Do you mean the prisoner’s dilemma?
Yes, basically it’s roughly that type of situation, except it’s a weird unpredictable mix of a one-off (in which the stable solution is to defect) and repeated play (where it pays to cooperate) because it takes place across generations and dimensions (individuals, families, states…) with ill-defined “players.”
EDIT: And you have chaotic external factors to boot. Two island nations might prosper from mutual cooperation until a volcano ruins one of the islands and sends the refugee population flooding to the safe one. At that point (from a purely utilitarian, survival oriented perspective), a war might make sense.
I’m super-uncomfortable at the readiness to take this as “Teacher Forces Kids to Join KKK!!!”. If someone were at all inclined to join the KKK (or the next version of it), wouldn’t our number-one wish be that they first question why they’re doing it? And isn’t that specifically what this exercise does?
And I think 5th grade is a pretty good age to deal with the subject. Kids that age probably spend more time thinking about in-group / out-group dynamics than at any other time in their lives, so (assuming it’s not mishandled) it’s the ideal time to start addressing how individual judgement fits into the picture.
Actually, let me expand on the island scenario:
Imagine two lonely tropical islands in the middle of an otherwise seemingly boundless ocean. One is inhabited by the Orange tribe, the other by the Green tribe. The islands are close enough to permit mutually beneficial trade (yummy mussels from the Green island lagoon for the obsidian found in abundance on the Orange island) but sufficiently far apart to prevent any direct competition over fisheries and such.
Both island tribes are on a comparable stone-age technological level. With no effective contraceptives or family planning, both islands’ populations roughly reflect the carrying capacity of the environment. Some thousand-odd people live on each, limited by the amount of fruit that can be grown and fish that can be caught.
One sunny day, the huge hill in the middle of the Orange island starts belching smoke from its summit. Alarmed, the tribe elders consult the ancient cryptic stories and songs orally passed down the generations and come to the conclusion that the Fire god became really angry at them for taking all his obsidian and it’s time to haul ass, pronto.
As they load all their family members and valuable possessions on every canoe, barge and half-hewed log to be found on the island and make out to sea, they watch in horror as the pyroclastic flows descend down Mount Orange and turn the lush tropical paradise into a smouldering wasteland. So now what?
They can’t stay at sea for very long. Fresh water is a huge issue, for starters. The obvious solution is to head to the only known nearby island, inhabited by their relatively friendly Green trading partners. At this moment, shaman Weirdaffection stands up in his canoe and loudly explains that at the best of times, the Green island can support maybe 1200 people and that’s really pushing it. With the entire Orange tribe arriving, they add up to over 2000. That means some 800 people are going to die from starvation, no matter how well intentioned everyone involved is. Now which 800 people is it going to be?
The Green tribe, he continues, will probably object to equitably sacrificing 400 of their children and elderly to hunger and disease just because the Fire god’s obsidian claim against the Orange tribe happened to come due. And that’s not even taking into account their possible objections to having filthy foreigners infest their ancestral Green island en masse in the first place. We know that and they know that and we know that they know that we know. So the most likely scenario involves the Green tribe kicking our refugee butts off their turf sooner rather than later and leaving us to the privations of the vast empty ocean.
However - the future need not be entirely grim for our Orange tribe Sh. Weirdaffection pointed out, involuntarily raising his cursed arm. Given the limitations of the game-theoretical scenario I just laid out, there is one winning solution: We disembark secretly at dawn, spears first. We take the Green tribe village by surprise. We slaughter the men before they can arm and assemble, using the element of surprise. We massacre the population and only keep roughly 200 of the hottest, most fertile girls for ourselves as concubines. We take over a new island with delicious mussels and make it our own, coming out of this calamity more prosperous than ever!
Three days later, hiding from the Orange savages in a secluded cave, the leader of the Green tribe Republicans, previously generally disliked among their compatriots for their paranoia, irrational fear of everything foreign and continuous attempts to sabotage the mutually beneficial contact with the Orange island inhabitants for which they held hitherto inexplicable hatred, explains to his ragtag group of resistance survivors that if only everyone had heeded his game-theoretical analysis of the meaning of the volcanic plume rising from the Orange island and prepared for a sneak attack by the desperate refugees, the invasion could have been stopped at the beaches. Now he shall proceed to lay out a plan to take back their ancestral homeland thanks to the Second scroll, fortunately granting them the divine right to excessively arm themselves and train war arts even in peacetime…
My entire middle school annually took part in what amounted to a Civil War reenactment day as part of the curriculum. We were divided up based on which classrooms were on the north and south sides of the building, and I feel like I recall being encouraged to wear blue or gray. I definitely remember my friend jokingly calling me a “dirty yankee.” It was all a game. A game at a school with very, very few–if any-- black students.
Yeah, I look back on that with a full-body cringe.
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