The Last Word On Nothing

What scientific concept would everyone be better off knowing? When the magazine Edge asked mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein, he described the following:

What rigorous system would be capable of tying together an altered reality of layered falsehoods in which absolutely nothing can be assumed to be as it appears. Such a system, in continuous development for more than a century, is known to exist and now supports an intricate multi-billion dollar business empire.

Oooh – which transcendent scientific concept is this? Weinstein is an economist, so you’d be forgiven for thinking he was cracking open a pint of behavioural economics. Is Weinstein about to introduce us to a new insight from Nobel prize-winning doyen of nudge Richard Thaler?

Not quite. The business Weinstein was talking about is professional wrestling – Hulk Hogan, the Undertaker, the actor formerly known as The Rock – and the system it has developed, the one Weinstein thinks we should all get cozy with, is called “Kayfabe”.

Kayfabe is the thing about wrestling that makes non-fans sneer and say “you know it’s all fake, right?”

Of course it’s fake. Wrestling fans know it’s fake. They’re so aware of the fakery, in fact, that they have a word for the specific subtype of fakeness that characterises professional wrestling. Kayfabe refers to the willing suspension of disbelief that lets them enjoy scripted storylines of grudges that are supposedly so real they transcend the ring. It allows fans to root for their favourite wrestler and believe that the entirely predetermined match results were the result of actual sport, not a prefab reality show.

But Kayfabe is more than just a temporary suspension of disbelief. It also refers to the framework of stringently enforced rules that keeps the edifice from toppling. Good guys – “faces”, according to the parlance – are set up by management to win matches and titles (and act as a proxy for how the fans think of themselves). Bad guys – “heels” – are set up to be satisfyingly crushed at the end of a nail-biting match. When these heels embody society’s deepest fears, the matches are especially cathartic. (In the 1980s, Hulk Hogan was the “face” of American exceptionalism; the Iron Sheik was the heel wrestling fans could jeer after, for example, the Iranian hostage crisis.)

The house decides who gets to be a face and who has to be a heel. Once cast, you can’t break character. The script you will follow is called the work. Deviate from the work in a misguided attempt to make a legitimate sport out of wrestling, and you’re branded a “shooter”. You’ve “broken Kayfabe.” You won’t find work again soon.

This is how wrestling has worked for decades, but in a 2013 paper, William P. Stodden, a political scientist at Concordia College in Minnesota, identified a more recent shift: “a new Kayfabe” in which being in on the open secret had become inextricable from the enjoyment of wrestling. Fans aren’t just wise to the game – being aware of the illusion actually heightens their enjoyment of the spectacle, giving them a strange double vision in which they enjoy the match but also have access to the insider’s understanding that all outcomes are predetermined. Nobody was ever going to let the Iron Sheik keep his championship belt. Hulk Hogan was always going to snatch it back and Make America Great Again.

Is this all starting to sound a bit familiar? Even though maybe you’re not the least bit interested in wrestling? Well, that’s because Kayfabe long ago untethered itself from wrestling. The Rock went from Wrestlemania to Dwayne Johnson, Hollywood actor, without batting an eye (“You’re welcome!”). Donald Trump went from World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Fame Inductee to reality show actor to the president of the United States.

Indeed, in that 2013 paper, Stodden was prescient. “Kayfabe and fan interaction with professional wrestling has come to mirror the way many people engage with political discourse,” he wrote.

That is, politicians engage in Kayfabe in a bid to get the public to support the policies they enact – but without letting that public have any actual say in crafting those policies, heavens to Betsy. They do this by inflating tiny policy differences into full dramatic enactments full of heels and faces and grudges. The public focuses on the personalities and the conflict, organises Twitter wars about bills that would have gone unnoticed but for the theatre. And then feels the warmth of having steered the governance of their country.

Stodden’s assessment of everyone involved in this quid-pro-quo is blistering.

“The politicians need [Kayfabe] to appear to have taken the interests of the people into account, while the people need it to feel a sense of ownership in the government and its policies without actually having to participate in any meaningful way.”

In this view, all the political theater we all claim to be so sick of is pure Kayfabe. “Lock her up” is Kayfabe. Donald Trump’s fuming tweets are Kayfabe. In fact all of Twitter is kayfabe. You got screaming fans, you got heels, you got faces, you got people who break kayfabe and find themselves quickly out of a job. You got bots. Fake news is kayfabe, but so is real political news, reflecting as it does political scripts written to generate maximum outrage at minimum personal cost to everyone who knows how to play the game. As Stodden wrote, “political Kayfabe represents political reality – as real as anything – for the vast majority of the interested population.”

If that’s true, though, not everyone in the audience is in on the joke. I guess my question is, where exactly are we on the Kayfabrication of politics and news? When in the 1990s, professional wrestling was forced to own up to the fact that its scripted outcomes made it the opposite of a legitimate sport, writes Weinstein, “[wrestling] discovered the unthinkable: its audience did not seem to require even a thin veneer of realism.” 

If Stodden is right, that’s where politics is going and by extension journalism. People will make a lot of money off their audience’s cynicism and willingness to believe what they fundamentally know to be bullshit.

Indeed, Weinstein thinks this goes far beyond politics. He sees the “expected deception” of Kayfabe all around us, infecting even the production of knowledge in science. He sees it in physics’ unending fight between Team String Theory and Team Loops. He sees it in the continuing farce of economists who can’t predict their way out of a paper bag but are still consulted on how to run the world’s financial systems.

This is a grim forecast.

But I wonder. Instead of simply capitulating to Kayfabe, can we learn to use it in a more thoughtful way? 

Can we use it, as Weinstein originally wrote, to cognitively navigate “an altered reality of layered falsehoods in which absolutely nothing can be assumed to be as it appears?” Can we learn to recognise Kayfabe – and then break it? 

I wish more behavioural economists and sociologists would start studying this concept Weinstein identified so long ago. Today’s wrestling fans seem to be better off than people who read the news to try to understand their government. After all, they understand that Sami Zayn didn’t really hate Kevin Owens. They can even enjoy a wrestling match without also believing that all hockey, football and swimming contests are fake.

Picture source: WWE superstar Chris Masters performing for the troops in Iraq in 2009 Wikimedia Commons