I love travelling, it teaches me a lot. There are incidents that push me to think and ponder.
I came across one such incident recently while travelling in a train. I was carrying some pretty heavy luggage, but I was determined to carry all of it in one trip.

After boarding the train and hauling everything clumsily with all the luggage sloppying around me, I reached my compartment and found one guy sitting peacefully on the lower berth. Since my boarding-point and my destination, both, were terminals for the train’s route, I wanted to push my luggage deep into the abyssmal depth under the lower berth he was sitting on. Although he looked like a perfectly well-educated man, he probably couldn’t comprehend my gesture of drawing his legs up. So I politely asked him,
“Would you mind helping me?”
and out came the most disturbing answer I had ever had to listen to,
“Why?”
That man asked me why he should help me! Although his question had made perfect sense, and I would have developed deep respect for him had he given me a smirk a second later and pulled his legs up, he was brutal enough to look me in the eye and demand an answer!
As I pushed my luggage beneath the opposite berth, his why got me thinking about the reasons people would be willing to help and also the reasons people would expect to be helped.

A Fair Game

What is your idea of a fair game?
Take a moment and think.
It may be a game where every player wins.
Or it might be a game in which some win and some lose. Or a game in which some win and some lose with equal probability.
Yes, this is important - probabilities of winning and losing being equal. Why though? Because it is only when the probabilities of winning and losing are equal that people in general are willing to play the game, again and again.
What else can be important? Rules, definitely. All-binding rules with no exceptions and corner cases seem legitimate. Why? Because it is an assertion of the equal probability.

Now that we have defined our ‘fair’ game, we realise that it is actually a game where there is only one final output for a player (either in favour or against, determining his win or loss). Examples can include a simple coin-toss, or rolling a dice after clearly indicating what 3 numbers will result in a win.

Let us consider a fair game with 2 people playing in all honesty. Considering that the game indeed, is fair, two conditions must hold:

  1. Probabilities of winning and losing are equal.
  2. None of the players enjoy any kind of priveleges like second-chances, quota, seat-reservations, and the like.

For a fair game, it should be obvious that if one wins, the other loses.

But Life Isn’t Fair

“But hey!”, you ask.
Sure, no sane person in his right mind should expect life to be fair, except for some fortunate events of heightened romanticism for faith in the spirit-of-the-universe that makes us believe in some hallucinating and misleading concepts like karma, which is used for nothing but to console people so that they refrain from taking malicious revenge.

Let’s not deviate and try to define an unfair game instead.
Deriving from the fair game, the unfair game

  1. might have a clear bias in the winning or losing chances, i.e, the probability of winning will clearly be either towards 1 (a safe game) or towards 0 (a risky game).
  2. might have slightly different rules in a way which makes one person have higher chances of winning (a truly unfair game).

Be it through the instructions given as a child, or through the learnings and experiences of the adult nature, people tend to boil transactions in daily life to one of the games mentioned above (fair, unfair, risky, safe). By transaction, I mean any event that acts as enough of a stimulus to elicit a reaction that forces two people to acknowledge each others’ presence in a given setting.
In my understanding, people’s decisions in life are influenced largely by the kind of game they perceive the transaction as. They then participate by determining their chances of winning or losing and take decisions in their best interest.
It is, therefore, nothing but obvious that in a neutral transaction involving strangers, a dull brain is bound to perceive it as a fair game. A dull brain is bound to believe that one’s win necessitates the other’s loss.
A dull brain sees the obvious win for the other person, but weighs in heavily on the idea of a fair game!
In essence, a dull brain is bound to assume that helping someone might will result in its loss.

Why Are Good People Good?

Because a bright brain understands the failure in the games described above - the missing idea of a non-zero sum game. It understands that games can be fun for both players and that games are not just about wins or losses. It understands that transactions can be investments, and are not as shallow as a simple coin toss. It knows that the universe is not putting all its energies conspiring against one specific person. It understands that it is not the only bright brain in all humanity.
But most importantly, it believes, that for it to win, it doesn’t need to necessitate someone’s loss.
This is why they are good, because they don’t intend harm to succeed, to win. The brilliant thing is, they might even intend someone else’s benefit for their win, all because of their belief in a non-zero sum game!

Moral of this discourse? At times when you see that you clearly can’t win, start focusing on someone else’s win, you might be playing a non-zero sum game ;)