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Not if the victors get to rob and kill the vanquished it isn't.
What you're complaining about isn't that the game is meaningless really, but that people care more about winning than making sure you can continue to play in the future.
My point is, it doesn't matter because if you don't win right now you don't get to play in the future anyways. Because you're dead and poor.
Of course this isn't stable, you can't have people defect like this forever, but this is how and why societies collapse. Focus on internal rather than external conflict, widespread erosion of norms, etc.
What people seem to often miss though is that this is the result of a series of rational decisions.
If you don't fight the meaningless social issue game, if you don't give citizenship to sympathetic foreigners, if you don't loot the treasury to give spoils; you will not get to keep power versus someone who can and does those things. Using power to gain more power at any cost is a practically superior strategy to any other which is why anyone that has power is inexorably attracted to it or replaced by people who are.
The one flaw, or saving grace, is that power is cursed and by accumulating it you will eventually reach a point where you have too much of it and the distance to reality becomes great enough that you destroy yourself.
You're just laying out the principles of any good model of the world, what naturalists call science.
There is no disagreeing with this.
Except, unfortunately, in the one game where you get to rob and kill the losers. Where this attachement to the truth falls easily pray to the more immediately expedient strategy of seeking power and using it to eliminate the competition.
Connecting this game and truth seeking is basically what the Enlightenment did by inventing scientific government, and though we've gained tremendous boons from it, I think it was ultimately an evil act precisely because now that this connection exists, it has become impossible to have either proper government or proper truth seeking.
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