Liu's Law: “Every forest is dark.”
A friend expanded on what could become a corollary to Liu's Law once recondensed: the risk of kayfabe is drinking one's own Koolaid. Most of the rest of this is a restatement and exploration of his insights, and should credit one day be publicly necessary (ironic!) I am happy to yield precedence.
Anything produced for an audience tends towards becoming fake, and the one who fakes inevitably tends towards believing and embodying their own fakery. The one you deceive may be yourself. The kids don't get the joke. Organizationally, any entity with an attack surface tends towards being consumed by subversion or countersubversion, and attack surfaces can be internal.
He called this “The Strawman Always Wins”.
The Strawman Always Wins, the Bailey Eats the Motte which is that any doctrine or belief system used as a coordination mechanism or an attack/defense mechanism inevitably tends towards its stupidest and most simple minded version. This is true even if only used as an internal principle of action, even within just one person. Your guiding beliefs will naturally entropically tend towards their strawman version unless you continually invest energy in maintaining them above the ground state.
The consequence of this is that true scholarship has to be done for an audience of two: oneself and God. A real truth service, an antiversity, cannot communicate legibly with other antiversities or with power. We meaningmake in concert for the individual encounter.
This intersects with thoughts I've long had about the best possible scholarship as anonymous and without remuneration. Likewise, the time preference of the true scholar should tend to zero. There can be no schedule for real scholarship. You have to have real, permanent endowments enabling the best scholars for their lifetime, without restraints or demand. Can you have this in this world? Universal Brain Income.
Another friend adds that this leads (in his opinion) inevitably to process philosophy:
The advantages of stealth tend towards the occultation of governance, until the overhead of such encryption outweighs the risks of open rule. See live players as those that can pretend to be dead, the Autarch in _The Book of the New Sun_, and every wartime generation that only trusts their buddies from the trenches, not those they meet once successful.
All the same kind of “enclosed” operation, picking a top level and acting within/beneath it, to allow global optimizations within a closed system that are computationally infeasible in the open system limit.
Occulted government as the most potent defense against cordyception. The veiled face, the holy of holies.
