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.
Dumbing-Down: Why AB-EXIT Has a Negative Incentive to Produce Stupidity¶
Chapter: 08 — Implementation (paired with 048; linked to §9 "A Vaccine against Tyrants") File: 08_048b · v1 · 12 August 2026 (session 37)
48b.1. The economics of dumbing-down under three systems¶
An autocrat invests in the stupidity of the population because stupidity lowers the cost of lying — the cheapest tool of rule: any picture of the world can be sold to the uneducated; the educated makes lying expensive (checks, doubts, laughs). The investment in dumbing-down is profitable for the autocrat: cheaper to lie — dearer to steal.
For democracy dumbing-down is poison by construction: its mechanism lets stupidity through into decisions — the dumbed-down votes, the vote weighs the same, the quality of decisions degrades together with the quality of the median voter. Democracy requires a clever people and has no mechanism to produce one.
An honest admission for AB-EXIT (we say it first): the stupidity of the population does not frighten the mechanism — the dumbed-down with high probability takes the dividend and exits; those resistant to manipulation decide. The system gives quality decisions at any level of stupidity, because it filters the entrance. Hence the wicked question: is it not advantageous for an AB-EXIT government to dumb down — "let them take the money and not get in the way"?
48b.2. Three locks against the incentive to dumb down¶
Lock 1 — dumbing-down becomes a pure expense. For the autocrat the dumbed-down is an asset (a battering-ram vote, a mobilisable mass). Under AB-EXIT the dumbed-down is a line of expense: pay him the dividend, political benefit zero — he cannot be mobilised (he has exited), there is nowhere to deceive him (he is out of the game). Investment in stupidity for the first time in history has a negative return: you pay to produce a good you are then obliged to buy back yourself.
Lock 2 — the lie loses its audience. The deciding electorate is self-selected for resistance to manipulation (refusing money for weight is a filter on motivation and counting). Lying to it is expensive and useless; unkept promises are visible in an un-dumbable indicator — the median and the dividend, numbers that no channel can misreport. The autocrat dumbs down so that lying is cheap; AB-EXIT makes lying useless at any level of stupidity — there is no reason to dumb down.
Lock 3 — feedback below the level of propaganda. Dumbing-down switches off political judgement but cannot switch off the ability to compare two figures. The dividend-from-the-median is a feedback channel working below the level propaganda reaches: no need to read, no need to understand — the number grew or it did not. Even a maximally dumbed-down population keeps one sensor that cannot be switched off, and it hits the government more precisely than political literacy.
48b.3. The formula of three machines¶
Autocracy is a machine for which stupidity is fuel. Democracy is a machine that stupidity breaks. AB-EXIT is a machine in which stupidity loses its market price. A continuation of the thesis of 048.5 ("destroying the sales market of ignorance") to the limiting case: the last and largest buyer of stupidity leaves the market — the state itself, because the good stopped bringing power and started bringing bills.
48b.4. The honest boundary¶
Addition of 30.09.2026 (019g §8). The boundary stands, but it is incomplete. The protocol does not make people cleverer — it makes being clever pay. The architect: today "there is no incentive to be clever if you suffer for it, because policy is aimed at pleasing the average"; after the protocol the clever person with a long horizon does not take the money, votes, the power works for those who vote, and he becomes more successful — "and that stimulates being clever and educated". The side road in the paragraph below acquires a direct incentive.
AB-EXIT does not make people cleverer and does not promise to: it makes their stupidity useless to predators. Growing cleverer, if it happens, will come by a side path — through the un-switchable sensor that cycle after cycle teaches one to link the quality of governance to a personal number (the mechanics of re-learning — 02_011b, circuit 5). The difference from the "vaccine" of §9: the vaccine protects the system from the tyrant; this section is about the system also not generating in the government any demand for the raw material of tyranny.
Related: §9 · 08_048 (the market of ignorance) · 02_011b (the sensor as re-learning) · §13.9 · 10_056a (the unkillable indicator) · §15