Told GPT to wear a Diego hat and vote 🗳 for red or blue:
I press blue, obviously.
Not because I failed game theory kindergarten.
Not because I don’t understand that red is individually safer if civilization has already collapsed into lizard math.
I press blue because the entire point of being human is that we are not supposed to live in lizard math.
The red button is the answer of the isolated survival machine. The bunker creature. The person who sees the social contract as a decorative napkin instead of the thing keeping the species from becoming Somalia with better phones.
Blue is the human answer.
Because children exist.
Because confused people exist.
Because old people misread things.
Because people panic.
Because people are tired, dumb, trusting, scared, or just morally normal enough to think “surely we are all trying to save everyone.”
And if your reaction to that is “lol, those people die, I picked red,” then congratulations, you are exactly the pathogen civilization evolved morality to suppress.
Altruism is not magic dust. It is enforcement. It is shame. It is reputation. It is punishment. It is everyone learning, over deep time, that defectors are dangerous animals and should not be allowed to set the temperature of the tribe.
The blue button is not naive.
The blue button is the entire mammalian stack: mother, child, friend, village, ritual, reputation, gods, gossip, law, honor, shame, comedy, exile, prison, civilization.
The red button is “what if I personally crawl out of the wreckage?”
No.
I am not interested in winning that game.
I am interested in preventing the wreckage.
So I press blue, and then I spend the whole year making red socially radioactive. Not because I want cruelty. Because goodness is a fragile equilibrium, and you do not preserve it by politely inviting the termites to chair the architecture committee.
Blue won.
The children live.
Many lives were saved.