The film Wargames was on tonight. In the end they use a simple game of tic-tac-toe to prove to the computer that you cannot win – and when it applies this to nuclear war the computer realises there are no winners.
It struck me that it was a very simplistic definition of winning, a binary approach. But life tends to be a lot more complex.
I’ve seen it all around recently – the BREXIT/REMAIN is cast as win or lose. Somebody had to have their own way and others had to lose. At no point did anybody say “You know what – we are divided down the middle, how do we get an answer we can all live with”.
We see it in SCEXIT – devolution is not good enough – one side or another has to win.
And we see it with the pandemic response – we judge based on numbers of deaths.
Here is to a new year where we can try to be less binary.