Question

“To simply work hard and get decent grades doesn’t cut it anymore if you believe there are only two options: the very top or rock bottom. It is a classic prisoner’s dilemma: to sit around for 2-3 hours at the dining hall ‘shooting the breeze’ or to spend time engaged in intellectual conversation in moral and philosophical issues, or to go on a date all detract from time we could be spending on getting to the top and, thus, will leave us worse off relative to everyone else... Because we view humanity – and thus its institutions – as corrupt and selfish, the only person we can rely upon is our self. The only way we can avoid failure, being let down, and ultimately succumbing to the chaotic world around us, therefore, is to have the means (financial security)to rely only upon ourselves.”

Do you agree that these options – either begrudgingly work hard to get to the top, or improve your moral, intellectual, and social life – constitute a Prisoner’s Dilemma game?

Explain, using a payoff matrix. Your explanation should be less than 100 word

Answer 1

We are meritocrats out of a survivalist instinct. If we do not race to the very top, the only remaining option is a bottomless pit of failure. To simply work hard and get decent grades doesn’t cut it anymore if you believe there are only two options: the very top or rock bottom. It is a classic prisoner’s dilemma: to sit around for 2–3 hours at the dining hall “shooting the breeze,” or to spend time engaged in intellectual conversation in moral and philosophical issues, or to go on a date all detract from time we could be spending getting to the top and, thus, will leave us worse off relative to everyone else.... Because we view humanity—and thus its institutions—as corrupt and selfish, the only person we can rely upon is our self. The only way we can avoid failure, being let down, and ultimately succumbing to the chaotic world around us, therefore, is to have the means (financial security) to rely only upon ourselves. Educational institutions rest on grand philosophical mottos, usually in Latin, that typically include terms like “truth,” “light,” “wisdom,” “justice,” “virtue,” “citizenship,” and “liberty,” among others, yet as institutions now implicitly tasked with the charge to sort winners and losers, higher education creates prison-like structures where a sense of success, freedom, and autonomy feel more like a personal escape from life at the bottom of the social heap than the kind of growth and self-actualization implied in a phrase like “Knowledge is Liberty” ( James Madison University’s motto). Deneen makes a distinction between modern and ancient conceptions of liberty by exploring the advance of liberalism as a political philosophy and ideology beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries up to the present. Liberalism is not simply a “narrowly political project of constitutional government and juridical defense of rights. Rather, it seeks to transform all of human life and the world. Its two revolutions—its anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and its insistence on the human separation from and opposition to nature—created its distinctive and new understanding of liberty as the most extensive possible expansion of the human sphere of autonomous activity”