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true zero-sum games are ridiculously rare in the real world. There's always some way to achieve mutual gains - even if it's just "avoid mutual losses"
I disagree.
I think you're underestimating how deep value differences can be, and how those values play into everything a person does. Countries with nuclear weapons who have opposing interests are actively trying to destroy each other without destroying themselves in the process, and if you're curious about the failures of MAD, I'd suggest reading The Doomsday Machine, by Daniel Ellsberg. If that book is to be taken as mostly true, and the MWI is to be taken as true, then I suspect that many, many worlds were destroyed by nuclear missiles. When I found this unintuitive, I spent a day thinking about quantum suicide to build that intuition: most instances of all of us are dead because we relied on MAD. We're having this experience now where I'm writing this comment and you're reading it because everything that can happen will happen in some branch of the multiverse, meaning our existance is only weak evidence for the efficacy of MAD, and all of those very close calls are stronger evidence for our destruction in other branches. This doesn't mean we're in the magic branch where MAD works, it means we've gotten lucky so far. Our futures are infinite split branches of parallel mes and yous, and in most of those where we rely on strategies like MAD, we die.
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Scissor statements reveal pre-existing differences in values, they don't create them. There really are people out there who have values that result in them doing terrible things. Furthermore, beliefs and values aren't just clothes we wear -- we act on them, and live by them. So it's reasonable to assume that if someone has a particularly heinous belief, and particularly heinous values, that they act on those beliefs and values.
In the ssc short story, scissor statements are used to tear apart mozambique, and in real life, we see propagandists using scissor statements to split up activist coalitions. It's not hypothetical, divide and conquer is a useful strategy that has been used probably since the dawn of time. But not all divides are created equal.
In the 1300s in rural France, peasants revolted against the enclosure of the commons, and since many of these revolts were led by women, the nascent state officials focused their efforts on driving a (false) wedge between men and women, accusing those women of being witches & followers of satan. Scissor statements (from what I can tell) are similar in that they're a tactic used to split up a coalition, but different in that they're not inventing conflict. It doesn't seem to make much of a difference in terms of outcome (conflict) once people have sorted themselves into opposing groups, but equating the two is a mistake. You're losing something real if you ally yourself with someone you're not value-aligned with, and you're not losing something real if you're allying yourself with someone you are value-aligned with, but mistakenly think is your enemy. The amount of power people like you with your value has loses strength because now another group that wants to destroy you has more power.
If two groups form a coalition, and gorup_A values "biscuits for all," and group_B values "cookies for all," and someone tries to start a fight between them based on this language difference, it would be tragic for them to fight. Because it should be obvious that what they want is the same thing, they're just using different language to talk about it. And if they team up, group_A won't be tempted to deny group_B cookies, because they deep-down value cookies for all, including group_B. It's baked into their decision making process.
(And if they decide that what they want to spend all their time doing is argue over whether they should call their baked food product "cookies" or "biscuits," then what they actually value is arguing about pedantry, not "cookies for all.")
But in a counter example, if group_A values "biscuits for all" and group_B values "all biscuits for group_B," then group_B will find it very available and easy to think of strategies which result in biscuits for group_B and not group_A. If someone is having trouble imagining this, that may be because it's difficult to imagine someone only wanting the cookies for themselves, so they assume the other group wouldn't defect, because "cookies for all? What's so controversial about that?" Except group_B fundamentally doesn't want group_A getting their biscuits, so any attempt at cooperation is going to be a mess, because group_A has to keep double-checking to make sure group_B is really cooperating, because it's just so intuitive to group_B not to that they'll have trouble avoiding it. And so giving group_B power is like giving someone power when you know they're later going to use it to hurt you and take your biscuits.
And group_B will, because they value group_B having all the biscuits, and have a hard time imagining that anyone would actually want everyone to have all the biscuits, unless they're lying or virtue signalling or something. And they'll push and push because it'll seem like you're just faking.
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I find the way people respond to scissor statements ("don't bring that up, it's a scissor statement/divisive!") benefits only the status quo. And if the status quo benefits some group of people, then of course that group is going to eschew divisiveness.
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To bring it back to the Spanish Civil War, the communists were willing to ally themselves with big businesses, businesses who were also funding the fascists. They may have told themselves it was a means to an end, and for all I know (because my knowledge of the Spanish Civil War is limited only to a couple books,) the communists may have been planning to betray those big business interests, in the end. But in the mean time, they advanced the causes of those big business interests, and undermined the people who stood against everything the fascists fought for. It's difficult to say what would've happened if the anarchists had tried a gambit to force the hand of big business to pick a side (communist or fascist) or simply ignored the communists' demands. But big business interests were more supportive of Franco winning (because he was good for business), and their demands of the communists in exchange for money weakened the communists' position, and because the communists twisted the arms of the anarchists & the anarchists went along with it, this weakened their position, too. And in the end, the only groups that benefitted from that sacrifice were big business interests and Franco's fascists.
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whether the deal can plausibly be kept secret.
That's a crapshoot, especially in the modern day. Creating situations where groups need to keep secrets in order to function is the kind of strategy Julian Assange used to cripple government efficiency. The correct tactic is to keep as few secrets from your allies as you can, because if you're actually allies, then you'll benefit from the shared information.
This is a fictional piece based on Sort By Controversial. You do not need to read that first, though it may make Scissor Statements feel more real. Content Warning: semipolitical. Views expressed by characters in this piece are not necessarily the views of the author.
I stared out at a parking lot, the pavement cracked and growing grass. A few cars could still be seen, every one with a shattered windshield or no tires or bashed-in roof, one even laying on its side. Of the buildings in sight, two had clearly burned, only blackened reinforced concrete skeletons left behind. To the left, an overpass had collapsed. To the right, the road was cut by a hole four meters across. Everywhere, trees and vines climbed the remains of the small city. The collapsed ceilings and shattered windows and nests of small animals in the once-hospital behind me seemed remarkably minor damage, relatively speaking.
Eighty years of cryonic freeze, and I woke to a post-apocalyptic dystopia.
“It’s all like that,” said a voice behind me. One of my… rescuers? Awakeners. He went by Red. “Whole world’s like that.”
“What happened?” I asked. “Bioweapon?”
“Scissor,” replied a woman, walking through the empty doorway behind Red. Judge, he’d called her earlier.
I raised an eyebrow, and waited for elaboration. Apparently they expected a long conversation - both took a few seconds to get comfortable, Red leaning up against the wall in a patch of shade, Judge righting an overturned bench to sit on. It was Red who took up the conversation thread.
“Let’s start with an ethical question,” he began, then laid out a simple scenario. “So,” he asked once finished, “blue or green?”.
“Blue,” I replied. “Obviously. Is this one of those things where you try to draw an analogy from this nice obvious case to a more complicated one where it isn’t so obvious?”
“No,” Judge cut in, “It’s just that question. But you need some more background.”
“There was a writer in your time who coined the term ‘scissor statement’,” Red explained, “It’s a statement optimized to be as controversial as possible, to generate maximum conflict. To get a really powerful scissor, you need AI, but the media environment of your time was already selecting for controversy in order to draw clicks.”
“Oh no,” I said, “I read about that… and the question you asked, green or blue, it seems completely obvious, like anyone who’d say green would have to be trolling or delusional or a threat to society or something… but that’s exactly how scissor statements work…”
“Exactly,” replied Judge. “The answer seems completely obvious to everyone, yet people disagree about which answer is obviously-correct. And someone with the opposite answer seems like a monster, a threat to the world, like a serial killer or a child torturer or a war criminal. They need to be put down for the good of society.”
I hesitated. I knew I shouldn’t ask, but… “So, you two…”
Judge casually shifted position, placing a hand on some kind of weapon on her belt. I glanced at Red, and only then noticed that his body was slightly tensed, as if ready to run. Or fight.
“I’m a blue, same as you,” said Judge. Then she pointed to Red. “He’s a green.”
I felt a wave of disbelief, then disgust, then fury. It was so wrong, how could anyone even consider green... I took a step toward him, intent on punching his empty face even if I got shot in the process.
“Stop,” said Judge, “unless you want to get tazed.” She was holding her weapon aimed at me, now. Red hadn’t moved. If he had, I’d probably have charged him. But Judge wasn’t the monster here… wait.
I turned to Judge, and felt a different sort of anger.
“How can you just stand there?”, I asked. “You know that he’s in the wrong, that he’s a monster, that he deserves to be put down, preferably slowly and painfully!” I was yelling at Judge, now, pointing at Red with one hand and gesticulating with the other. “How can you work with him!?”
Judge held my eyes for a moment, unruffled, before replying. “Take a deep breath,” she finally said, “calm yourself down, take a seat, and I’ll explain.”
I looked down, eyed the tazer for a moment, closed my eyes, then did as she asked. Breathe in, breathe out. After a few slow breaths, I glanced around, then chose a fallen tree for a seat - positioning Judge between Red and myself. Judge raised an eyebrow, I nodded, and she resumed her explanation.
“You can guess, now, how it went down. There were warning shots, controversies which were bad but not bad enough to destroy the world. But then the green/blue question came along, the same question you just heard. It was almost perfectly split, 50/50, cutting across political and geographical and cultural lines. Brothers and sisters came to blows. Bosses fired employees, and employees sued. Everyone thought they were in the right, that the other side was blatantly lying, that the other side deserved punishment while their side deserved an apology for the other side’s punishments. That they had to stand for what was right, bravely fight injustice, that it would be wrong to back down.”
I could imagine it. What I felt, toward Red - it felt wrong to overlook that, to back down. To let injustice pass unanswered.
“It just kept escalating, until bodies started to pile up, and soon ninety-five percent of the world population was dead. Most people didn’t even try to hole up and ride out the storm - they wanted to fight for what was right, to bring justice, to keep the light in the world.”
Judge shrugged, then continued. “There are still pockets here and there, where one side or the other gained the upper hand and built a stronghold. Those groups still fight each other. But most of what’s left is ruins, and people like us who pick over them.”
“So why aren’t you fighting?” I asked. “How can you overlook it?”
Judge sighed. “I was a lawyer, before Scissor.” She jerked her head toward Red. “He was too. We even came across each other, from time to time. We were both criminal defense attorneys, with similar clients in some ways, though very different motivations.
“Red was… not exactly a bleeding heart, but definitely a man of principles. He’d made a lot of money early on, and mostly did pro-bono work. He defended the people nobody else would take. Child abusers, serial killers, monsters who everyone knew were guilty. Even Red thought they were guilty, and deserved life in prison, maybe even a death sentence. But he was one of those people who believed that even the worst criminals had to have a proper trial and a strong defense, because it was the only way our system could work. So he defended the monsters. Man of principle.
“As for me, I was a mob lawyer. I defended gangsters, loan sharks, arms dealers… and their friends and families. It was the families who were the worst - the brothers and sons who sought sadistic thrills, knowing they’d be protected. But it was interesting work, the challenge of defending the undefendable, and it paid a fortune.
“We hated each other, back in the day. Still do, on some level. He was the martyr, the white knight putting on airs of morality while defending monsters. And I was the straightforward villain, fighting for money and kicks. But when Scissor came, we had one thing in common: we were both willing to work with monsters. And that turned out to be the only thing which mattered.”
I nodded. “So you hated each other, but you’d both spent years working with people you hated, so working with each other was… viable. You even had a basis to trust one another, in some weird way, because you each knew that the other could work with people they hated.”
“Exactly. In the post-scissor world, people who can work with monsters are basically the only people left. We form mixed groups - Red negotiates with Greens for us, I negotiate with Blues. They can tell, when they ask whether you’re Blue or Green - few people can lie convincingly, with that much emotion wrapped up in it. A single-color group would eventually encounter the opposite single-color group, and they’d kill each other. So when we meet other groups, they have some Blues and some Greens, and we don’t fight about it. We talk, we trade, we go our separate ways. We let the injustice sit, work with the monsters, because that’s the only way to survive in this world.
“And now you have to make a choice. You can go out in a blaze of glory, fight for what you know is right, and maybe take down a few moral monsters in the process. Or you can choose to live and let live, to let injustice go unanswered, to work with the monsters you hate. It’s up to you.”