Prepotency

I. The case

At tick 24,000 the game put up a story beat it reserves for a settlement that is plainly working and plainly not eating:

The keeper read it and asked the right question: it says what is wrong, and nothing about what happens next. Hold that; it is repaired in §V. First, what the seventeen people in question were deciding while their stores stood at twelve.

An hour and a half before the beat, the landing carried a bird sanctuary on fifteen first preferences of seventeen — over a weather vane, over somebody to put a quarrel to. Sula, who asked for it, wanted to wake to birdsong “like I used to in the old country.” An hour and a half after the beat, the same seventeen carried a memorial — a record of who did what here, so the work outlasts the people who did it — on eleven first preferences. One ballot gave the game away twice in one sentence:

The record… that’s the real thing — keeps us from forgetting who brought food when the valley was starving, or who hauled stone for the hall. Osk, forester, voting for the memorial, during the famine

And between the two sittings, a forester stood in the middle of the shortage and said the quiet part into the record:

Gotta get that bench made, no food for the food shortage if I don’t. Mara, tick 22,415

II. The theory, abstracted

Maslow, 1943. Needs stand in ranks, and the ranks are ordered by prepotency: the body first — food, water, warmth, sleep; then safety — shelter, health, the security of what you hold; then belonging — company, and somewhere the day can end among people; then esteem — standing, mastery, the worth of a day’s work acknowledged; then, last and least urgent, what he called self-actualization — the hour that is not for anything, the view, the song, the work that outlasts you. The claim with teeth is the dynamic one, and it cuts both ways. A satisfied need stops motivating — the sated man is not moved by bread — and an unsatisfied lower need, returning, is meant to seize the whole organism again: the man who has known hunger drops the poem and goes back to the field.

Maslow himself flagged the exceptions — people who put esteem before love, artists who create while hungry, the order being typical rather than fixed — and this valley will furnish him several more. The catalogue the settlers vote from maps onto his ranks almost without remainder:

III. The record, read upward

Read the landing’s grants in the order it carried them this run, and for a long stretch the theory looks embarrassed: an agreed wage — esteem — carried ninth from the top of the figure and first in time, before the settlement had a well. Tools before water. A joiner before an infirmary.

But the early inversion is not a violation, and saying why is most of the theory: a met need does not motivate. When the wage carried, the landing was small and the coast was thick with berries — bread was answered, so bread was invisible, exactly as the sated man’s bread should be. The ballot asks what the valley is missing, and what a fed valley of ten was missing was the worth of a day’s work. The climb was honest. The theory’s hard half comes later: at seventeen mouths the berries stopped keeping up, the lower tier fell open again, and prepotency says it should have seized the meeting the way it seizes a man. The weir and the sheep did carry — fifteen and sixteen of seventeen, the two biggest majorities in the landing’s history, hunger voting exactly as Maslow says it does. And then the pyramid was climbed, the ratchet took, and the two sittings held during the famine were about birdsong and being remembered.

IV. Why the pyramid does not re-invert

The ballot is a ratchet. A category once carried leaves the slate for that settlement for ever — openTo drops everything the settlement has decided, which is the right rule for not granting the same thing twice and has a side effect nobody chose: the bottom of the pyramid is votable exactly once. Of the nineteen proposals standing open on the books at the time of the beat, the landing could be offered none — every one asks for something it already holds. So the slate climbs the figure whether the stomach does or not, and a sitting held in a famine chooses between a custom, a memorial and a rope ladder, because those are the only words left. Maslow’s pyramid is dynamic — need comes back, seizes, re-orders. This one is climbed once, in one direction, and the ladder is pulled up behind each rung.

In the person, the theory is implemented — literally. A settler’s own decision function runs in prepotency order, top of the file to bottom: eating before the hurt, the hurt before sleep, tools before any trade, the trade before the evening, the evening before the hour by the water. It works; nobody in this valley has ever died. But a hungry settler feeds themself — bush to mouth, and the pack never reaches the stores — so individual prepotency never aggregates. Seventeen people can each obey the hierarchy perfectly while the settlement, the only body that votes, stays hungry at the collective scale where no hierarchy operates at all.

Esteem is load-bearing in the labour market. A settler ranks a day’s work by what the valley is short of plus what their own hands know plus what they are for — and the shortage term is capped while the mastery terms are not. A famine pulls at strength 1.6 at most; a practised forester’s own trade meets that number before the shortage term contributes anything. The census falls out of the arithmetic: eleven foresters, five miners, three traders, and one farmer, in a valley of twenty that cannot feed itself. Read the ballots and the settlers vote as their trades too — “I’m a forester, so wish-311 makes the most sense for me.” Practice tells is the game’s proudest rule, and it is Maslow’s inversion built into the wage structure: mastery outbids hunger in the aggregate, which is the oldest complaint anybody has made about a real economy.

And the beds convert every answered need into new hunger. Arrivals are gated on one thing: an empty bed. Not food — beds. The joiner makes furniture, the hall lifted the ceiling from ten to twenty, and every tier the settlement solves becomes carrying capacity, which becomes mouths, until food binds again. A person satisfies a need and moves up the pyramid; this settlement satisfies a need and grows until the need is back. Malthus is standing at the bottom of Maslow’s figure, holding the door.

V. Two repairs, and what was left standing

The beat has a second act. “Something that does not run out has to be voted in” was the right sentence the first time and a dead letter by the sixth famine, said to a settlement that had carried the weir fifteen to two. The beat now reads the town it fires at: where the votes are not yet carried it still says vote; where they are, it says the true thing — that a vote is permission, not dinner; that one person in seventeen spends the day at food; and that what happens next, unless afternoons move to the water or the beds stop being built, is more of this.

The craft deadlock is closed, and it was a small tragedy in three thousand acts. Tove — bare-handed, one stone in her pack, at a lean-to too full to take it — was walking to the door once a tick because tool-making spent the stores, and what is on somebody’s back is not the stores. She could neither put the stone down nor spend it, and the record counted her three thousand walks without comment. The grindstone has stated the house rule all along: the cost comes out of your own pack first and the settlement’s stores second. Craft obeys it now. Tove had a stone axe within minutes of the fix, and her next recorded act was to carry food to somebody laid up.

And the valley got a word it was missing. Halla asked, two days ago, for “a rope ladder for safely accessing the deep woods” — and the catalogue, having no entry for the climb, had wedged her exact phrases into road, which answers time and not the drop. There is a rigging entry now: lines and ladders where the work is high, cutting the hazard of the four jobs a settler climbs to, on the near side of the mill so the people working with the least are not asked to earn iron before they stop falling. It classifies as itself, the record re-heard the wish within the hour, and the landing put it straight on its next slate — where it took one first preference of seventeen and was struck off, six ballots asking for the strike, at the sitting that carried the memorial. The fix obeyed the inversion it was built to document. Struck is not banned; it returns if she asks again.

Two things were deliberately not touched. The ratchet stands, because it is the same rule as the game does not retcon a decision, and unwinding it is the keeper’s call and not this sheet’s. And the beds still gate the boat, because a settlement that stops growing at the first hungry week is a different game, and choosing it is a design decision, not a repair.

VI. Verdict, and a prediction

Does the valley follow the hierarchy of needs? In the person, exactly — it is the order of the branches. In the meeting, once. The settlement climbed the pyramid honestly, tier by tier, each rank going quiet as it was answered, which is the theory working. What it cannot do is come back down: the ballot has no memory of hunger, so a need that returns finds its words already spent, and seventeen hungry people spend a famine voting on birdsong — not because they are fools, but because every ballot below that one has already carried. The game deviates from Maslow at exactly one joint, and it is a mechanism, not a mood: his hierarchy is dynamic and this one has a ratchet.

One release in the ratchet already exists, and it makes a prediction. The landing never carried planting — the one food word still open to it — and the game’s own triage tables a food category when the stores fall under the mouths. If the theory and the mechanism are both right, the landing’s next vote on anything to eat will be an orchard: hunger’s last remaining word, arriving at the meeting by the only door left open. The record will say.

I want to wake up to the sound of birds instead of just the wind, like I used to in the old country before we came here. Sula, miner — wish-311, carried 15 of 17, twelve food in the stores

She is at the top of the figure because the figure is the only direction the ballot still has. Maslow would have recognised her anyway: his own footnotes are full of people who sang hungry. The theory’s last word belongs to the exceptions, and so, apparently, does the valley’s.