---
type: claim
domain: mechanisms
description: "The Sabbath potlatch and other anti-Jevons rules functioned as social technologies that explicitly bound competitive escalation — Leviticus made violation punishable by death because the alternative was race-to-the-bottom resource exhaustion"
confidence: experimental
source: "Schmachtenberger on Great Simplification #132 (Nate Hagens, 2025), anthropological literature on potlatch and gift economies"
created: 2026-04-03
related:
  - "yellow teaming assesses all nth-order effects across domains before deployment distinct from red teaming which tests only for direct failure modes"
  - "four restraints prevent competitive dynamics from reaching catastrophic equilibrium and AI specifically erodes physical limitations and bounded rationality leaving only coordination as defense"
---

# Indigenous restraint technologies like the Sabbath are historical precedents for binding the maximum power principle through social technology

Schmachtenberger identifies a class of social technologies whose function is explicitly to bind the maximum power principle — the tendency for any competitive system to escalate toward maximum resource extraction. These "restraint technologies" share a common structure: they impose coordination constraints that prevent race-to-the-bottom dynamics, enforced through social rather than physical mechanisms.

**The Sabbath as mechanism design.** The Sabbath is typically understood as religious observance. Schmachtenberger reframes it as a multipolar trap binding mechanism: if everyone works seven days, competitive pressure forces everyone to work seven days (the trap). The Sabbath mandates one day of rest for all participants simultaneously, preventing the trap. Leviticus making violation punishable by death seems extreme until you recognize the alternative: without enforcement, any individual who works on the Sabbath gains competitive advantage, forcing others to follow, collapsing the coordination.

**The potlatch as wealth redistribution.** Northwest Coast potlatch ceremonies required periodic redistribution of accumulated wealth. This prevented the concentration dynamics that would otherwise emerge from competitive accumulation — a social technology for preventing the power-law distribution of resources.

**Anti-Jevons rules.** Various indigenous resource management practices included explicit limits on harvesting efficiency — catching fish by hand rather than nets not because nets didn't exist but because unrestricted efficiency would exhaust the fishery. These are anti-Jevons rules: deliberate inefficiency that preserves the resource base.

The structural pattern across all three: (1) identify the competitive dynamic that, unconstrained, produces collective harm, (2) design a coordination rule that constrains it, (3) enforce the rule through social mechanisms strong enough to override individual defection incentives.

This pattern is directly relevant to AI governance. The competitive dynamic (race to deploy AI without adequate safety) produces collective harm (accelerated existential risk). The coordination rule needed is analogous to the Sabbath: a binding constraint on ALL participants simultaneously, enforced through mechanisms strong enough to override the competitive incentive to defect. The historical precedent suggests this is achievable — but only with enforcement teeth proportional to the defection incentive.

## Challenges

- The analogy may romanticize indigenous practices. Many restraint technologies were embedded in hierarchical power structures, enforced by elites, and accompanied by oppression. Extracting the mechanism design insight without endorsing the social context is necessary but difficult.
- Scale is the critical disanalogy. Sabbath enforcement worked within communities of hundreds to thousands. AI governance requires binding billions of actors across jurisdictions with no shared social authority. The mechanism may not scale.
- "Deliberate inefficiency" as AI governance translates to "deliberately not building capabilities we could build." This is the alignment tax argument, which existing KB claims show collapses under competitive pressure.

---

Relevant Notes:
- [[four restraints prevent competitive dynamics from reaching catastrophic equilibrium and AI specifically erodes physical limitations and bounded rationality leaving only coordination as defense]] — restraint technologies are historical examples of restraint #4 (coordination mechanisms)

Topics:
- [[_map]]
