A Gentle Introduction to Mencius Moldbug Part 11: "Conquest's 3rd Law"
Conquest’s 3rd law is the redheaded stepchild of the bunch, the one that nobody talks about.
The first and second law, look like commandments etched in stone, something that will be true now and forever. But the third law just looks like a complaint about bureaucrats, pretty pedestrian to be honest. And it's not even clear how the Third Law is related to the other two.
Bureaucrats are inefficient? What a revelation! But when you stop to think about it, have we asked ourselves why government bureaucrats are inefficient?
Mainstream conservatives, like Ben Shapiro, have an answer for this question that is neat enough: incentives.
Bureaucrats are inefficient, they act like they're in a conspiracy against the institution because they don't have proper market incentives to act correctly. Corporationst, they say, do have proper market based monetary incentives and so their employees at least do not act like a conspiracy against the institution itself.
But is the explanation true?
Certainly no one ever accuses the military of behaving this way and the military doesn't use market incentives. Furthermore, the mainstream conservatives assertion that employees of corporations do not act like a conspiracy against the shareholders is really only true when we look at healthy companies, companies that are solvent and in their period of growth. Unhealthy corporations, in impossible situations where their business model fundamentally fails, do start to act just like Conquest’s Third Law describes, the employees begin conspiring against the shareholders.
Corporations exist for one reason only, to pay off shareholders. They develop around some business model and expand based on its success. But along the way, as they grow, corporations change, the market shifts, the founding leadership leaves and is replaced by more mercenary management. And soon the organization has a new set of priorities that are not as focused on shareholder value. And so the corporation loses focus and eventually goes into decline.
And at some point in this decline, it becomes obvious to the management and other employees that the business model is insolvent. Then the incentives change, the priorities of the management stop being about to delivering value to shareholders in the long term, because the long term is futile. What matters is getting out with what you have, looking out for number one, and making sure that you're not the one who's holding the bag of shit when the music stops.
So once decline is reaches a certain point, management does become a conspiracy against the shareholders. And this pattern is present inside governments and inside civilizations.
In fact, it can be useful to model civilizations both as corporations. Both corporations and civilizations have shareholders, the shareholders in the case of a corporation, and the general posterity of the people in the case of a civilization. Each also has assets and liabilities that it manages and manipulates to further the objectives of those stakeholders.
Perhaps Robert Conquest’s Third Law is not as eternal as the first, but simply an observation about the current state of affairs. A description of our current age as transition of the leadership class in the west from a mode of delivering value to the people and their posterity, to just another bureaucratic organization trying to manage the decline of the body politic and get out of the door with their heads intact.
And if this is the case, do we have evidence that in fact we are in the middle of a decline, potentially a metastasizing decline that will end in total collapse? The music is slowing and it may yet stop.
But of course, again, this is somewhat subjective. We all have to decide how trustworthy our cultural, governmental, and educational leaders are. We all have to decide whether our leaders are no longer as interested in the people as in previous areas of the West and are just looking out for themselves. I get the sense that people generally feel like this is the case, but there could be some nostalgic misremembering going on. Maybe there's nothing to worry about and we are on our way to utopia.
But what if the music is slowing down? And what if we get the sense that the load won't bear, and that we might be looking down the barrel of collapse. This is the real red pill. And it comes along with a sinking feeling when you realize the nature of what we might be facing.
But then, at the same time, I think there is a relief that is also present when we face the worst and are able to prepare for it. So here we might segway to the very obvious next question.
What is to be done? How do we head off or lessen the impacts of this terminal decline?