What Werewolves Can Teach Us About Political Warfare

As it turns out, a small number of bad actors who have an informational advantage over a much larger but naive population in turn have a gigantic strategic advantage over that same population. In order to demonstrate this fact and make it popular, a Russian student some decades ago devised a popular party game called “Mafia” that, after spreading to Western nations, got rebranded “Werewolves.” This game can teach us a lot about how a small band of actors who are deliberately coordinating with one another can extract an enormous strategic advantage over a population who doesn’t realize who the bad actors are or that they’re coordinating. Join host James Lindsay for this fascinating episode of New Discourses Bullets where he explains the relevance of this game and its lessons to our everyday experience of political warfare environments.