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You Gotta Serve Somebody
TLDR: The most important choice you make in life is who you will choose to follow. Obedience is agency.
Earlier this week, there was a long conversation about agency and its apparent reduction, leading to my reply on the topic of how we build agency in kids. Particularly this example passage from Herodotus sparked a lot of discussion from the crowd:
I offered it mainly as a fun little example of boys being boys throughout human history, whether it is ten year old Persian boys playing palace, or 12 year old boomer boys playing sandlot baseball, or 14 year olds in 2002 playing D&D late into the night at scout camp; how the best and brightest rise naturally to be leaders in any of those endeavors, and this teaches boys to find their role in the group and seek to raise their status by getting better at things according to their ability. But some of our friends saw something a little darker in it:
@Bombadi said:
@Corvos among other things said:
And my reply to first one, then both of them spiraled outward until it became entirely too large to be a reply to one small comment, so I’m branching it out.
You gotta serve somebody. Obedience and submission is the ultimate act of human agency and will. Who you choose to obey and what you choose to submit to is what decides who you are and how you live your life, for good and for ill. An effort to avoid serving anyone, to be totally free of obligation or obedience, is a life thwarted, stunted, never to grow to its possible power.
Cyrus was not the only one displaying agency here, all the boys were displaying their agency, except the son of Artembares who was displaying cowardice and weakness. The boys got together, decided on a set of rules, elected a leader, and followed the orders of their chosen leader. They all used their will collectively to imbue their chosen leader with power, to make their chosen rules the rules, and make that will a reality. That is the essence of agency: organizing amongst themselves to work together, and choosing a leader who will work most effectively towards those goals.
And they could not have chosen better. We hear nothing of these boys in the future, to my recollection. But if they maintained their relationship with Cyrus after he became Great King, if he remembered their loyal service in their youth, then they were set for life. The spoils of Cyrus’ empire would have flowed into their coffers, they would have been Satraps and Generals, lords over peoples and estates. They would have pillaged Babylon, Lydia, Egypt, Ionia, Phoenicia. They would have had rich and beautiful wives of noble family, their sons would have been great princes and nobles.
Those who were cruel to the young Cyrus were luckier if he forgot them. The son of Artembares, he displayed not agency but weakness. He chose the game to start, he chose Cyrus, then he hesitated, he lacked the courage to commit, he tried to change horses midstream and wound up all wet. Rather than abide by the rules that he and his peers had organized together, rather than live in the world conjured by their own collective will, he tried to run to his daddy and get bailed out. He’s lucky if he was simply forgotten when Cyrus was Great King.
The choice of who to follow determine our lives. Man is at core a political animal, “apes together strong,” how we choose to organize ourselves determines our power and our ability, and who we choose to align ourselves with determines how far we rise. Whether we are ancient Persians choosing to follow a king, Romans choosing a Consul, Israelites choosing a Rabbi who claims to be the Messiah, soldiers choosing how to follow orders from an officer, citizens choosing sides in a civil war, students choosing which professor to try to seek mentorship from*, choosing a boss to follow or a business partner to work with or a company to dedicate our efforts to building, a young athlete determining to listen to everything the coach or the team captain says, a woman choosing a husband, an investor choosing a startup to go all-in with, a man picking a religion or a political party. We all gotta serve somebody.
Agrippa was the childhood friend of Augustus, he chose to follow Augustus at a time when it was not an easy choice to remain loyal and his loyalty made him a great man whose name and story I remember off the dome. The Apostles of Jesus and the Companions of the Prophet and the Sravakas of the early Sangha all became great men, great religious leaders, saints, because they saw a man worthy of loyalty and remained loyal. Lafayette and Hamilton submitted themselves to Washington when they joined the Continental Army. Ringo and George became gods following John and Paul around.
Every Billionaire makes many millionaires, some make other billionaires! Wozniak would never have been a household name if he had refused to follow Jobs. Ballmer would never have bought the Clippers (and gotten into trouble for breaking the salary cap rules) without the money he earned working with Bill Gates. Musk, Thiel, Bezos, and Huang have all made many of their friends and compatriots and early employees rich. The great coaches across sports spawn sprawling family trees: Bellichek and Saban famously demanded total dedication and loyalty from their assistants and players, but dozens of their assistants and former players have become great head coaches in their own right today. You’re much more likely to get rich by choosing the right guy to partner with or to work for than you are to get rich by founding the company yourself.
And you can choose wrong, with dire consequences. Think of those who chose to follow Benedict Arnold instead of George Washington. Think of those who backed Pompei over Caesar. Think of those zealots who aligned with Judas Iscariot over Jesus Christ. Think of those who backed and dedicated their lives to the vision at WeWork or at Theranos, instead of Tesla or OpenAI. You gotta serve somebody.
For most people, most of the time, agency is in choosing who to follow, who to take orders from, what orders to take. Choosing who to submit to in marriage is the most important decision most people make in their personal lives, and choosing to punt the decision and never marry is an equally important and life-deciding choice. Whose treatises and manifestos do you read? What political party do you sign up for? What candidate do you vote for? Who do you work for? Who do you give your money to? This is what agency looks like.
Coming off @Thoroughlygruntled ’s reply from the prior thread bringing up the Boy Scouts as a vehicle for boys to “go into the woods and throw rocks at each other” and thus build agency, and returning to kids for a moment. What I see as the truly great aspect of Boy Scouts is that if an average boy remains in the scouts from 11 to 17, he will go through every phase of the troop. He will join as an 11 year old, working to make Tenderfoot, and he will be in the bottom group of 11-12 year olds who are basically useless to the troop, who need to be shown how to do anything, who can’t keep up on hikes and their backpacks are taken up by the stronger older boys, who need to be protected from others and from themselves, who will need to be closely supervised when doing any task. The 11-12 year old looks to the older boys for help and guidance with everything, for leadership and mentorship, and they learn to listen to the older boys. Then they’ll grow up, get their First Class badges, and they’ll be in the middle group of kids, 13-15, who are basically self-sufficient and competent, who can be trusted with basic tasks like building a fire or pitching the kitchen tarp. They’ll become responsible members of the troop, trusted to handle themselves and expected to do what the 16-17 year olds tell them, and to instruct the 11-12 year olds. Then they’ll grow a few years older, and the older boys they grew up with will graduate and leave the troop, and they will become the older boys, the troop leaders, the 16-17 year olds. They’ll become the Senior Patrol Leaders and ASPLs and Quartermasters that the younger boys rely on for guidance and support. They’ll become the older kids guiding the younger boys. Boy Scouts is one of the few remaining organizations that delivers that kind of clear life advancement over time for kids.
Or at least it was. I had this argument many times with people about admitting girls to the Boy Scouts. It’s not that I think girls can’t enjoy or benefit from mostly the same program and activities that Boy Scouts runs, it’s that the moment you insert 12-17 year old girls into the group, it can no longer be self governing. Nobody wants to see a 17 year old senior patrol leader “guiding” a 13 year old girl without close adult supervision, and once you add close adult supervision the entire vision is destroyed. Who knows if my sons will be able to benefit from scouting, if they’ll ever get Eagle or get voted into the Order of the Arrow like their old man.
But I hope, whether it is in scouting or elsewhere, that they’re able to learn to obey and to lead. One cannot truly be capable of one without the other. Someone who cannot listen cannot give orders, someone who cannot give orders can’t really listen. We all give orders or take them in greater or lesser degrees as our talents provide in the Great Chain of Being, but we all gotta serve somebody.
*One of the reasons “Mentor” and “Mentorship” have become degenerate buzzwords rather than live concepts is that we do such a bad job of teaching young people how to be proteges. Mentorship isn’t a one way street, wherein your mentor altruistically imparts knowledge and favors onto a young subordinate in exchange for nothing. Rather, the protege must demonstrate his value. This can be that the protege demonstrates his simple talent: one day he will be important, and that will reflect well upon his mentor as well as put him in a position to dispense favors to his mentor in his turn. It may be doing favors or tasks for his mentor. It may be willingness to take the fall, take the blame, take the bullet for his mentor when necessary. But it will certainly involve loyalty and obedience. Choosing a person within an organization to be loyal to is a key part of advancing in any hierarchy, whether it’s a sports team or the Boy Scouts or a corporation or a police department or a courthouse or a military. However meritocratic a bureaucracy may purport to be, who you know is always important. Without the loyalty of the protege, the mentorship is meaningless, just an endless series of networking lunches.
Good post.
This is explored in the ending of Xenophon's Education of Cyrus, and forms the core of Xenophon's argument against monarchy, actually. Xenophon argues that what Cyrus did was take the best men of his people, lead them in glorious asabiyyah to ruling a great empire- and then what? What Cyrus has to do, once becoming Great King, is to make his friends worse men. He has to play them off against each other, he has to reduce their formidable wills, he has to effectively castrate the excellence and will to power that made these men worthy friends. Even the greatest king cannot be truly good to his friends, no matter how many satrapies he gives them, because he has to stay on top.
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There is something to your broader point, but...
Choose is doing a lot of work there. In the anecdote you give:
Did this boy choose Cyrus? Actively, willfully? Or did he 'choose' in the sense that I 'choose' to pay my taxes because something something Social Contract means that a big man will hit me with a stick if I don't? 'Collective will' so often imitates that Fuentes line: 'your body, my choice'. Cyrus was a tyrant who didn't give a single shit about your 'choices', and we can tell because when that boy does make an active, willfull choice, Cyrus has him beaten.
How many choices does one need to be offered before it is a choice, in your opinion?
Meta, but I also just wanted to thank you for responding to criticism with a proper well-written top-level post. I'm dubious on a decent chunk of the actual argument but good-faith, constructive responses to disagreement are not so common.
Cheers. What I enjoy about this place is when criticism causes me to learn more about my own hot-takes, I knew Teddy's history in my head but talking to you caused me to look up the passage in his autobiography, and it turned out the story was far more on-point than I realized. My opinion on the topic is deeper as a result.
Happy to be of service. Note that Teddy's original turn towards the strenuous life and deliberate weightlifting was prompted by his father though (at least as relayed in The Rise of Roosevelt by Edmund Morris, strong recommend). His father basically told him flat out that he had a brilliant mind, but that it would do him no good unless he built bodily strength to match, which Teddy assented to.
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At least 2, of which one cannot be 'I punish you harshly for not choosing the other'.
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I believe most scout troops (age 12-17) are still single-sex. There are some pairs of boy and girl troops that meet at the same time, but where I've seen this the young girls seem to be much better at taking charge of things (girlboss memes?) and there doesn't seem to be any pressure on the boys to step up and actually lead, which despite cultural memes doesn't actually seem to be something little boys want to do without a leadership vacuum or adult prompting. Most troops seem to still be single-sex in practice, but this may somewhat depend on your area.
It's a little more complicated than that. There are single sex troops, but that also alters a lot of events where both male and female troops will be necessary. The troop level is only relevant for the weekly meeting and for troop-only events. If scout summer camp or high adventure camps admit both male and female troops, then that event is co-ed. If the local church has a boys and a girls troop and they hold camping trips together, if the local council jamboree or civil war reenactment event has both boys and girls, local Order of the Arrow, etc. Then each of those events becomes co-ed, and advanced adult supervision becomes necessary, and kid independence becomes lessened.
Venture scouts have existed for a long time, but there's a reason they start at 14 instead of 11.
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I believe the Boy Scouts require their troops to be single sex, for obvious reasons relating to liability and chaperoning policies.
Troops, yes. They already have had other types of co-ed units: Venturing (age 14-21) and Cub Scouts (elementary school), for example. The chaperoning policies include a semi-annual multi-hour training course for adults.
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Why? How great would Cyrus have been if he operated simply on lizard brain tit for tat?
The difference between a great king and your common Crip is that the great king understands that there's more to life than getting even.
Not to mention that choosing to rebel is also a choice. Better to reign in hell, etc etc.
The most agentic angel in Milton isn't Satan, it is Abdiel, the one angel who is present when Satan incites rebellion in heaven but chooses to be loyal.
Have we wrapped around to "agency is doing as you're told"? Running and telling Father about the rebellion is worse than what Artembares' son did.
Agency is as much having the ability to do what you're told as having the ability to not do what you're told. An individual who can't follow instructions, who can't cooperate with others, who chafes under any guidance, who rebels against any authority, lacks any agency just as much as someone who can never act against the crowd.
So what you're saying is, if Satan didn't rebel you'd think he was high agency?
Whose instructions did Cyrus, your high agency wunderkind, follow? Or is the top dog the only one in the chain with no agency, and all the goons high agency?
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I like your post overall but this jumped out at me:
And Jobs would've been nothing without Wozniak. It was a partnership, not one man following another. They needed each other equally - without Wozniak, Jobs is a sales guy without an interesting product, and without Jobs, Wozniak is a tech guy with a killer product but without the ability to convince people of its utility.
It was one sentence in a comment, so obviously I'm condensing the complexities of a relationship that was told in movies and books so long and boring that people gave them to me as gifts because they know I love long boring books.
But I do think there is some truth to it. Wozniak is arguably more responsible for the existence of Apple than Jobs in terms of technical innovation, in the same way that Agrippa is arguably more responsible than Augustus for winning the wars that put Augustus into power. Woz was the brains, but Jobs was always the public leader and visionary out of the two, even back to the days when they were selling Blue Boxes to scam telephone companies. Woz' decision to follow Jobs in his vision is the difference between Woz' likely outcome of a modestly wealthy tech worker bee in California, and being worth hundreds of millions of dollars and having a name I know. Agrippa would have been a talented Roman general regardless of who he chose to follow, but I wouldn't know his name if he hadn't followed Augustus.
A partnership naturally involves some degree of submission of one's own will to the partner, whether in a marriage or a corporation. But forming a partnership is a greater act of agency than going it alone and never making anything great.
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Taking this apocryphal story at face value, Artembares clearly displayed agency by refusing to obey. The argument that he agreed to the rules and helped elect the "king" and then refused to go along seems a little suspicious and convenient; one would suspect something else happened that made him say "Nah," but to call refusing to go along with the crowd a lack of agency is quite a weird argument. Yes, you gotta serve someone (in some sense), but refusing to serve a particular person is a choice.
Arguably running to daddy to complain is cowardly and weak. But if instead he'd knocked Cyrus in the dirt, I don't think you'd be saying he lacked agency.
I define Agency, inasmuch as we are describing a virtue, as something a little nobler than a deadbeat dad. Agency isn't just lack of discipline, it isn't just doing what you want when you want to, it isn't just "if it feels good, do it." A person who starts something but can't finish it is clearly lower agency than someone who finishes what they start. Giving in to the temptation to quit easily over every unpleasantness is a lack of agency.
Two kids join a baseball team. One does the bare minimum of showing up to practices, goes through the motions of the drills, then refuses to play the outfield and tells the coach that he refuses to play any position except shortstop or pitcher. The other shows up early to practice and stays late because he wants to do his best in every drill, practices as hard as he can, and goes wherever the coach tells him whether it is second base or right field or shortstop because he just loves baseball and wants to get into the game.
Which, in your view, is a higher agency kid?
That's an easy setup with an obvious answer. But "Obey the little shit who got elected as our sandlot 'king' no matter how tired you get of this game" is not showing agency, persistence, or drilling and practice. It's just being a submissive bootlicker.
Is there an obvious answer to to that setup? One of the kids loves baseball and seems to enjoy every part of the practice, the other kid's maybe only there because the authority figures in his life are forcing him and does the bare minimum to not get in trouble. We don't get any insight whatsoever into the first kid's agency, and the lack of more open defiance from the second could show a lack of agency, but then that would be counter to FHMs larger point. (Which I think is nonsense, tbf. His entire post seems to be "agency=good, therefore the action that lead to the best outcome must have been the highest agency".)
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I think the connection between the two setups is that the lazy and annoying kid who refuses to play right field or be in the band if he isn't lead singer or play DnD if he isn't DM, he will always insult the other kids by saying that they are
This is the universal cry of the burnout too lazy to study calculus, the kid who doesn't want to be on the football team if he has to do two-a-days, the guy who never makes progress in the gym because he doesn't want to stick to a program, the unemployed loser insulting his brother who just made VP at the bank. There's a balance between the two, Agency as a virtue means a moderation of willfulness and submission, having the strength to endure unpleasant things to get what you want, and the strength to choose what it is you want.
I guess we're both projecting our own version of what the setup and rules for ancient Persian and Mede kids playing "Palace" would be, and determining the outcome based on our vision.
But surely you can see my point here, that refusing to play isn't inherently more agentic than choosing to play, and that in many cases the individual who "takes his ball and goes home" is in fact less agentic than one who endures discomfort or a less than ideal situation to keep up with something they want to do?
Nor is choosing to play inherently more agentic than refusing to play. You can choose not to play. And if that means breaking commitments or you choose not to play because it was too hard, perhaps that speaks poorly of your character. But--
Agreeing to make some other kid "king" is not a commitment as binding and serious as joining a sports team or signing up for calculus or agreeing to start a workout program. The scenario you (Herodotus) present is that some kids made Cyrus king for a day, one kid got sick of it, and you argue that he was wrong to get tired of the game. He should have continued bowing and scraping until Cyrus said the game was over, dammit! Again, I think "running to daddy" was the weak part, not when he got tired of calling Cyrus king. But Cyrus responded to some kid not respecting his "authority" by getting the other kids to gang up on him and beat him, and you (Herodotus) praise him for this!
You are presenting one principle ("You should choose your commitments and stick to them") but supporting it with an entirely different argument ("You must be obedient and you may not change your mind").
I honestly find your entire argument rather baffling. "You gotta serve somebody" is a truism that sounds profound on the surface, but essentially you're saying "Choose your master and obey him." Herodotus presents this as an anecdote about how awesome and naturally kingly young Cyrus was. Not being enamored of kings, or the concept of any man being "born to rule" (and others born to bend the knee), I don't know what to make of your ode to submission except that I reject the premise. We all serve someone, willingly or not. We don't have to make a virtue of it.
Let's take a closer to home example of self-organized play then: is the poster on theMotte who lashes out at the moderators and refuses to play by the rules more or less agentic than the poster who abides by the rules and advocates for their position?
TheMotte is actually a pretty good example of what I'm talking about, when I think about it. We respect those who demonstrate their worth, their skill and charisma, often if they are interested they end up as mods, they're in a position to change some of the rules if they want to enough. Those who lash out and can't handle the rules, they flame out, they don't have any impact.
The Motte equivalent of Artembares is someone who decides we suck and leaves (and then goes to whine about us on reddit). We can't actually keep people here who decide they don't want to play anymore.
Or if you want to compare Artembares to the guy who lashes out and gets banned - yes, he is being agentic and he's quite entitled to decide he doesn't want to follow the rules. And we're entitled to ban him.
That's where I disagree, I don't think the people who come here and then lash out are agentic. I think they are slaves to their own passions, incapable of agency because they can't operate within the rules. What amazes me about this place is the people who get banned and come back and get banned again. They clearly want to be here, but the moment a rule offends their delicate sensibilities they lash out and ruin it for themselves. Over and over.
I don't look at such a person and see a wild stallion who can't be tamed, an electric centaur with the true spirit of freedom in their breast. To me such a person is a slave, lacking in agency, they can't do the things they want to do because they are too chained to their own feelings.
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We followed the man because he embodied the virtues of office that effect the manifestations of success within ourselves, and we replaced the man with tbe office hoping that virtue can be embedded within the wall and text like words of power. Modern failure is due to the office being sacrosanct and the selection of men to enter such offices is done by chicanery crookery or chance. The corner office is degraded by the incompetent holding it as his own, but the failure is to let the incompetent drape himself in the trappings of virtues rewards without the work. The gatekeeper to the doors of office are what maintain or degrade the virtues desired, and when the office is hollowed then other offices are made to do what is necessary without the gatekeeper being present.
The great man and great leader works fantastically for small group organization where personal affect can be sustained, but it fails to scale horizontally or linearlly past death. Old boy networks held the line when mass labour mobilization and consolidation let in incompetents, but those networks had to be hidden, impossible in modern digital communication.
Right now the gatekeepers are the masters of the offices and the great men are replaced by what the gatekeepers deem relevant. With the rewards still accruable to the islands of competence, what incentive is there for greatness to subject themselves to the struggle session of gatekeeping proles or bureaucratized academica? The obvious problem is that the system as a whole rots, but thats the fault of the system for ennobling asskissers and tokens.
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Our modern childish individualism sees people as complete and perfect, needing no training or education at all. We are taught to resist and subvert legitimate authority, and submit to the opinions of strangers on the internet.
How much of our educational idiocy is downstream of the inability of teachers to command the respect and attention of their students?
How much of our criminal idiocy is downstream of the resistance of large sections of the public to basic enforcement of the laws?
How much of our political idiocy is downstream of the unwillingness of our ruling class to support the government they control?
Ultimately, we all spend our lives on what we find important. We follow the rules we must to get where we want to go. We all serve, we are all limited. Freedom is not the lack of restriction, it is the choice of restriction.
One might note that "legitimate authority" hasn't exactly covered itself with glory recently.
If it's "legitimate" then we wouldn't be taught to resist it, now would we?
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