King of the Ashes
The Science behind Littlefinger’s Rise to Power
The fifth season of Game of Thrones has begun, and as the new chapters in the story unfolds, more and more errant paths to the top seem to show Lord Baelish’s footprints. Behind his tremendous rise and behind his intricate plan lies a concrete set of ideas and reflections on realities of his world that not only guide him through his victories, but shape an equanimity of character and confidence that separate him from the truly deplorable villains of the story.
Littlefinger’s monologues are stripped of the hackneyed moralizing elements of the Starks’, of the rather annoyingly brash style of the Lannisters’, and of the prosaic delivery of Stannis’s. Where others equivocate, his style is always defined by an acerbic sense of honesty that is strangely appealing.
One of the most critical turning points in the last season involved the unveiling of the complex web of scheme and traps laid out by Littlefinger over the span of the story. He was revealed to be not only one of the most fundamental and pivotal players in the struggle for power but also the main impetus behind the War of Kings.
Like most intriguing antagonists in fiction, Littlefinger’s allure stems from a certain set of superior cognitive and behavioral skills that shape his unscrupulously survivalist attitude. He has dashes of sado-anarchism, most closely similar to the Joker and Thomas Pynchon’s favorite rebels. He has the tendency of delaying the satisfaction of destroying the enemy for the much greater satisfaction of testing out their proclivity to self-destruct , as was the habit of Shakespeare’s Iago. Two significant takes on human psychology and behavior give Petyr Baelish’s strategy its form and substance.
1. “Do you know what the Realm is?”
No other aspect of the story presents a better case study in assessing Littlefinger’s perspective on social-psychology than the interesting juxtaposition between him and Varys. In the reoccurring exchanges of sardonic wit and intellect between these two characters, the most honest portrait of each man’s philosophy is revealed. One critical occasion arose after a brief victory for Varys, when Littlefinger’s plan to take Sansa away from King’s Landing was successfully thwarted by Varys. The tense and volatile confrontation between the two, following this incident, directed both varyz and Littlefinger to finally address their core disagreement: the role of the realm. Littlefinger is quietly harboring thoughts of chaos and disorder for the realm while Varys sees no other ultimate goal than to preserve stability, but the main point of contention arises from a simple ideological difference about how social movements can be prophesied and, perhaps more importantly, influenced. For Varys, the concept of social cohesion is pivotal to the cause of preventing social upheaval. Varys is a “strict constructionist”. In the field of Sociology, proponents of the social constructionist theory of social movements hold that influential actors within a system can effectively construct “interpretations of reality” and “cultural meanings” that frame the certain grievances and motivations of social groups; this in turn helps to control the rise and decline of social movements. A strict constructionist, therefore, finds himself concerned with the image and identity of historic incidents and leaders only as a tool for framing a distorted reality, a false narrative, that can be sold to social groups to either subdue their grievances or to distract their attention. Varys believes that the collective identity of political leaders and events is often a forged identity. What the collective memory holds is different than the reality, and it follows that a statesman’s main objective is mold the most suitable collective identity. This is precisely why Varys has found himself deeply obsessed with the missed opportunity to shape the collective memory of the Battle of Blackwater. For Varys, Tryion’s tremendous show of leadership could have been a pivotal moment in constructing a social identity of a new leader, one that Varys deeply admires, and yet Varys failed at framing this identity.
Unsurprisingly, Varys sees value in an apocryphal of the thousand blades of Aegon merely because the enchanting story serves as an important tool in constructing a “national identity”, a form of social construct that is useful in subduing discontent and grievance on the national level. Littlefinger is acutely aware of the appeal of such fabrications; he, however, maintains an opposite view of social movements. Littlefinger’s philosophy can best be described as “Resource Mobilizationist”. Proponents of Resource Mobilization theory trace the rise of social movements to rational actors’ desire for acquiring more resources and power, with an absolute disregard for collective values and goods. To Littlefinger, grandiose concepts such as the realm, the Gods, or love are illusions that can easily be dispensed with when individual actors are adequately supplied with enough resources in their quest for power. Littlefinger, therefore, perceives Varys’s goal of delivering stability by shaping a national identity as a futile attempt that can easily be subverted if sufficient amount of resources are provided to the right actors.
Nascent signs of collaboration with Sansa Stark is reflects Littlefinger’s newest project in resource mobilization, a study in sapping the last residues of Stark-ist moral absolutism and attachment to ideals out of Sansa by providing her with adequate resources for getting what she truly desires. For such a strong believer of resource mobilization the only precondition for rebellion is an imbalance in resources among different forces, and Littlefinger’s long tenure as the Master of Coin has provided him with the amazing access to the most valuable resource: money. As the Master of the Coin, Littlefinger has been able to put the Lannister family in an imbroglio that no army, no matter the size, can fix. Lannisters are heavily in debt to the Royal Bank and the shift in allegiance from the bank might indeed be the Lannister’s undoing. So whose orders do the soldiers follow when The Queen proclaims one King and the King’s Hand proclaims another? Littlefinger’s answer was dispositive: “The man who pays them.”
2. “Littlefinger…..God only knows what game Littlefinger is playing”
Avid fans of the field of Game Theory will note that no other TV show on television today serves as a better demonstration of the panoply of understood rules and regulation of Game Theory than Game of Thrones. Game Theory, as a field of applied mathematics, is concerned with a scientific and empirical analysis of interactions between human beings as agents in the game of exchanging utilities, where each actor’s decision affects other actor’s well-being, and in turn determines whether a relationship of cooperation or retaliation will form between the two actors. In the most basic problems in Game Theory, such as the famous Prisoner’s Dillema, the players are faced with two options of cooperation and cheating. It is further assumed that each player’s utility peeks when he can successfully cheat in the face of cooperation, reaping the benefits of both other player’s cooperation and his own self-interested move, and that the lowest level of utility for both players follows the scenario of both players cheating. When both players cooperate, they forgo the possibility of gaining the highest possible utility in the hope of avoiding the lose-lose scenario. This dilemma arises in repeated games when a cheater is bound to face retaliation in the next round of interaction, if he cheats despite the other player’s decision to cooperate.
The pioneering work of Robert Axelrod of University of Michigan on repeated games showed that one strategy clearly stood out as the most efficient and most desirable mode of behavior: the tit-for-tat strategy. Actors following the tit-for-tat strategy start the first round of the game by cooperating and in each subsequent round simply replicate the other player’s action. This classic strategy is the essence of the Golden Rule and finds its strongest endorsement in the motto “a Lannister always pays his debt.”
This means that the tit-for-tat strategy has the remarkable advantage of setting up an infinite game of cooperation but is also susceptible to delivering a scary chain reaction of retaliation with neither party ever forgiving the other side’s decision to cheat. This glitch in the tit-for-tat strategy is exacerbated when the two players are operating in a system which allows for “noise”. Noise is a signaling error in the system where one player’s cooperative behavior is mistakenly perceived as cheating by the other party. In a pure tit-for-tat strategy, when player 2 misreads a cooperative move as cheating, he retaliates by cheating and invites a spiral of non-cooperative interaction that will continue for the rest of the game. The world of Westeros with its amalgamation of self-interested parties perpetuates this exact kind of noise, as other parties desperately try to inject themselves in other games, seeking to disrupt the signal between two otherwise cooperating players. In fact the main source of contention between the Starks and the Lannister’s can easily be traced back to a signaling error in the system. A cooperative move on the part of Jamie Lannister in killing the mad king was misinterperated by Ned Stark, starting a seesaw of retaliatory interaction.
The only solution to the problem of miscommunication in the system is designing a strategy that allow for certain number of defections before noncooperation is punished by noncooperation. One such strategy is the more risky “forgiving-tit-for-tat” strategy, often adapted by the Starks, and more than often botched. Forgiving-tit-for-tat players incorporate a small probability for forgiveness in the face of first noncoperative behavior in the hopes of avoiding the cycle of retaliation. This strategy, however, leaves the forgiving player at the mercy of exploitation at the hand of a pure tit-for-tat player. The strategy can, therefore, have catastrophic results if it induces the forgiving player to give a perceived defector a second chance, as Ned Stark did with Littlefinger, or assume that other players are also operating the forgiving strategy when they are pure tit-for-tat players, as Rob Stark did with Walder Frey.
So how does Littlefinger’s strategy works to exploit all the other strategies in the game? First, there is an undoubtedly remarkable strategic prevarication incorporated into the strategy. Littlefinger, more than all the other players, is fully aware that he is operating in a system that is riddled with uncertainty and noise. Littlefinger has a “non-stationary” strategy, meaning that, not only each action in each round, but the rule for picking each action changes with each round.
Littlefinger’s non-stationary strategy allows for abandoning predicative rules of behavior, whether it be a Moral absolutism of the kind practiced by the Starks or the zero-sum strategy of the Lannisters, in exchange for a dynamic long-run strategy equipped with “learning”. Non-stationary strategic players use past experiences and the evidence gathered from other players behavior in the previous rounds to form beliefs about their future decision and adapt accordingly. This is why Littlefinger is as likely to respond to cheating with cooperation as he is to respond to a long practice of cooperation with retaliation. As one an obvious advantages of utilizing this shifting strategy, Littlefinger has proven to be apt at always cheating in the last round following a long chain of cooperation. Joffrey Baratheon, Dontos Hollard, and Lysa Arryn so far have been subjects of betreyal in the last round. In nosiy systems, adaptive strategies are bound to prevail ovr statioanry strategies such as tit-for-tat and orgiving-tit-for-tat, what happens when the adaptive and pragmatic strategies of Littlefinger and the Boltons’ meet remains to be seen.
