Ontology:Q644
- pronounced [S0] Trotsky's wager 1-1-1
Core characteristics[edit]
- pronounced [P] label [string] (L)
- pronounced [S0] Trotsky's wager 1-1-1
- E:Trotsky's wager
- pronounced [P] alias (en) [string]
- Trotskyist god grid (variation on Pascal's wager centering around early Trotskyism)
- shares thematic block [Item] (BB) 1-1-1
- Pascal's wager
- pronounced [S0] ethics problem involving workers' states (pronounced C) 1-1-1
- case of [Item]
- pronounced [S0] ethics problem involving Trotsky (pronounced C) 1-1-1
- existential-materialist thought experiment 1-1-1
- super-case of [Item]
- --
Use in thesis portals[edit]
- appears in work [Item]
- "Talk Eagle" - Trotsky's wager [unreleased]
Wavebuilder combinations[edit]
- pronounced [P] pronounced Wavebuilder: forms result [Item]
- --
- along with [Item]
- pronounced [S0] Trotsky's wager 1-1-1
Wavebuilder characterizations[edit]
- pronounced Wavebuilder: route [Item]
- pronounced [S0] Trotsky's wager 1-1-1
- along with [Item]
- Pascal's wager
- forming from [Item]
- Pascal's wager
- pronounced Z–617 pronounced [IV] [Z] Trotskyism (top-level category) 1-1-1
- pronounced [S0] Trotsky's wager 1-1-1
- pronounced Wavebuilder: route [Item]
- pronounced [S0] Trotsky's wager 1-1-1
- along with [Item]
- Pascal's wager
- forming from [Item]
- Pascal's wager
- 1930s Trotskyite conspiracy (proposed; Zv) 1-1-1
- pronounced [S0] Trotsky's wager 1-1-1
- pronounced Wavebuilder: route [Item]
- pronounced [S0] Trotsky's wager 1-1-1
- along with [Item]
- Pascal's wager
- forming from [Item]
- Pascal's wager
- pronounced [S0] ethics problem involving Trotsky (pronounced C) 1-1-1
- pronounced [S0] Trotsky's wager 1-1-1
Background[edit]
"Trotsky's wager" is the motif of applying the concept of Pascal's wager to Trotskyism. Within Pascal's wager, the basic premise is this: if you believe in a worldwide god, and that god exists, you gain everything, but if you don't believe in a worldwide god and that god exists, you lose everything. There are many problems with Pascal's wager if it is being used in the context of an actual pathway to truth: what if the grid does not capture all the possibilities, or the consequences of each possibility are wrong? However, Pascal's wager becomes far more interesting if it is turned around specifically to be a model of how believers think and why believers remain in religion. From this angle, it starts to make sense to use Pascal's wager as a toy model of absolutely any ideology and how people in that ideology make decisions.
We can now consider the possible outcomes for people in the Soviet Union believing in Trotskyism versus not believing in Trotskyism.
- Support Trotskyism, Trotskyism is correct: world workers' state. gain everything.
- Support Trotskyism, Trotskyism is incorrect: lose everything. no Soviet Union, no world workers' state.
- Reject Trotskyism, Trotskyism is correct: lose everything. workers' states fail to survive capitalism because they didn't become Trotskyism.
- Reject Trotskyism, Trotskyism is incorrect: lose nothing, gain nothing.
When the outcomes are laid out in this grid, it can start to become clear why someone like Trotsky or Zinoviev would side with Trotskyism. Although siding with Trotskyism creates a conflict between two possible workers' states, as long as Trotskyists believe that their workers' state is the one that will be constructed and if constructed would survive the Cold War, they have a strong motivation to not cooperate with mainstream Marxism-Leninism even if the underlying reality is that mainstream Marxism-Leninism is correct. Trotskyists do not have access to the underlying reality, except as mediated through the socially-linked countable culture of people that they interact with and the culture-specific ontological models inside it.
Of course, knowing the above "Sunny fallacy" is a fallacy, there is also a way to fix the Trotskyist decision grid to be somewhat more accurate to material reality — add one more degree of freedom. A classic Pascal's wager grid only includes two outcome axes: what the believer chooses to believe is true or be affiliated with, and what exists in reality. However, the situation with workers' states is more that the world always contains multiple defined realities in the form of physically separate populations which can develop separately in different directions. Although the internal beliefs of a population do not directly influence what futures are actually possible for it, the separation between populations means that given a particular date in the future "reality" in the Soviet Union can turn out one way and "reality" in the United States can locally turn out another way. Thus, if a Soviet or Trotskyist future and a United States future are separated on the grid, these are the outcomes:
- Support Trotskyism, Trotskyism is correct, United States loves it: gain everything. Trotskyists join with United States to create a large workers' state, perhaps a world workers' state.
- Support Trotskyism, Trotskyism is correct, United States hates it: lose something. Trotskyists scramble to create workers' state no bigger than half the world, United States tries to destroy it.
- Support Trotskyism, Trotskyism is incorrect, United States loves it: gain something, lose something. Trotskyists join with United States to create a workers' state, but the workers' state implodes somehow.
- Support Trotskyism, Trotskyism is incorrect, United States hates it: lose everything. Trotskyists expelled from Soviet Union, no Trotskyism-in-one-country, no world workers' state.
- Reject Trotskyism, Trotskyism is correct, United States loves it: lose everything. United States becomes Trotskyist and you become the enemy of the world's most powerful workers' state.
- Reject Trotskyism, Trotskyism is correct, United States hates it: gain nothing, lose nothing. Soviet Union pursues Stalin's Marxism, United States tries to destroy it.
- Reject Trotskyism, Trotskyism is incorrect, United States loves it: lose everything. United States tries to break open Soviet Union for not being Trotskyist. no workers' state.
- Reject Trotskyism, Trotskyism is incorrect, United States hates it: gain nothing, lose nothing.
Various different remarks can be made about this new grid. For one, as events multiply very few possible outcomes are good outcomes; this is a basic principle of probability, that the more events there are the harder it is to get all of them to line up. For another, there are multiple different bad outcomes. One is Trotskyism being true but the United States getting it first and seeking to crush everything that's not Trotskyism; another is Trotskyism being true but the United States crushing it because it helps the Soviet Union or hypothetical Trotskyist countries; a third is Trotskyism being false and the United States and the Soviet Union both crushing it because its creation benefits no existing population of people. The major factor in whether believing Trotskyism is a good idea is whether on a given hypothetical timeline the person who believes Trotskyism ends up aligned into a Marxist bloc which is capable of closing up the Cold War and Trotskyism can guide the bloc it is part of to victory. This is not just a prevailing assumption based in the standards of the United States and the Soviet Union — if Trotskyism itself claims to be capable of creating a world workers' state or in any case of guiding all the industrial and republican countries of the world to Trotskyism, then it is reasonable to point out that Trotskyism was effectively claiming it was powerful enough to end the Cold War, and it should be held to that standard.
Relevance to center-Liberalism[edit]
Some people outside Marxism may wonder what the point is in debating the viability of different named Marxisms and studying the difficulty or ease of keeping everyone connected into a particular Marxism. If you happen to be reading this page without being a Communist... carefully stop and think about the concept that Trotsky's wager applies to every movement that has ever existed. Non-Marxist movements generally cannot produce scientific predictions of whether they will actually succeed. This means that every movement produces a grid of what being allied with that movement potentially gains or loses someone and all the people socially connected to that person. If there exists a feminist movement to kick all rapists out of workplaces, people do not necessarily know how successful it will be in the end, so every individual in the country will unconsciously evaluate whether to be part of it based on its outcome grid. Anyone who is a rape survivor has so much to gain if the movement succeeds that the the possibility of failure becomes less relevant. For anyone who is detached from the experience of rape survivors, there is nothing to be lost by ignoring the movement, and there may not necessarily be much to gain by supporting it, while being in a movement when the movement fails could bring significant consequences to an individual and other individuals socially connected to that individual, as whole socially-linked groups of reactionaries first attack people they know were directly involved and then begin suspecting all the individual's friends or allies of being unacceptable "Commie progressives" who as a group all need to be expelled from institutions; failure to successfully pull off a particular movement could mean that people in general become more prejudiced against all movements and more discriminatory against any particular identity of people which could "hypothetically" be allied to another identity that could then be allied to a movement. Somewhere else, it may be that people are assembling a reactionary party. This movement will also have a decision grid. A few people will look at the movement and decide that the possibility of success is more relevant than the possibility of failure. Other people will look at the movement and decide that the possibility of being in the movement and failing is so bad that they do not want to affiliate themselves with it. Said another way, the calculation people typically picture when they think of movements may not be well aligned with the actual probabilities and decision functions for how people will really behave. People often look at non-affiliation with factions as a disadvantageous choice, claiming that "centrism will surely aid The Right", but in reality, it may well be that non-affiliation is simply an individual choosing to not actively participate in reactionary movements' attacks on the people — a highly rational choice when looking only at the decision grid of how bad being affiliated with "The Right" can actually be. Meanwhile, every movement which is not simply an exercise in non-affiliation with reactionaries tends to have actual material goals, meaning these goals may be achievable or unachievable and may conflict with other progressive movements' goals. Every act of becoming affiliated with a progressive movement is an act of abandoning non-affiliation with anything to again become affiliated with something; the act of being affiliated with something means that thing could fail and make things worse rather than making anything better. In short, every act of actually being affiliated with a progressive movement is a lot like being Trotsky. The simple act of being affiliated with something could bring problems in the form of conflict between movements or other movements saying your movement is harmful or incorrect or too unlikely to succeed. There will always be a downward pull for everyone to suddenly drop all movements and stop doing anything purely to prevent frustration and keep movements from fighting.
All of this traces back to the core problem of movements being unable to predict their own success or each other's success. When there is no objective answer to what movements, movement clusters, or movement forms are the most likely to succeed and the most likely to make life better rather than worse for a particular individual and that individual's immediate surrounding circle of people, the decision of which movements get to happen is handed to the sheer material competition between people to even eat and live in a house and to get to tell each other what to do, where the strongest minority people will win the ability to think and act and the weakest will be crushed into supporting the strongest leaders or experts. If movements could build scientific understandings of the basic structure and functioning of movements, this could become unnecessary — all movements could simply increasingly come to agreements of what each movement looks like and how to improve them. This begins at abstract exercises like comparing the realization process of mainstream Marxism-Leninism to the realization process of Trotskyism.
Usage notes[edit]
Swatch color[edit]
This Item uses the orange IV color swatch in reference to the subject of the thought experiment, not the fields the thought experiment is used in.