It has come to my attention that there is a lot of money to be made by developing a video game and then getting a lot of buyers. I am told that the amount of money spent on video games every year is greater than the amount of money spent on theater tickets.
I would like to get a piece of this action. So, I have come up with an idea: The Angels Game. Maybe there is a programmer out there who would like to work with me to develop The Angels Game.
The great thing about this game is that it will be highly educational. Not only will the angels have supernatural powers, which all angels have to have, they will also have to have social organization. After all, angels are not God.
There have to be certain rules. I would call these ground rules, except we are talking about angels. I am not sure what to call these rules. "Cloud rules" sound like the Internet. "Ethereal rules" sound like the ethernet. "Spook rules" sound like the CIA. "Metaphysical rules" sound like medieval philosophy -- an unlikely market.
The goal of the game will be to illustrate a point: the free market is necessary for angels.
What about fallen angels? Here, there is no question: central planning is fundamental. David Warner's characterization of Satan is exactly on target.
But why would angels need a free market? I mean, they are good. Isn't the capitalist system necessary because people are not good? If this is the case, and angels are ethically good, then why would they need a free market system? Why wouldn't they adopt socialism?
INCOMMUNICABLE ATTRIBUTES
Let's start with what theologians call the incommunicable attributes of God: omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. God knows everything; He can do whatever he wants at zero price; and He is everywhere all at once. He is the ultimate central planner. His central plan works.
Because God is top dog, so to speak, He can afford to decentralize. It's no skin off His nose. But Satan, driven by envy, could not tolerate this. He resented the fact that God was on top, and he wasn't. Anyway, that's the general story. So, he rebelled, taking advantage of specialized knowledge, specialized skills, and his ability to recruit. But he still wasn't God.
Nevertheless, he wanted to be like God. So, he presumed that if he just worked at it hard enough, he could be omniscient and omnipotent. "Computers. If I just had fast enough computers." But he always had a problem with omnipresence. For this, he had to decentralize. He is always trying to re-centralize, but being forced to remain in one place at the same time places limits on his ability to centralize. Even nearly ubiquitous digital cameras won't do it. Nevertheless, he is using London as a testing area.
Probably the best description of Satan's problem appears in the original version of Bedazzled (1967), where Satan, played by Peter Cook, explains to his victim, played by Dudley Moore, why he has such serious organizational problems. He takes Moore to the below-sidewalk tavern that serves as the front for his headquarters. Sloth has his head on the bar, asleep. Anger is the bouncer. Satan [Spiggott] complains that he just can't get good help. "What terrible sins I have working for me. I suppose it's the wages."
HAYEK'S TWO SCENARIOS
F. A. Hayek wrote his famous chapter, "Why the Worst Get on Top," in The Road to Serfdom (1944). The Angels Game should demonstrate this process. The players who join the host of fallen angels should figure out early that it pays to be corrupt.
Another fundamental Hayekian theme is that of decentralized knowledge. The year after The Road to Serfdom was published, his most important article was published: "The Use of Knowledge in Society." He described the problem that every society faces.
The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate "given" resources--if "given" is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these "data." It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.
We're back to omniscience, or rather the lack of it. However well-informed angels and fallen angels may be, they still face the problem of insufficient knowledge. In the game, angels will have to have some way of gaining access to accurate knowledge regarding the future. I mean, if a fallen angel cannot buy a man's soul with information about next week's stock market, he is really hampered. If he cannot sell accurate inside information, he would have no more influence than CNBC. Nobody is going to sell his soul just to get inside tips from the supernatural equivalent of Jim Cramer. Anyway, somebody who would be this dumb is probably not worth recruiting, even in a down market.
Angels face the problem of scarcity. At zero price, there is greater demand than supply. They have to coordinate their war against evil, so they have to be able to offer benefits to the followers of God.
The Angels Game must have this as its operating assumption: winning and losing have to do with ethics, not power. If winning and losing are based on power, then history is a cosmic arm-wrestling match between God and Satan. That would not be much of a game. We know who the winner will be. So, the game is about ethics. How you play the game has to do with ethics.
The fallen angels begin with the supreme rule of the netherworld: Angels have to gain men's cooperation based on ethical cause and effect. So do fallen angels, but they have a problem. Selling ethical cause and effect is a hard sell in a fallen world. It is a lot easier to sell power. The game therefore proceeds on the basis of Hayek's two scenarios. The first one is this: the worst get on top. The second one is this: government bureaucracies cannot gain access to accurate information to the same degree that decentralized free markets can. Any attempt to centralize planning mandates the centralization of power, which produces two processes: first, the worst get on top; second, the people who get on top have to make their plans in terms of inaccurate and incomplete information. The angels try to persuade men not to pursue power. They try to persuade men to pursue profits in an open market. RULES OF THE GAME Here, we have a real problem with the foundational the rules of the game. Is the pursuit of profit, irrespective of ethics, the way to win the game? Couldn't that assumption be part of the arsenal of deception employed by the fallen angels? This question has divided the defenders of the free market for over two centuries. Here is the question. "Do we do the right thing in order to gain a profit, or do we gain a profit by doing the right thing?" This is another way of asking this: "Is the great benefit of the free market its enabling of people to become efficient servants, in order to accumulate capital, or is it its enabling of people to accumulate capital, in order to become efficient servants?" We have heard this before. Maybe there will be competing versions of The Angels Game. "May the best game win!" But the question remains: what should be our criteria for "best"?
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon (Matthew 6:25).
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