Despotic systems fail because political meaning corrupts information into sycophancy
Evidence
The most fundamental reason [why despotic rulers are unable to achieve their goals] is found in the lack of reliable information. … The flaw of the system is that all acts tend to have an immediate political significance, which means that information degenerates into informing and so becomes worthless for planning purposes. Or else the information is offered that the informant believes his superiors want to hear, even if they insist on information that reflects the world as it is rather than the world as they would like it to be. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1642
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- DEEPTHINKING: The claim that political significance degrades information into informing (and hence worthless for planning) is a dense mechanism — highly relevant to the reader’s Luhmann/Hardin analysis since it’s about how surveillance corrupts the observability substrate.
- XREF: Counterpart to the reader’s Luhmann baseline-familiarity analysis: where the doctor’s wife provides ground truth through sight, despotic systems lose ground truth because all reporting is strategic.