What Makes a Good Ruler?

Peeking Past Issues and Into Mechanics

In my recent article Victory and Vengeance I raised the question of “Who is fit to rule?” Given the tenor of this election season, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that it provoked a question from a supporter about what makes a good ruler, and how that relates to the way we choose our leaders in democratic systems. What follows is my attempt to explore these issues in some kind of informative depth.

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What Does It Take To Rule?

“Give a man an inch and he thinks he’s a ruler. Give him twelve inches and he is a ruler.”
—Rich Little

As America heads into another Presidential election, the question on everyone’s minds is “Who’s going to win?” or, probably more accurately, “Is my candidate gonna win?”

We go through this rigmarole every four years, and it usually devolves into very little more than a popularity contest. Questions of “character” and “respectability” often rule the news cycle, mixed up in a mishmash of “issues of the day.” Most of us who choose to vote end up either voting for our tribe’s candidate, or at least against the other tribe’s candidate, who will obviously destroy our country (or at least “set things back” some number of years).

Lost in the noise is the much more basic question:

What are we actually choosing when we choose a ruler?

What does it take to rule? To run a government? Once you strip away the partisan questions, what kinds of qualities does a leader need, anyway?

One might be tempted to answer the final one of these questions by saying “that depends on the system.” It’s possible, for example, that the qualities that make a good king would differ from the qualities that make a good president.

Possible, yes. But, upon scrutiny, we will find some basics common to all rulers, regardless of context or system.

Ruling vs. Leading

It would probably be useful to distinguish between leading and ruling, as the two jobs, though they frequently co-occur, are not identical.

A leader is one who not only directs the actions of a group of people, but also inspires confidence by the style with which they do it. They may lead by example, or by intimidation, but one way or another they know where they’re going and they convince and/or inspire others to follow them. Coaches, directors, older siblings, and military squad leaders all bear—to some extent—the burdens of leadership and command, but it would be a big stretch to call any of them “rulers.”

A good leader is a complex basket of contradictory qualities, with the chief contradiction being the ability, on one hand, to cannily manipulate those he leads while, on the other hand, inspiring their confidence and trust with his character, charisma, or skill. Usually, we view manipulation as underhanded, sneaky, and dishonest, so we aren’t inclined to place confidence in or trust in those whom we catch doing it.

A leader—to retain his legitimacy—must convince those who follow him that he has their best interests at heart (however these are defined). Sure, a squad leader could order you to your death on a black ops mission, but in joining his unit you declared that, in your view, your “best interests” include placing the welfare of your country or your team above your own.

Rulers are different animals entirely. Consider what it takes to actually run something. Be it a business, a crime family, or a nation, running an organization requires four qualities:

1. Perspicacity

2. Enticement

3. Violence

4. Administration

Let’s take them one by one.

Perspicacity

Perspicacity, n.
1: intelligence manifested by being astute (as in business dealings) [syn: shrewdness]
2: the capacity to assess situations or circumstances shrewdly and to draw sound conclusions

The nature of being a ruler is that you are the sole and final responsible party for that which you rule. If you blunder in the wrong way, your position, power, reputation, and esteem will fall away—assuming that you manage to keep your life. Wielding power always brings with it an acute risk of death by assassination.¹

In order to avoid failing at your job—especially terminally—you have to be quick on the uptake. You have to read the room. To put it bluntly, you need the skills of a good con artist. Whether you’re meeting with power brokers, constituents, enemies, allies, or diplomats, your job is to be the savviest person in the room.

Note: I didn’t say smartest. All humans are prone to playing to and moralizing their strengths, and intelligent people are no different. It’s easy to assume that having a high IQ will let you run the table in a political situation, but the slightest glance in the direction of any bureaucracy should disabuse you of that notion pretty damn fast. Geniuses and borderline geniuses (i.e. the groups possessing IQs north of the mid-130s) are vanishingly rare, statistically speaking, so one might assume they’d easily attain powerful positions. However, such people don’t often accrue power, because geniuses mistakenly think that intelligence is power for the same reason that a body builder in his prime might think that wheelbarrows are for pussies: why use a tool when you don’t need one?

Power is a tool that force-multiplies your efforts. Nobody reaches for a tool when they don’t have to, because humans are evolved to be constructively lazy.² If you want an excellent recent example of a high-IQ ruler, you need look no further than the only certifiable genius to hold the office of the President in recent memory: Bill Clinton.

Sometimes a cigar is so much fun it’s criminal.

Clinton was so smart that he was able to run his administration like a college frat boy on a free-ride scholarship. He would not prepare for diplomatic or cabinet meetings until a few hours before hand, he would do a fantastic job with the meeting, do about eighty-percent of the negotiation required to close important deals, and then go on about his business…and then pretty much forget about what he’d done.

He didn’t manage his people. His administration was infamous for its lack of follow-through on any topic that wasn’t a pet passion of one of his inner circle (and even some of those got spectacular launches and then no real follow-through).

Being President isn’t a job for a dummy, but there is such a thing as being too smart to actually perform well, and Clinton perfectly fit that bill.³ Genius isn’t necessarily a disqualifier (Jefferson, for example, didn’t to a half-bad job, though he wasn’t half as brilliant a President as he was a thinker), but as demanding as the job is, its nature is such that it is literally beneath the attention threshold of people north of a certain IQ level.

Middlingly-smart people (i.e. midwits—those in the IQ range from 110-130) more easily grasp that they can’t bluff their way through every single situation they run into, and thus more easily intuit that if they can accrue power they can amplify their effectiveness in their field of choice. Acquiring power also doesn’t require the same kind or level of intelligence as inventing encryption or designing a rocket motor. Thus, this much-derided class runs universities and government agencies, and fills corporate offices.

This, of course, creates a problem, as people who are good at running institutions aren’t usually smart enough to understand the institutions they’re running (which is not a knock on them—systems analysis is incredibly difficult, and the difficulty increases faster than the complexity of the system does).⁴

Here’s where things get gnarly:

A ruler is basically a glorified bureaucrat with decision-making authority. Whether you’re dealing with a monarchy, a modern bureaucratic pseudo-democracy, or anything else on the spectrum, the “Chief Executive” (President, Prime Minister, King, etc.) is the person charged with making decisions about how to execute policy. In most systems, that person also is invested with the authority to formulate policy (a least in certain domains).

But that’s not all there is to the job. A ruler also manages relationships with patrons (the donor class and other power brokers) and other rulers (diplomacy/foreign policy), communicates with those to whom he is nominally responsible (either the “people” or the college of nobles, depending on the system), and is charged with formulating compromises between these and other interest holders and presenting those compromises in such a way that nobody is unhappy enough to come for his job (or his head). This means any given ruler a very limited range of possible action.

When we first met I had no power and all the choices I could ever want. And now I have all the power I could ever want and no choices at all.
—Londo Molari, Babylon 5

In such a circumstance, the difference between a chair-warmer and a good ruler comes down to brass (i.e. the willingness to cause problems and offend the power brokers) and perspicacity—or, to give it a more common name, savvy.

A savvy person reads the room and susses out, quickly, how best to manipulate the people they’re confronted with. They identify quickly what their interlocutors want, and they just-as-quickly spot the difference between what someone really wants and what someone thinks they want, and then use the gap between the two to run the table. And if they’re very good at what they do, they’ll run the table while leaving all their adversaries with smiles on their faces.

What the Presidency is really like

Enticement

Our popular image of an ideal political leader (even though it runs against our experience) is one of a faithful public servant who discharges the demands of office according to the best interests of the country, guiding the ship of State through the dicey waters of current events.

A much more accurate view would be of a lone man (or woman) riding the back of a bucking horse while trying to shoot at a pack of wolves clustering around.

Most people wouldn’t know what to do with power if they got it (including most people who get it), because most people don’t know either what power is, or what it is for.

So what is power, and what is it for?

Power is the ability to impose your will upon the world. Power is what you use to make the world do what you want.

Socio-political power is simply power applied to people and groups of people. It’s the social or political equivalent of a wrench, or a lever, or a hammer. And, in the political world, power comes in two forms:

Soft power, and hard power.

We will deal with hard power later. In this section, we’re talking about soft power.

No, not that.

Soft power is the power of awe, of admiration, and of seduction. It’s the sway that a rock star holds over his fans. It’s the power of a mother whose son decides not to join a gang because he doesn’t want her to feel ashamed of him. It’s the power of a father whose daughter decides not to plagiarize a paper because she doesn’t want to see that look of disappointment on his face. It’s the power of a twenty-something woman who gets a ninety year-old billionaire to leave a big chunk of his fortune to her to at the expense of his own children.⁵

Soft power only works when it is given by those over whom it is exercised. That ninety-year-old billionaire could have told the twenty-ish model to take a hike, but he didn’t want to. So he gave her power over both his fortune and the final years of his life.

Soft power is the velvet glove on the fist of a ruler, and its most important manifestation is enticement. So let’s get vulgar for a moment, because the exercise of soft power is vulgar in the extreme:

Your job as a ruler is to get other people to do what you want, and not all of those people are formally under your control. You can’t easily force people who aren’t your subjects to do what you want. And as for those people who are your subjects…well, you can only piss them off so much before they revoke your soft power.

In such a position, your best strategy is to give those who court your attention something they want without giving up anything you care about. Do you want to contain the Soviet Empire? Convince one of its potential allies (like Malaysia) to defect to your side by allowing it to sell tariff-free goods into your domestic market (without demanding a reciprocal agreement from them)—it will take your country a long time to get hurt by this policy, but it will uplift your client state quite quickly. You win on the deal, and the only losers are your own constituents who won’t notice how they’ve been sold out (at least, not for a few decades).

Don’t laugh, doing this with the entire world is how the United States won the Cold War. They called the policy “free trade,” which it’s not. Sure, free bi-directional trade would have prevented the hollowing-out of the American working class, but it wouldn’t have let the U.S. offer such a great deal that other countries were willing to put their citizens at our disposal for use as human shields against the Soviets.⁶

Of course, it’s even better if you can use your soft power to get the other party to do what you want without giving them anything of value at all. Flattery, hookers, cash (which, if you control the mint, is literally valueless), drugs, exclusive parties with taboo pleasures on remote islands, jobs in your operation once they move on from their current position, free publicity, and public endorsements—all of these have been more than enough inducement for the less savvy among the political and influencer classes to sell out their actual interests since time immemorial.

As a ruler, you must be willing to sell these kinds of deals (as well as more substantive ones) to everyone you meet in such a way that the other guy usually feels like he’s getting the long end of the stick. This makes him more willing to defer to you in the future.

And, to rule effectively, you have to be able to do all that with a clear clear conscience, because you need your sleep. And why wouldn’t you have a clear conscience? You know that someone who you can’t bend with soft power will eventually have to be dealt with the hard way—you’re doing them a favor by giving them the velvet glove instead of the iron fist.

Teddy Roosevelt was famous for hard power big stick diplomacy. 1904 political cartoon.

Violence

If soft power is the velvet glove, hard power is the iron fist.

If soft power is the carrot, hard power is the stick.

Soft power says “I will give you something so you’ll do what I want.”

Hard power says “You will do what I want…or else I will hurt you.”

Hard power is, in a word, punishment. A ruler must use hard power to do his job (and to hold on to it), whether that hard power involves withdrawing from trade deals, cutting off foreign aid, dissolving strategic partnerships, going to war, ordering assassinations, and killing or imprisoning those who endanger his power.⁷

And here’s the fun thing:

To be power at all, soft power must, at least implicitly, be backed up by hard power.

Consider the examples above. A rock star can always walk off stage or kick a groupie out of his dressing room if he’s displeased. A mother whose son joins a gang might disapprove and withdraw from the relationship. A father who is disappointed by his child’s cheating is withdrawing esteem and respect, and he might do worse, up to and including disowning his child (or, if he’s of a brutish bent, beating or killing the child). The twenty-something model might withhold her sexual attention or even basic affection from her ninety year-old husband until he signs the will guaranteeing her a fortune.

But there’s a problem with soft power: people’s affections are fickle because humans are basically self-seeking—the man whose loyalty you buy today may not stay bought tomorrow. Gratitude is a humiliating emotion, and it takes a particular discipline of spirit to be able to tolerate it (or to obtain edification from it) in more-than-small doses. When you owe something in your life to someone else’s generosity, it reminds you that you are not good enough on your own.

This dynamic is all over the Old Testament, and Kipling once referenced the Exodus story in a stanza making this point:

And reap his old reward,
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard—
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah slowly!) toward the light—
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
"Our loved Egyptian night?"
—Rudyard Kipling, White Man’s Burden

Machiavelli, in The Prince, instructed rulers to strive to be both loved and “respected” (i.e. feared) by their subjects, but that if forced to choose between them, to prefer respect (i.e. fear), because fear is more dependable than love.

In addition to people tending to rebel against gratitude (and there are a whole host of reasons for this dynamic that will form the basis of an article in the not-too-distant future), people also do not value things which come too easily. Receiving good things from a person or structure they fear keeps people in line, because they know that you, the ruler, could just as easily smite them on a whim. By being fearsome but showing favor, you effectively enslave their affections.⁸

The ruler of a State—whether that’s a clannish tribe or a city-state or a nation-state—is responsible for directing the violence of the state. He must be comfortable with the fact that it is his job to kill and imprison people to further the power of his office.

One of the less glamorous aspects of ruling.

Administration

Finally, and perhaps incongruously, all of the above qualities that a ruler must have in order to do his job are—even in the case of the most ruthless rulers like Stalin and Hitler—put in service of that most boring of human pursuits: administration.

Paperwork.

Decision making about relatively minor matters.

Carrying out policy.

For example, let’s say that your country will enter an economic depression that could shatter the government because its debts—taken on for expedient short-term reasons—are about to come due and there’s no way to pay them off. Most of those debts are held by a foreign superpower who is able to go to war and conquer your nation in order to make sure it gets paid. You’d strangle the dip shit who signed for the loan, but you can’t, because he’s dead, so you’ve got to come up with another bargaining chip.

Then, you hear about a massive resource strike in a neighboring nation—one that’s more than capable of generating enough wealth to pay off the debt and save your country. The neighboring nation isn’t interested in getting into the resource-extraction business, but they also won’t sell you the rights to pull the riches out of the ground yourself. You’re at an impasse.

You can’t really afford to conquer the land—it would be too expensive, and your other allies will notice you breaking your treaty with your neighbor (which could make the debt-call come a lot faster).

But what if you quietly let slip that if one or more of your megacorps were to slide across the border and start illegally extracting the resource, that you wouldn’t help the foreign power evict them?

That would give you the best of all worlds. All you’d have to do is look the other way while your neighbors are killed so a third party can steal their land and wealth, and your country (which is WAY bigger and has more people depending on it) will continue to survive. Hell, maybe you’ll even find a way to help the Lakota Sioux live better lives as subjects of South Dakota than they could have as free peoples on their own.⁹

“Administration” is the business of directing bureaucrats through rendering decisions on questions ranging from “how do I get Bob and Sue—who hate each other—to work together?” to “which division of my operation needs the most attention today?” to “which of my advisors are worth listening to?” to “who has to die so I can fulfill my responsibilities?”

It is accomplished through signing forms, holding meetings, and filling out paperwork.

In other words, “ruler” is essentially the world’s highest-stakes office job, with the world’s biggest load of red tape on top of it.

Securing Power

To put all of the above succinctly:

A leader, by wielding informally-delegated power in the form of influence, brings order to his corner of the social universe by ensuring that everyone in his charge has a meaningful place in the social hierarchy (however loose it is). All his power derives from his ability to do this job.

A ruler wields formally-bestowed power in order to preserve the potency of his own position, which is, itself, seen to be necessary to the functioning of the State. Leadership qualities are a bonus (especially in nominally-democratic systems), but are not strictly necessary.

When we call the President of the United States “The Leader of the Free World,” we are simultaneously acknowledging that the American Empire is a soft-power arrangement and also pointing out that the President’s primary job is not to serve the people of the United States, but instead to serve the foreign policy interests of the government of the United States.

This is the case in all empires, eventually, and is one of the reasons why the rise of empire usually presages the end of democracy. Some empires do a decent job—for a while—of separating the government of the homeland from the administration of the colonies and/or client states, but that separation (at least so far in human history) eventually dissolves as the economic drain of the imperial project demands that the citizens of the homeland be drained in order to make up for it.¹⁰

The trouble is, during the middle period between actual representative government and complete despotism (or imperial collapse, which doesn’t always end in despotism), the political system gets…weird.

If you have to get votes to secure power, but you can’t actually campaign on political issues (the country’s entire rationale has already gone over to the imperial project, and if you oppose that, you’re close to committing treason), then how in the hell are you going to get elected?

And, on the other hand, how is a voter supposed to figure out what kind of ruler a candidate is going to be?

The Problem of Imperial Governance

And so this is the situation we find: a succession of Galactic Presidents who so much enjoy the fun and palaver of being in power that they very rarely notice that they’re not. And somewhere in the shadows behind them—who? Who can possibly rule if no one who wants to do it can be allowed to?”

—Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

There are two ways to rationalize democracy.¹¹ The first is moral:

People deserve a vote because they should have a say in how they’re governed.

The second is pragmatic:

The people who are governed are the ones in a position to know whether or not that government is working.

When the State has limited power and runs a few systems which the population is well-informed enough to understand, democracy is meaningful when measured against both moral and pragmatic rationales.

When the State has grown in power into a bureaucratic leviathan, the pragmatic grounds no longer obtain. The moral grounds, however, continue to be persuasive. People deserve a vote because it gives them a meaningful way to fight for their own interests (especially if they organize). And, if nothing else, they can vote “no.”

But when the State has grown into an Imperial power, where the Foreign Policy apparatus is effectively directing domestic politics (as has been the case on a gradually ratcheting basis in the United States since the outbreak of World War Two), voting is neither morally nor practically justifiable—those voting “no,” after all, might “nope” the country out of its empire without even understanding what it is they’re doing.

When a State hits this stage of development, a shadow government (or “Deep State”) naturally develops to preserve continuity of policy and aims between formal changes of administration. The levers for control over “Deep State” interests are far upstream of anything that voters have access to—they rest in the schools where our governing class is trained, and in the ground conditions that inform the strategic analysts of what is possible and impossible in the current world. Populist uprisings in such a situation are useful and tolerable insofar as they increase the apparent instability of the system, because it is human nature to give more power and resources to a faltering system than to a functioning one.

Seems batty until you think about it for a few moments. Your body gets hungrier when you’re sick because it needs the extra calories and nutrition to attempt to heal itself.¹² If you’ve got a kid who’s having trouble in school, they receive more attention than the kids who are doing well. Justice would dictate that well-behaved people get preferential treatment, but that’s not how the world works. It’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease, because problems command our attention.

Therefore, if you’re in a position of power in the Deep State of an empire that’s in trouble, social instability is your goal, because it means you’ll be given more resources to keep the empire growing and functioning. The sorry state of your homeland might distress or embarrass you, but as long as you can keep the whole machine running, there’s always a chance that everyone will make it through the dark patch and to the golden age on the other side.

In this kind of environment, you want people running for office who either buy your view of the world (and, hence, your priority stack), or you want people running who know they’re clueless and will basically sign off on anything you ask them to. But you will do everything you can to disqualify, marginalize, or murder someone who doesn’t know how things work, but who believes that you are the problem. It doesn’t matter whether they’ve got a prayer of hurting you or not—there’s always the danger that they will appoint someone who knows how to hurt you.

The Art of Getting Votes

The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.”

―Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Meanwhile, if you’re a candidate in this kind of environment, you know that the people whose votes you need haven’t a prayer of understanding the complicated geopolitical and economic gamesmanship going on behind the scenes—and you also know that most of them wouldn’t care even if they did understand. In order to get elected, you need to figure out how to buy their silence with something that doesn’t cost you a thing.

You can “support” important ideas, like family, or sexual freedom, or “the community” or “our children.” You can do it loudly, and it costs you nothing. If voters believe your heart is “in the right place” they will then trust that whatever actions you might take will be in service of goodness.

You can “identify” with people. You’re gay, you’re straight, you’re Catholic, you’re a good Christian, you’re a man or a woman or something else entirely, you’re black, you come from the working class, you’ve been on the streets, you’re not one of those people up in the ivory towers.

And, if you really have to, you can promise people money. Call it UBI, or pandemic bailouts, or infrastructure spending, or student loan forgiveness, or universal health care, or increasing the minimum wage, or tax cuts, or tax credits, or incentives—it really doesn’t matter. All that really matters is that people know that if they vote for you, you’ll make their cash register ring.

All of that goes down a lot easier if you also give people someone to hate. Jews, gays, trans folks, black people, white males, Karens, immigrants, drug dealers, globalists, localists, libertarians, conservatives, liberals, and especially anyone who votes for the other party. It’s very important that your supporters understand that it is the people who support the other candidate who are the problem. Hating other voters absorbs their attention, and energizes them. And it keeps you safe.

If you fuck up and make the other candidate themselves the problem—or, worse, you make the shadow government apparatus the problem—you’re gonna get shot (or otherwise attacked) either by someone who identifies with that other candidate (who’s playing the same game you are) or by someone who sees you as an actual threat to the continuity of the State.¹³

Looking at all of the above, we can derive a general rule to describe the art of political campaigning:

Campaigning is the art of securing power by weaponizing the public’s heuristics against them so that they become incapable of political thought.¹⁴

Who is Fit to Rule?

The question “who is fit to rule?” is, itself, premised upon the presumption of an answer to the question:

“What needs to be ruled?”

Electing the “Leader of the Free World” is a very different matter than electing the “President of the United States.” The former position requires someone who is willing to prioritize the interests of the NATO alliance above those of his own country, should the two ever come into conflict. The latter position implies a ruler whose primary concern is that which happens within the borders of the United States.

Rhetoric aside, we haven’t had the latter sort of ruler in longer than I’ve been alive. Reagan, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and Trump all posed in that direction, but none of them ruled like it. “America first” should be a rhetorical damp squib, but it turns out to be an effective campaign slogan because no President in decades has been willing to consistently prioritize his own countrymen over the demands of the empire.

Eventually, the subjects of the United States will get a government that prioritizes them again, because eventually that government won’t have a choice. As legitimacy wanes and solvency fades—and especially as the opportunities of empire dry up for a while in the wake of global financial and population decline—the U.S Government will eventually be forced to turn its attention to the one resource without which it cannot function, and which it has incrementally squandered in its grand ambition to bring justice, freedom, and wealth to the world:

The solidarity of the American people.

This might happen through a new technological boom producing a new economic golden age, as George Friedman argues in The Storm Before the Calm.

It might happen because America elects a Caesar or a Napoleon-style strong man who has the clout and the courage to hack the governmental bureaucracy down to a manageable size.

It might happen because the government itself goes bankrupt and is forced to restructure.

It might happen because a constitutional convention gives us a soft revolution, whereby lower levels of government seize power back from the central State, for good and ill.

Or it might happen because America descends into an honest-to-God civil war.

Most successful human projects die from problems caused by that success:

Successful nation building in a land of plentiful resources create the natural conditions for empire.

Ambitious children of wealthy nation-builders invariably seek to take up the White Man’s Burden and reach out their hands in conquest.

A successful empire invariably, throughout history, beggars the homeland.

A beggared homeland produces the conditions whereby the citizenry fights amongst itself for scraps from the imperial table, beggaring the State in return.

And, finally, the State is weakened enough that it collapses, is conquered, or descends into civil war and has to be re-invented (or not).

So as you look at the political candidates who are presented to you in the next few election cycles, consider looking past identity markers and party labels to what their history reveals about their willingness to stand up against (and re-task) the systems they’ve inhabited. Someone who can do that has at least one of the qualities that our historical moment demands.

And if you vote, then when you vote, consider first whether your candidate has those four qualities necessary to a ruler (perspicacity, enticement, violence, and administrative ability). If you believe they do, then ask yourself the all-important question:

Will they conduct themselves in accordance with the interests of their country?

It’s not an easy question to answer, but that is how you choose a ruler in a late-stage empire.

Final Thoughts

Governance is one of the wicked problems of life:

To secure the liberty to conduct business and private life, one must have some way to rain violence down on the heads of those who would disrupt both.

Once a system that can rains down this violence exists, it is vulnerable to capture by parties that will pervert it for their own benefit.

Once the system is perverted, it bleeds legitimacy.

Once bled of legitimacy, it becomes just another bully, and its ability to pacify those who would interfere with life and liberty evaporates.

When that happens, it must die and be reborn.

You are here.

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1. This is true even in eras and environments—such as the business world, or United States politics in the late 20th century—where such risk is relatively remote.

2. This is, by the way, why “gifted” students so often fall behind “average” students: they don’t learn the tools they’re presented with in introductory courses, because they don’t need them. By the time they encounter material where they DO need the tools, they must aggressively self-remediate in order to keep up with their less intelligent peers. Gifted programs in schools were supposed to solve this problem by providing more challenging material at the introductory levels, but they are usually so poorly run that they serve as little more than holding pens to segregate out the high-IQ troublemakers.

3. I refuse to apologize for that pun.

4. As I was writing this, I started going into depth about why, but realized it would take another article (or article series), so for now you’ll just have to take my word for it.

5. I am describing the case of Anna Nichole Smith, and have linked to the relevant wiki article in the body text.

6. This is also why the American working class is now the most despised demographic by America’s elite—the elites know how much rage they’ve caused, so they want to geld the working class before it gets its shit together to take revenge.

7. In a healthy system these are criminals whose activities promote discontent and/or hurt your country—in an unhealthy one, these are your political rivals, ideological opponents, and loyal lackeys who know too much.

8. Our brains evolved to allow us to thrive under this sort of threat/reward structure, because this is the way the natural world presents itself to animals in the wild (such as our hunter-gatherer ancestors). If you’ve ever wondered why people play slot machines, have their lives swallowed by video games, flock to capricious political figures, stay with abusive spouses, remain devoted to abusive parents, or flock to religions centered around gods that are powerful, unpredictable, benevolent, and wrathful, the dynamic at play is precisely the same as that which exists between hunter-gatherers and the natural world they depend on.

9. This, by the way, is the actual historical background for the hit HBO series Deadwood.

10. I mean, who else do you think we ought to drain? The companies, investors, bankers, and political patrons who actually manage to reap the profits from the empire? Get real!

11. By which I mean any political system where the vote of those who hold the franchise has a meaningful effect on who gets to rule.

12. I was horrified to discover how much weight I’d gained during my recent near-terminal illness.

13. Yes, I know that just happened to Trump, but I am not a Trump supporter, and this is not the first time something like that has happened in American history, let alone world history. 30-odd years ago Ross Perot claimed that the CIA threatened his family, inducing him to lower his profile and costing him a 3rd party Presidential election win. Trump just happens to be the major iconoclast on the scene at the moment—read this again in 20 years, another figure who is more recent will spring naturally to mind.

14. The result of recent political debates may seem to cut against this, but it doesn’t, really. Debates very rarely play a role in election outcomes. The 2016 election, the 2024 election, and the 1980 election are the only presidential contests during my lifetime that have had a debate that mattered worth a damn. In all cases, the difference between a candidate who projected comfort under pressure and one who looked stressed under pressure made a lasting impression in what was, up to that point, a close race. Debates don’t reveal very much about a candidate, but they do provide the opportunity to showcase one of the qualities that a ruler must have—the ability to project personal authority under pressure.