Reflection 2

To be quite honest, I'm not feeling particularly inspired tonight. Some people seem to think that the arms race in class Friday detracted from the discussion; I'm not so certain. I found class quite interesting: examining how groups are prone to competition, how they do (or do not) act altruistically, and how states can be organized to a common end (the thought embargo). Just because the discussion wasn't entirely verbal didn't mean it didn't occur. It's just that I already wrote (in my last entry) about my view of so-called "altruism" and the role it should play in politics, and arguments over morality rarely get anywhere; people tend to hold very deeply entrenched views on the subject, everyone has already heard what everyone else has to say, and when one continues to talk after making a point it merely becomes belligerence.

I guess what intrigued me the most about class Friday was the way in which we decided to distribute resources. We ended up using a system that was, I feel, inarguably worse than the one I designed. The lottery system that was used had no potential benefits and severe potential drawbacks. Namely, it relied on people's good will to effectively distribute resources. Most groups would initially begin with a deficit of resources: there was a greater chance that any one group would have a deficit than that they would have a surplus. Charity is never dependable, so it was not in any group's best interests to utilize the lottery system. By somehow redistributing the resources before assigning territories to groups, all groups could have increased their chances of having enough resources. Yet, for some reason, we did not do this. We did not act rationally, simply because we were too lazy to work out an effective and elegant solution to the problem of resource distribution and just sit down. Public servants and politicians typically don't have to worry about sitting down. Real international systems don't form in 15 minutes, and states have extensive foreign policy bureaucracies that promote efficient, disciplined, professional decision-making. But I still have to wonder: has the course of world ever been dictated by a leader who just wanted to go home?