The rule, exactly. Before an election each citizen chooses: to vote — or to take a payment and not vote in that election. The payment is a percentage of the median income, set by referendum; there is no fixed sum. One ballot is one vote, with no multiplier in the count; the vote is amplified only in that each ballot's share grows as others step out. The budget pays under law; a candidate never pays. Only a referendum of all citizens — simple majority, no quorum — introduces, changes or repeals the rule.
The protocol has been introduced nowhere and no pilot has been run: shares, turnout and outcome figures in the chapters are estimates, and the protocol promises nobody an election victory. If a chapter says otherwise, Exact Answers and the Charter are correct. For a candidate: ten questions and ten steps. For a citizen, a mayor, a finance officer, a donor, a journalist, a scholar, a lawyer: answers by role. Everything in force in one file: llms-full.txt.
The Second Wave of Exit: The Lying-Flat Generation and the Suppression of Creators¶
Chapter: 04 — Electoral Dynamics File: 04_019g · v1 · 30 September 2026 (session 30.09.26) Source: S. V. Kovalev's video "The End That Crept Up Unnoticed" (23.09.2026) as the occasion; the architect's question "why did all this appear, or rather — who created it"; the architect's chain in nine remarks and its check against data on 30.09.2026.
1. The occasion¶
The psychotherapist Sergei Kovalev describes "the collapse of the Promethean contract". For several centuries a person was asked to live for work and promised in return rising prosperity, affordable housing and confidence in the future. In the first third of the twenty-first century the promise stopped being kept: housing in large cities rose out of all proportion to incomes. The young calculated that extra effort no longer guarantees basic security, and stopped making it.
He lists the forms of this refusal: the Chinese "lying flat" and "let it rot", Western quiet quitting — work strictly by the book, the Korean refusal of marriage and children at a fertility rate of 0.72, the Russian move into self-employment, courier work and small towns. And he states the main thing: this is a revolution without leaders, barricades or manifestos; the protest is carried out by the absence of action.
The author's forecast — the collapse of the debt system and the coming to power of disciplined communities in 25–30 years — is his own and unsupported by sources. His remedy is purely personal: simple work for bread, asceticism, manual skills, one's own circle.
2. The architect's question: who created this¶
Kovalev describes the symptom and does not name the cause. The architect names it:
"Populist politicians who come to power only for their own enrichment and to deceive the poorly educated apathetic. They need no long horizons; they run policy for the majority and thereby kill the interest and energy of the active minority. By dumbing down the apathetic they thought the activity of the minority would carry everyone, but they were badly mistaken and do not even plan to change it."
The assistant first put forward three corrections, and all three turned out to be a quarrel with a word, not with the thought. That required a vocabulary.
3. The vocabulary¶
A populist is a position, not a label. The assistant objected: building restrictions and pension promises were introduced for decades by ordinary parties. The architect's answer: "from the point of view of AB-EXIT, if you take the percentage of voters, all the present parties are for populists and the apathetic, because they are the majority." If the majority of voters has no stake, any party wishing to win works for it. The difference between "mainstream" and "populist" is one of degree, not of kind; the same rule as for the autocrat: a state, not a type (015c §7a, 039).
The top means the creators. The assistant noted that the share of the richest has been rising for forty years and proposed dividing the top into "those who earn" and "those who own". The architect's answer: "The top, for me, is the creators, not those who parasitise on power, or on closeness to power, or on anything else." Rent-takers and cronies are not part of the top: they are hangers-on, and they are at one with the power. The rise in the share of the richest is the rise of the hangers-on.
Intent is not needed. The assistant held "they dumbed down deliberately, counting on the minority to carry everyone" to be unprovable. Having taken the sentence apart, he withdrew the doubt: simplification is a conscious choice of each separate campaign; the calculation is written into budgets; there was no overall plan and none was required — a system of links each chosen consciously works as if designed.
4. The chain¶
- The majority of voters has no stake, and the whole system works for it. "The whole system of education, the press, state financing, state control and state regulation goes to the middle and even below."
- This system has no need of creators — for three reasons (§5).
- Suppressing them with prohibitions costs nothing (§6).
- The calculation was that the creators would carry everyone anyway. It is written into budgets: every long-term forecast, pension system and state loan assumes that the tax base works as before.
- The creators stopped carrying. The first wave of exit was from elections: the active and the burned (011b). The second is from the economy: the lying-flat generation. In both cases a person stops investing where someone else decides; this is Hirschman's exit (036c) and Atlas (040e) — only not among industrialists but among couriers.
- Nobody plans to change it, because the customer is the same: the symptom is treated with subsidies, propaganda and censorship.
5. Three reasons why power has no need of creators¶
| Who | What they want | Why the creator is in the way |
|---|---|---|
| The middle and the bottom | not to be worse than others | "the clever and the skilled are needed by nobody, they irritate, the middle and the bottom envy them" |
| The ruler | to remain the only rich and strong one | "power always wants to minimise all the rich except itself"; the new breeds the independent |
| The official | to work less and not make mistakes | "creators keep creating something new, and laws and taxes have to be changed, and in general one has to think and work, and power is not interested: they want the people to live as before, and then they can work less, and the risk of their making a mistake is smaller" |
The third reason has a mechanism. The responsibility of power is asymmetric: for a permitted novelty that went badly there will be punishment — there is a culprit and a victim; for a forbidden novelty that would have been useful nobody will punish — the victims do not know what they lost. To forbid or to delay is always safer than to permit.
On the elite "before": "this 'elite' reproduced itself for more than a hundred years, but creators still squeezed in; AB-EXIT is made precisely to fix that."
6. The paradox of prohibition: the apathetic have no café¶
"By forbidding development with restrictions, power does not trouble the apathetic. A tax on cars does not trouble those who have no car. A tax on and control of construction the apathetic cannot understand. The main word of power is 'for the sake of safety' of everything: for housing unnecessary norms are introduced, for food safety endless permits and inspections. But the apathetic have no café."
A prohibition hits only the one who does something. The majority does nothing and feels no restriction, while the words about safety sound like care for it. There is nobody to vote against safety.
The second half of the paradox: the apathetic person pays after all, only without the sender's name on the bill. Superfluous building norms sit in the price of a flat and in the rent, inspections in the price of a lunch, the closed ladder for creators in the number of jobs. The person sees a high rent and blames the landlord, not the norm (019c: reform by subtraction; 055c §6.4).
The result is a prohibition with properties ideal for power: the one it hits is in the minority; the one who pays for it does not understand what for; and it is called protection.
A prohibition has a third beneficiary too — the incumbent large player. The architect: "this is the basics of economics and of monopoly — to raise the barrier to entering the market; all of it was proven long ago without us." A large chain can afford the inspections, a small café cannot, so the large ones themselves ask to "tighten the rules for the sake of safety". Economics describes this as regulatory capture (Stigler, 1971) and as the strategy of raising rivals' costs (Salop and Scheffman, 1983). Power, the official and the monopolist each get their own from one prohibition; the one who pays is the creator just entering.
7. The check against data¶
| Link | What the data show |
|---|---|
| Policy for the majority | The median German voter is 52; from 2026 half of voters are over 55; in the United States and Britain the majority of voters own their homes |
| The same without elections | "Lying flat" was born in China: power rests on a passive majority, an official is promoted on the indicators of his five-year term, local budgets lived on land sales. The point is not the ballot box but reliance on the passive |
| The school aims at the middle | Chicago, two reforms holding schools accountable for the share passing: pupils in the middle gained, the strongest and the weakest barely moved |
| The voter is simplified consciously | The language level of US presidential addresses: Kennedy — 13th grade, Reagan — 10th, Obama and Trump — 8th; the 2024 debates — below 4th |
| The top pays | The top tenth provides 70.5 % of income tax in the United States and 60 % in Britain |
| Housing is closed to those who earn | Owners vote against new building so that their house does not lose value |
| A long horizon is impossible | Pension reform burdens present voters for the sake of the unborn and therefore does not pass |
| The calculation failed | Worldwide 21 % of the employed are engaged in their work, 62 % work by the book; the share of men aged 25–54 at work in the United States fell from 98 % in 1954 to 89 % in 2024 |
| No plan to change | Since 2006 Korea has spent about 270 billion dollars on fertility, and the rate fell from 1.08 to 0.72; China answered with censorship |
8. What the protocol changes in each link¶
The median, not the mean. The architect: "power always wants to minimise all the rich except itself, and so the share of power in the median will be minimal." The rulers are few, their incomes are extreme values and do not enter the median at all. The enrichment of power and its hangers-on does not raise the payment by a penny; it can be raised only by the person in the middle earning more. The mean income and GDP per head work the other way: eleven people who got rich make the country "richer". The choice of the median in the formula is not technical but protective.
The middle as a result, not as a customer. Today the middle is flattered and policy is written for it. Under the protocol it cannot be appeased — it can only be made richer, and those with a stake decide.
Suppressing creators acquires a price. Creators are the jobs and wages of the middle. Crush the creators — the median sags — the payment falls, and it is power itself that pays.
The inaction of power stops being free. Kovalev: action can be taxed, inaction cannot. This holds both ways: the state cannot tax a citizen's inaction, and the citizen cannot punish the state's inaction. A payment tied to the median rates stagnation. And not as zero: "a country that stands still degrades compared with its neighbours" — which is why the number is shown in two comparisons, with one's own past and with the neighbours (039).
Those who have a café remain to vote. A stake is what a person does and risks. By construction those who remain to decide are the ones a prohibition hits directly; the words "for the sake of safety" for the first time reach people who know what they cost.
The bill gets a sender. The invisible price of prohibitions adds up into the median, and the median arrives as a number to everyone, including those who exited.
The ladder opens. The creator no longer "squeezes in" — he becomes the one on whom power's rating depends.
The electorate grows younger by itself. The assistant supposed that in the dispute over housing the protocol would work in reverse: the owner with a stake would stay and vote against building, while the young renter would take the money. The architect: "you got it all wrong." The repository had answered this earlier (016 §25): the turnout of the old is habit, not motivation; the young do not vote out of calculation, because the vote weighs nothing; with a greater weight and forty years of life ahead the payment is a trifle for them against the consequences, and the pyramid turns over — seven in ten of the young remain, fifteen in a hundred of those over 75. The architect added four arguments: the renters are "the children of those who already have housing", their interests are shared; "housing does not get cheaper if the standard of living rises and everyone can afford it"; the owners' fear is overrated — "they do not count residual value, what matters to them is comfort and quality"; "the young man has his whole life, and the goal of that life, and his strength ahead of him, he burns and thirsts, while the old owner simply wants to live out his days, and needs nothing, and extra money will not hurt". The consequence for Kovalev's fifth conclusion about the rule of old men with a horizon of "it will last our time": the electorate grows younger without qualifications or quotas, and power's long horizon comes from the voter's long horizon.
Debt is the horizon of the apathetic voter. Kovalev's sixth conclusion: the debt was taken from a future that has refused to pay. The assistant asked whether the protocol says anything about accumulated debt. The architect: "this is the horizon of the apathetic, and if they have left, the power has become different. The apathetic understand nothing about the national debt, or how and who pays it; they simply see social payments growing, they do not care at whose expense, they do not even care that they themselves pay the interest on that same debt, and the country's default is all the same to them, because in essence they have nothing that can be taken away." And this is not blindness but a forecast: "that is how they think — that it will not touch them; they have no experience or skills to predict and calculate it; and yes, they will suffer later, but that will be later." "Later" lies beyond their horizon — the same selection by length of horizon as in 055c §6.4. The architect summed it up: "that is exactly why he takes the money at the election; and if there is a horizon, he does not." The button is a test of the horizon: money now or influence on what comes later. Borrowing from the future costs nothing to someone who has nothing to lose: the benefit is visible, the price is not, and he pays the interest through prices by the same bill without a sender as for the prohibitions (§6). After the protocol those vote who have savings, a home, a business and forty years ahead; the country's solvency becomes, for the first time, a personal stake of the majority of voters. The old debt is not a question for the protocol: another power, chosen by other people, will deal with it.
The creators already exist. Kovalev's eighth conclusion: education has stopped paying, people leave the fields that demand long discipline. The assistant asked about the time lag: the rules change in a cycle, while the engineers and doctors who were not trained will not appear for another ten to fifteen years. The architect: there is some truth in it, "but they exist now too, there is simply no incentive and they are being crushed; and they will learn quickly — most skills and professions can be learned in one to five years, given the will and the mind". This is not a shortage of people but an idle reserve: the 62 % of the employed who work by the book, the educated young lying flat, and those who left. The response to an open ladder comes within one or two cycles, not a generation. And second, more important than the first — the incentive. The architect: "Kovalev says there is no incentive to be clever if you suffer for it, because policy is aimed at pleasing the average, and they are not the cleverest. And here AB-EXIT works best of all: the clever have a long horizon, are more successful, have a little more money, and so will not take the money, will vote and become even more successful. And that stimulates being clever and educated." Today cleverness costs dear: the system works for the middle, and whoever is above the middle pays for it in tax, prohibition and envy. After the protocol cleverness pays: a long horizon → a vote → a power working for those who vote → success → an example for the rest. The same loop that led downward (§4) begins to lead upward; this is "from the downward spiral into the spiral that circles upward" from the explanation of the protocol's name (040k §2).
The protocol is the first instrument that works on inaction. A fine and deprivation do not work on the lying-flat generation: one cannot punish by taking away what a person has given up himself. What remains is payment — and weight for those who decided to stay.
9. Ten conclusions from the video: the outcome of the analysis¶
| # | Kovalev's conclusion | Where the answer is |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The contract is broken, the refusal of effort is rational | §4, §6; housing — §8 "The electorate grows younger by itself", 016 §25 |
| 2 | A revolution without leaders or manifestos: protest by inaction | §4: Hirschman's exit, the second wave (036c) |
| 3 | Action can be taxed, inaction cannot | §8: true both ways; the protocol is the first instrument that works on inaction |
| 4 | One cannot punish by taking away what a person gave up himself | §8: a fine does not work, payment and weight remain |
| 5 | The elites live by the electoral cycle; old men rule | §8: the electorate grows younger without qualifications, power's horizon comes from the voter's |
| 6 | The debt was taken from a future that has refused to pay | §8: debt is the horizon of the apathetic voter |
| 7 | The family has become a refuge; the man is not valued as the provider | 019f (the remainder after child support and rent), 019e (the marriage penalty) |
| 8 | Education has stopped paying | §8: the creators already exist, the ladder is closed; a response within one or two cycles |
| 9 | Trust moves into small circles; power will go to the organised | 015c §7b: bringing in the indifferent is broken, the group's own turnout is weakened, the burned return; 029.10 |
| 10 | The remedy is purely personal | §1: advice on how to exit more comfortably; the author does not touch the arrangement |
Common to all ten: Kovalev describes a system that receives no signal until it collapses — the same one as Strauss and Howe (040k) and Fukuyama (040l). His lying-flat generation is the apathetic and the burned at the scale of a whole life, not of one Sunday.
10. Weak point¶
The chain explains the political causes; the share of the non-political ones — automation and world competition, which also squeezed the wages of the young — is not estimated, and without it one cannot say what part of the "lying-flat generation" the protocol will bring back. The experiments on envy and the asymmetric responsibility of the official are given without a check against primary sources, and the tax data count the top tenth by income without separating creators from hangers-on. 🟡
Sources: Kovalev S. V., "The End That Crept Up Unnoticed", 23.09.2026; Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026; Neal D., Schanzenbach D., "Left Behind by Design", NBER w13293; analyses of the reading level of State of the Union addresses (Berkeley School of Information; Priceonomics); BLS, labour force participation of men aged 25–54; National Taxpayers Union Foundation, "Who Pays Income Taxes"; HMRC, data for 2023–24; Fischel W., The Homevoter Hypothesis, 2001; Sinn H.-W., Uebelmesser S., "Pensions and the path to gerontocracy in Germany", 2003; data on South Korea's spending on fertility since 2006.
Related: 019f (the vector: wearing down men) · 019e (the marriage penalty) · 019c (reform by subtraction) · 011b (the burned) · 036c (Hirschman: exit and voice) · 040e (Ayn Rand: Atlas) · 040f (Acemoglu) · 040k (Strauss and Howe) · 040l (Fukuyama) · 039 (the thermostat, two comparisons) · 029.10 (the mirror of trust) · 056d §5b (the limited good) · 048b (the economics of dumbing-down) · 001 (the formula)