What happens when an imperial oligarchy gets overrun by quasi-marxist postmodernists who only care about deconstruction and petty power games to control the masses?
Not sure I know, but I suspect we are getting a whiff these days. I expect it starts to look a lot like most Marxist states, however. Let's make sure it doesn't get that far.
I suspect if we drive the woke out of institutions they are going to start to act like Hamas. Except in this Marxist state MN, the woke are in full control, having made common cause with the oligarchs.
Marxism and socialism have power at their root, born bad as it were, because there is no other way to effect and maintain the system. Power is essential to the process, and so those who want power find a home quickly. If they can coopt an existing hierarchy they do, and if not they try to overthrow it and replace it.
This next year or two is going to be very instructive. Things might get very ugly in a hurry around election time... I am really glad I don't live outside Minneapolis/St. Paul anymore!
If they don't succeed in putting Trump in a cage, or keeping him and RFKjr off the ballots, I wouldn't be surprised if walking dead Brandon gets 100mil "votes"
I don't have money on it, but if I did I would put it on Newsom stepping in after Biden backs down after primary season due to "health issues". Not sure of course, but I suspect 65% likely. I am only about 50% sure Biden remains able to speak at all by mid 2024.
Interesting. How would you say all of this lines up with other forms of governance? Is any large dictatorial regime eventually forced into oligarchy? Or are they secretly that way from the get-go? Are communist governments also subject to oligarchical tendencies, or do they manage a different tact?
I think all forms of governance are in practice oligarchies once they get past a certain size and scope, at least from the point of view of the majority of the population. Every hierarchy is a pyramid, and once you get past the city state/large tribe stage with a government that does a good bit that pyramid gets a lot of layers, such that the top guy has a hard time actually making the relevant decisions. More than that and the decision makers are almost never the nominal ruler unless he makes an effort to be. A little more and he is just one of the groups.
When it comes to dictatorships especially I think the ruler is beholden to his ministers and supporters. Without a strong reason to be the one in charge (in human terms; being the kid of the last popular ruler counts as strong) the dictator has to have very good reasons for everyone else to listen to him. At the far extreme of independence might be a Stalin, partly because of his being so bloody scary that no one wants to challenge him, but also because his cult of personality was so strong that he held a lot of loyalty at all levels of society. At the other extreme would be say some of the child emperors of China (I can't think of an emperor this extreme; they get deposed before this point I think) where he is so removed from reality, kept away in a palace, that his ministers do all the ruling and tend to replace the emperor when necessary.
Communist governments are oligarchies just the same as the rest, often more explicitly so with their Party Councils and the like, but are just a form of dictatorship in the end. Oligarchy is what you get when the state gets above a certain size and scope, unrelated to the type or philosophy of the government.
Gotcha, wasn't sure if access to more brutal methods of keeping people in line changed the dynamic for you. Interesting to view the violent tendencies of a dictator as being essential to their power, because they otherwise lack it.
I guess, with the communist angle, I was looking to see if there are any governments which are more disperse than oligarchy. Representative democracies might be a better example, actually. Several dozen or hundred people in competition, rather than a handful. Your essay points out the pressures pushing power down and out pretty nicely, but what's pulling it back up and in?
Good question. Typically what pulls power up and in is the flow of resources (money say), and "legitimacy". (I use scare quotes because it is more a question of a Schelling Point on who makes the rules, not actual legitimacy in a deeper sense.)
So the flow of resources goes to the head of state; who pays the piper calls the song. In the case of a kingdom, it's the king; in the case of a republic it might be a president or prime minister. Those resources are then used to buy the support of the key ministers, who use those resources to buy the support of their key supporters, all the way down to the guys who turn the wrenches or pull the triggers. Then resources get collected, they go to the top and get dispersed down again. So long as the flow goes up and then is distributed down the system keeps going.
The other requirement is legitimacy, the notion that one should do what the bosses say, for some reason. It might just be "They paid me", or it might be "They won the election," or even "They are the descendant of God!" That is the key part of "ruling in the name of", that it is assumed that when you say "Shoot that guy" it is really the big boss saying it. When regimes break down it is often that chain of legitimacy breaking down. The bosses say "Shoot that guy!" and the troops say "eh... nah," and the Berlin Wall gets taken down. The boss says "Shoot him!" and the troops look at some other boss for confirmation, and that boss says "No, shoot HIM" and you have a palace coup.
These two are tightly related, as if the dictator stops paying his supporters he loses legitimacy, and if no one wants to do what he says he has a hell of a time getting the resources to pay them. Or he loses legitimacy and some of second level bosses decide they can do his job better.
This is why the Emperor in the Palace no one ever sees is so functional: he has perfect legitimacy in many ways, and you just have a real leader behind the throne distributing the resources. The Emperor never loses legitimacy, so the flow keeps going and it is easier to replace those at the top when desirable to the ruling group. Whereas an active head of state like a Stalin makes actual enemies of the people, and loyalties get divided at many levels.
The funny thing with using brutal methods of keeping people in line is that it makes the leader more dependent on their immediate supporters, because they can't handle all the violence themselves but need the much larger police forces and militaries necessary to met it out. That requires a lot of people from a lot of different walks of life to support you, which can be tough to do without a clear reason they need to stick with you. I think that is why you get ethnic minority dictatorships/monarchies so often: those who enjoy the privilege of their minority group status know it goes away, possibly in a bloody manner, as soon as the government falls, so even the bottom of the barrel have a strong incentive to keep the regime going. Majority dictatorships have options for the members outside the regime, so they are less keen to maintain it at all costs. I think that is why modern oligarchies tend to be focused around somewhat insane ruling philosophies: there is a need to separate out the ruling elites from the run of the mill populace, and to make it so that if the dominant power structure falls apart those elites are totally screwed, and those elites need to know it.
Yeah, legitimacy alone might explain it, honestly. Though, as you mentioned, having access to cash goes a long way in securing legitimacy. I wonder if governments are structured as they are in large part because there's a hard limit on how many bosses an individual is willing to keep track of/bow the knee to. Anyway, it's fun to think about this stuff, thanks for the responses!
Legitimacy seems to work on the smaller scale, but quickly falls apart as scale goes up. When we think of say a King Arthur type, he has his own lands, a really vague tax function (if any), coupled with no standing army save some house guard paid off his lands and such. He doesn't do a lot of redistribution of resources but depends heavily on loyalty and legitimacy to raise armies, keep his lords following him (when it works) and the like. He doesn't have much governing apparatus outside of that.
Likewise small scale political movements are often run by volunteers with day jobs, or at least spouses with day jobs, and the independently wealthy. Yet to grow and really solidify they need to develop a professional core, a staff or party whose only job is to run things, and that requires money to pay those people. So long as people have two bosses, the ideological boss and the boss who pays the bills, they are torn and you don't know you can rely on them. Not too terrible if you just need them to put out campaign signs, but really not what you want if you need them to pull triggers when you ask.
As the boss, the ideal situation is to be the source of money and legitimacy, so people under you who want to exercise power do so because you said they could and paid for them to do so. If that isn't achievable you get into a Machiavellian "love vs fear" situation, where if you are relying on them loving you to do what you say you are in an unstable spot, and at least you can decided to pay them or not at will. (Until you can't, or someone credibly promises to pay them more!)
Have you heard of the Australian aborigine method of government. They use consensus government where EVERYONE gets to have a say, shares data, expectations, goals, availability of resources. Only when based on the FULL data set available to EVERYONE having come to the SAME LOGICAL conclusion is a policy made.
I like the idea a lot. There is no king, everyone tacitly accepts the penalty for not following protocol because everyone WROTE and SIGNED the social contract, there is no case of 49% of the population hates the government. Instead 100% of the population trusts the government because it is the same 100% of the population.
In the modern era this could be done quite easily. Keep pouring verifiable data at a problem until the logical solution presents itself. Keep going until no new dissent is recorded. Lock it in place.
If consensus cannot be found then break the problem down or re-frame it until consensus can be achieved. This can work because in the end people can be rational and on an individual basis they can see that they do not have to cave into an irrational individual. However when the mob has the weight of 51% if the brainwashed population then having a logical point to make that is ignored causes disenfranchisement.
Also see if there is any blog writings by Denis Beckett on Demogarchy are online still. He also had a little book.
Buchanan and Tullock discuss the notion of 100% unanimous consent in I believe "Calculus of Consent". The main trouble is that it doesn't scale well past enough people that you can fit them all into a discussion. We see tribes split apart once they hit a certain size as a result, which all works out. Once you start getting very large groups, however, you start running into serious issues with getting those last few people to agree, or else the group does nothing as a group. Which might be fine! It does limit things a bit, though, so most groups go for some form of majority or have rules for exiling the handful of people who slow things down.
Of course another solution for that is to just stop doing so many things through compulsory public choice and instead leave more to voluntary groups. Still, those are going to be limited by size, but that isn't so bad.
I do agree that the nomadic, come to geather for seasonal pow-wow to set policy is not practical with large groupings. I do think that we could take more away from it. Have a tiered system that is 'organic' based on geography. Street, suburb, town, city, county, province, country, planet. At each level policy is decided ONLY for those that voted on the policy. What suits one may not suit the other. Things that cross borders are handled higher up the chain. Each group decides IN PERSON on their stand and their representative is merely holding the proxy vote at the next level up, they do not get to make deals or interpret the best policy, they cannot be brought because they are merely there to educate others and learn from others. If a new data point is found by one group that informs their choice it can be passed onto the other representatives when they meet to see if it can sway the other groups consensus.
Most of politics could be made whole again if non-personal lobby power could be defused, when profit is a goal it is naturally orthogonal to the goals of people who do not directly profit. A railway track benefits many but the railway barons did not break laws and avoid taxes to benefit people, they did it to gain profit and power. I read a interesting write up (perhaps on substack) on how they were responsible for achieving personal rights for companies as far as equality under the law is concerned in the USA and it spread from there. This will be hard to roll back but may be needed before human society can reach a workable equilibrium.
I too agree that government should be a light as possible, I don't see that happening until another event occurs. UNCONDITIONAL Basic Income or as I like to call it "Resident Adult Citizens Dividend" should be equal to the total income of a nation (or any other size grouping) divided by the number of citizens (the juvenile portion is diverted to the education budget according to parents and governments best practice agreement). All social spending is cut back to exclusively what is very special cases. Tax on income, salary, dividends (including the UBI), profits, personal and corporate is then set as a flat percentage that is needed to meet the needs of the state.
There are MANY benefits to filtering ALL income through the citizens. Firstly it is their income, if loans are taken then they stand surety for the debt so the money goes to the people and not special interest groups. Secondly the citizens get a fare shake on taxes. The poorest have something and everyone pays the same on what they get to spend from whatever sources, this means doing a gig or one day per week or morning or seasonal work ALL increases income with the same tax rate and no reduction on benefits for the poor. Also people get to see (this is shown from school age) where their money is going and all citizens will see that it is in their interest to have communities against waste, graffiti, wars, bureaucrats, administrators, marketing, propaganda. It will also make people want to protect and best utilize natural and other intellectual property that belongs to the country (university patents, minerals) so that everyone benefits.
Open Source Government is where we will be in 2000 years, we should start now.
Getting the last person to agree should be a community thing and it can be done by shunning, If there is freedom of movement then people can in some cases leave the irritating person and leave them to collect like minded fools around them, have to be careful that that is not a paid tactic but it also means people will create rules to prevent the ingress of people who will not listen to reason, it would be a big draw-card if a community is ruled by facts instead of bullying.
Does it follow that the range of things the government does is endogenous and partly depends on your ability to get people you trust in charge?
So a monarch (or whoever) will only try and do more things if they think they have the agent who can reasonably do a job (or at least are more likely to do those extra things)?
Good question. I think in part yes, it is endogenous, but in the same way that most service providers and goals are endogenous in individual choice. When do we hire people to do things for us?
1: When we need something done (Toilet breaks, Gauls get uppity, etc.)
2: When we want something done that we think should be (Build a new deck, provide public schools)
3: When we are sold on something we didn't know we wanted or could have (That guy who shows up to tell you he is sealing your neighbor's driveway and can do yours the same day for very little money, that guy who tells you he can prevent drug use if you give him all the money)
So in part it is predicated on finding the right people for the job, but at the same time I suspect that most of the time governments grow because either someone convinced the rulers that they could solve some problem that has arisen, or that there was a problem they didn't even know about that could be done. More of a "I want X done... who can I get to do it?"
Now some of that behaves differently than others. Military and Security is much more demanding on actually being able to do things and even more demanding on trust and loyalty than say Parks and Recreation. That's also why they are more well paid, powerful and prestigious, and Parks and Rec isn't a cabinet level position :D But, when supporters need paid off, Parks and Rec can soak up some worthless nephews and nieces who need 'jobs' as rewards to more important supporters.
(So I suppose that is a fourth reason why government does things, because doing them justifies giving money to supporters who pretend to do them.)
"how does the ruler incentivize the general to solve the problem, and how does he know the general is doing the best he can and not secretly encouraging the rebels to have an argument for funneling more resources to the military?"
An interesting thesis by Martin Broszat is that organised competition and uncertainty about the remit and standing of underlying administrators helped centralise power in Nazi Germany. https://x.com/page_eco/status/1528009921685770240?s=20
Excellent description.
What happens when an imperial oligarchy gets overrun by quasi-marxist postmodernists who only care about deconstruction and petty power games to control the masses?
Not sure I know, but I suspect we are getting a whiff these days. I expect it starts to look a lot like most Marxist states, however. Let's make sure it doesn't get that far.
I suspect if we drive the woke out of institutions they are going to start to act like Hamas. Except in this Marxist state MN, the woke are in full control, having made common cause with the oligarchs.
Marxism and socialism have power at their root, born bad as it were, because there is no other way to effect and maintain the system. Power is essential to the process, and so those who want power find a home quickly. If they can coopt an existing hierarchy they do, and if not they try to overthrow it and replace it.
This next year or two is going to be very instructive. Things might get very ugly in a hurry around election time... I am really glad I don't live outside Minneapolis/St. Paul anymore!
If they don't succeed in putting Trump in a cage, or keeping him and RFKjr off the ballots, I wouldn't be surprised if walking dead Brandon gets 100mil "votes"
I don't have money on it, but if I did I would put it on Newsom stepping in after Biden backs down after primary season due to "health issues". Not sure of course, but I suspect 65% likely. I am only about 50% sure Biden remains able to speak at all by mid 2024.
At this point I'm only 50% sure he's coming back from the Middle East breathing.
Interesting. How would you say all of this lines up with other forms of governance? Is any large dictatorial regime eventually forced into oligarchy? Or are they secretly that way from the get-go? Are communist governments also subject to oligarchical tendencies, or do they manage a different tact?
I think all forms of governance are in practice oligarchies once they get past a certain size and scope, at least from the point of view of the majority of the population. Every hierarchy is a pyramid, and once you get past the city state/large tribe stage with a government that does a good bit that pyramid gets a lot of layers, such that the top guy has a hard time actually making the relevant decisions. More than that and the decision makers are almost never the nominal ruler unless he makes an effort to be. A little more and he is just one of the groups.
When it comes to dictatorships especially I think the ruler is beholden to his ministers and supporters. Without a strong reason to be the one in charge (in human terms; being the kid of the last popular ruler counts as strong) the dictator has to have very good reasons for everyone else to listen to him. At the far extreme of independence might be a Stalin, partly because of his being so bloody scary that no one wants to challenge him, but also because his cult of personality was so strong that he held a lot of loyalty at all levels of society. At the other extreme would be say some of the child emperors of China (I can't think of an emperor this extreme; they get deposed before this point I think) where he is so removed from reality, kept away in a palace, that his ministers do all the ruling and tend to replace the emperor when necessary.
Communist governments are oligarchies just the same as the rest, often more explicitly so with their Party Councils and the like, but are just a form of dictatorship in the end. Oligarchy is what you get when the state gets above a certain size and scope, unrelated to the type or philosophy of the government.
Gotcha, wasn't sure if access to more brutal methods of keeping people in line changed the dynamic for you. Interesting to view the violent tendencies of a dictator as being essential to their power, because they otherwise lack it.
I guess, with the communist angle, I was looking to see if there are any governments which are more disperse than oligarchy. Representative democracies might be a better example, actually. Several dozen or hundred people in competition, rather than a handful. Your essay points out the pressures pushing power down and out pretty nicely, but what's pulling it back up and in?
Good question. Typically what pulls power up and in is the flow of resources (money say), and "legitimacy". (I use scare quotes because it is more a question of a Schelling Point on who makes the rules, not actual legitimacy in a deeper sense.)
So the flow of resources goes to the head of state; who pays the piper calls the song. In the case of a kingdom, it's the king; in the case of a republic it might be a president or prime minister. Those resources are then used to buy the support of the key ministers, who use those resources to buy the support of their key supporters, all the way down to the guys who turn the wrenches or pull the triggers. Then resources get collected, they go to the top and get dispersed down again. So long as the flow goes up and then is distributed down the system keeps going.
The other requirement is legitimacy, the notion that one should do what the bosses say, for some reason. It might just be "They paid me", or it might be "They won the election," or even "They are the descendant of God!" That is the key part of "ruling in the name of", that it is assumed that when you say "Shoot that guy" it is really the big boss saying it. When regimes break down it is often that chain of legitimacy breaking down. The bosses say "Shoot that guy!" and the troops say "eh... nah," and the Berlin Wall gets taken down. The boss says "Shoot him!" and the troops look at some other boss for confirmation, and that boss says "No, shoot HIM" and you have a palace coup.
These two are tightly related, as if the dictator stops paying his supporters he loses legitimacy, and if no one wants to do what he says he has a hell of a time getting the resources to pay them. Or he loses legitimacy and some of second level bosses decide they can do his job better.
This is why the Emperor in the Palace no one ever sees is so functional: he has perfect legitimacy in many ways, and you just have a real leader behind the throne distributing the resources. The Emperor never loses legitimacy, so the flow keeps going and it is easier to replace those at the top when desirable to the ruling group. Whereas an active head of state like a Stalin makes actual enemies of the people, and loyalties get divided at many levels.
The funny thing with using brutal methods of keeping people in line is that it makes the leader more dependent on their immediate supporters, because they can't handle all the violence themselves but need the much larger police forces and militaries necessary to met it out. That requires a lot of people from a lot of different walks of life to support you, which can be tough to do without a clear reason they need to stick with you. I think that is why you get ethnic minority dictatorships/monarchies so often: those who enjoy the privilege of their minority group status know it goes away, possibly in a bloody manner, as soon as the government falls, so even the bottom of the barrel have a strong incentive to keep the regime going. Majority dictatorships have options for the members outside the regime, so they are less keen to maintain it at all costs. I think that is why modern oligarchies tend to be focused around somewhat insane ruling philosophies: there is a need to separate out the ruling elites from the run of the mill populace, and to make it so that if the dominant power structure falls apart those elites are totally screwed, and those elites need to know it.
Yeah, legitimacy alone might explain it, honestly. Though, as you mentioned, having access to cash goes a long way in securing legitimacy. I wonder if governments are structured as they are in large part because there's a hard limit on how many bosses an individual is willing to keep track of/bow the knee to. Anyway, it's fun to think about this stuff, thanks for the responses!
Legitimacy seems to work on the smaller scale, but quickly falls apart as scale goes up. When we think of say a King Arthur type, he has his own lands, a really vague tax function (if any), coupled with no standing army save some house guard paid off his lands and such. He doesn't do a lot of redistribution of resources but depends heavily on loyalty and legitimacy to raise armies, keep his lords following him (when it works) and the like. He doesn't have much governing apparatus outside of that.
Likewise small scale political movements are often run by volunteers with day jobs, or at least spouses with day jobs, and the independently wealthy. Yet to grow and really solidify they need to develop a professional core, a staff or party whose only job is to run things, and that requires money to pay those people. So long as people have two bosses, the ideological boss and the boss who pays the bills, they are torn and you don't know you can rely on them. Not too terrible if you just need them to put out campaign signs, but really not what you want if you need them to pull triggers when you ask.
As the boss, the ideal situation is to be the source of money and legitimacy, so people under you who want to exercise power do so because you said they could and paid for them to do so. If that isn't achievable you get into a Machiavellian "love vs fear" situation, where if you are relying on them loving you to do what you say you are in an unstable spot, and at least you can decided to pay them or not at will. (Until you can't, or someone credibly promises to pay them more!)
Thanks for all the great comments and questions!
Have you heard of the Australian aborigine method of government. They use consensus government where EVERYONE gets to have a say, shares data, expectations, goals, availability of resources. Only when based on the FULL data set available to EVERYONE having come to the SAME LOGICAL conclusion is a policy made.
I like the idea a lot. There is no king, everyone tacitly accepts the penalty for not following protocol because everyone WROTE and SIGNED the social contract, there is no case of 49% of the population hates the government. Instead 100% of the population trusts the government because it is the same 100% of the population.
In the modern era this could be done quite easily. Keep pouring verifiable data at a problem until the logical solution presents itself. Keep going until no new dissent is recorded. Lock it in place.
If consensus cannot be found then break the problem down or re-frame it until consensus can be achieved. This can work because in the end people can be rational and on an individual basis they can see that they do not have to cave into an irrational individual. However when the mob has the weight of 51% if the brainwashed population then having a logical point to make that is ignored causes disenfranchisement.
Also see if there is any blog writings by Denis Beckett on Demogarchy are online still. He also had a little book.
Buchanan and Tullock discuss the notion of 100% unanimous consent in I believe "Calculus of Consent". The main trouble is that it doesn't scale well past enough people that you can fit them all into a discussion. We see tribes split apart once they hit a certain size as a result, which all works out. Once you start getting very large groups, however, you start running into serious issues with getting those last few people to agree, or else the group does nothing as a group. Which might be fine! It does limit things a bit, though, so most groups go for some form of majority or have rules for exiling the handful of people who slow things down.
Of course another solution for that is to just stop doing so many things through compulsory public choice and instead leave more to voluntary groups. Still, those are going to be limited by size, but that isn't so bad.
I do agree that the nomadic, come to geather for seasonal pow-wow to set policy is not practical with large groupings. I do think that we could take more away from it. Have a tiered system that is 'organic' based on geography. Street, suburb, town, city, county, province, country, planet. At each level policy is decided ONLY for those that voted on the policy. What suits one may not suit the other. Things that cross borders are handled higher up the chain. Each group decides IN PERSON on their stand and their representative is merely holding the proxy vote at the next level up, they do not get to make deals or interpret the best policy, they cannot be brought because they are merely there to educate others and learn from others. If a new data point is found by one group that informs their choice it can be passed onto the other representatives when they meet to see if it can sway the other groups consensus.
Most of politics could be made whole again if non-personal lobby power could be defused, when profit is a goal it is naturally orthogonal to the goals of people who do not directly profit. A railway track benefits many but the railway barons did not break laws and avoid taxes to benefit people, they did it to gain profit and power. I read a interesting write up (perhaps on substack) on how they were responsible for achieving personal rights for companies as far as equality under the law is concerned in the USA and it spread from there. This will be hard to roll back but may be needed before human society can reach a workable equilibrium.
I too agree that government should be a light as possible, I don't see that happening until another event occurs. UNCONDITIONAL Basic Income or as I like to call it "Resident Adult Citizens Dividend" should be equal to the total income of a nation (or any other size grouping) divided by the number of citizens (the juvenile portion is diverted to the education budget according to parents and governments best practice agreement). All social spending is cut back to exclusively what is very special cases. Tax on income, salary, dividends (including the UBI), profits, personal and corporate is then set as a flat percentage that is needed to meet the needs of the state.
There are MANY benefits to filtering ALL income through the citizens. Firstly it is their income, if loans are taken then they stand surety for the debt so the money goes to the people and not special interest groups. Secondly the citizens get a fare shake on taxes. The poorest have something and everyone pays the same on what they get to spend from whatever sources, this means doing a gig or one day per week or morning or seasonal work ALL increases income with the same tax rate and no reduction on benefits for the poor. Also people get to see (this is shown from school age) where their money is going and all citizens will see that it is in their interest to have communities against waste, graffiti, wars, bureaucrats, administrators, marketing, propaganda. It will also make people want to protect and best utilize natural and other intellectual property that belongs to the country (university patents, minerals) so that everyone benefits.
Open Source Government is where we will be in 2000 years, we should start now.
Getting the last person to agree should be a community thing and it can be done by shunning, If there is freedom of movement then people can in some cases leave the irritating person and leave them to collect like minded fools around them, have to be careful that that is not a paid tactic but it also means people will create rules to prevent the ingress of people who will not listen to reason, it would be a big draw-card if a community is ruled by facts instead of bullying.
Does it follow that the range of things the government does is endogenous and partly depends on your ability to get people you trust in charge?
So a monarch (or whoever) will only try and do more things if they think they have the agent who can reasonably do a job (or at least are more likely to do those extra things)?
Good question. I think in part yes, it is endogenous, but in the same way that most service providers and goals are endogenous in individual choice. When do we hire people to do things for us?
1: When we need something done (Toilet breaks, Gauls get uppity, etc.)
2: When we want something done that we think should be (Build a new deck, provide public schools)
3: When we are sold on something we didn't know we wanted or could have (That guy who shows up to tell you he is sealing your neighbor's driveway and can do yours the same day for very little money, that guy who tells you he can prevent drug use if you give him all the money)
So in part it is predicated on finding the right people for the job, but at the same time I suspect that most of the time governments grow because either someone convinced the rulers that they could solve some problem that has arisen, or that there was a problem they didn't even know about that could be done. More of a "I want X done... who can I get to do it?"
Now some of that behaves differently than others. Military and Security is much more demanding on actually being able to do things and even more demanding on trust and loyalty than say Parks and Recreation. That's also why they are more well paid, powerful and prestigious, and Parks and Rec isn't a cabinet level position :D But, when supporters need paid off, Parks and Rec can soak up some worthless nephews and nieces who need 'jobs' as rewards to more important supporters.
(So I suppose that is a fourth reason why government does things, because doing them justifies giving money to supporters who pretend to do them.)
"how does the ruler incentivize the general to solve the problem, and how does he know the general is doing the best he can and not secretly encouraging the rebels to have an argument for funneling more resources to the military?"
An interesting thesis by Martin Broszat is that organised competition and uncertainty about the remit and standing of underlying administrators helped centralise power in Nazi Germany. https://x.com/page_eco/status/1528009921685770240?s=20