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There’s a sort of prisoner’s dilemma now facing a federal judge in the ongoing Harvard race discrimination court battle. As you know, the prisoner’s dilemma is a game theory that suggests self-interest will compel two confederates to betray each other when cooperation would benefit their mutual self-interests. For those unfamiliar with the court proceeding, in it plaintiffs allege that Harvard’s diversity regime is racially discriminatory against Asians rather than merely the whites against whom it was intended to be racially discriminatory. As a result a race other than whites was denied legal protections, which runs counter to the country’s principles.

A prisoner’s dilemma subsequently arose between Asian advocacy groups on one side and college admissions and Big Diversity on the other. As collaborators, they both want the elimination of whites from elite universities, but they also have competing interests as well. Diversity mongers view discrimination against Asians as a bearable price to pay for discriminating against whites. If it took losing the former to banish the latter, there’s not an Ivy League administrator alive who would furrow their brow. That’s a collateral effect of the left’s racial demonization: getting rid of the demons is job one.

That can have impacts beyond the obvious. Asians, like Sarah Jeong for instance, agree that whites need to go; though certainly not at the cost of Asians. That would be discriminatory. Why not just stop admitting dumb blacks instead, they ask in extremely veiled terms.

This tactical conflict amidst strategic alignment created the prisoner’s dilemma we now see playing out in a federal courtroom, the only venue where national policy is now concocted. In this dilemma, Asians and Diversity would benefit by cooperation. Asians could simply front-channel their discontent through colluding media outlets, and institutions like Harvard could pronounce their dignified acquiescence and deny a few more white kids out of each class in exchange for more imported test-mill output from Peking. That’s not ideal for either, but still good collectively for both.

But game strategy says that’s not likely to happen, since one or the other can likely get everything they want by betraying the bargain. And that’s what has happened. Asians, naturally infuriated by being treated like whites, have gone straight to the head of state: a federal judge. In doing so they have sown the potential for both to lose.

If Asians win, diversity as state religion could simply be tossed out like a segregated southern school house. Asians labor under a satisfying delusion that perceived merit will perpetually carry them forward. In reality, mandated diversity has always been their friend and mortally wounding it will accrue to their detriment in ways they have almost certainly not considered. But, of the world’s seven billion minorities, the death of Diversity would cut Asians shallowest, and so they betrayed their POC partners for a wider berth at the Western trough. On the surface that seems reasonable, though in reality both will have lost.

But if Asians lose this case, they risk relegation to a semi-formal state of whiteness. The court could carve out another principled exception to America’s sacred principle of non-discrimination. Taken even further, a thorough judicial enshrinement of Diversity might even mandate strict university admissions in alignment with population demographics. If Diversity is Godliness then you better start getting right with scripture. What makes this particularly amusing is that diversity has been rhetorical subterfuge for anyone-but-whites for so long that its peddlers forget the term has a separate dictionary meaning. Thus a literalistic court could take them at their word and require full proportional diversity in higher education. That would be very bad for diversity indeed.

This could represent a template-altering loss for both plaintiffs and defendants. That’s because the percentage of white gentiles at Harvard isn’t 63% and the percentage of Jews isn’t 3%. Though perhaps Asians would be satisfied if the result of their suit was to go from a current 20% of Harvard to their population’s diversity mandate of 5.6%.

It’s all quite a conundrum. How can whites reconstruct their country in a way that only harms whites? Is there a differential equation for calculating that?