game. So it follows that since morbidly obese people get slightly cheaper plastic toys which give their children cancer, Britain’s industrial base must be cheerfully sold to China. So it follows, in the words of one influential effective altruist, that the crimes visited upon British people by refugees must continue because those refugees are better off eating pom bears than they were in the Sahel and nobody really cares that much about “those girls.”

There are many woke cases in favour of zero sum thinking too. The enslaved people of the USA almost certainly benefited from their warped, ‘cooperation’ with the masters. They had food, housing and many became literate. It would be trivial to create a piece of Rationalist game theory showing how the immediate descendants of slaves lacked all of these things and so were engaged in heckin cursed zero sum thinking by fighting for freedom. If the empirical case is shady with slaves, it is 100% verifiable with decolonisation in Africa.