Anti-Molochian Governance

Solutions that Inspire Cooperation to Diminish and Negate Multipolar Traps

And thirsts more rav'nously for gore, Than any worshipp'd Power before. That ancient heathen godhead, Moloch, Oft stay'd his stomach with a bullock; And if his morning rage you'd check first, One child sufficed him for a breakfast.

—John Trumbull, Mcfingal, Canto IV

When I read Scott Alexander’s “Meditations on Moloch,” I had an “ah-ha moment.” After years of contemplating the world's problems and their attendant complexities, I realized and started comprehending the extent of our planetary crisis.

I previously approached all issues from the anarchist philosophy — such as Murray Rothbard's work — which suggests that social problems stem from the iniquities of power fueled by monolithic nation-states.

To be fair, the anarchists are not wrong. Not morally wrong. Not logically wrong. Their castigation of society's power structures is apt and warranted. Having a small group of people monopolize the use of force is evil and causes untold suffering. However, the underlying dynamic leading to larger, nastier governments, with all the unintended and violent externalities, is directly related to Molochian games.

Unfortunately, Alexander’s solutions to Moloch in his Meditations leave much to be desired. He suggests that government and regulation are part of the solution set — but if governments exacerbate Moloch dynamics (also called multipolar traps), then his solution is self-detonating. The game-theoretic problems in modern human societies are well described and documented, but most of our current solutions also belie a deep, collective bewilderment.

Let’s explore the topic further and strive to uncover new ways to solve the Moloch problem, starting with governance. This article will describe Moloch and Molochian dynamics, their impact on our collective problems, and how Network States and novel governance solutions are positioned to solve runaway Moloch traps.

Who is Moloch?

Moloch is the Canaanite god of child sacrifice. He is also a God of destruction and insatiable hunger. He personifies the power of short-term benefits over long-term collective good.

For instance, ancient peoples often sacrificed their children to appease a god. This appeasement would allegedly be paid back through a bountiful harvest season, abatement of floodwaters, or victory in warfare against the neighboring tribe.

In other words, letting the child’s blood run down the altar of Moloch would solve a short-term problem at the expense of their children and their culture’s long-term stability.

Of course, the idea that Moloch will respond represents the manifestation of a tragic externality. It describes cultural self-annihilation through the murder of children. Furthermore, the tribe’s pleas to Moloch do not guarantee that the floodwater will recede or they will win the next war. Since Moloch is mythological, these people were simply murdering children without any payoff. The game was rigged. It was also self-perpetuated.

This personification of Moloch perfectly describes our current governance structures in society and the zero-sum, self-destructive games they encourage.

What are Molochian Dynamics?

People are still sacrificing their children, so to speak. But the problem is no longer tribal or localized. It is global and reverberates through an interconnected system and a web of information ecologies.

The underlying idea of Molochian dynamics bears repeating. It denotes that people prioritize the optimization of local conditions for short-term benefit rather than focusing on collective well-being. This condition is a “multipolar trap” because it has many “poles” that entrap the gameplayer in a situation they believe they cannot escape.

Here is how Alexander described a multipolar trap:

In some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse.

One of the key characteristics of multipolar traps is that the individuals involved in these games realize it is awful and destructive. For instance, the tribes practicing infanticide to appease Moloch knew that killing the child was wrong, but they were competing with other tribes. In a situation where the other players are perceived to be benefitting from child sacrifice, the tribe ramps up its regime of child sacrifice to outcompete the enemy and win the war or yield the better crop.

Let’s look at a few examples of Moloch traps.

Drone Arms Race

An example of a destructive Moloch trap is the autonomous weapons armament race.

Modern nations race to develop the most adroit, nimble, and deadly drones. They seek to produce a drone swarm capable of eliminating any army while being able to lock down or raze entire cities.

The multipolar trap scenario is straightforward:

Every international player knows developing a drone swarm is self-destructive and can lead to a machine apocalypse. However, they are stuck in the game. They play regardless. It becomes a war of attrition and preemption. They figure if they do not engineer and innovate on drones as quickly as possible, someone else will. This ping-pong dynamic inevitably invokes the runaway development of drone warfare capabilities. At the current pace, the development of these catastrophe weapons will continue to ramp up exponentially.

Another name for arms races like these is the “Hobbesian trap,” which suggests that a group must “preempt” the other because someone will develop weapons or initiate violence first. This psychological fear promotes unending Moloch games. Another, albeit less existentially terrifying game, is the Beauty Wars.

Beauty Wars

Former poker professional Liv Boeree described another poignant example of a Moloch trap — Instagram beauty influencers.

The trap works thusly: Beauty influencers stay ahead of the game by shilling products and vying to be continuously beautiful. They achieve this goal by enhancing their looks with makeup, cleansers, moisturizers, and other beauty accouterments. They “gamify” their success by measuring likes, followers, and comments via their Insta accounts. With these initial conditions, the equilibrium of the beauty influencer game is somewhat even.

Things changed drastically with the introduction of Instagram filters. If the influencers had coordinated an agreement that filters should be off-limits, they could have maintained an evenly balanced game. But, of course, one of the influencers decides to augment their appearance with a filter. They do this subtly at first, perhaps by removing blemishes. Other influencers do the same, but the use of filters gradually intensifies.

Over time, each influencer applies more filters until their appearance becomes unnatural or unreal, a husk of its former self. Eventually, It is difficult to distinguish between the filter-augmented person and the real person. This use of filters turns the game into a “race to the bottom.” It reaches its apotheosis with many people competing for “beauty influencer status.”

Now, let’s discuss the solution space.

How do we stop playing these games, especially regarding governance and government?

Understanding and Fighting Moloch

Setting the Initial Conditions: Governance

I have written or spoken extensively about counter-governance.

Counter-governance means applying governance models that undermine the current social order to “force” competition among governance providers worldwide, incrementally sapping power from nation-states.

An area I did not previously explore was how governance models can combat Molochian dynamics. Most players involved in world governments cannot escape the multipolar traps and arms races. They are inexorably stuck in races to the bottom.

Part of the problem is that these players did not — nor could not — craft the initial governance conditions. In other words, the game's rules were set before they started participating. Molochian dynamics were already underway when they entered the game.

For example, US politics has been underway since the Declaration of Independence was signed. The Founding Fathers crafted the initial governance conditions. Sadly, they couldn’t see the holes in their logic or how power would ultimately subvert and corrupt their agenda. Furthermore, the experiment in constitutional democracy was cloned worldwide when other nations should have experimented with different models.

With the emergence of network states, we can now build anti-Molochian dynamics into our governance. But first, let me be clear about what a “governance model” is. Think of a governance model as a game. It is a set of rules we choose to live by and relate to each other socially. It usually includes a binding contractual agreement, constitutional framework, and corresponding “laws.”

However, most of these “games” have loopholes that those in power exploit. These loopholes are what allow for the emergence of Moloch games. It is no wonder Frank Herbert famously quipped, “It is not that absolute power corrupts absolutely; it is that absolute power is magnetic to the corruptible.”

Rules for Diminishing Multipolar Traps

So, how do we address corruption and diminish multipolar traps in governance?

I will argue for three primary components of good governance. These procedures and ideas will mitigate zero-sum games by fostering the growth of positive incentives.

Daniel Schmactenberger referred to positive incentives as part of a global vision for betterment. But this is specifically for a vision of better governance or “authentic progress in governance.”

1. Low exit costs. A vital path to prevent Moloch traps from ensnaring new governance models is to keep exit costs significantly low. If exit costs are too high for those opting into a governance suite, it is easier for those at the top to get involved in runaway cascades of clout and power-chasing.
   
   To learn more about the importance of exit costs as a general principle in society, read Albert O. Hierchmann’s notable work, “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty

   Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States.”

   
   Low exit costs also create another beneficial side effect: They give rise to governance experiments. If you can radically experiment with new governance models, you can deploy novel solutions that enhance the incentives ecosystem.
   
   One important driving force in the crypto industry is experimentation in governance. I will wager that we have made more inroads into understanding how systems can be captured or spoiled by running experiments in crypto governance. This area represents the proving ground for good governance versus Moloch-tinged gameplay scenarios.
   

2. Technological and tokeneconomic safeguards. Modern governance models will also leverage tokenization to allow for the democratization of the structure and promote a voting stake in society. These models can be tuned and optimized so that they are fairly gamified, and no one can easily cheat. Typically, cheaters will only cheat when they can access the cheat codes.
   
   For example, the “game” of the FED and US monetary policy is one in which the players can cheat without repercussion; they have the cheat codes. They can print as much money as they want. They call this “policy,” but it is arbitrary and negatively impacts the rest of society. Currently, that game is optimized to benefit the system and its players at the expense of the average person. This situation is why currency inflation is always a race to the bottom, causing irreparable harm to “Main Street,” diminishing the well-being of the middle class. Read Peruvian Bull’s “The Dollar Endgame” to learn more.
   
   Conversely, Bitcoin acts as a form of parallel finance with a consensus-based governance structure. No one can arbitrarily inflate the supply, which is algorithmically set to 21 million units. The total number will not be printed out until 2140.
   
   Bitcoin is an example of a system that is impossible to cheat or easily alter. You have to have consensus. Remember that I am not making a case for whether Bitcoin is the best or even a good solution. I only suggest that it acts as an example of good governance in some narrow categories.

   

   
   

3. Experimental markets, not regulation. It is typical that in the intellectual walled gardens of game theory analysis, most commentators suggest that “good regulation” is the key to preventing snowballing Molochian outputs. This is the typical perspective espoused by Scott Alexander in his Meditations. I’ll make an important counterpoint. Businesses can easily capture governmental regulatory agencies and change the rules to fit their business model. This situation, of course, feeds Moloch. It creates the necessary and sufficient conditions for a downward spiral into optimizing for short-term dopaminergic hits versus long-term collective goodwill.
   
   Markets with internal self-regulating mechanisms and an ethos of experimentation naturally lead to creating institutions that mitigate Molochian gameplaying. My thesis is that the optimal conditions for arms races are generated in environments where power has accumulated—in other words, a highly centralized entity or bureaucratic monoculture devoid of creativity.
   
   When power accumulates, it creates conditions ripe for Moloch’s emergence. After all, Moloch is the God of child sacrifice, a God of insatiable hunger. Power is hunger. It is the One Ring in Lord of the Rings. If you actively want to instill the worst conditions for game playing, give someone power above all the other players. Then, watch Moloch manifest in all of his most grotesque and heinous forms. Moloch can and will manifest whenever incentives become warped; however, power centralization guarantees the worst game-theoretic outputs will be realized.
   
   However, when you run experiments in governance and allow people to iterate and innovate on the initial conditions, you reach a balanced equilibrium of gamification. Indeed, “gamification” should be the term we use to denote governance dynamics that ultimately reward the players without creating perverse incentive structures. Markets have the capability to do this, but markets must be balanced with evidence-informed decisions and a culture of inspired experimentation.

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Conslusion: Taming Moloch

To be sure, we do not have all the answers to solving Moloch dynamics and multipolar traps. Most of the solutions have been lackluster and uninspired. Most people have had a keen insight concerning describing the problems in excruciating detail. However, understanding a complex problem does not imply delivering a clearly defined solution.

It is also true that we probably have not discovered a solution to Moloch at all. It is not as simple as saying, “Fix the incentives” or “Get the government involved.” We have to combine many different solutions to the problem and iterate on those, which is why I believe experimentation in governance, mixed with technological safeguards, provides us with a valuable starting point. Of course, we should do our best to gather as much data as possible to inform each decision.

We may be unable to slay Moloch — but perhaps we can tame him.