Dharma: The Rules of the Infinite Game
What karma, reciprocity and the Mahabharata reveal about how societies sustain cooperation—and why the Gita ultimately asks us to transcend the game Karma is commonly reduced to “what goes around comes around,” while dharma is reduced to duty. Both ideas are considerably richer. Viewed through repeated-game theory, karma and dharma can be understood as complementary ideas about how actions shape both the actor and the social environment. In a one-shot interaction, defection may be rational; in an indefinitely repeated relationship, cooperation, reciprocity, reputation, proportionate retaliation and forgiveness can become remarkably powerful. Robert Axelrod’s work on the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma demonstrated this through the success of Tit-for-Tat under particular conditions. Ancient Indian thinkers were addressing a different set of questions, but they too were concerned with conduct that sustains social order across repeated interactions and generations. Yet the analogy has limit...