When not to negotiate
Some battles can't be won.
Not everyone can be negotiated with and giving the wrong person what they want can be a a pathway to ruin.
That said, my intention for writing this article is not to encourage pessimism for my readers. On contrary, I want to show that 99.9% of the time, a mutually positive transaction is possible because most disagreements we have are a result of things we imagine we will lose.
Even in cases where the opponent tries to take advantage of the transaction, it benefits them to know that they are better off splitting the difference with you than to walk away without a deal.
However, I will not encourage naivety and tell the comforting lie that "everything is negotiable with the right approach and clever tactics".
Some people enter negotiations with no intention of finding balance. They want everything and will use your willingness to compromise as a weapon against you.
This isn't pessimism; it's a crucial distinction that will save you time, resources, and emotional energy. Recognizing when negotiation is futile is strategic wisdom.
Understanding objectives
In grand strategy, the most common optimization it aims to achieve is to maximize a country's long-term national interests.
There is no written solution to the problem of national interests or how a country should play, but so far we have reduced them to 2 categories:
- limited objectives: an opponent that leaves you alone after getting what they want (material, status, security)
- unlimited objectives: an opponent whose primary objective also includes your destruction, on top with any material, status, security they can get out of you
Unlimited Objectives
Have you tried to reach an agreement with someone who kept moving the goalposts, and with each concession you made, they'd introduce new demands?
While these people may not want the destruction of you, what they are doing is close to what someone with UO will behave.
People with unlimited objectives don't want a fair deal -- they want to extract maximum value while giving nothing in return. Every advantage you concede doesn't bring you closer to resolution; it widens the power gap between you.
Think of it like feeding a stray cat. The first time might seem like a one-off kindness. But tomorrow? They'll be back, expecting more, getting aggressive if you don't deliver. That's the UO pattern.
What makes negotiation impossible is that UO people view compromise as weakness. Your willingness to meet halfway signals an opportunity for exploitation, not collaboration.
It is also a form of enablement that encourages more parasitic behaviors. Your concession not only hurts youself, but also the opponent, as well as other 3rd parties trying to live honestly.
Here are some examples of entities that systematically have characteristics of UO.
State, government, bureaucracies
Bureaucracies are an emergent form of community at large scale -- where every agent tries to optimize for their own interests and relative social status.
While these organizations are made by people, they are similar to a market where no single agent can influence its course of action. By design, they cannot appeal to morality or individuality.
As a result, most bureaucracies are optimized to grow as much as they can while maximizing the relative power gap between the institution and an independent agent.
Look into history and observe how often bureaucracies grow in personnel size and how infrequent they shed the size of their followers, managers, or employees?
The outcome of every bureaucracy has been the same: they keep growing until they can no longer finance themselves. Then, a debt collapse happens (which usually leads to large scale civil war or external invasion).
Every tax you pay, every paperwork you put up with, every time you waste on their rituals makes the bureaucracy more legitimized, more powerful, and harder to get rid of.
I've witnessed this pattern in smaller settings like corporates, local community clubs, even within online communities.
A Discord server initially allowed users to voice concerns at meetings. When participation grew, they changed rules to limit speaking time, then moved meetings to inconvenient times, then required pre-approval for topics. Each concession from users led to further restrictions, not progress. 1
Cancel culture
Public apologies rarely satisfy online mobs.
While a lot of people who got into online drama do so for bad reasons, complaining and mudslinging as a netizen is not a civic way of solving problems.
If you ever tried to think independently and suggest different solutions that conflict with the online mob's idea of justice, you will often find yourself being very unpopular.
Like a bureaucracy, an online mob is no longer an individual that owns the ability to negotiate. Rather it has a new found purpose to consume and destroy as much as possible to justify and grow its existence.
When someone apologizes for a perceived transgression, the admission doesn't resolve the situation -- it accelerates it. The objective isn't correction or growth; it is punishment and social control.
The most prominent examples I have observed are conservative voices in social media before 2024 (peaked in 2020), where accounts get banned for conservative content, employments and contracts getting rescinded for conservative participation, businesses getting cancelled for accidental perception of racist expressions, and so on.
This contrasts sharply with traditional reconciliation models. Christian forgiveness (at its best) creates a path back to community for those who had sinned. Forgiveness serves a crucial social function -- it prevents eternal outcasts and exiles. 2
When someone's objective is your permanent exclusion rather than your improvement, negotiation becomes impossible.
Unremorseful criminals
There is a reason we incarcerate violent offenders -- someone who has demonstrated willingness to harm others for personal gain has crossed a fundamental social boundary.
When lenient sentences repeatedly land on unremorseful offenders, we're not showing mercy -- we are enabling escalation and endangering the law-abiding public. This is why capital punishments have been topic of debate that never seems to be resolved.
As civil people, we don't like punishing people severely, but we also have to admit certain severe punishments need to be in place to deter crime. It is hard to balance between optimal leniency or toughness because often the generated results are mixed and cannot guarantee a good policy.
In terms of our private judgement, it makes a lot of sense to keep people demonstrating patterns of predatory behavior to incur more severe punishments for each repeated offense.
Monopolies
The best way to negotiate with a profit maximizing firm with no competition is to create competition.
I haven't seen a monopoly that improves their product after raising prices. Every additional margin of profit given from the consumer to the monopoly creates a worse experience and product for the consumer.
Examples of monopolies I've witnessed in Malaysia are JPJ (driving license issuer). The product never improves, the instructors always have an attitude, and it was always a hassle to get or renew a license. 3
Limited Objectives
People with limited objectives actually want resolution.
When someone has specific, reasonable goals, negotiation works because reaching those goals ends the conflict. They don't view each concession as an invitation to demand more but rather as a progress towards conclusion.
That said, most of the conflict we have today are due to either of us mistaking our opponent to have UO when they actually only have LO.
If you notice the examples I have given for UO, it is more likely that it belongs to an institution or crowd. On a personal level, very very rarely will you find someone that operates with UO.
Family, romantic partner
I have a friend who often argues with his partner in relationship. Both are competitive at winning the argument, despite the arguments being very mundane (someone forgot the housework, someone accidentally locked another person out).
Despite the arguments being very straightforward in LO (EG: just finish the housework and move on, just unlock the door and move on), rarely do arguments get settled like that. A lot more ego and grudge was invested into those arguments.
When I asked both if they thought their relative status in the relationship would diminish if they conceded the arguments and admitting mistakes, both agreed.
When I asked if they will take advantage of their partner's mistake and raise their status after the event, they hesitated but ultimately decided cooperation is more important than power.
In summary, both have the idea that their partner has UO over them, therefore they can't afford to lose a single argument or it would be harder for them to defend themselves in the next argument.
I also see this happening between father and son, where the father refuses to let his son win any argument regardless of how reasonable the son is because losing power is bad for the father when it comes to correcting future misbehavior.
When they both understood each other's true fear (partner has UO) and discovered the solution (both have LO), both sides finally opened up -- the mistaken will concede the argument with an agreement that their partner will not use that opportunity to diminish respect and status of the mistaken.
In a relationship with love, this agreement is a no brainer -- of course we want our partners to correct their mistakes without losing anything.
It ended up as a very productive agreement, not only in terms of the outcome but also to the quality of the relationship going forward.
Workplace
When you work in sales, your real job is to identify what they actually want. People often say what they want, but not their underlying objective. This is the main reason why many business transactions don't close.
I have a friend who had a hard time selling his product to a client as the management is very resistant to the product. Through conversation, I discovered the management's real concern wasn't the solution, rather the fear of being redundant during implementation. When addressed, the opposition vanished. 4
Signs of unlimited objectives
That said, don't be naive and don't be destructively compassionate. You have to look out for 0.1% of people who are willing to be ruthlessly destructive and are often manipulative.
Before entering any negotiation, ask yourself: Does this person want something specific, or do they simply want more? Are they seeking resolution, or do they thrive on conflict itself?
Moving goalposts
When each concession triggers new demands rather than bringing closure. Its time to cut the losses and move on.
History of scorched-earth conflicts
When someone leaves devastation in previous disputes, it looks like a parasite that has done killing its host, and is finding a new one to put up with them.
Pleasure in your distress
When someone seems more energized by your suffering rather than by resolution its best not to owe them any favors. For some of you unlucky people, you might know a few friends like that. You cannot take a single thing from them as that debt cascades into an UO over you.
Most people have limited objectives
A lot of times, people who express signals above don't do it intentionally. When you point out that they are operating with UO, it is very likely they will immediately adjust their behavior if they really cared about the cooperation.
99.9% of people aren't out there to destroy you. They're simply advancing their interests within normal social boundaries.
Your neighbor wants quiet after 10 PM, not your constant misery. Your employee wants fair compensation, not your company's bankruptcy. Your customer wants a working product, not your financial ruin. Your partner wants sex, conversation, and respect, not all of your assets and dignity.
Understanding this distinction prevents paranoia and enables productive engagement with the majority of people you'll encounter.
Too many times we mistaken our opponent to have UO when they actually only have LO. Even if some expressed behaviors of having UO, many times it is due to emotional reasons they don't even notice themselves doing it. If you show them that they will get more using the LO approach, they will eventually recognize what's good for them and adapt their interest.
Footnotes
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Rules are inevitable when network starts scaling. But I observe communities that get transformed the quickest into bureaucracies is when there is social status to be gained by moderators. Status become zero-sum and moderators are encouraged to set up a bureaucracy to maintain their relative status to wall off young blood and new competitors, even at the expense of the absolute power of the community. For any startup founder, you are the only link between the difference of a community with leader and a bureaucracy -- the culture starts and dies with you. ↩
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A culture that churns out exiles will be unstable in the long run. When people are left behind or are "irredeemable", not only can't they positively contribute to the community, they will actively raise the severity of their crimes and create more long-term losses for a culture (might as well go big or go home). Forgiveness is necessary, but blind forgiveness is enabling. ↩
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You can call it a state bureaucracy. I was being generous with the definition and decided to call it a monopoly. ↩
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It's an AI product. It's hard selling software until managers are comfortable that the product will not be a threat to their jobs. For the same reason, you observe companies spend irrationally on McKinsey interns for projects with little business outcomes. The real thing they are paying for is to avoid getting fired by their shareholders for bad policy. Management consultants have already mastered this market of "Status-as-a-service". ↩