This post is about how implicit coordination between powerful people allows them to act in surprisingly synchronized ways. I’ll start by discussing wokeness, the most prominent recent example. I’ll then analyze the mechanism behind such coordination (which I call the consensus of power); discuss how to oppose it; and outline some possibilities for what healthier power structures would look like.

If you're more sympathetic to wokeness, or want to focus on the more timeless aspects of the post, you might want to skip the first section. I included it because it felt dishonest to write a post implicitly about wokeness when it was the central example in my mind.

The mystery of the cathedral

The politics of the last decade have been very weird. The Great Awokening gave rise to an extreme variant of progressive ideology that quickly gained a huge amount of traction amongst American elites, and from there embedded itself into institutions across America and the wider western world.

Sudden ideological change is nothing new—my last post was about political preference cascades, and how they’re a natural result of social behavior. But what’s fascinatingly novel about the Great Awokening is the extent to which it was an almost entirely leaderless movement. There was no modern MLK leading this new charge for a racial reckoning; nor a Harvey Milk of trans rights; nor even Butlers or Steins writing incisive commentaries. The closest we had was Obama, who in hindsight was a milquetoast leader whose cult of personality was driven in large part by progressive longing for a black president.

One of Curtis Yarvin’s main intellectual contributions has been to give an account of wokeness (and its historical antecedents) which highlights this peculiarity, specifically via his concept of the cathedral:

“The cathedral” is just a short way to say “journalism plus academia”—in other words, the intellectual institutions at the center of modern society, just as the Church was the intellectual institution at the center of medieval society.

But the label is making a point. The Catholic Church is one institution—the cathedral is many institutions. Yet the label is singular. This transformation from many to one—literally, e pluribus unum—is the heart of the mystery at the heart of the modern world.

The mystery of the cathedral is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure.

That is: different parts of the cathedral talk about the same issues, support the same policies, share the same taboos, and so on. Why? When we see this level of synchrony without visible leaders, it’s tempting to take a conspiratorial stance: there are leaders, they’re just acting surreptitiously. And undoubtedly there have been many small conspiracies within woke organizations, some of which grew to involve high-level figures (e.g. the FAA hiring scandal, or the conspiracy to suppress the lab leak hypothesis, or conspiracies within universities to discriminate against Asians).

But wokeness is so visibly a bottom-up phenomenon (with high-level figures being followers rather than leaders) that it’s difficult to postulate that its overall priorities are set by any large-scale conspiracy. So Yarvin doesn’t. Instead, he explains the mystery of the cathedral in memetic terms:

[In a progressive liberal democracy], there is a market for dominant ideas. A dominant idea is an idea that validates the use of power … And there is no market for recessive ideas. A recessive idea is an idea that invalidates power or its use.

…It is not hard to see why, in the lecture halls and newsrooms, dominant ideas tend to outcompete recessive ideas. A dominant idea is an idea that tends to benefit you and your friends. A dominant idea will be especially popular with your friends and former students in the civil service, because it gives them more work and more power.

Now, competition between ideas is undoubtedly a big part of the story of wokeness. The introduction of algorithmic newsfeeds in the early 2010s produced hotbeds of rapid cultural evolution, which quickly led to the widespread transmission of many woke concepts. Even if you don’t like Yarvin’s specific memetic explanation (which I don’t, since many aspects of wokeness are recessive ideas), there are plenty more to choose from. Indeed, the common description of wokeness as a “mind virus” closely parallels Dawkins’ description of religions as “viruses of the mind”.

But there’s a crucial difference between explaining how an idea spreads and explaining how people who believe in that idea coordinate. Memetics generally focuses on the former; the mystery of the cathedral is about the latter. When woke institutions behave “as if they were a single organizational structure”, it often involves each of them reacting to each other’s actions (e.g. media outlets rapidly flipping from “it’s racist to worry about covid” to “masks and lockdowns are crucial”). That level of synchrony is hard to explain in terms of which ideas are memetically fitter.

So to solve the mystery of the cathedral we should appeal neither to conspiracies nor competitions between ideas. Instead, I think, we need a third type of explanation: an “emergent conspiracy” of people independently acting in ways that they expect others to support. I call this phenomenon the consensus of power (a term I originally got from Ben Landau-Taylor, which I’ll define more precisely in the next section).^[1]

The cathedral is a prominent example of a consensus of power. But my main focus in this post isn't to analyze the cathedral specifically, but rather the game-theoretic dynamics underlying how consenses of power work in general. Daniel Ellsberg describes some of these dynamics in his account of US decision-making about the Vietnam War. So does Naunihal Singh in his account of coups, and Timur Kuran in his account of preference falsification, both of which I discussed at length in my last post. You can think of this post as extending those ideas from the simple case of “will the coup succeed?” to a setting where people are deciding their positions on many related issues based on their expectations about other people’s expectations and behavior. (Unfortunately, this change makes discrete formalisms like threshold models and Keynesian beauty contests much less applicable. I’m keen to better understand how to formally model consenses of power; for now, though, I’ll focus on their qualitative dynamics.)

The consensus of power

Whenever we interact with others in society, we need to figure out which social and political norms to use. (Here I’m using the term “norms” broadly to include which factions to favor in which ways, which ideas are within the Overton window, etc.) A crucial feature of norms is that they don’t just guide your own behavior, but also which behaviors you reward or punish when done by others. So you benefit from adopting (and enforcing) the same norms as other people, especially powerful people. This means that it’s advantageous to track not just which norms other people follow, but which norms people believe other people will follow, and which norms people believe that people believe that other people will follow, and which…

This suggests a definition for the consensus of power: the norms which are common knowledge amongst the ruling elite. Of course there’s no clear demarcation for who qualifies as a ruling elite; what I’m trying to gesture towards (but can’t yet define precisely) is a version of common knowledge which weights more powerful people more highly. Note that this is very different from just aggregating powerful people’s preferences, because norms can persist even when they’re extremely unpopular. Often when someone goes against the consensus of power, you don’t personally care. But you know that others will punish you if you’re associated with it (because others will punish them if they don’t punish you, because…). So you push back against it—and thus help uphold the consensus of power. I’ll call people who consistently uphold the consensus of power “apparatchiks”.

The consensus of power, like the conspiratorial stance, attempts to explain the surprising level of coordination often seen within ruling elites. But direct coordination via conspiracy and indirect coordination via consensus are very different mechanisms that make importantly different predictions. I’ll elucidate the differences by framing each of them as a type of superagent containing many individual people.

Conspiracies are centralized agents who coordinate in a top-down way, by deferring to the decisions of leaders. This allows them to be highly goal-directed, and to plan and execute complex strategies. But it also bottlenecks them both on trust in those leaders, and on how well those leaders can gather and process information. This leaves them vulnerable to direct attack: disrupt or undermine their leaders and you can take out the entire conspiracy.

By contrast, consenses are distributed agents. They need not have any leaders, or even any central nodes. Instead, each apparatchik observes the behavior of many other apparatchiks, and gradually adjusts their own behavior accordingly. This allows consenses of power to perceive and act on a lot of information in parallel.

It also makes attacking them difficult, because there’s no clear locus of power. One good example comes from the ideological conformity of the mainstream media over the last few decades. If there’d been a news czar who’d banned coverage of Biden’s cognitive decline, or Pakistani pedophile gangs, or opposition to the BLM riots, or pushback against child transitions, or immigrant crime statistics, or racial IQ gaps, then that person could be criticised directly. But instead there were just thousands of individual decisions made by apparatchik news editors trying to judge which stories the consensus of power wanted them to run, resulting in a news environment almost as homogeneous as if there had been a left-wing news czar.

So consenses of power can be very influential and robust. But they’re also myopic and inflexible. Apparatchiks will only throw their weight behind positions that it’s common knowledge that the consensus of power favors. But without leaders willing to take a risk to rally people around a position, common knowledge is hard to achieve. So consenses of power are very limited in their ability to “think outside the box” or course-correct when pursuing their goals. The latter typically requires big flashy failures, which allow apparatchiks to then coordinate a push for a “vibe shift”.

A prominent example of these dynamics was the process by which the Democrats selected first Biden then Harris as their 2024 nominee. Biden’s decision to run again was very unwise but hard for leading Democrats to oppose, since nobody wanted to stick their neck out by taking a stand against such a powerful figure. There was also no Schelling point to coordinate on pushing back on it—until Biden’s poor debate performance broke the taboo, leading to a huge surge of criticism.

The shift was so sudden that many hypothesized that it was centrally coordinated, but that hypothesis isn’t necessary. Instead, we can picture every Democrat leader individually wanting to get rid of Biden, then jumping on the bandwagon as soon as it became socially permissible to do so. Biden tried hard to cling onto the nomination, but once roused a consensus of power is very difficult to oppose. Yet even then the difference between conspiracy and consensus was clear. Any conspiracy powerful enough to remove Biden would have replaced him with a more electable candidate than Harris. However, none of those candidates were prominent enough for the consensus to land on.

More generally, we can think of wokeness as a consensus of power under which it was common knowledge that leaders would give in to demands made by left-wing activists. As more and more leaders gave in to more and more demands, it took more and more courage for any individual leader to draw a red line. This created a channel by which left-wing activists could rapidly inject ideas that evolved on social media into prestigious institutions.

Fighting a consensus of power

Another way to characterize consenses of power is by understanding what it takes to resist them. When you find yourself opposing a conspiracy, the best thing you can do is bring it to light—even one piece of evidence of illegitimate collusion can blow the whole thing up. But when you find yourself opposing a consensus of power, such smoking-gun evidence may be very hard to find, or nonexistent. You can try to describe the more subtle dynamics you see, but this can easily sound uncompelling or paranoid. And even if the evidence is pretty good, it’s often hard to get people to act on it—because they’ll then find themselves opposing the whole consensus of power, which is a terrifying prospect.

In other words, attacks that work on centralized agents often won’t work on distributed agents. But distributed agents have their own weaknesses, most notably their lack of coherence. What do those suggest as strategies for fighting a consensus of power?

Firstly: act in its blind spots. Common knowledge is hard to build, and so consenses of power can be surprisingly slow to incorporate knowledge that many individual apparatchiks already have. This means that there are often many possible high-impact actions which the consensus of power doesn’t yet have an opinion about. For example, the losses that the woke consensus of power have incurred from Elon buying Twitter are at least an order of magnitude larger than the purchase price of $44 billion. But it was very difficult for the woke consensus of power to defend itself against this form of attack, because buying a social media platform is a very non-standard strategy for acquiring political power. (It did act afterwards, via the GARM-coordinated boycott, but this was too little too late.)

Although consenses of power have many blind spots, taking advantage of them isn’t always easy. Firstly, because consenses of power inherently want to preserve their own power, and are therefore suspicious of people doing unusual things at scale, even if they don’t fully understand how those things threaten them. (If you see something being criticized as “weird”, it’s a good bet that this is an attack by a consensus of power.) And secondly, because it’s easy for opponents of consenses of power to slip into a conspiratorial stance, treating the consensus as an entity that’s as well-organized and goal-directed as a centralized conspiracy.

Conspiratorial thinking suggests that if you ever do something which goes against the interests of apparatchiks, the consensus of power will “get you” for it in a way that you’re not anticipating. Because consenses of power can be so widely-distributed, this creates a miasma of fear around acting (or even thinking) against them. In order to dispel that miasma, you need enough courage to act against individual apparatchiks and see that they can’t actually direct the consensus of power to target you. The rarity of people who are willing to do that helps explain Thiel’s claim that courage is in shorter supply than genius.

Secondly: judo-throw the consensus of power. Consenses of power have a tendency to overreach, because there’s nobody in control who can stop ill-advised bandwagons. For example, a decade ago Silicon Valley was weak enough that Democrats could score easy points by attacking it. That gradually became less and less true, but Democrat elites in government, journalism and academia continued a campaign of pointless and often petty attacks, because there was no clear signal that they should stop. This has now backfired dramatically for them, with Silicon Valley leaders coming out strongly for Trump.

So it’s possible to cause significant damage to a consensus of power by waving a red flag in front of it, to draw it into an uphill battle. But this is a risky strategy. The woke consensus of power attacked many people on increasingly flimsy grounds over the last decade (e.g. James Damore, David Shor, and Emmanuel Cafferty). But when wider society failed to rally in their defense, those potential overreaches turned into victories, creating (self-fulfilling) common knowledge that the woke consensus could cancel people for basically anything.

So judo-throwing a consensus of power is bottlenecked not just on courage but also on integrity and political savvy. The former makes it harder for the consensus of power to find pretexts for attacking you, thereby helping your allies build enough common knowledge (or faith) to mobilize to defend you. The latter allows you to choose when and how to most effectively take a stand—as civil rights leaders did by choosing Rosa Parks as a figurehead. Perhaps the best example of a judo throw on a consensus of power is Gandhi’s Salt March, which was extremely courageous (in its commitment to nonviolence), high-integrity (in its openness about its plans and goals) and politically savvy (in its choice of the salt tax as a symbol of oppression).

Having said that, one common downside of cultivating political savvy is that understanding how the consensus of power thinks risks turning you into an apparatchik. It’s easy to overzealously police naive activists on your “own side”, out of fear that they’ll provoke the consensus of power. But doing so makes you complicit in upholding the consensus of power, and sometimes even makes you your own side’s harshest critic. (A recent example comes from Nigel Farage, who’s so scared to be branded as dangerously far-right that he’s preemptively making those same accusations against his own MP.)

Worse, engaging closely with a consensus of power reliably makes you overestimate its stability. It’s easy to assume that apparatchiks hold their positions sincerely (since that’s the impression they’re all trying to give!) when in fact most are conformists who would flip if they saw the tide turning. So almost all politically savvy people are far less ambitious than they should be: they try to gradually nudge the consensus of power when they should be trying to replace it altogether.^[2]

Replacing a consensus of power

Recall that I’ve defined the consensus of power as common knowledge about what people will favor, weighted by their power. But power is actually in large part constituted by people’s willingness to defer to you, which is significantly affected by how much influence you have over the consensus of power. So there are many possible stable(ish) consenses of power which we could choose to steer towards or away from.

Indeed, we can think about the history of politics in terms of transitions between different consenses of power. Most of human history was governed by what I’ll call the consensus of force: a consensus of power weighted by the ability to deploy military force. This tended to involve power struggles between monarchs, nobles, and generals, often cashing out in very destructive wars.^[3]

The rise of enlightenment liberalism helped rein in the consensus of force via (implicit and explicit) rules. I’ll call the regime which has replaced it the consensus of culture: a consensus of power weighted by your ability to spread your ideas. The cathedral is a consensus of culture focused around the institutions which used to be the best at spreading ideas: newspapers and universities. While the consensus of force is backed up by physical coercion, consenses of culture are primarily backed up by social coercion. This dramatically reduces the costs of conflict.

We can imagine distributed agents which don’t even rely on social coercion. In my last post I talked about values (like morality or national identity) as distributed agents. The crucial difference between values-based agents and consenses of power is that values motivate individuals even in the absence of external incentives. By contrast, a pure consensus of power has no sway over people who aren’t rewarded for following it or punished for defying it (though in practice almost all ideologies are somewhere between purely value-based and pure consenses).

But the price of non-coercion is a lack of robustness. You can’t run a society on purely non-coercive grounds, because you then have no mechanism to punish defectors. Even consenses of culture can become extremely decoupled from physical reality, because you don’t need physical force to apply social coercion. For example, South Korea’s consensus of culture is so bad that they’re driving themselves extinct. More generally, social media and smartphones facilitated the creation of echo chambers in which unhinged consenses of culture could develop. And while populist surges in many western countries are now pushing back against wokeness, there’s no guarantee that the same forces won’t drive them equally crazy.

There’s an interesting historical analogy here. The development of modern militaries made the consensus of force unprecedentedly powerful, leading enlightenment intellectuals to develop the ideological paradigm of liberalism to rein it in. Liberalism spread because “letting our ideas die in our stead” was more appealing than continuing to fight wars over religion. Now the development of modern communications technology has made the consensus of culture unprecedentedly powerful. What this suggests is that we need liberalism 2.0: an ideological paradigm robust enough to rein in the excesses of the consensus of culture, but non-coercive enough that it can spread without sparking another culture war.

That’s a hard ideology design problem. But I think it’s solvable. In forthcoming posts I’ll talk about some of the other constraints that such an ideology would face, and my best guess at what it should look like.

1. ^{^}

   In Scott Alexander’s terminology, I’d describe conspiracies as a conflict theory explanation, and memetic competition as a mistake theory explanation. I’d then describe the consensus of power as a systems theory explanation.

2. ^{^}

   For example, most AI governance advocates historically tried to take positions that would sound reasonable in DC, without planning for how to respond to predictable rapid Overton window shifts. So after ChatGPT it was DC outsiders like FLI and Yudkowsky who stepped up to bring AI risk discourse into the political mainstream.

3. ^{^}

   Ben Landau-Taylor pointed out to me that the consensus of force best describes feudal societies. By contrast, at various points various empires (such as the Chinese and Roman empires) consolidated power to a sufficient extent that it was infeasible to challenge the center using military force. This shifted power from the consensus of force to what I’ll call the consensus of the court: a consensus of power weighted by the favor of the emperor.

   A system where power flows from a single person might seem very different from the consenses of power I’ve discussed above. But even an emperor with absolute formal power still has scarce attention, and still needs to delegate almost all tasks. So the apparatchiks within the court will scramble to anticipate his desires, and only infrequently bring complaints directly to him (since doing so is costly and risky). The consensus of the court is then determined by common knowledge about what gatekeepers will allow to be brought to the emperor’s attention, and which types of orders the emperor can actually enforce. Not even the emperor is in control of this process, since the consensus of the court is trying to tell him exactly what he wants to hear—sometimes effectively enough that he becomes no more than a figurehead.