When Information Asymmetry Becomes a Weapon

In theory, money is supposed to be power. In practice, it often is not.
One of the biggest reasons is information asymmetry: the gap between those who know and those who don’t.

Most ordinary people cannot be specialists in every domain. They have jobs, families, and lives to run. Inevitably, there are areas—taxes, law, public insurance, real estate procedures—where they lack expertise. That is precisely why they hire professionals or turn to public institutions: they pay, explicitly or implicitly, for knowledge and guidance.

But information asymmetry does not just create a market for expertise. It also creates a power imbalance. If I know the rules and you don’t, I can not only charge you, I can also quietly shape the game to my advantage. You are not stupid; you are simply uninformed. Yet your lack of information becomes a lever: I can delay, deflect, or confuse you and still appear “within the rules,” because you don’t even know what the rules are.

This is where a strange and toxic relationship emerges:

• The expert or bureaucrat receives money (or salary) and, at the same time, effectively occupies the position of “master.”

• The citizen or client pays and simultaneously experiences themselves as a “servant,” dependent and disempowered.

Money, in this context, is no longer a superpower. If you have money but lack information, you are not strong. You are simply an easier target. You can pay for advice, but you have no guarantee that all relevant information will be disclosed, or that the advice will be complete. The asymmetry remains—and so does the vulnerability.

The Passive State: Why Bureaucrats Are Cold and Inefficient

This dynamic becomes particularly visible in the public sector.

Unlike many private employees, public servants are not paid more because they hustle harder for each individual citizen. Their salary does not spike because they solved an unusually complex case on Tuesday. Whether they go the extra mile or stick to the bare minimum, their paycheck is essentially the same.

In economic terms, this is close to a flat, low-powered incentive system. In human terms, it means:

• The minimum effort tends to become the default.

• Difficult, messy cases are not something to welcome; they are something to survive.

• There is little built-in reason to proactively guide confused citizens who lack background knowledge.

From the citizen’s perspective, this feels like passive resistance.

You call one office. “That is not our jurisdiction, please contact another department.”
You call another. “We have no authority over that; you should ask elsewhere.”
You try to explain that you do not understand the underlying processes. The answer, explicit or implicit, is:
“Figure it out yourself. We will respond only to what you already know to ask.”

Thus, citizens enter the system already stressed—often because something has already gone wrong, or some previous process was mishandled. They are not calling with a clean slate; they are calling with accumulated frustration. When they meet a chain of cool, minimal, scripted replies, that frustration converts into anger.

From the bureaucrat’s side, it looks like this:
“People are rude. They shout. They use harsh language. We are just doing our jobs.”

But from the citizen’s side, it looks like this:
“We are already in trouble because someone did not do the job cleanly in the first place.
We don’t understand the procedures, and the people who do are unwilling to guide us.
Of course our voices get louder.”

The relationship deteriorates not because “citizens are inherently trash” or “officials are inherently evil,” but because the structure systematically rewards passivity and punishes initiative. Over time, each side learns to see the other as the problem, and almost no one examines the underlying incentives.

The Citizen’s Helplessness Under Asymmetry

For citizens, the core experience is helplessness.

They are not experts in law, administration, or digital government portals. They have no reason to be; that is why institutions exist. In this situation, information asymmetry should be compensated by careful guidance: the knowledgeable side taking responsibility for helping the less knowledgeable side navigate the system.

Instead, what often happens is the reverse:

• “We cannot do more than this, you must handle the rest yourself.”

• “We have processed our part; if something is stuck elsewhere, that is not our problem.”

• “We do not provide detailed instructions for every possible case.”

When this becomes routine, citizens learn a painful lesson:
“If you don’t already know the path, no one will draw the map for you.”

Their ignorance is not a fault; it is a consequence of rational life choices. They invested their time in other areas. Yet that ignorance is treated as a kind of moral failure or personal deficiency.

This is why, in many interactions with state institutions, you hear raised voices, sharp tones, and angry words. It is not simply that people “have bad personalities.” It is that they have been pushed to the edge of their cognitive and emotional limits in systems that demand knowledge they do not possess and refuse to compensate for that gap.

When Responsibility Feels Misplaced

From the citizen’s side, the story often starts long before the phone rings.
Something has already gone wrong—an application mishandled, a deadline missed without clear notice, an administrative step (like lifting an attachment or sending a cancellation) processed incompletely. By the time the citizen calls, frustration and anxiety are not being born in that moment; they are simply arriving at the surface.

Interestingly, the official who answers the phone may not be the one who caused the original problem. They inherit the case rather than create it. From their perspective, the logic can easily become:
“I did nothing wrong. Why is this person shouting at me?”
Over time, this turns into a broader belief:
“Citizens are inherently aggressive. Their personalities are the problem.”

In reality, the citizen’s emotional trajectory is different.
They often start the call relatively controlled, with an implicit condition:
“I will adjust my tone depending on how you respond.”
But underneath that controlled voice, there is already a backlog of disappointment and helplessness. They are calling precisely because something was not done properly before, and they do not know how to repair it on their own.

When the response they receive is once again limited to:

• “This is not my jurisdiction.”

• “We followed our procedure; if other parts are stuck, that is not our responsibility.”

• “We cannot guide you through the entire process.”

then the citizen’s internal equation becomes:

“The system failed me once in action,

and now it fails me again in attitude.”

At that point, raised voices and harsh words are not simply expressions of a “bad temperament.”
They are reactions to a double experience of abandonment:

1. Procedural abandonment – the initial mistake or omission.

2. Relational abandonment – the later refusal to take ownership of guiding the case to resolution.

Officials, seeing only the second moment, understandably feel victimized:
“I am being attacked for something I did not do.”
Citizens, living through the entire chain, see a different picture:
“This institution, as a whole, did not do what it should, and now no one within it is willing to truly help.”

The gap between these two perceptions is where mutual resentment grows.
It is not that citizens are born with “dirty personalities,” nor that officials are born “cold and hostile.” It is that, within a system that misplaces responsibility and normalizes passivity, each side learns to misread the other: officials see aggression where there is accumulated hurt, and citizens see indifference where there is fragmented responsibility.

If we want fewer shouting matches and more genuine problem-solving, the first step is to admit this:
citizen anger is often a delayed response to institutional failure, not a spontaneous character flaw.

Why AI Should Arrive First in Public Institutions

Paradoxically, the environment most in need of proactive, knowledgeable guidance—the public sector—is also the one least structured to provide it.

Private companies at least have profit incentives. If they treat customers badly, they risk losing revenue. If they systematically mislead clients, reputation and competition eventually push back. In many markets, bad behaviour has a price.

Public institutions, however, operate under a different logic:

• Salaries are fixed.

• Demand is mandatory (citizens cannot simply “choose another state”).

• Workload and case complexity are largely unpredictable.

• Emotional burnout is high, and yet emotional labour is not explicitly valued.

In such a system, asking for more passion, more empathy, and more initiative from human staff without changing the underlying incentives is unrealistic. You are essentially asking people to expend more effort for no structural gain.

This is precisely where AI becomes relevant.

AI systems:

• Do not seek higher salaries.

• Do not experience burnout in the human sense.

• Can be trained on large bodies of law, regulation, and procedural guidelines.

• Can provide consistent, patient, step-by-step explanations to citizens who lack background knowledge.

• Can work at scale, handling repetitive questions without resentment.

If the objective function is clear—“help citizens navigate the system as cleanly and quickly as possible”—AI can, in principle, be relentlessly proactive in ways that human staff cannot sustain under current conditions.

It is ironic but logical to imagine that one of the earliest large-scale deployments of AI might not be in profit-maximizing private companies, but in state agencies and public service portals:

• As the first line of guidance for complex administrative procedures.

• As a buffer that absorbs routine frustration and confusion.

• As a tool that narrows information asymmetry by making specialized knowledge available on demand, in plain language.

In other words, AI could become the non-extractive expert: a knowledgeable entity that does not use information as a weapon, does not grow tired of explaining, and does not treat citizens’ ignorance as a moral failing.

Conclusion: From Asymmetry to Alignment

Information asymmetry, left unmanaged, turns expertise into dominance and ignorance into vulnerability. In public institutions, where citizens cannot simply “walk away,” this dynamic becomes especially toxic.

Officials, trapped in low-powered incentive structures, grow passive and emotionally defensive.
Citizens, trapped in opaque procedures, grow angry and distrustful.
Both sides are reacting rationally to a system that quietly trains them to see each other as adversaries.

The emergence of AI presents an opportunity to rewire this relationship. Not because AI is magical, but because it can be:

• Expert without arrogance,

• Tireless without resentment,

• Structured without indifference.

If we design it well, AI in public institutions could transform information asymmetry from a weapon into a bridge:
a way for non-experts to stand on equal footing with the system that governs their lives, without having to become bureaucrats themselves.