Bear Head

Now I get the crap jobs because, like plenty others, I just stopped giving a shit. Because there is not much to do on Mars. You can watch all the movies and play all the games and talk politics and sports with whoever’ll listen, but eventually your social motor runs down and every damn film looks like the last one and you owe everyone so nobody’ll play. And then you find that, because humans are humans, there’s a whole extra layer of Things To Do On Mars if you’re up for a little extra-legal shenanigans. Because it’s hard to get super excited about building the thousandth identical condo for some future Mars colonist who’ll neither know nor care about you. Who won’t even look like you. They’ll look human.

His voice is hitting that register that triggers my fear-response, like the bears did. Bioengineer us however much you want, sometimes we humans ain’t so very far from the caves and the stone tools.

Sugar’s got a look on her like she’s not entirely sure what Honey’s accusing her of, and Honey obviously reads the room because she adds quickly, ‘So, let’s say you’re a peacock and you have your grand tail, which likely evolved because it shows health and wellbeing, hence fitness. But the peahen just cares that you’ve got the biggest tail. Or... you’ve got your caveman in the Stone Age brings a mammoth in to show he’s a big hunter, you’re with me? And hunting’s the game, the actual important activity that’s being judged. Except Og next door just bonks Thog on the head and steals the mammoth, and that’s the metagame. Og’s a lousy hunter because he spends his time and effort not on hunting, but on the secondary activity that’s supposed to show how good a hunter you are. And so he wins out over Thog, gets the girl, becomes chief. And your worker who kisses ass’ is seen as management material not because they give their all to the company, but because they spend that effort they would otherwise give to the company on lookinglike they give it all to the company. They spend it on all the little social games instead, and because effort spent on the metagame is focused entirely about the appearance of virtue, it overshadows those who are actually performing the primary task, it overshadows actual virtue. And this is how human hierarchical structures end up working. This is why the people who end up in authority are generally not those focused on whatever the purpose of the community is, but those who are focused on achieving positions of authority. This is why you have career politicians, why administrators end up pulling ten times the salary of a surgeon or an academic under their administration, why performing well in an exam or a test is not actually the same as being good at the thing the exam is supposed to be testing. Because the metagame outweighs the game.’