Game of Thrones and Philosophy (22 page)

One of Tyrion’s particular strengths is his ability to convert either the strictly win-lose “zero-sum game” or an all-or-nothing one-shot game into a win-win situation; or at the very least, into a repeated game where he is likely to come out, if not ahead, then at least
with
his head. By forging alliances and reframing payoffs, the dwarf masterfully improves his position in the game, as the events that follow his capture by Catelyn Stark and subsequent trial at the Eyrie leave little doubt. Tyrion begins his long and perilous journey to the Eyrie as a captive. By reading the motives of his captors, Tyrion is able subtly to begin to lay the groundwork for coalition with Bronn, one of the sellswords currently serving Catelyn Stark. Tyrion understands that those of his captors who joined Lady Catelyn out of duty and honor will not offer him any aid, because any help given undermines their endgame of fealty. The sellswords, however, are another matter. Their endgame is reward, and that is a field of play on which Tyrion and his Lannister gold have an advantage.

The Lannisters are known not only for being the richest family in the Seven Kingdoms but also by their motto, “A Lannister always pays his debts.” When Catelyn Stark’s tattered group reaches the Eyrie, Tyrion is able to transform what looked to be his immediate summary execution into a public trial by calling into question the honor of house Arryn. By introducing house reputation, Tyrion forces the game to move from a one-shot to a repeated-game scenario. Even if Tyrion is executed—the ultimate one-shot game for any player—Lysa Arryn is still left to answer for the events. Thus for her the game becomes a repeated one. Tyrion’s cleverness underscores why publicity is crucial to justice. What may be carried out as a one-shot game in private becomes a repeated game when a player is associated by name with those events each time they are mentioned by others.

For her part Lady Lysa agrees to a trial without concern, as the judge will be her own seven-year-old son. Little Lord Robert has already declared his desire to “see the bad man fly,” indicating that any trial would be a mummer’s farce at best.
19
Thus, Tyrion’s next play must take Lord Robert out of the equation. Having gained an audience for his maneuvers, Tyrion has improved his bargaining position and is able to demand his right to a trial by combat. On the surface this move may seem to have improved Tyrion Lannister’s position little or none at all. However, trading now on the precarious coalition he has cultivated with Bronn and the type of player Tyrion believes Bronn to be, the dwarf engineers a situation where both his own and Bronn’s positions improve dramatically if Bronn agrees to champion Tyrion—assuming he emerges victorious!

Tyrion has typed Bronn correctly. The sellsword volunteers to serve as Tyrion’s champion and wins the day, thus ensuring both Tyrion’s freedom and a handsome payment for Bronn from Tyrion’s father. Tyrion’s maneuver turns out to achieve further gains as well, because in order for Bronn to collect his reward, the sellsword needs to deliver Tyrion safely to Tywin Lannister. Tyrion has thus earned not only a champion, but also an armed escort back through the mountains and to his father’s encampment.

Tyrion uses this strategy and again meets with success when Conn and the mountain clans accost Tyrion and Bronn on their way home. Tyrion convinces the raiders that whatever they got by robbing and killing Tyrion in the woods would not be nearly so valuable as the new weapons and armor that Tywin Lannister would provide as reward for his son’s safe return. Tyrion thus completes the journey he began as a captive with a small army of his own. Each time Tyrion’s situation seems destined to lead to his demise, he is able to rewrite his destiny by recognizing the endgame of his opponent and offering a revised strategy, a strategy where it is in everyone’s interest that Tyrion stays alive, if only a little longer.
20

Through the Eyes of Love

Alliances, temporary or permanent, are critical within the game of thrones. Tyrion Lannister demonstrated how temporary alliances based on mutual gain can dramatically improve a player’s position. The more players have invested in an alliance, the more important that alliance becomes, and perhaps none more so than those alliances forged through love or marriage. It’s just a happy coincidence when love and marriage go hand in hand in the Seven Kingdoms. More typically, marriages are arranged so that lords can unite their houses in order to strengthen the position and commitment of both families. In the marriage of Cersei Lannister to Robert Baratheon, the Baratheons gained the power, wealth, and prestige of House Lannister, while the Lannisters gained access to the Iron Throne. Their coalition seems mutually beneficial as both parties receive their desired payoff. Any children the king and queen have together reinforce the alliance, because as the legitimate heirs to the throne, the children ensure the succession, and therefore the success, of both houses.

The marriage appears to King Robert to be a non-zero-sum game, but in fact it is not. There is game within a game. The Lannisters are playing to eliminate the king and sit a Lannister upon the Iron Throne. This subgame changes the nature of the original game from beneficial alliance to deathly trap. One of the reasons Cersei Lannister’s pronouncement “You win or you die” strikes the reader as particularly sinister is that this outlook reduces what is normally a much more complex game, with multiple payoffs and possibilities for cooperation, to a simple zero-sum scenario.

King Robert and Queen Cersei’s alliance is based on mutual gain, and not on shared love or affection. Does the equation change when the players’ self-interest includes compassionate commitment to the best interest of another player? This question truly reaches the heart of the matter. The game theory one uses must be robust enough to accommodate a self-interest that privileges the interest of another in order to model many of our most important decisions—that is, the things we do for love.

Consider the familiar game of “I Cut, You Choose.” The logic driving the game is that in the division of a limited set of goods, such as a piece of cake, each player will want the better portion. Thus it is in the cutter’s interest to divide the pieces equally because the chooser will have the first selection. Yet if we put that game to Septa Mordane’s test, we would likely come to a very different result. Practical experience teaches us that in social situations the choosers often select the smaller, and not the larger, of the offered pieces of cake. What deviant reasoning could possibly underlie such irrational decisions? Perhaps a guest takes a smaller piece because it is more important to be seen as polite than to enjoy the larger portion, or because she is watching her weight or wants to appear to be health-conscious. Or perhaps the smaller portion is chosen because the “chooser” knows how much the “cutter” enjoys cake and would like the cutter to enjoy the larger portion. None of these strategies is actually irrational, but all deviate from the mathematically predicted outcome. What we learn is that “I Cut, You Choose” may be an effective strategy for modeling fairness, but
fairness is but one of many rational preferences
. Furthermore, fairness understood as
equality
is only one of many rational models of fairness. These insights will take us far in adapting game theory to games ruled by love.

Game theory has typically discounted strategies in which fairness is not paramount, but the logic of love may actually accept and promote them. Far from seeing her as a “free rider,” the chivalrous knight will assume all the duties of rowing his lady across the river and take satisfaction in allowing her simply to enjoy the ride. Parents regularly take on the greater share of work in a village so that children are not overburdened and still share in the benefits of living in a community. Lovers willingly sacrifice their own interests so that their beloved can have a greater share of something treasured. Allowing for the fact that love merges and binds our interests with our loved ones’, we can see that players may formulate multiple coherent strategies. This recognition compels us to assess which of a plurality of possible rational choices are in play.

Recognizing multiple rational possible moves by an opponent demands that the successful player be able to sympathetically inhabit the other player’s position to determine which rationality is operative. It is not enough to know what
you
would do if you were in the other player’s position—you must understand what
your opponent
would do in that position. This sympathetic identification with another’s preferences in and of itself demands that we acknowledge and regard the humanity and potential uniqueness of that player. The ability to see other players’ outcomes as
they
see them, and not simply how we would see them, is the basis of “brotherly love” and is a prerequisite for honoring the dignity of other persons. The Golden Rule in game theory evolves from “Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself” into the more discerning “Understand others as they understand themselves.”

Games thus understood
demand
that we attend to each player as a uniquely situated person and not simply as an abstract rational agent automatically moving toward a predetermined rational end. Such insight improves our ability to predict, understand, and foster the actions of others, as well as to further our own ends as we play the expanded game of thrones we call the game of life. It is in heeding the call of love that game theory transcends its previous applications and becomes effective in the arenas of moral and social philosophy.

NOTES

1
. Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations
, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1958), p. 32, ¶67.

2
. George R. R. Martin,
A Game of Thrones
(New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), p. 488.

3
. Ibid., pp. 123–124.

4
. Ibid., p. 82.

5
. George R. R. Martin,
A Storm of Swords
(New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), p. 841. Thank you to Henry Jacoby for reminding me of this quotation.

6
. Ibid., p. 16.

7
. In a game of complete information, such as chess or its Westerosi cousin
cyvasse
, all players are aware of each move up to the current point of the game. In games of incomplete information, however, one player has private information that is relevant to her game play or strategy. For an excellent introduction to game theory, I recommend Ken Binmore’s
Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007).

8
. Plato,
Phaedrus
, 249d5–e1.

9
. Martin,
A Game of Thrones
, p. 662.

10
. Ibid., pp. 662–663.

11
. “The rules of fair play do not apply in love and war.” John Lyly,
Euphues
, 1578. This quotation is believed to be the source of the nonlogically equivalent popular adage, “All is fair in love and war.”

12
. Friedrich Nietzsche,
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
, “Reading and Writing,” part 1, Chap. 7, trans. Alexander Tille (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1896).

13
. Martin,
A Game of Thrones
, p. 135.

14
. Ibid.

15
. Reverse induction is the process of reasoning backward from a conclusion through a sequence of actions to determine the most likely starting point.

16
. Martin,
A Game of Thrones
, p. 136.

17
. Ibid., p. 57.

18
. Ibid.

19
. Ibid., p. 437.

20
. The technique of generating a change in strategy in which one player is better off and no payers are worse off is called a Pareto improvement, after the Italian sociologist and philosopher Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923). Pareto optimal outcomes are outcomes in which Pareto improvements are no longer possible. In other words, there are no possible outcomes to be sought that would not cause at least one party to be disadvantaged.

Chapter 20

STOP THE MADNESS!: KNOWLEDGE, POWER, AND INSANITY IN A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE

Chad William Timm

“I am no maester to quote history at you, Your Grace. Swords have been my life, not books. But every child knows that the Targaryens have always danced too close to madness. Your father was not the first: King Jaehaerys once told me that madness and greatness are two sides of the same coin. Every time a new Targaryen is born, he said, the gods toss the coin in the air and the world holds its breath to see how it will land.”
1

—
Ser Barristan Selmy to Daenerys Targaryen in
A Storm of Swords

In A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. R. Martin introduces us to a world full of murder, brutality, and death, a world seemingly full of insanity. At one time or another more than a dozen significant characters have their sanity questioned, from the Mad King Aerys to Patchface, the lackwit fool in Stannis Baratheon’s court. Upon closer examination, though, the actions of those labeled “mad” are not much different from those assumed to be of sound mind. As a matter of fact, the line between sanity and insanity in Martin’s books is so blurred that it barely exists at all. Ser Barristan Selmy, former knight of Robert Baratheon’s Kingsguard, claims madness is hereditary, as it apparently runs in the Targaryen family right alongside greatness. But why are one person’s actions deemed great while another’s are labeled mad? Who gets to determine insanity and decide what is done with the mentally ill? The French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984) can help us answer these questions with his investigation of the relations among knowledge, power, and madness.

The Archaeologist and the Mad Fool

While traditionally philosophers have sought knowledge of universal truth, Foucault and other postmodern philosophers have questioned the existence of universal truth and have sought instead to uncover the circumstances that lead to thinking something is true.
2
Foucault called his method of historical excavation “archaeology.” In
The History of Madness
, he worked to show how the definition of madness, as well as the knowledge used to determine sanity, has changed historically, depending upon who had the power to define and determine it. According to Foucault, “One simple truth about madness should never be overlooked. The consciousness of madness, in European culture at least, has never formed an obvious and monolithic fact. . . . Meaning here is always fractured.”
3
Instead of madness having a universal definition or absolute truth, the way European society defined madness changed constantly depending upon social, economic, and political circumstances. As we shall see, much the same is the case in Westeros.

According to Foucault, knowledge of insanity has depended upon those with power to name it, whose power in turn increased with their ability to designate certain people as insane. For example, both Stannis Baratheon and Joffrey Lannister surround themselves with entertainers known as mad fools. Patchface, the fool in Stannis Baratheon’s court, is a boy who was lost at sea for two days before washing up on shore “broken in body and mind, hardly capable of speech, much less of wit.”
4
Everyone except Shireen, Stannis’s daughter and only child, sees Patchface as “mad, and in pain, and no use to anyone, least of all himself.”
5
The fool in King Joffrey’s court at King’s Landing, Moon Boy, is described as a “pie-faced simpleton” who often acts strangely.
6
On one occasion he “mounted his stilts and strode around the tables in pursuit of Lord Tyrell’s ludicrously fat fool Butterbumps.”
7

So what’s the big deal? It’s obvious that Patchface and Moon Boy deserved their label as mad fools, right? But what if they aren’t crazy? What if it’s just that the kings are powerful enough to label people mad and force the named to comply with the king’s decree? By labeling the fool mad, the king creates an identity for the person as insane. Because of the king’s power and authority, everyone associates madness with the person named mad. This clearly occurred when King Joffrey named Ser Dontos Holland a mad fool. Within a matter of minutes Ser Dontos went from being a knight in the king’s tournament to a crazy fool in his court. In
A Clash of Kings
, after being late for his joust and making King Joffrey wait, “The knight appeared a moment later, cursing and staggering, clad in breastplate and plumed helm and nothing else . . . his manhood flopped about obscenely as he chased after his horse.”
8
Dontos, too drunk to get on his horse, sat down and said, “I lose . . . fetch me some wine.”
9

King Joffrey initially responded by ordering Ser Dontos’s execution, stating, “I’ll have him killed on the morrow, the fool.”
10
Upon Sansa Stark’s recommendation, however, Joffrey decided to turn Dontos into a fool. Joffrey declares, “From this day on, you’re my new fool. You can sleep with Moon Boy and dress in motley.”
11
In naming Dontos a fool, Joffrey used his power as the king to construct a new identity of Dontos, an identity as a lackwit idiot.

Foucault called this the power/knowledge nexus. Because you have named the category, you are perceived as knowledgeable or an expert in the subject. As a result, your expertise in the realm of madness gives you additional power to continue naming and categorizing. Foucault further argued that we must vigilantly tease out these knowledge/power relationships so “we can grasp what constitutes the acceptability of a system, be it the mental health system, the penal system, delinquency, sexuality, etc.”
12

Pointing a Finger at the Crazies

Kings aren’t the only ones with enough power to decide who is crazy in Westeros. Madness also manifests itself through other examples of naming and sorting the mad. Quite often this sorting is seemingly harmless and is used as a means of explaining a person’s abnormal behavior. For example, Tyrion Lannister characterized Ser Loras Tyrell’s response to the murder of Renly Baratheon by saying, “It’s said the Knight of Flowers went mad when he saw his king’s body, and slew three of Renly’s guards in his wrath.”
13
Catelyn Stark’s sister, the Lady of the Vale, Lysa Tully, was believed to have gone insane with grief after having five miscarriages and losing her husband, Lord Jon Arryn. King Robert Baratheon stated, “I think losing Jon has driven the woman mad,”
14
and Grand Maester Pycelle remarked, “Let me say that grief can derange even the strongest and most disciplined of minds, and the Lady Lysa was never that.”
15
In these instances, naming madness seems like no big deal. After all, we are constantly describing people’s actions and valuing them as appropriate or inappropriate, reckless or crazy, logical or illogical. It becomes a big deal, though, when this naming is done in a systematic way as a means of marginalizing an individual or a group in order to justify one’s own questionable actions. This is exactly what occurs with Aerys “The Mad King” Targaryen.

Meet the Mayor of Crazytown

As Catelyn Stark notes in
A Clash of Kings
, “Aerys was mad, the whole realm knew it.”
16
Granted, King Aerys’s mannerisms were enough to raise eyebrows. According to Jaime Lannister, King Aerys’s “beard was matted and unwashed, his hair a silver-gold tangle that reached his waist, his fingernails cracked yellow claws nine inches long,”
17
and he was seen “pacing alone in his throne room, picking at scabbed and bleeding hands. The fool was always cutting himself on the blades and barbs of the Iron Throne.”
18

Furthermore, Mad King Aerys had a reputation for brutality. When talking to Hallyne the Pyromancer, the Imp Tyrion Lannister thought to himself, “
King Aerys used you to roast the flesh off enemies
.”
19
Aerys also had Ser Ilyn Payne’s tongue cut out for no more than claiming that the King’s Hand, Tywin Lannister, actually ruled the kingdom.
20
Perhaps most brutally, after being held captive by Lord Denys during the Defiance of Duskendale, Mad King Aerys went on a killing rampage: “Lord Denys lost his head, as did his brothers and his sister, uncles, cousins. . . . The Lace Serpent [Denys’s wife] was burned alive, poor woman, though her tongue was torn out first, and her female parts, with which it was said she enslaved her lordly husband.”
21

According to these accounts King Aerys was an incredibly dangerous individual due to his madness. This is a phenomenon that Foucault similarly traced to the nineteenth century and the birth of psychiatry, contending, “Nineteenth-century psychiatry invented an entirely fictitious entity, a crime that is insanity, a crime that is nothing but insanity, an insanity that is nothing but a crime.”
22
Foucault demonstrated how psychiatrists, using their credentials as medical experts, defined certain instances of mental illness as criminal and certain criminal behaviors the result of insanity. Being able to identify the criminally insane gave psychiatrists more power, because their diagnoses claimed to reduce crime and make cities safer.

This seems to apply to the Mad King, since he murdered and brutalized people. But think of it this way: Jaime Lannister, among others, defines Aerys’s brutality to be a result of his madness. Is he one to talk? In
A Game of Thrones
Jaime Lannister threw Bran Stark, a child, out a window because he caught Jaime having sex with his own sister, Cersei.
23
And remember Jaime’s also the Kingslayer, responsible for murdering King Aerys, even though he was a sworn brother of the Kingsguard.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. The series is full of examples of brutally violent behavior, yet only a select few individuals have their violence attributed to madness. Is this because some acts of brutality and violence are justified or logical? Was it logical for Jaime to throw Bran out the window to preserve his incestuous secret, but illogical for Aerys to cut out Sir Ilyn Payne’s tongue for undermining his power?
24
In the world of Westeros, this is exactly the case: one instance of brutality is justified and the other is not. This is because by naming the acts of others mad, a person places himself within the group of the sane, or logical. Such a person’s sanity isn’t scrutinized then, no matter how crazy the person’s actions might seem. For how can the person who has the power to name what it means to be insane actually be insane her/himself? As we’ll see, this is well illustrated by the heated debate between Eddard Stark and Robert Baratheon over whether to send assassins to murder Daenerys Targaryen and her unborn child.

We Had to Murder the Mad Murderer!

In
A Game of Thrones
, King Robert Baratheon received word that the last of the Targaryens, Daenerys, daughter of Aerys, was pregnant with “the stallion that mounts the world,” future son of Khal Drogo. Ned Stark, Hand of the King, disagreed with Robert’s command to have Daenerys and the unborn child assassinated. “Your Grace, the girl is scarcely more than a child. You are no Tywin Lannister, to slaughter the innocent.”
25
Here Ned referred to the fact that upon usurping the throne from Mad King Aerys, Tywin Lannister (Aerys’s own Hand) presented Robert with the corpses of Aerys’s heirs, Rhaegar’s wife and children, “as tokens of fealty.”
26
Ser Gregor Clegane had dashed the children’s heads against rocks and raped Rhaegar’s wife, Elia. Robert replied, “Seven hells,
someone
had to kill Aerys!”
27
Whereas Robert saw the killing of Daenerys as justifiable and logical given his hatred of the Targaryens, Ned drew the line at killing children, stating “the murder of children . . . it would be vile . . . unspeakable.”
28

King Robert’s argument is that the death of Mad King Aerys and his family, along with Daenerys and her unborn child, is justifiable based on the necessity of preventing the mad Targaryens from holding the throne. In truth, Robert’s feelings for the Targaryens stemmed from his hatred of Rhaegar for naming Robert’s betrothed, Lyanna Stark, “the Queen of Love and Beauty” after a tournament victory at Harrenhal where Rhaegar subsequently ran off with her.
29
Instead of announcing it in those terms, which would have made the error of his logic obvious, Robert’s excuse rested on the supposed madness of the Targaryen family. Robert, from his position of power and authority as the King of the Seven Kingdoms, defined the acts of Aerys as mad in order to justify his own actions. In response to Ned’s question, “Robert, I ask you, what did we rise against Aerys Targaryen for, if not to put an end to the murder of children?” Robert replied, “To put an end to
Targaryens
!”
30

Robert frames the knowledge or facts of Targaryen insanity in such a way as to link Aerys’s acts of violence to madness. We might think that ordering the murder of a child is completely insane, but Robert considered it justified in order to prevent another mad king from eventually taking the throne. Foucault claimed that the early psychiatric movement sought to solidify its position of power and authority in European society by proving its own necessity. Likewise, Robert tried to demonstrate his power and authority by killing Daenerys and her unborn child. Early psychiatrists demonstrated their own necessity by linking crime with insanity, and insanity with crime. As Foucault says, “Crime, then, became an important issue for psychiatrists, because what was involved was less a field of knowledge to be conquered than a modality of power to be secured and justified.”
31
In other words, instead of psychiatrists seeking to learn all they could about what it meant to be insane, they were more concerned with establishing and maintaining their position of power and authority.