“Eat my Tongue!” The Decentralized Distributive brilliance of Tibetan Buddhism.

“First, the condition is you must give me a hug. Next, the condition is you must touch your forehead with my forehead. Next you must rub my nose with your nose. Next, you have to give me a kiss. Now, eat my tongue — LOL.”

This is how Tibetan grandparents and elderly culturally and literally “troll” their grandchildren.

Tibetan grandparents and elders have a playful cultural tradition when a child asks for a treat, gift, or money, they must go through a series of affectionate negotiations, like hugging, touching foreheads, rubbing noses, and even sticking out their tongues. This seemingly innocent and humorous exchange recently turned into a media nightmare for the Dalai Lama.

A recent event showed the Dalai Lama engaging in this traditional exchange with a child who approached him for a hug.

Out of context this interaction appeared sinister, leading to the Dalai Lama being accused of child pedophilia.

The spread of this disinformation was shockingly fast and far-reaching, causing significant damage to his reputation exactly one week after the Dalai Lama confirmed the transfer of governance of the body of Tibetan Buddhism to Mongolia, neither to India, nor Tibet, nor China.

Anyone focusing on governance in online communities, please pay attention — this is likely not what you think.

The explosion of disinformation and its consequences is a central focus of research and development of Conversational Game Theory, which introduces a governance consensus process that teases out disinformation that arise in disputes over governance. While our system of governance is quite humble, applying to small online communities, the patterns are the same no matter the governance system.

The incident involving the Dalai Lama was a carefully crafted disinformation campaign.

The video was edited to emphasize a seemingly child-threatening moment, and it was combined with incendiary words like pedophilia, religion, slavery, and the CIA.

The campaign tapped into existing paranoia and anti-religious sentiment, weaving a narrative that exploited people’s fears and suspicions.

The disinformation campaign incorporated a mix of skepticism, political propaganda, and justifications for historical events, such as the invasion of Tibet and the Dalai Lama’s exile.

It even included a segment from the HBO show Bullshit with skeptic entertainers Penn and Teller, which questioned the Dalai Lama’s credibility and Tibet’s history of slavery. Combining different viewpoints and critiques into one event.

Governance is a touchy subject.

From the viewpoint of Conversational Game Theory and conflict resolution; disinformation smear campaigns can be predicted to happen at specific instances of what are essentially governance disputes over the distribution of power in a consensus process to control the narrative about the governance process itself.

I can completely avoid the obvious elephant in the room in regards to the political relationship the Dalai Lama has with China because that part is irrelevant in the governance problem that is trying to be solved here.

Tibet’s Narrative Theme for Distributive Governance

Tibetan Buddhism formed the nation that we know of today as Tibet over a thousand years ago, and Tibet was the very first nation that adopted Buddhism directly into their governance.

As Tibet adopted this new form of governance, the nation demilitarized, something that was unthinkable, even now. While many western nations at the time were flying the banner of Christianity’s “turning swords into plowshares”, Tibet was the only nation to ever achieve that.

While there is indeed plenty reasons to criticize feudal societies from the point of view of comfortable Western 21st century viewpoints, when Tibet formed one thousand years ago, all societies were feudal if they were lucky, and in comparison, Tibet was a feudal utopia.

Tibet turned a nation of warriors into a nation of monks. At it’s peak, Tibet was a nation of 8,000 monasteries innovating the “Tulku” narrative tradition. The Buddhist concept of “rebirth”, which is a distinct concept from “reincarnation”, allowed power to be distributed via a form of “magical realism”.

Tibet truly introduced a novel solution to the transfer of power problem long before Europe rediscovered the Greeks and established Western Democracy in 1776.

The Transfer of Power Problem.

The “Transfer of Power” problem is proof that society can achieve something close to a “perfect” form of governance under certain conditions. What are these conditions?

Historically, a “perfect” form of governance has existed any time there is a “good ruler”. The best possible type of governance is governance where all decisions are centralized by the most intelligent and compassionate individuals capable of making wise choices and therein lay the problem.

How do the good rulers, good kings pass on their power to other good rulers and good kings, and not bad ones?

In simple terms, the “good ruler, bad ruler” transfer of power problem poses a challenge for societies to ensure that power is transferred from one effective leader to another without devolving into chaos or tyranny.

Tibet’s system of governance integrated Buddhist monks directly into the governing body, transforming the nation from a warrior society into a monastic one that was able to maintain itself for one thousand years.

The Tibetans discovered a thousand years ago that they could develop a customizable narrative theme that could become its own form of governance, a tradition of Termas, Tertons, and Tulkus.

The innovative Tulku system, which is based on the concept of rebirth, was introduced as a decentralized solution to the transfer of power problem.

This system enabled even the poorest citizens to potentially be discovered as “reincarnated” Lamas, Karmapas, or even the Dalai Lama.

By distributing power through the Tulku system, Tibet ensured that their leaders were not only raised under Buddhist principles but also pledged to continually be reborn into their communities, studying their whole lives the methods of compassionate service, a form of governance based on loving kindness.

Any Tibetan who dedicated themselves to the study of a unique type of imaginative self-immersion could become a “Terton”.

A “Terton” is an individual who becomes self-actualized and discovers a “terma”–– a teaching that provides insight that magically appears only when necessary.

The notion of “rebirth” is often clouded in the west due to our projections of “supernatural beliefs”; but in the context of governance, the notion of re-birth implies a type of recapitulating social responsibility, whatever actions are made by a ruler in one lifetime, they inherit when returning to the next life time.

Thus, a poor farmer’s child could discover that he was the re-birth of a high lama, and now that monastery and its wealth have been successful transferred from “rich to poor”.

It is obvious to see the misunderstanding––consider Marxists “dialectical materialism”, in the eyes of the PRC which has a completely different world view have no frame-work with which to measure that transfer of power because concepts like re-birth are simply superstitious.

It is almost an impossible negotiation, for it is a position that must assume “bad faith”, and the more well intentioned the PRC, the greater the degree of the confusion and frustration.

So what transpired recently?

The Dalai Lama recently confirmed a transfer of power within their tradition to a young child who is claimed to be a re-birth of Mongolian spiritual leader, a “dalai lama” of Mongolia.

Establishing Mongolia, neither India, China nor Tibet, as the continuation of decentralized Tibetan Buddhist governance, Tibetan Buddhism is still spreading, even gaining territory!

This power transfer made headlines about a week before the disinformation campaign reached its peak online, with TikTok being particularly aggressive in the US with it.

For many Westerners, the significance of this event may not be immediately clear and may even seem strange and bizarre.

However, this rebirth tradition represents more than just a myth or a religious belief system, it is literally a form of distributive decentralization of power, and Tibetan Buddhism is larger and power expansive now in the 21st Century than it ever was before China invaded/liberated Tibet.

China and the PRC are in the frustrating position; every act of “liberation” the PRC forces on the Tibetan Buddhists creates a larger body of Tibetan Buddhism governance that will always elude a centralization effort by its natural design.

Independent of the esoteric Buddhist imagery, it is a system of decentralized power distribution that transcends national and international boundaries, capable of transferring across borders, and surpassing laws of nations and military force, with no blockchain or army or bank required.

Such an impressive distribution of power is bound to be frustrating for any governance structure, whether well-intentioned or otherwise.

Lacking any other mechanism to assimilate the decentralized structure, the only remaining option is to undermine the identity of the individual perceived to be distributing the power.

This is predicted to occur, almost like Game Theory, and almost exactly like election cycles. Politicians always need a “bogey man” a “demon” for which a common cause can be identified.

What any agency applying such a tactic strategically cannot see in the big picture is that the application of this strategy is more than just a sign their overall strategies are failing, it is an emergic algorithmic event that shows they have already lost and have yet to realize it.

I am intentionally walking a very fine line in between conflicting viewpoints to show you those are irrelevant. There is something else more interesting to learn here.

We can assume that all nations have the ideal governance for their societies and that all nations have competent rulers and leaders. They all have the same identical problem. The problem with all forms of governance is that some leaders are good people, and some leaders are corrupt.

How do we tell the difference, and how do the good people get the jobs?

How do we transfer power from good people to good people, seamlessly?

This is the problem of all governance communities, centralized or decentralized.

What all governance systems share in common are the steps between “conflict” and “resolution” in the transfer of those powers.

Conversational Game Theory utilizes an algorithmic approach to consensus building, identifying only nine possible outcomes that can arise from conflict to resolution.

Thank you Professor Robert Thurman

Tibet first caught my attention in 2020 when I learned about their remarkable contributions to governance, listening to Professor Robert Thurman of Columbia University’s many podcasts shed light on Tibet’s incredible one-thousand-year-old legacy.

The appeal to me was how imaginative Tibetan Buddhism was. As wild and as far out Tibetan thinking is, they are quite upfront about it all just being “created in the mind” and not something that is inherently “real”.

Professor Thurman described it like science fiction, and 2020 Covid isolations gave me months of study into this intriguing culture that surprisingly I realized I knew almost nothing about––a system of governance that is informed by science fiction yet grounded and rooted in a very analytical system, the magical realism of Tibetan Buddhism may be more relevant now than ever.

Tibet’s unique system is worth learning about and applying in our age of decentralized artificial intelligence systems. Tibet’s innovative solution to the transfer of power problem is still active and unfolding in real-time.

Tibetan Buddhism is proving that their seamless decentralized structure is virtually impossible to suppress, emerging under any circumstances that attempt to contain it.

It is fitting to honor Tibet in this manner. A millennium ago, while the rest of the world was embroiled in violent conquest, they introduced an enlightened distributive governance system akin to that of the ancient Greeks.

What sets the Tibetan system apart is that it doesn’t require a violent revolution to propagate and expand. Today, it thrives more than ever, disseminated and shared with billions worldwide.

This is where disinformation campaigns can backfire. While they can be remarkably effective at rapidly spreading misleading information, they eventually fail, inadvertently distributing the very knowledge they sought to suppress.

We do not need to own Bitcoin, or even care about it, to acknowledge that its distributive properties work better for distributing and storing wealth than centralized banks.

Likewise, we do not even need to be a Buddhist or believe in the concept of re-birth and Buddhas from other worlds to appreciate the world’s first decentralized governance system play out in real time, one thousand years since its inception.