History
Explanation
The Joke
The comic presents a simplified view of human history as a repeating cycle: someone proposes a reasonable system, other people find ways to exploit it, attempts to fix the exploitation create new systems that get exploited in turn, and so on forever. The conclusion is that history is not a march of progress but an endless arms race between rule-makers and rule-exploiters.
The Humor
The humor is dark and systemic. Rather than blaming any particular ideology or system, the comic suggests that the problem is inherent to human nature: any system designed by humans will be gamed by humans, because gaming systems is what we do. This is funny in a bleak, knowing way — the kind of joke where you laugh because the alternative is despair.
Context
This connects to public choice theory in economics, which models political actors as self-interested rather than public-spirited. It also echoes the observation often attributed to various thinkers that "every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets." Weinersmith frequently returns to the theme that human institutions are shaped more by incentive structures than by the intentions of their designers.