Bob Neal

Some folks tell us that the basis of support for today’s Republican Party is racism. Others say, no, it’s people who have lost or fear losing jobs and status who are trending Republican as America becomes more openly and more clearly diverse.

Each position is probably right. At least partly. But neither tells the entire story.

Having grown up in segregated Missouri, I find it difficult to imagine any problem in America greater than racism. It is embedded — that’s why it is called “systemic” racism — broadly and deeply in our daily lives. Not to belabor the point, but just watch an episode of “The Lone Ranger” to see how negative attitudes toward indigenous people dominated our movie culture. Which is to say, our whole culture back in the days of western movies.

And who can deny that the national Republican Party is playing to racism? U. S. Sen. Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, even told an interviewer last weekend that if the mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 had been Black Lives Matter backers, he would have been afraid. As it was, he said he wasn’t scared by the Proud-Boys-Three-Percenters-Oath-Keepers insurrectionists because they “love their country.”

They showed their love of country by beating a Capitol policeman to death.

If you went up into the “hollers” of East Tennessee or out onto the ranches of Wyoming, you’d see and hear the discomfort of those who fear being displaced, those who see the change and have a hard time seeing how that change can improve their lots.

To use an old idea from social science, they see life as a “zero-sum game,” which means that any gain for you is a loss for me. If you win, I lose. Sports, one of our most common metaphors, is usually a zero-sum game. Only one team can win. And only one can lose.

Game theory came about in 1928, in the work of John von Neumann, a Hungarian-American usually considered the leading mathematician of his time. As you’d expect if you’ve spent more than five minutes in an academic department, other scholars piled on, most parsing Neumann’s work to come up with new mini-theories. The game of theories.

At least 14 types of games have been categorized by these academics. No, no, don’t turn away yet. We’re not going to look at 14 pointy-head theories. But let’s look at one that is used too often and another that may be our way out of the quagmire created by the first.

Another way to picture the zero-sum game is to imagine life as a pie. When you take out a slice, it is gone forever. So everyone scrambles to get “my piece of the pie.”

You probably don’t have to think long about that to realize it can be deadening and a dead end. If someone else’s gain can only be a loss for you, your outlook is bleak, at best.

But then the game theorists who drew this bleak picture came to our rescue. They gave us “cooperative games.”

In cooperative games, individuals and groups form coalitions to get something they all want, something they could not have got on their own. Then, life is no longer a pie.

Looking to economics for examples is risky — economists are like farmers in that if you ask four of them for an opinion you’ll get at least five answers — but the economics idea of comparative advantage can help us see the value, too, in cooperation.

We can get more done by cooperating than each of us would get by working alone.

For 30 years, I raised turkeys. We did everything we could on the farm. We cut cedar fence posts on our lot rather than buy steel posts from a farm supply. We printed our own labels. Ideally, we would raise the feed for our turkeys. Like you, we had seen videos of birds scratching in the dirt for grubs or snatching a beakful of grass to ingest.

Guess what. The modern turkey grows so fast that it couldn’t eat enough grubs and grass to sustain itself even if it ate 24/7. We had to have more potent food. So, I went to my friend Russ Dodge, a farmer who owns the Whitewater Farm feed store, and ordered feed milled from corn and soybeans and other elements that I couldn’t grow.

So, despite a stubborn independence, we learned we had to work with others, to form a coalition. Had I insisted on zero-sum, I would have had to find something else to do. Russ made money selling me feed, I made money selling turkeys to people who eat food.

As my late friend Al Tracy put it when we were talking about female pastors, “We wasted a lot of talent by not letting half of all Christians into the pulpit.” Some religions (many fundamentalist and some mainstream such as Southern Baptist and Catholic) still deny women the pulpit. Do the men running the show see the pulpit as a zero-sum game?

Most of us learned about cooperation from the kindergarten teacher who taught us to hold hands crossing the street, but the academics have put it all into a scientific framework to prove the point. 

Bob Neal doesn’t believe for a minute that you have to lose in order for him to win. He can be reached at turkeyfarm@myfairpoint.net.