This reckoning was in the cards. Technological evolution, ever since the Stone Age, has placed humans in nonzero­-sum situations of growing scope and complexity. The only way to stop the trend toward bigger and more elaborate games is to play them so badly that chaos ensues. And even then, among the ruins, we’ll be playing nonzero-­sum games, if less far-flung ones. Assuming we’re around at all.

There’s a good chance—maybe 50 percent, maybe higher—that we will, in some fairly thoroughgoing sense, fail. The pull of tribal psychology is strong, and few countries lately have shown the wisdom it takes to build visionary policies at the international level, or even at the national level (where creativity is also deeply needed if all the roots of today’s discontent are to be addressed).

Still, things could be worse. It could be that the conventional wisdom is right—that Trumpism is in no small part a reaction against global governance per se, and so stands in immovable opposition to it. But the story turns out to be more complicated than that. The reaction is largely against global governance done badly—against some rules that were designed with disregard for people in flyover country, and against the fallout from America’s disregard of other rules. And global governance can in principle be done well. Reconciling populist nationalists to the international tools the world needs will be hard, but at least it’s not logically impossible.

We can take some heart in the history of our species. The fact that we’ve gotten this far—to the threshold of a functioning global community—is a tribute to the human capacity for playing nonzero-­sum games wisely. Our ancestors didn’t know game theory, but like us they had cooperative instincts as well as belligerent ones, and they deployed them often enough to play their games with intermittent success. They built passably effective governments of growing scope and intricacy, and sometimes placed those governments in firmly peaceful relationship with one another, even cementing these bonds with institutions that transcend borders. The rudiments of global governance, however flawed, are an impressive legacy, testament to a long and arduous ascent punctuated by chaos and bloodshed from which hard lessons were learned.

It would be nice to have a president who could carry the torch forward, someone who sees the big picture and has both an accordingly big vision and the rare skills that would inspire commitment to it. But look at it this way: At least we have Trump! In his own way, he vividly and powerfully alerts us to our predicament.

Trump channels the discontent generated by the basic drift of history—the drift toward global social organization—and by contingent facts of history, in particular by the failure of his predecessors to fully grapple with that drift. He voices grievances about economics and foreign policy that are the residue of that failure. Further testament to failure lies in the ease with which he activates and exploits the most volatile human capacities: fear, resentment, hatred, bigotry, xenophobia.

In addition, Trump offers clear guidance, even if it’s mainly a kind of reverse guidance. His basically zero-sum perspective shows us how not to conceive of a world that is rife with nonzero-sum games. His belligerence and narcissism, even solipsism, show us how not to act if we want to play them well. And yes, here and there he champions a truly important policy idea—an idea that fits both the present and future, if in ways he doesn’t wholly understand.

Maybe someday we’ll be thankful that Donald Trump came along and, however unknowingly, however perversely, pointed us in a new direction. After all, it’s not as if things were going all that great until he showed up. That, in fact, is why he’s here.

Robert Wright (@robertwrighter) is the author of Nonzero, The Moral Animal, and Why Buddhism Is True. A visiting professor of science and religion at Union Theological Seminary, he publishes the Mindful Resistance Newsletter.

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