Being a good shepherd* would involve a sufficiently deep dive into MAGA Studies to be able to figure out which high-order bits could be flipped. (like pronouns switched, over the course of the XX, from coding antisymmetric to coding symmetric relationships?)

As a corollary, this probably means establishing a myth of the "Good MAGA" (compare 爱,责,仁,德?) but as long as it be less destructive than the current situation, there is a nonzero possibility to do some nose-holding. (compare Bismarck on Bratwurstspezialitäten) One would have to search one's soul in order to decide if the ends justified the means!

[actually, Bismarck is only credited for that observation. He was a master of the strategic ambiguity, however: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ems_dispatch ]

* are dogs a good analogy? LEO (or wannabe LEO?) like to think of themselves as the good guys, the sheepdogs, as opposed to the bad guys, the wolves. Might it be possible to point out that it's mostly small, fearful, dogs who bite inappropriately; big dogs are more tolerant?

EDIT: Altenmeyer seems to have called it (p254):

> 19 Some high RWAs may be especially energized now because the backlash that is growing against their causes convinces them that they are being discriminated against.

A few Dispo characters:

  Atro (aristocrat physicist, high [Urras])
  Oiie (capitalist physicist, mid [Urras])
  Shevek (anarchist physicist, mid [Anarres])
    yes, the anarchists are equal,
    ...but some are more equal than others

and a few quotes, from when Shevek travels from Anarres to visit the anarchists' enemies: the propertarians on Urras:

> [The battle for Shevek's theory] had been the high point of Atro’s life. He would not have fought for less than the truth, but it was the fighting he had loved, better than the truth.

> Atro could trace his genealogy back for eleven hundred years, through generals, princes, great landowners. The family still owned an estate of ... the most rural region of A-Io. He had ... archaisms to which he clung with pride. Wealth impressed him not at all, and he referred to the entire government of his country as “demagogues ...” His respect was not to be bought. Yet he gave it, freely, to any fool with what he called “the right name.” In some ways he was totally incomprehensible to Shevek—an enigma: the aristocrat. And yet his genuine contempt for both money and power made Shevek feel closer to him than to anyone else he had met on Urras.

> Oiie was a changed man at home. The secretive look left his face, and he did not drawl when he spoke. ... He behaved to [his wife] and to his children very much as an Anarresti might. In fact, at home, he suddenly appeared as a simple, brotherly kind of man, a free man.