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2026-03-27

My letter to Richard Ngo on US politics

Disclaimer

• Quick Note
• Contains politically sensitive info
• target audience - hopefully richard ngo directly, but otherwise this will just stay in the public
• I have never stepped foot in US, and don't have a friend circle in the US. This is a very outside view perspective on US politics
• Update - I dislike how this writeup didn't seem to address Richard Ngo's core objections, so I probably won't send it. Will edit it more first.
• To do for self - respond more to 5

Conclusion for Richard Ngo

• You correctly observe that across all three socioeconomic classes, across both genders, across all religions, across all nations, across various time periods: people's political beliefs only make contact with reality when they personally suffer, otherwise they are free to be quite unhinged. Primary reasons for suffering are lack of physical safety, lack of basic resources, and social ostracism.
• If you want to figure out "virtues" for a uniting political ideology, figure out how to have a good long-term relationship with your own parent / spouse / child, despite them following different norms around sex/family/parenting than you do.
• Differences of practices in sex/family/parenting is a major source of social ostracism, it is a civilisation-scale problem not just a US-specific problem, and it has be fixed at the object-level not in some meta-level discussion. Practice not theory is what matters. As long as this divide is not fixed, there will always be politicians and billionaires who use all sorts of proxy memes to exploit this real divide that exists in society, and compete for their own power.
• You yourself are the best person to run this experiment on, because you have a lot more data available on your own life as compared to other people's lives.
• If you are serious about solving this, then ofcourse you should read about other people's lives. If you take this further, you will probably want to build what I call a "particle collider for social dark matter", which in simple words means you get a lot of therapists/priests/lawyers/spies/etc in a room and have them talk to each other a lot about topics that polite society does not publicly talk about (there's a standard list of topics).
• But ultimately, you probably can't solve this via theory alone, many decades of practice may be required before humanity converges to good answers here.
• I'm not trying to solve sex/family/parenting. In my view, there's no time for me to solve all that given how soon ASI could be. But if your intellectual curiosity feels called to solve this, maybe you can give it a shot.
• Update - I just realised this is a good razor for anyone in the EA/LW cluster trying to build uniting ideology, not just Richard Ngo.

Main

• I just read 1 2 3 4
• I think Richard Ngo's writings on politics are important, and I have learned valuable things from them.
• That being said, I feel like a lot of his writings on US politics are mostly sitting at the meta level, and not enough at the object-level. I think this is one of my main differences in worldview from Richard Ngo. All your game theory has to cash out in terms of object-level reality. There is an actual truth to politics, and that is people's internal experiences. People's internal experiences and subsequent worldviews are mostly shaped by periods of intense suffering. Not all of politics is just memes floating detached from any ground reality.
• Main causes of suffering for people (all this directly follows from Maslow's heirarchy):
  • lack of physical safety
    • Lower and middle class both don't want to feel threatened by actual violence from their neighbours, police, etc
    • Upper class is basically immune to physical violence, actual executions of elites are rare even during civil war, regime change, etc
  • money
    • The lower class will literally starve and die (or get imprisoned or become "homeless" in the US in particular) if they don't get enough money
    • The middle class would still like if they could do less work and get more free time (but beyond this, acquiring money is just a social signalling game or to escape social ostracism)
    • The upper class is either people with inherited wealth who go with the default which is increasing wealth for them and/or their family, or people who climbed there from the middle class (usually because they were so desperate to have some ideas Win in society that they suffered for 5-10 years to do).
  • social ostracism
    • In lower and middle classes both, the primary reasons for social ostracism long-term are either money problems, or differences of opinion on sex/family/parenting.
    • US political divides (democratic v republican) are deep down religious divides (christian v atheist) and religious divides are deep down divides on the topics of sex/family/parenting. This also true for the politics of many other countries.
    • Sex and class
      • The lower class has to follow the consensus of power, but power here means their parents, relatives, other neighbours in their town etc. They literally lack money to leave town or city. This means following whatever are the sex/family/parenting norms there.
      • The middle / upper-middle classes can choose to acquire enough money to buy their way out of their family or town, and self-select into a friend group with other norms on sex/family/parenting.
      • The upper class is predominantly run by men who want wives who can be entrusted with their secrets, because literally their entire empires could fall if their secrets came out. They want children who can be groomed into successors for their empires. They don't really have the luxury to invest their attention on any other type of sex/family/parenting arrangement, if they are truly ambitious.
• Privacy and pre-computation processes, and "consensus of power" aka Keynesian beauty contests
  • Everyone wants privacy to process implications of their own experiences, then pre-compute what is the best face to show in front of their family/friends/etc. Everyone wants privacy to do this pre-computation to protect their reputation.
  • Lower class has no privacy and hence bad pre-computation. Expect a manufactured "consensus" to always be there, and for minority to hide their opinions. See also: Most of the US lower class identifies as christian. I suspect this is because US lower class atheists who want the sex/family/parenting norms of the upper-middle class atheists have to hide this opinion from their family/friends/etc, atleast until they make more money.
  • Middle/upper-middle has some ability to climb out and keep privacy, and self-select which group they want to affiliate with versus not. There are hence a lot of groups with a lot of separate "consensus" and most of these are fragile. However there are a lot of intellectuals and activists with principled beliefs, that they won't abandon the first time they encounter serious suffering (see above for for most common sources of suffering).
  • Upper class has an extremely high level of privacy if they want it. They can keep secrets and run precomputation processes spanning decades or even centuries. Ambitious politicians/billionaires often form coalitions with other politicians/billionaires and they may need to shared secrets over many decades within their coalition. Ambitious elites thus have to maintain a "consensus of power" that controls media houses, academia funding, military/intelligence circles, the judiciary and actual politicians across all federal levels. Unambitious politicians/billionaires can do whatever they like in complete privacy (including but not limited to actual rape and murder). I presume that this consensus of power is what Richard Ngo is primarily interested in understanding.
• Applying all this to US politics:
  • I asked gpt-5.4 for top political issues mentioned in US presidential speeches 2024: Cost of living, immigration, foreign policy, rule of law, reproductive rights, energy/trade/tariffs/anti-China
  • Cost of living - This is obviously most important to people in lower class, for reasons explained above. I would guess this is single-voter issue for people of lower class who feel they have ability to climb out, but only depending on who comes to power. Also important to middle class but it depends, and can become less important than other concerns. Also note that lower class votes based on the consensus in their immediate social circle, people don't vote as individualist.
  • Immigration - US atheists like atheist immigrants from other countries, US christians like christian immigrants from other countries, all people in US dislike or tolerate hindu and muslim immigrants. Most people don't care about lives of people thousands of kilometres away. Most people don't even care about whether god exists or not, or who made the Earth millenia ago or whatever. Most people do care about whether their own sex/family/parenting norms will be made easier or harder by their neighbours (who could be immigrants). Most people care about physical safety from violent immigrants. Atheists are also now subfragmented into those with different sex/family/parenting norms, and those with guns versus not, and into all sorts of ideologies that have never made contact with reality. So it is possible, for example, that a US atheist who likes casual sex dislikes an atheist immigrant who does not, for example. Or US atheist who wants women to have equal role in parenting dislikes an atheist immigrant who wants the father to have disproportionate role in parenting.
  • Foreign policy - See again, most people genuinely don't care about the lives of people thousands of kilometres away. What they are primarily concerned with is whether their own government responds to their interests or not, and if the govt is persistently pro-war when they are anti-war, this causes them issue. Also foreign policy, atleast when presented in front of the public, becomes yet another signalling game tied to immigration. "I don't want immediate neighbours on my street to follow Islamic norms around sex/family/parenting so I will vote for a President that bombs Muslim countries, although I dont really know or care either way what is going on in those Muslim countries." Most of the middle and lower classes subscribe to deontological norms around violence, and don't get to see immediate benefit from the violence.
  • Anti-China - US christians are anti-China because China is atheist/buddhist and they know nothing about Chinese population. Most US atheists across lower and middle classes genuinely don't care either way what happens to China, they have more immediate concerns.
  • Reproductive rights - It should be very obvious by now this is again just difference of approach to sex/family/parenting.
  • Rule of law - People are concerned about members of their own class but different political group turning violent against them. Otherwise "rule of law" is just a buzzword to get one president elected versus the other. Also everyone likes democracy, as in, everyone likes politicians/billionaires who actually responds to their interests. If the politicians/billionaires are actually responding to your interests already, you are less likely to have a principled support for "rule of law" or "democracy" or whatever, and may just be fine with authoritarianism.
• Everyone understands their problems really well and nobody understands solutions
  • Money unites people across their class.
    • The entire lower class is united in wanting more money, and has no time to waste in politics of what other classes get or don't get. They will enter a labour union iff they personally or affected, and not otherwise.
    • The entire middle class is united in wanting more money for themselves and their class, don't care about the lower class, and neutral or opposed to the upper class having more money.
    • The entire upper class is united in wanting more money for their class, and less money for the other classes.
  • All three classes, and both religions, and both genders, etc - everyone is illiterate when it comes to economics and finance.
    • Nobody can explain basics of monetary theory and eurodollar markets, or supply-demand curves, or price of energy and how this affects industrial society. Almost everyone has deranged solutions for how to modify the economy, and most people's ideas never come into contact with reality.
    • The primary exception is the upper class. When a coalition of politicians/billionaires take somes economic theory seriously, this has multi-generational consequences for everyone in their country (and other countries in their sphere of influence).
  • Sex/family/parenting is a big divider between the lower and the middle class, and within the middle class itself.
    • Most people don't understand long-term consequences of casual sex. Most people don't understand how to do long-term marriages that don't break apart in 5-10 years. Very few people are truly "successful" on this lens, atleast if I define "success" as being outlier good at it, not just getting the average outcome of your friend group or class.

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