my_research/duncan_sabien_politics.html

2025-11-10

MtG Colour Wheel applied to Politics

Disclaimer

• Quick Note
• Target audience - Anyone curious about this topic. I've tried making myself more comprehensible here.
• I have never spoken to Duncan Sabien, and I might end up reinterpreting his concepts in ways he doesn't like or agree with. If he's reading this, he can correct me.

Colour wheel

Duncan Sabien's take on the MtG colour wheel is that he tries to classify both individual personalities, and movements and organisations, using the same system.

If you don't want to read the full article, here is the summarised classication

• Green - Seeks harmony through acceptance
• White - Seeks peace through order
• Blue - Seeks perfection through knowledge
• Black - Seeks satisfaction through ruthlessness
• Red - Seeks freedom through action

I asked gpt-5 to make a list of popular political ideologies and classify them on Duncan Sabien's colour wheel.

You might have minor disagreements with which ideologies are popular versus not, and you might have minor disagreements with some of the classifications, but mostly this makes sense to me.

Which colour are you?

The best way to identify which colour you are is by looking at your own life decisions where you have sacrificed something of value. Look at revealed preferences not stated preferences.

Here's my list of Duncan Sabien's social dark matter

• Death
• Sex
• Close relationships (especially conflicts in them)
• Morality and politics
• Money
• Physical and mental health

What is your attitude towards death, sex, close relationships, morality and politics, money, and physical and mental health, as shown by your life decisions?

I will also include the following, as they're among the most important life decisions one can make.

• How you spend your time and money - which projects, activities and people get it?
• Which city you live in

Examples of life decisions and which colour they may indicate

(Note that being Green does not strongly indicate you will donate to environmental non-profit for example, but donating to environmental non-profits strongly indicates you are Green)

• Green
  • If you follow a strong deontological moral code
  • If you donate your money to environmental non-profits
  • If you are typically the peacemaker rather than picking sides, when two of your close relationships enter a conflict with each other
  • If you follow a political ideology that is Green
• White
  • If you stay in a job you tolerate but don't love, because your parents ask you to
  • If you freely loan your money and time to people within your community
  • If you plan to marry and have kids, and disprefer casual or non-monogamous relationship styles
  • If you follow a religion or ideology that is White
• Blue
  • If you join academia or a lower-paying job, but the job satifies your curiosity
  • If you shift cities or distance yourself from a partner to join academia or lower-paying curiosity-satisfying job
  • If you obsess over pursuit of scientific knowledge via reading papers or blogs, to the point where it causes social isolation or degrades your mental health
  • If you follow a political ideology that is Blue
• Black
  • If you work on a startup
  • If you are working on projects that may cause some harm, like working on a gambling app
  • If you shift cities or distance yourself from people, in order to live with other people who also seek power
  • If you follow a political ideology that is Black
• Red
  • If you travel a lot because you intrinsically love travel
  • If you pick an unusual relationship style, such as polyamory
  • If you have distanced from parents, partner or a job, because you found them controlling
  • If you follow a political ideology that is Red

Blacks rule

In a sufficiently competitive society, IMO primarily Black people get power.

• There will always be people who care deeply about acquiring power, who are willing to endure a lot of personal suffering to acquire it, who are willing to make acquiring power their number one life priority, and consistently do this for decades.
• If you are not one of those people, you will probably be outcompeted by someone who is, over a long time period. Over a long time period, you probably will just get what you want badly enough.

Political implications

• This means non-Black people are typically ruled by Black people who are their nearest neighbour on the colour wheel.
• Often there is deception involved. For instance fascists may pretend to be religious in order to get the religious votebank, and authoritarians may pretend to be communists in order to get the communist votebank

Blacks ruling Non-Blacks

• A population with majority being traditional religious people (White Green) is typically ruled by fascists (Black White)
• A population with majority being classical liberals (White Blue) is typically ruled by transhumanists and neoliberals (Black Blue). They may also be ruled by fascists (Black White)
• A population with majority being communists and socialists (Red White) is typically ruled by authoritarians (Black White)

Blacks ruling blacks

• A population with majority being neoliberals is typically ruled by other neoliberals
• A population with majority being fascists is typically ruled by other fascists
• A population with majority being transhumanists is typically rules by other transhumanists
• I don't know of any societies that were primarily ruled by libertarians or anarchocapitalists, so I'm ignoring those Black ideologies here.

I have not shared examples because they're political sensitive, especially where I live right now. If you think a few minutes, you can probably think of examples for all of these.

My personal views, and transhumanism

Me

• I'm personally Blue Black, with Blue being primary.
• I used to have a shade of Red too, but that is fading.
• I am a neoliberal.
• I am not a transhumanist, but I wish I could be.
• I have now classified all my close relationships (friends, family, etc) in this system, and it makes intuitive sense to me how this is useful when we have political discussions.

Transhumanist politics

• History and present
  • I think societies ruled by neoliberals (black blue) have historically done better than societies ruled by authoritarians (black red) and fascists (black white).
  • I think transhumanists (black blue) are increasingly replacing neoliberals, fascists and authoritarians as the most powerful political leaders on Earth.
  • IMO this is a problem
  • Neoliberals have figured out stable political systems (like free markets and representative democracy) within which they can compete for power, but transhumanists have not figured out stable political systems within which they can compete for power.
• Future
  • The default outcome of technologies like human genetic engineering and artifical superintelligence is to break both markets and democracy.
  • Markets and democracy rely on informed consent, which only makes sense when the intelligence gap between both agents is narrow. Large intelligence gaps break this, as extreme persuasion can manufacture consent.
  • Markets and democracy rely on many unintelligent people keeping a few intelligent power-seeking people in check. This breaks down if the few can become too powerful and too intelligent too quickly.
  • Democracy relies on free speech and free flow of ideas to ensure that good values are spread in society. This breaks down when you can directly engineer your values into other agents by messing with their code (in case of digital minds) or genes (in case of human genetic engineering).
• Pause AI politics
  • One response to this threat is to simply preserve neoliberalism, by banning both artificial superintelligence and human genetic engineering.
  • To enforce a ban, you have to build a coalition between many actors, who are not Blue Black like transhumanists are. (A major motivation for me to write this post was to understand people's views across the political spectrum, to figure out how to communicate with them more effectively, or how to think about political alliances, and so on.)
  • On the timescale of a century however, I'm unsure how stable a ban will be. It is useful to invent new systems of governance to handle transhumanist technologies.
• New political systems of governance for transhumanists.
  • I have noticed that when I have discussions with people around new systems of governance:
  • Blue Black power-seekers like me typically propose a system of power-seeking actors threatening mass violence on each other.
    • Historical examples
    • Supporting gun laws and supporting keeping guns illegally, if you country does not legally allow guns.
    • Supporting the post-WW2 world order that keeps peace via states threatening nuclear war on each other.
    • Most neoliberal policy is blue-black, it assumes unrestrained competition via free market is good, and the harms and externalities of this competition are acceptable or can be mitigated later on.
    • Industrial revolution and subsequent colonisation of the world by the British Empire
    • English becoming the universal language, as countries that don't use English can't compete. (Chinese and French play this role to a smaller extent.) Singapore mandated English, India prioritised it, most of south east Asia didn't prioritise English and this is hindering
    • China and US leading the world on many zero-to-one technologies, due to atheist culture in their top research institutes.
  • Blue White technocrats typically propose new international treaties, laws and political structures that assume the existence of atleast some systems that remain benevolent, or some actors that remain benevolent.
    • Historical examples
    • International treaties to ban human gene cloning or CFCs for ozone depletion
    • Deregulation, reducing licensing and zoning restrictions in housing and various industries, while not eliminating regulation completely
    • Carbon credit system
    • Inflationary monetary supply and the eurodollar system to loan dollars to foreign govts
    • Venture capitalist ecosystem funding fundamental R&D for transhumanist technologies like anti-aging
  • Blue Red freedom-lovers typically propose more open source solutions that involve giving the weapons or technology to everyone
    • Historical examples
    • Open source movement in the software industry such as Linux, the Free Software Foundation or Github today
    • Democratising scientific knowledge via internet such as Arxiv, internet archive, libgen, bittorrent
    • Open sourcing specific hard tech like drones or robotics or pharmaceutical manufacturing
    • Focus on decriminalisation and harm reduction for hard drugs
    • Cypherpunks movement that was pro-encryption and privacy, and lead to Tor, Signal and blockchain.
  • Blue Green people I have met in practice often propose new ideology to persuade actors to become more benevolent, without proposing any specific changes in political systems
    • They generally accept neoliberalism will continue, and have a neutral stance towards it. Possibly a negative stance if they are also pro-environment.
    • They try to create centres where discussion between powerful people of other camps (Blue Black, Blue White, Black Red) can take place.
    • Duncan Sabien himself claims to be Blue Green. Writing posts like the one he did is itself a Blue Green activity.
    • My ability to pass ITT for Blue Green people is pretty bad, so I am going to skip this section entirely.
  • I could dive deeper into the specific disagreements between Blue Black, Blue Red, Blue White and Blue Green, but I don't want to get into detail here. I generally do think though, that no matter which camp you belong to, it is useful to be able to pass the ideological turing tests of the other camps.

Subscribe / Comment

Enter email to subscribe, or enter comment to post comment