Eric Weinstein
Mathematician and economist; principal, Natron Group
The sophisticated scientific concept with the greatest potential to enhance human understanding may come not from academe but rather from the unlikely environment of professional wrestling.
Evolutionary biologists Richard Alexander and Robert Trivers have recently emphasized that deception rather than information often plays the decisive role in systems of selective pressures. Yet most of our thinking treats deception as a perturbation in the exchange of pure information, leaving us unprepared to contemplate a world in which fakery may reliably crowd out the genuine. In particular, humanity’s future selective pressures appear likely to remain tied to economic theory that uses as its central construct a market model based on assumptions of perfect information.
If we are to take selection in humans more seriously, we may fairly ask what rigorous system could handle an altered reality of layered falsehoods, in which nothing can be assumed to be as it appears. Such a system, in development for more than a century, now supports an intricate multibillion-dollar business empire of pure hokum. It is known to wrestling’s insiders as “kayfabe,” a word of mysterious origin.
Because professional wrestling is a simulated sport, competitors who face each other in the ring are actually collaborators who must form a closed system (called “a promotion”), sealed against outsiders. Antagonists are chosen from within the promotion, and their ritualized battles are largely negotiated, choreographed, and rehearsed, at a significantly decreased risk of injury or death. With outcomes predetermined under kayfabe, betrayal in wrestling comes not from engaging in unsportsmanlike conduct but from the surprise appearance of actual sporting behavior. Such unwelcome sportsmanship, which “breaks kayfabe,” is called “shooting” to distinguish it from the expected scripted deception, called “working.”
Were kayfabe to become part of our toolkit for the twenty-first century, we would undoubtedly have an easier time understanding a world in which investigative journalism seems to have vanished and bitter corporate rivals cooperate on everything from joint ventures to lobbying efforts. Confusing battles between “freshwater” Chicago macroeconomists and Ivy League “saltwater” theorists could be best understood as happening within a single “orthodox promotion,” given that both groups suffered no injury from failing (equally) to predict the recent financial crisis. The decades-old battle in theoretical physics over bragging rights between the string and loop camps seems an even more significant example within the hard sciences of a collaborative intrapromotional rivalry, given the apparent failure of both groups to produce a quantum theory of gravity.
What makes kayfabe remarkable is that it provides the most complete example of the process by which a wide class of important endeavors transition from failed reality to successful fakery. While most modern sports enthusiasts are aware of wrestling’s status as a pseudosport, what few remember is that it evolved out of a failed real sport known as “catch” wrestling, which held its last honest title match early in the twentieth century. Typical matches could last hours with no satisfying action or end suddenly with crippling injuries to a promising athlete in whom much had been invested. This highlighted the close relationship between two paradoxical risks that define the category of activity that wrestling shares with other human spheres: (a) occasional but extreme peril for the participants and (b) general monotony for both audience and participants.
Kayfabrication (the process of transition from reality toward kayfabe) arises out of attempts to deliver a dependably engaging product for a mass audience while removing the unpredictable upheavals that imperil the participants. Thus, kayfabrication is a feature of many of our most important systems—such as war, finance, love, politics, and science. Importantly, kayfabe also illustrates the limits of disbelief the human mind is capable of successfully suspending before fantasy and reality become fully conflated. Wrestling’s system of lies has recently become so intricate that wrestlers have occasionally found themselves engaging in real-life adultery following the introduction of a fictitious adulterous plot twist in a kayfabe backstory. Eventually, even kayfabe itself became a victim of its own success, as it grew to a level of deceit that could not be maintained when the wrestling world collided with outside regulators exercising oversight over major sporting events.
When kayfabe was forced to own up to the fact that professional wrestling contained no sport whatsoever, it did more than avoid being regulated and taxed into oblivion. Wrestling discovered the unthinkable: Its audience did not seem to require even a thin veneer of realism. Professional wrestling had come full circle to its honest origins by at last moving the responsibility for deception off the shoulders of the performers and into the willing minds of the audience.
Kayfabe, it appears, is a dish best served clientside.