The Primordial Protocol
Survival in the Front, Party in the Back
As a kid, I probably drove my parents crazy asking, “Why does life want to live?”
The difference between organic and artificial confused me. And the difference in agency between fauna and flora did too. The survival strategies that animals employed are much more legible. Those of plants, not so much. Why did the tree even want to keep living? What motivated its survival?
To preserve my sanity, I gave up on answering these sorts of questions. But the fact remains, today’s organisms are *very* good at surviving, whatever their motivation.
“Survive” might be the primary protocol of life. Being alive is a necessary condition for reproduction. Can’t make babies if you’re dead. Pretty straightforward.
Which is why the concept of safety is so critical. The presence of hazards is not conducive to survival. Safety is the relative absence of hazard. Humans have done an excellent job of engineering hazards out of our environment. We’re incredibly safe, relative to any other species on the planet, which allows us to excel at reproducing.
The Survive Protocol has even made it into some of today’s popular literature, like Simon Sinek’s Infinite Game or Nassim Taleb’s Incerto.
Sinek holds that in business, like in life, the goal is to keep playing the game. It doesn’t matter if you’re successful for a few years. If it comes at the cost of you going to prison – which removes you from the game – then there was no point. And Taleb says, “Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later.”
Even the Stoics had some philosophical musings related to the Survive Protocol. Some of them suggested that the avoidance of unhappiness, despair, and anxiety was a more productive strategy than the pursuit of purpose or contentment. Stoicism is the mullet of philosophies. Have a strong, simple foundation at the helm. The rest is extra.
The idea behind Survive Protocols is that being “in the game” is the cornerstone of success. This goes for life, business, relationships, and philosophy. The better you execute the Survive Protocol, the longer you will be in the game. The longer you're in the game, the more opportunities for success you will experience. Before Game Theory, there is survival.
When it comes to recent, real-world instances of the Survive Protocol, workplace safety is a rich field. The adversarial employee-employer relationship displays two conflicting Survive Protocols. First, the employee wants to be alive at the end of the day. Second, the employer wants to be in the business at the end of the day.
Next week, I’ll provide some more analysis on the interplay between the Employee Survive Protocol and the Employer Survive Protocol.
Gah. It pains me to see Simon Sinek referenced instead of James P. Carse. Sinek’s treatment of Finite and Infinite Games was hollow, and missed much of the nuance, depth and grace of Carse’s work.
Here’s a snippet, somewhat apt but best read in context.
“Death is a defeat in finite play. It is inflicted when one's boundaries give way and one falls to an opponent. The finite player dies under the terminal move of another. Although infinite players choose mortality, they may not know when death comes, but we can always say of them that "they die at the right time" (Nietzsche).”