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Is weeding out those who have trouble with resolving the confusion towards "whatever the overwhelming societal consensus backed by the local monopoly on violence wants me to believe" a bug or a feature? Society's wheels are greased with a million falsehoods, oversimplifications and truths that are too hard to verify for the vast majority of people, and not all of them are as memetically reinforced as this one. Perhaps having a conspicuous honeypot (which I'd also estimate to be in the third category, even if some cosmetic details may be fudged, which only serves to raise its attractiveness) is better than letting the compulsive contrarians advance through society and wind up somewhere where they can do real damage.
Feels like a feature to rulers, but is a bug.
People bred for compliance tend to get conquered.
I don't know about that. If I try to think of particularly low-agreeableness/insubordinate peoples, the ones that come to mind are marginal ethnic groups like Chechens and Borderers, who historically tended to be brought to heel by adjacent empires with superior state capacity enabled by having access to a deep pool of soldiers and bureaucrats.
You've inverted the criterion. You should look at societies that have successfully eliminated dissent, not societies that are entirely made of dissenters.
What happened to China, the perpetually great Empire that invested significant cultural, technological and political capital to make its population as docile as possible? What happened to the Ottomans, who had comparable technology to Europeeans and then banned the printing press? What happened to the Soviet Union, whose dissenters turned a backwater laggard into a superpower but enforced strict ideological conformity?
State capacity is only useful if you can wield it effectively, and eliminating dissent eventually prevents this.
If it did, it failed. Chinese history is history of endless revolts, urprisings and civil wars, revolts that sometimes succeeded.
Traditional China based on "mandate of heaven" ideology effectively justified and encouraged revolt, Christian Europe based of "noble blood" and "divine right to rule" made revolt blasphemy and effectively eliminated dissent from the lower classes. In China, common peasant overthrowing Son of Heaven and stepping on his place was SOP, in Europe peasant becoming king was something unthinkable.
In China, every peasant boy knew he could be emperor when he grows up (and finds few friends to help him). In Europe, every peasant knew that God made peasant a peasant and king a king, and dispute it was to dispute God himself.
No surprise that European history was history of stable society where kings and nobles ruled undisputed for millenia, while Chinese history was chaotic one where everything was burned down regularly every two or three centuries.
When/where in Europe are you thinking about, specifically?
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People say this, but the person I associate most with divine right is not Charles I, but Oliver Cromwell - who genuinely believed that God had ordained him as ruler of England. The strong religious beliefs in Europe did not lead to peace and unity, but the opposite - to decades of war as men sought to topple ungodly or heretical princes. And far from crushing dissent, the early modern period saw the birth of liberalism. John Locke and John Lilburne were the contemporaries to Oliver Cromwell.
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This is not a particularly accurate summation of events. European feudal monarchies in the sense that we understand them crystalized in the breakup of the Carolingian empire, where might most definitely made right rather than strict blood claims making right. The history of the middle ages is then one of near constant warfare over who ruled what, resolved generally by might makes right, with blood claims added as a legitimizing principle. And then of course with the wars of the protestant reformation the whole system gets overturned, absolutism only lasts for a few centuries(a century in England, two in France and most of the rest of the continent, and it never took hold in the Netherlands) and was never a particularly stable equilibrium anyways.
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Is... is one allowed to ask where said society is heading when the wheels are being greased so readily but it appears you can't switch which direction you're traveling?
I am fundamentally unconvinced that 'compulsive contrarians' are more likely to cause damage than any other person who seeks out and obtains power.
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