In previous posts, we’ve explored how the spectacle of political discourse functions as a screen, such as how essentialist narratives about “bad individuals” distract us from the systems that produce and protect them. We’ve also examined the propaganda machine that fuels this distraction: the manufactured neutrality, the co-opted skepticism, and the solipsistic individualism that keeps people arguing over symptoms while the disease spreads unchecked. Both posts converge on the realisation that what presents itself as bug in the system is, more often than not, function operating exactly as designed.

So now we’ll take that further by asking why does the chaos persist? If elites have the resources and coordination to impose order when it suits them—passing legislation overnight, mobilising militaries, bailing out banks—why does so much of political life feel chaotic, contradictory, and resistant to resolution? The answer, examined through the lens of game theory, is that chaos itself is a strategic resource.

The Game Behind the Game

Game theory, at its core, models how rational actors make decisions when outcomes depend on the choices of others. In classical models—the prisoner’s dilemma, zero-sum games, Nash equilibria—the assumption is that all players share a common information environment and pursue identifiable objectives within known rules.

But real political power doesn’t operate in a clean, bounded game. It operates in what game theorists would call an extensive-form game with incomplete information. This is a game where the sequence of moves matters, players don’t know each other’s full hand, and the rules themselves can be altered mid-play. This distinction is crucial because it shifts the strategy entirely. In a game with fixed rules, winning means outplaying opponents within those rules. In a game where rules are malleable, the highest-leverage move is to change the rules, or better yet, to ensure no stable set of rules ever consolidates long enough for challengers to learn them.

This is the meta-game. The chaos we observe in political life—the contradictory policies, the manufactured crises, the endless culture wars—is not a failure of governance. It is a feature of a game designed to prevent competing players from ever reaching equilibrium.

Unpredictability as Dominance

In standard game theory, unpredictability is formalised through mixed strategies. For example, a player randomises their actions to prevent opponents from predicting and countering their moves. A poker player who always bluffs is easy to read; one who bluffs at calculated but variable intervals forces opponents into uncertainty.

Elites apply this logic systemically. Consider how policy oscillates between ideological poles depending on which coalition holds nominal power, while the underlying flows of resources—military contracts, tax structures, regulatory capture—remain remarkably consistent. The surface-level chaos is the mixed strategy. It forces the public, opposition movements, and even mid-level political actors into a reactive posture. You can’t build a counter-strategy against a system that never presents the same face twice.

This is not accidental. The cultivation of unpredictability serves multiple functions simultaneously:

It fragments opposition. When the rules keep shifting, coalitions struggle to form. Each new crisis demands a new response, a new set of alliances, a new framing. By the time one movement gains traction, the board itself has already shifted. This is the game-theoretic equivalent of forcing your opponents to play a new game before they’ve finished the last one.

It monopolises attention. Chaos is an attention tax. Every manufactured crisis, every outrageous statement, every contradictory policy announcement consumes the finite cognitive and organisational bandwidth of anyone trying to resist or reform. In information-theoretic terms, it raises the noise floor, making the signal of systemic exploitation harder to detect.

It normalises instability. Over time, people adapt to chaos as the baseline condition. This is a form of what behavioural game theorists call reference point manipulation. Because if the reference point for “normal” is constant turbulence, then the absence of crisis feels like progress, even if the underlying power structure hasn’t shifted at all.

The Asymmetry of Information

Classical game theory assumes that at least the structure of the game is common knowledge. It assumes that all players know the rules, even if they don’t know each other’s strategies. In practice, systemic power operates by violating this assumption. Elites don’t just play with better strategies; they play a different game from the one the public believes is being played.

Consider the Bell, California example from From Spectacle to Substance. The city’s officials didn’t break the rules. They simply exploited the gap between the game the public thought they were in (representative governance) and the game actually being played (resource extraction through legal manipulation). The special election to convert from a general city to a charter city was, in game-theoretic terms, a mechanism design problem. In this case, the officials designed the rules of the new game to guarantee their own payoff, counting on informational asymmetry (jargon, voter apathy, low turnout) to prevent opposition.

This pattern scales. International trade agreements, tax code complexity, and regulatory frameworks are all mechanism design exercises where the architects of the system are also its primary beneficiaries. The game is rigged not by breaking the rules but by writing them. And the complexity that surrounds these mechanisms is itself a strategic choice: it raises the cost of participation for anyone outside the designing coalition.

Chaos and the Suppression of Cooperative Equilibria

Perhaps the most important game-theoretic insight is this: chaos suppresses cooperation. In repeated games—situations where actors interact over time—cooperation can emerge and stabilise through mechanisms like reciprocity and reputation. The folk theorem in game theory tells us that in infinitely repeated games, cooperative outcomes can be sustained as equilibria, provided players are patient enough and can observe each other’s actions.

Systemic chaos disrupts every condition that makes this possible. It shortens time horizons (constant crisis makes people focus on survival, not long-term strategy). It obscures observation (propaganda and information overload make it impossible to track who did what). And it destabilises reputation (today’s ally is tomorrow’s villain in the media cycle).

This is why solidarity is so difficult to build and maintain under present conditions. It’s not because of the typical media propaganda that people are inherently selfish, but because the game has been structured to make cooperation irrational in the short term. The folk theorem requires patience and visibility. Systemic chaos destroys both.

The Spectacle as Camouflage

Return now to the spectacle—the relentless stream of outrage, scandal, and personality-driven politics we examined in the earlier posts. From a game-theoretic perspective, the spectacle is a screening mechanism. It separates those who engage with surface-level narratives from those who look beneath them and it rewards the former with a sense of participation while punishing the latter with isolation and dismissal.

The spectacle is also a commitment device because it locks public discourse into a framework where the only legible moves are reactions to the latest crisis. Once the media cycle has framed the game, opting out of that frame requires an investment of attention and credibility that most people cannot afford. You either play the spectacle’s game or you’re invisible.

This is how material resource battles—over land, labour, capital, and the legal structures that govern them—get masked by the noise of cultural conflict. The culture war is the mixed strategy; the resource war is the payoff matrix underneath it. And the genius of the system is that pointing this out sounds like conspiracy, because the game has been designed so that its structure is itself invisible to most players.

What Game Theory Doesn’t Tell Us

Game theory is a lens within the liberal economic framework and therefore not a prescription. It reveals the structural logic of why chaos persists and who benefits from it, but it doesn’t offer an easy counter-strategy. The system’s strength lies in its adaptability as it absorbs critique, co-opts resistance, and reshuffles its tactics faster than opposition can consolidate.

But the lens can still be valuable because it clarifies something that the spectacle works hard to obscure: the chaos is not an accident. It is a calculated, maintained, and strategically rational feature of a system designed to concentrate power and suppress the cooperative equilibria that could challenge it. Understanding this won’t dismantle the system on its own, but it does something the system fears: it makes the game visible. And a game that can be seen is a game that can, eventually, be changed.

The struggle, as always, is to move from spectacle to substance, from reacting to the chaos to understanding its architecture, from raging against the machine to mapping its circuits. The game is rigged, but knowing the rules is the first step toward refusing to play on their terms.