We'll Give You Things > We'll Leave You Alone

The low-agency dominant strategy

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 inhabits a parallel delusion, never realizing his actions are counterproductive; the feedback mechanism is too long, and failure attribution too vague. Unlike the trader who receives swift market feedback, the policy architect luxuriates in ambiguity. 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.

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Dominant Political Strategies Optimize for Recruitment

Framing is critical 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 is guided by efficacy, they care about the moral stance. Democracy, stripped of its sanctifying rhetoric, operates like any other competitive system where incentives shape outcomes. The politician who grasps this thrives; the one who clings to civics textbook idealism withers.

Political parties are in the businesses of amassing influence and power, and the way they achieve that is through enlarging 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 candidate that advocates for the expansion of state power under the pretense he 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?

The answer writes itself in demographic ink: producers dwindle, dependents multiply. The political customer base for 'leave me alone' contracts each year, while the market for 'give me things' inflates as resources do, and power laws amplify their uneven distribution. This isn't a bug, but a feature in democracy's code: the inevitable output when you run universal suffrage on a prosperous society's hardware.

Selling power is guided by manufacturing constituencies, and it goes beyond simple monetary handouts. The DEI regime is a prime example of how the party recruits its soldiers, by providing them standing they otherwise would never have on their own merits. These aren't jobs that emerged from market demand or institutional necessity, but political patronage positions dressed in corporate drag. Every act of race communism producing a dedicated voter whose livelihood depends entirely on the continuation of the regime that birthed their role.

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 responsible for the power they otherwise would not have. Dependency through patronage. Their loyalty is bought.

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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. The Pareto distribution that governs everything from crater sizes to city populations also governs human competence and agency. All creative and economic endeavors follow this power law, 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.

In any democracy, this creates an insurmountable arithmetic: the vital few who generate value will always be outnumbered by the many who consume it. One person, one vote transforms this natural hierarchy into an inverted pyramid; the productively impotent commanding the productively vital through sheer numbers.

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, and their market is multiplying. As prosperity grows, the Right’s market deflates.

If your wellbeing comes from the state, you unsurprisingly consistently vote for the expansion of the state. The Left is excellent at incrementally buying votes, by selling power to those who would have none without the bureaucracy.

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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 if the other party promises them 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, bidding for voter allegiance becomes the superior 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. We’ll give you things."

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 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 is simply not calibrated for it. The environment dictates the expression.

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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 be mostly fine. All their power does not come from the state. They’re industrious and conscientious and not natural dependents. However dependents know if they defect, they will return to the bottom rungs.

Maintaining loyalty among the capable — self-sufficient and independent, who aren’t acted upon, but act upon the world — is like herding cats. Maintaining loyalty among the impotent, obedient, and reliant, those who don’t act upon the world but are instead acted upon, is like herding sheep.

One scatters freely, the other flocks naturally.

It is much easier to form and maintain coalitions of the dependent. If the independent leave, they’ll still be pretty okay, they’re capable and they know it! The dependent know they exist at the pleasure of the state, and they are loyal because of it. It is much easier to coordinate allegiance among those who are beholden to you.

This is what you get when you indiscriminately grant the franchise to both the family-having business owner and the welfare-consuming criminal in the exact same way. One of these people you can buy, the other you must convince; which one makes for the better dependent?

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Closing

History offers variations on this theme. Athens voted itself bread and circuses. Rome's citizens traded republican virtue for imperial grain doles. The pattern persists because it emerges from democracy's very structure, not from any particular culture's failings. When you democratize power while centralizing resources, you create a machine that can only run in one direction.

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. These are just ripples in a left-bound tide. 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 a bloating 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. The destination is embedded in the logic of the system itself: a democracy wealthy enough to buy its own votes will do so until it can't. The auctioneer's gavel does not fall when wisdom prevails, but when the treasury runs dry. Perhaps that's the only feedback mechanism that truly functions in democratic time: not the ballot box, but the balance sheet. Until then, we’re going to keep giving you things.

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