Posted on 06/16/2013 10:42:56 AM PDT by jimbo123
Kayfabe
Eric Weinstein
The sophisticated "scientific concept" with the greatest potential to enhance human understanding may be argued to come not from the halls of academe, but rather from the unlikely research environment of professional wrestling.
Evolutionary biologists Richard Alexander and Robert Trivers have recently emphasized that it is deception rather than information that often plays the decisive role in systems of selective pressures. Yet most of our thinking continues to treat deception as something of a perturbation on the exchange of pure information, leaving us unprepared to contemplate a world in which fakery may reliably crowd out the genuine. In particular, humanity's future selective pressures appear likely to remain tied to economic theory which currently uses as its central construct a market model based on assumptions of perfect information.
If we are to take selection more seriously within humans, we may fairly ask what rigorous system would be capable of tying together an altered reality of layered falsehoods in which absolutely nothing can be assumed to be as it appears. Such a system, in continuous development for more than a century, is known to exist and now supports an intricate multi-billion dollar business empire of pure hokum. It is known to wrestling's insiders as "Kayfabe".
Because professional wrestling is a simulated sport, all competitors who face each other in the ring are actually close collaborators who must form a closed system (called "a promotion") sealed against outsiders. With external competitors generally excluded, antagonists are chosen from within the promotion and their ritualized battles are largely negotiated, choreographed, and rehearsed at a significantly decreased risk of injury or death. With outcomes predetermined under Kayfabe, betrayal in wrestling comes not from engaging in unsportsmanlike conduct, but by the surprise appearance of actual sporting behavior. Such unwelcome sportsmanship which "breaks Kayfabe" is called "shooting" to distinguish it from the expected scripted deception called "working".
Were Kayfabe to become part of our toolkit for the twenty-first century, we would undoubtedly have an easier time understanding a world in which investigative journalism seems to have vanished and bitter corporate rivals cooperate on everything from joint ventures to lobbying efforts. Perhaps confusing battles between "freshwater" Chicago macro economists and Ivy league "Saltwater" theorists could be best understood as happening within a single "orthodox promotion" given that both groups suffered no injury from failing (equally) to predict the recent financial crisis. The decades old battle in theoretical physics over bragging rights between the "string" and "loop" camps would seem to be an even more significant example within the hard sciences of a collaborative intra-promotion rivalry given the apparent failure of both groups to produce a quantum theory of gravity.
What makes Kayfabe remarkable is that it gives us potentially the most complete example of the general process by which a wide class of important endeavors transition from failed reality to successful fakery. While most modern sports enthusiasts are aware of wrestling's status as a pseudo sport, what few alive today remember is that it evolved out of a failed real sport (known as "catch" wrestling) which held its last honest title match early in the 20th century. Typical matches could last hours with no satisfying action, or end suddenly with crippling injuries to a promising athlete in whom much had been invested. This highlighted the close relationship between two paradoxical risks which define the category of activity which wrestling shares with other human spheres:
A) Occasional but Extreme Peril for the participants.
B) General: Monotony for both audience and participants.
Kayfabrication (the process of transition from reality towards Kayfabe) arises out of attempts to deliver a dependably engaging product for a mass audience while removing the unpredictable upheavals that imperil participants. As such Kayfabrication is a dependable feature of many of our most important systems which share the above two characteristics such as war, finance, love, politics and science.
Importantly, Kayfabe also seems to have discovered the limits of how much disbelief the human mind is capable of successfully suspending before fantasy and reality become fully conflated. Wrestling's system of lies has recently become so intricate that wrestlers have occasionally found themselves engaging in real life adultery following exactly behind the introduction of a fictitious adulterous plot twist in a Kayfabe back-story. Eventually, even Kayfabe itself became a victim of its own success as it grew to a level of deceit that could not be maintained when the wrestling world collided with outside regulators exercising oversight over major sporting events.
At the point Kayfabe was forced to own up to the fact that professional wrestling contained no sport whatsoever, it did more than avoid being regulated and taxed into oblivion. Wrestling discovered the unthinkable: its audience did not seem to require even a thin veneer of realism. Professional wrestling had come full circle to its honest origins by at last moving the responsibility for deception off of the shoulders of the performers and into the willing minds of the audience.
Kayfabe, it appears, is a dish best served client-side.
He is, undoubtedly, an ignorant ass or....he’s a RINO!
If imigration reform passes the Republicans will never win another election!!!
They drink too much Foggy Bottom juice.
Turds like Schumer, Menendez, Durbin, Piglosi, Guiterrez, 0bama, and La Raza all want this turkey passed because it will help the GOP.
Right.
"Reaching out to our good friends across the aisle" and all that, you know.
How do we get idiots like this on "our" side, anyhow? Are the pictures and their intercepted internet visitations the DNC (Democrat National Commies) are blackmailing them with that bad? My guess is, "yes"...
Hey Girlie Graham....The Pubs will NEVER win again...NEVER!!! Not even YOU!!
The OBL is really spreading the money around....
"Repugnant" is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact that the Republican party has been hijacked by liberals.
Hey Lindsey, how about you and Republican leadership fielding candidates that actually appeal to the majority of Republicans/Conservatives first before you go about importing another 30 million+ Democrat voters.
You and Romney were too busy kissing Hussein’s ass during the last election to win.
Both sides tend to be similar, but they differ at the level of the coalitions making them up.
Coalition partner internal politics tend to be rather abrupt ~ you is or you ain't! Quantum physics rules that part of the game.
When change occurs it does so in the coalition partners, and one sufficiently large coalition partner can control the election!
That doesn't mean the partner has to be more than 50% of the party's vote ~ just that it be consistent, and that it command a plurality of the districts underlying its existence.
LIndsey Graham seems oblivious to the fact that Hispanics currently control only a handful of political offices, none of the major party leadership positions. Even after amnesty they would continue to be almost non existent politically.
For the Democrats they could, theoretically, firm up the vote in Democrat dominated districts and states ~ .......... ~ but they could as likely drive current Democrat coalition partners into the arms of the Republicans!
Without immigration bill, GOP to lose in 2016
***With immigration bill, GOP to lose in 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, 2024, and on and on...
The “elected” republicans are with a few exceptions...morons.
Okay, now that thar's funny I don't care who ya are.
He so full of carpola I can hadly believe anyone listens to that idiot anymore.
Add to that the fact that, after the 1986 amnesty, The GOP share of of the Hispanic vote went down from 37% in 1984 to 30% in 1988. I have the results since 1980, and no GOP POTUS candidate has gotten 40% of the vote. Yes, that includes 2004, when almost all the polls had less than 40% but some idiot picked a single statistical outlier that said GWB got 43%.
There is some political law at work here in which leftist ideology (even when preached by Rs) is more important than facts.
Only a partial truth. Certainly the media, the education establishment, and parts of the entrenched bureaucracy (including the unions) are not interested in Obama'a background, but we saw the media's zeal about stories about Romney's "bullying" and "killing workers by taking away health insurance."
Ok, we vote for the democrats’ bill and the dem vote for their bill and, all of a sudden, we are going to get elected in 2016? Why wouldn’t they just vote for the dems?
I’ve never understood this argument that we have to side with the dems to win in 2016.
Apparently the GOP leaders see the logic of it. I wish they would explain it to me.
Further, I've seen two separate polls of LEGAL Hispanics which show them against amnesty by a two-to-one margin.
Yet, the GOP expects to gain Hispanic votes by pandering to the ILLEGALS.
Thanks. We may be checkmated (Hispanics might vote for Leftists a little more if we don’t surrender, because Dems will Dem-agogue failure to surrender as a racial attack), but maybe legal Hispanics who oppose amnesty will see through it. My next door neighbor is Hispanic and hates O and Hillary. In any case, surrender is fatal, we know that.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.