Kayfabe
Kayfabe (by Eric Weinstein link)
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.
