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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.
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.
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