I really enjoyed the comparison Pearly makes in this article, but let's start with this quote Perley provides from Robert Michels' The Iron Law of Oligarchy:

The majority is thus permanently incapable of self-government...Thus the majority of human being, in a condition of eternal tutelage, are predestined by tragic necessity to submit to the dominion of a small minority, and must be content to constitute the pedestal of an oligarchy.

This is a pretty grim view of humanity, I think. But it's difficult to see many cases where it isn't the outcome. Perley explains how he sees the US government shifting over the last century and half from a more governance structure that was more responsive to the overt democratic will of its citizens to a place where power resides with a covert administrative state.

Perley provides charts showing increasing reliance on executive orders, more and more new federal agencies, and a decrease in the number of laws passed per year, but an increase in the number of pages per law.

As the federal government has accrued more and more power for itself, and the individual and states conversely ceded more and more ground, we have seen some parallel changes in the processes by which we as a population make decisions for ourselves.

I'm sold on this point. But you might wonder

What does this have to do with Bitcoin?What does this have to do with Bitcoin?

Perley makes a very nice comparison between the shift away from rule of law toward rule by administration of the law and the rule of block validation rules in Bitcoin toward a rule by mempool policy. Perley is particularly careful to note that he doesn't see anything nefarious in this shift, but rather that it is the natural trend in any large system of people.

Here's a nice comparison table Perley made:

Keeping these points in mind, he puts a chart of Bitcoin soft forks next to a chart of mempool policy changes in Bitcoin Core:

Changes to Bitcoin block validation rulesChanges to Bitcoin block validation rules

Changes to Bitcoin Core mempool policiesChanges to Bitcoin Core mempool policies

It is a little hard to see because the x axis in these charts is not consistent, but it does kinda look like fewer changes are made to Bitcoin via soft fork and more changes are being made to mempool policy. Does this mean that we're trying to implement changes without overt changes to consensus rules?

Perley describes the benefits of effecting change via soft fork:

In order to avoid an inadvertent split, the process for deliberation and coordination is much more important for consensus changes than for policy. Miners and nodes, no matter whether they are in favor of a consensus change or not, largely want to avoid activating one unless and until enough of the network will accept the same blocks they will accept. Conversely, they will also more likely than not accept a change the network has activated, whether or not they politically supported it, if that’s where the economic activity is.

While difficult to change on the surface, policy rules ultimately are easier to alter:

Policy changes have proven nearly as difficult to change (consider the decade-long debate over opt-in RBF) and hardly without controversy. Their rules, however, can be changed with the proverbial “pen and a phone” where a Bitcoin Core release can change the policy incentives upon which well-established businesses depend, almost overnight.

Because they are easier to alter, the temptation is to use mempool policies to nudge the network into the things we want to see rather than doing the hard work of building consensus around the changes that need to be made.

Soft fork deployment asks more of the community in terms of participation, communication, and coordination than any policy change. The legibility of the process brings legitimacy to the final decision, whether the activation succeeds or not. It allows the community to sharpen its muscles of persuasion and develop its collective analytical mind. Opaque governance systems invite lazy thinking and mob rule. This amounts to a type of social DoS attack we’ve seen against core developers, where a position gains perceived legitimacy from the volume and passion of its supporters. This can become self-perpetuating, where the only defense against such positions is to have an even louder and more passionate counter-position.

The reality is that in the majority of cases, whether we’re talking about legislatures, regulators, core devs, soft fork proposers, or node runners, most people are behaving according to amoral incentives. The real responsibility doesn’t lie with “the other” to behave in the way we want, but rather with each individual to hold themselves up to a higher standard of responsibility of persuasion and compromise rather than coercion. Long-term anti-fragility comes from making hard decisions the hard way rather than bowing to the incentives of easy change and easy blame.