We'll Give You Things > We'll Leave You Alone
The low-agency dominant strategy
This essay is another prelude to my Biofoundationalism series.
We'll Give You Things > We'll Leave You Alone
The investor who overtrades eventually realizes it's a fallacy that more activity means more profitability. Take what the market gives you, more is not necessarily more. The zealous bureaucrat or academic never realizes his actions are counterproductive; the feedback mechanism is too long, and failure attribution too vague. If your policy didn't work, it's because you didn't do enough of it. Real *insert my policy* has never been tried.
So now you get more of the bad idea as a solution to the bad idea. However despite it being a technical failure, the idea was actually a strategic success. Your “more is always more” approach to political policy ended up being quite effective at what it was really aiming to accomplish: generating loyalty.
Dominant Political Strategies Optimize for Recruitment
Framing is important here: when you read “democracy”, I want you to view it as interchangeable with “adversarial domain”. That means you understand it on game theoretic grounds, not punditry or academic ones. You’re not trying to sell your ideas because they're any good, you’re trying to win iterated games with them.
Don’t analyze if the policy “works” as in “did it produce a good outcome?”; analyze it from the lens of “did it recruit new voters and please my constituency?”. There’s hopefully overlap between the two, but not always. And in a dysfunctional society, they’re increasingly mutually exclusive. Creating problems is a great way to justify political action for solving the problems you caused, which creates new problems, justifying even more political action, rinse and repeat.
The dregs of society don't fact check anything, they vote on impulse and how pleasant the idea sounds. Remember this in your sales pitch. No one cares about the efficacy, they care about the moral stance it's taking.
Political parties are in the businesses of amassing influence and power, and the way they achieve that is through maintaining and expanding political constituencies. The winning strategy is to optimize for recruitment, not marry yourself to a warm-and-fuzzy ideology. Does this get me more votes, or does it give me a sense of moral superiority while I lose?
In a democracy, voter recruitment is how you advance your objectives, which means the game theory dictates that he who maintains the most loyalty wins. If you create a governance system where large amounts of people only have power under the purview of your political party, you have created loyal soldiers at the ballot box. Don’t vote against the hand that feeds you.
The structural advantage for the party that advocates for the expansion of state power under the pretense it will share this power with its voting base, is loyalty generation.
The Left is vastly superior at it, because nearly every platform they run on promises to provide restitution to the “victims” of power laws… “we’ll give you things”; a product for the low agency.
Every tenet the Right espouses fundamentally advocates more autonomy for the agentic… “we’ll leave you alone”; a product for the high agency.
What are you selling? Who are you selling to? And most importantly, is the target market for your product growing, or shrinking? Why?
Selling power doesn’t mean just monetary handouts. The DEI regime is a prime example of how the party recruits its soldiers, by providing them power they otherwise would never have on their own merits. Without the legal imposition of this hierarchy-degrading apparatchik generator, none of those DEI hires would have power, economically or politically. They have now been recruited, and will vote as such.
Low-agency recruits cannot defect, because the party is directly responsible for the power they otherwise would not have. Their loyalty is bought.
When The State’s Power is Sold as Yours
By decree of nature and math, there are more beneficiaries of power redistribution than there are of those who simply want to retain it. All creative and economic endeavors follow a Pareto distribution, and in a democracy the 80% have-nots carry more raw voting weight than the 20% who have. How do you recruit the 80%? Their vote counts all the same.
The Left says power laws are to be flattened, any unequal distribution that nature produces isn’t your fault. Elect us, and we’ll make the power laws we dislike effectively illegal. The Left fundamentally sells low-agency solutions to an increasingly low-agency population; their TAM is expanding. It’s why they continue to win.
If your wellbeing comes from the state, you unsurprisingly consistently vote for the expansion and power of the state. The Left is excellent at incrementally buying votes, by selling power to those who would have none without the bureaucracy.
The Low-Agency Dominant Strategy
The game theory of winning democratic elections in wealthy nations devolves over time into a bidding war. Low-agency voters can be persuaded to defect only if the other party promises them something more. You are buying their vote by sharing state power and resources, not with your good ideas.
Wealth and power tends to cluster, and it becomes quite noticeable that there’s a lot of it in rich nations. You no longer can compete as effectively by selling high-agency solutions that promise “we’ll leave you alone”; you slowly adopt a low-agency sales pitch of “we’ll give you things”.
This democratic strategy only works in prosperous countries; how much you can redistribute correlates with how wealthy you are. Because only when there’s money and power present can you credibly campaign on reallocating it. If the country is poor, you simply don’t have much to give away.
Enabling the high-agency to create wealth is the dominant political strategy in ascending nations.
Enabling the low-agency to feed off that wealth is the dominant political strategy in descending nations.
A complex adaptive system always has homeostasis embedded in it somewhere. A star cannot grow forever.
In the presence of abundance, incrementally buying voter allegiance becomes a highly viable approach. Political platforms, for all parties, slowly creep left in rich nations, because strategies gravitate towards what wins over time. If everyone’s vote counts the same, and you can buy them, you do.
If the state’s power is sold as your power…. new voters for the Party of Largesse are born. Recruitment is earned through buying it; loyalty is maintained through dependence.
The party that sells independence to high-agency people in a low-agency society, will get predictable results over time in a wealthy democracy. This is what conservatives used to advertise, and what libertarians still do… who’s buying this product? The 20%? Is this market getting bigger or smaller? Lol.
This is why conservatism is simply liberalism going the speed limit in wealthy societies. It’s the scenic route leftwards. The polity maintains its nominal 50:50 voting split, but the sales pitch of both parties creeps stage left. Yesterday’s liberal policy is today’s based conservative one.
The Left sells political power: "Elect us and you get standing and handouts you otherwise won't have."
The Right sells political independence: "Elect us and we'll leave you alone."
Which strategy does a better job recruiting and maintaining loyalty among a low-agency, dependent population? The answer is empirically clear.
You will not get a wealthy society to adopt a fundamentally conservative mindset to its governance for the same reason you will not be able to grow a garden in the winter. You can try really hard, maybe get a flower or two if you constantly cover it with blankets and heating lamps, but the environment does not permit it. The environment dictates the expression. Swims left.
High-Agency Defection and Herding Cats
Consider how allegiance is maintained: the answer is essentially “what are the repercussions if you leave?”
If the agentic and competent defect, they’ll still be mostly fine. All their power does not come from the state, they’re industrious and conscientious. They’re not natural dependents. Dependents however know if they defect, they will return to the bottom rungs.
Maintaining loyalty among the capable, who aren’t acted upon, but act upon the world, is like herding cats. Maintaining loyalty among the impotent and dependent, those who don’t act upon the world but are instead acted upon, is like herding sheep.
It is much easier to form and maintain coalitions of the dependent, as opposed to the independent. If the independent leave, they’ll still be pretty okay, they’re capable and they know it! The dependent know they only have what they have because of the state, and they are loyal because of it. It is much easier to coorindate allegiance among those who are beholden to you.
Closing
You’ll occasionally get surges of rightward pushback when this process overextends: Reagan 1984, Trump 2016, Brexit 2020, and yet.... Cthulhu keeps swimming one way. Imagine seeing the electoral map in 1984, the hippies are on the run, Republicans just won 49 states, tax cuts are coming! And 40 years later, look at you….
In the presence of decadence in a democracy, the dominant political strategy becomes recruiting and maintaining political loyalty by creating new dependents. This inexorably leads to an expansion of state power and the bureaucratic class. It’s why the government never, ever gets smaller, no matter who’s in charge. Because it’s just how the stages of a dying star works. It’s part of the natural lifecycle of nations.
This is poetically a sign of success, because a poor nation couldn’t adopt this strategy. And it’s also a harbinger of decline, because nothing about it is sustainable.
Luxury conditions beget luxury beliefs. And luxury solutions follow suit.
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Fantastic analysis for the US. Agree that it's a solid point on DEI in corporate/university life, too, which I hadn't considered before. Keep the incompetent middle management in place because they will be the willing puppet of those above.
But given the corruption in India, China, elsewhere, I'm not convinced that the 'appeal to high agency people' is the strategy for ascending nations. I'm not even convinced El Salvador is an example of that. Usually, the strategy to attract rich people is the same-- giving stuff via tax breaks. Where have you seen the 'appeal to high agency people' work?
Excellent! Doomerish though, in spite of your view that “things still happen.” It’s cool I’m in, no worries. Boy it seems reductive, though - materialistic?
I’m fascinated.