Except from "The case for Flux" - max kaye

So what we're going to look at is how power acts on rulers, so opposed to how rulers use power just what effect does having power have on a ruler. So congratulations you are our volunteer you're the new monarch or overlord dictator or all that sort of stuff; and here's you...and here's your cake, congratulations. Now your first goal as supreme overlord is to keep being supreme overlord. Because obviously if you don't do that then you will have nothing and you will be able to change nothing and it will be a waste of time. And because you're an overlord and not a prime minister you'll probably end up dead which is bad. So the problems that you have is that in order to keep staying you know supreme overlord you've got to do a lot of stuff but you can't do that alone. You know you need allies and the only advantage that you have there is that you control the treasure. How much this is, maybe it's oil fields if you're a dictator whatever but the treasurer that's yours to control.

And so the first rule is you need to get the key supporters on your side. No man rules alone and you need someone to build roads and hospitals and oil fields and you know manage the police and the military and things like that. So you need to find key supporters and you probably find them you know where they're waiting for you after they deposed the you know whoever was your predecessor. So without them, without your key supporters or keys; you can't do anything and if you don't satisfy them then they're just going to replace you. So what you need to do then is basically to well maintain the keys, acquire the keys and what you need to do that with is the treasure. So the second rule is controlling the treasure, is only you can raise the treasure through tax or you know theft or whatever else and you need to pay that in part to your keys to keep them loyal. And then you can use your keys to raise more treasure and this cycle continues. But this is basically the if you had a dictatorship based on gold this is basically the structure. Cause you got some of the mined gold; someone to you know wield the guns and that's it and then they you know just keep cycling like that. So the problem here is that if you control the treasure you attract rivals. If you had the idea at this point that okay I've got this big trove of treasure and I want to do something nice with it like build schools or roads or hospitals and things like that; the problem is that you're not spending it on your keys. And the problem with not spending it on your keys is that someone else can come along and basically say I’ll like talking to the key I'll give you more treasure if you swap sides and you support me in you know the upcoming….

And so if we're talking about dictatorships in this sort of position then they are required, it doesn't matter how you know how pure of heart the person is. They are required to spend money in this way in order to stay in power. Because again if they don't stay in power then someone more tyrannical will come and take it from them. And so basically you're forced to do this, there's no way out of it. The other problem is that all of your key supporters have the same problem is that you know you are their income and they have to redistribute their treasure to their supporters and so on; you know all the way down the line peasants are you know off to the side here somewhere they're not really not part of this graph. But because being the key to power is a position of power you've got the same problem that any person in a position of power has and so you're incentivized to raise as much treasure as you can which means you're incentivized to support the leader who's going to pay you as much treasure as they will. And so you can't spend it altruistically, you're still forced into the same thing and we have this all the way down the - graph we have this same phenomenon. Now if you have too many keys then as you might acquire over time the problem is that you're giving less treasure to each key. And if you wanted to maximize loyalty, splitting the treasure up a lot isn't a good plan. So the only option is to eliminate the keys that aren't useful and in...maybe you kill them, maybe a nice and you just exile them or something like that. So rule three is you need to minimize your keys, you need as few key supporters as possible, you need them to be as loyal as possible and that's what makes it as difficult as possible for someone else to come and take power from you.

So just to recap, coups for dummies; is your dictator weak, are you in a position of power then you might be interested in a coup. Step 1: promise all the key supporters more treasure if they support you. Step 2: use their power overthrew the dictator. Step 3: eliminate the useless keys even if they supported you. And this is basically the recipe for every coup, this is why you know revolutionaries who take power end up turning on comrades who supported them and then end up allying themselves with some of the key supporters of the old dictator and so on and so on. You can't get out of this cycle for the reasons we've already talked about. If you try to you know be altruistic and spend it on all nice stuff then someone else is just going to take that back from you. So the moral of the story here is that power requires corruption; is that you cannot have power without being corrupt for all of these reasons. But you might think democracy offers a way out. However democracies are really not that different; so you still need key supporters in the case of you being a leader of a party that would be other MPs, you'll need groups of citizens to get you elected, highly influential people like Rupert Murdoch and definitely you know Rupert Murdoch can you know throw some bones your way. And basically you need to maintain your key supporters in the same fashion. The other things you can do is make it harder for other people's key supporters to vote. You can make it easier to win elections by changing the electoral system; you can gerrymander and draw a favorable electoral boundaries; you can ensure that your - has complex pre-selection protocols so that you're always the candidate things like that. And so you can use the same tactics and the same sorts of rewards in the same way to remain in power.

Now to touch on the idea of the selectorate, the groups that you need to convince to support you they're called the selector. And so it's a combination, it's a smaller part of the selectorate, you can approximate it with swing voters but it might be a bit larger or smaller. And basically if 40% of the people always vote left and 40% always vote right then there's no incentive to offer them anything. And all of the you know treasure that you have access to you can offer to these swing voters to get them to vote for you and continue to win elections and so on. So satisfying keys in a democracy is pretty straightforward although you can't give them bribes or eliminate people; you can give them favorable legislation, you can give them tax loopholes, give them get-out-of-jail-free cards especially if they're a banker and you can give them business contracts. You know you might be creative and come up with other ways as well. The problem here is that if you don't do things, do these things then whoever your competitors are who are willing to do these things will for the same reasons we covered before start winning the selectorates that you and then you won't be able to do anything because you’ll lose your power. And so again even in a democracy we still see that corruption is a tool that's required. So to stay in power use corruption as a tool and your authority is too good of a gift to waste. Basically corruption is enabled by authority. It's the power of decision making and the power of wielding you know I guess the instrument of the state that allows corruption to take place. And the problem with representation is that representation necessarily equals that authority. Is that if you win that election then you have that authority. If you're on the winning team of you know all of the you know out of the factions that try and build policy or wield authority for political parties then you know you can start doing a lot of stuff. And so democracy is by no means immune to any of the things that we've just talked about and as we can see here the problem at the end of the day is the problem of authority; corruption is just the manifestation of authority. So to end corruption you must end authority.

However in a dictatorship treasure come from theft or resources. In a democracy, treasure comes from the voters. So the rulers of a democracy need to keep their society productive unlike the rules of a dictatorship who can go around and you know kill people or steal...stuff. You need to keep your society productive in a democracy and that means that you need hospitals and roads and schools and education and the rest of it. So we do have it definitely we have more of an advantage here. Just to illustrate this - quickly, if we start with productive society that leads to specialization and more keys through either industry or other things like that. That would lead to an unstable dictatorship which then leads to democracy and then leads to higher productivity. But the thing here is that none of this starts with democracy, it starts with productivity. And only through being very productive such that being a dictator would destroy that means of raising treasure can we actually get to a democracy. So it's no use going into a dictatorship killing everyone and putting in a democracy if you haven't solved any of the underlying issues like being productive. So we're getting close to the end of this section; basically this I think labels you know everything as it stands so far. Dictatorships on the left have very few key supporters. They're unstable or sorry when they're far left they're stable then we have this period of instability. And then we have democracy as we know it with many keys and I definitely feel like in the West at least we're heading further and further towards this next unstable period. Satisfaction with democracy is the lowest it's ever been and maybe there's something beyond that. And maybe we're just going through like we went through the previous transition long ago or some people going through now will go through another transition shortly.

So I have a hypothesis here which is mostly because it's pretty cool and it's actually testable. I'm not sure if anyone's done any research on it but the hypothesis is that the political system that eventually dominates is the one that's able to support the most key supporters. And to enable the most specialized society most productive society essentially. Now I think this one's up with a lot of intuition, makes a lot of sense whether it plays out or not we shall see. So first little intermission who wants to grab a drink or anything now's the time but if you have questions on that last section with the selectorate theory yeah.