The Great Realignment: Money, Power, Greed & Bitcoin

Part Two: Power

This is Part Two of Four. Part One is complete and can be read here.

This is a work in progress. Significant changes will occur.

Power

Discussions around power reveal many of the same flaws we see with discussions about money. And much like the previous chapter, it is difficult to accurately place Bitcoin in the greater scheme of things without understanding political power. Many simply assume they know what it means to be “in power,” or to “have power.” Similar issues arise when discussing whether a particular country or agency is “powerful.” Yet, when asked to explain or define what those terms mean, I find very few can give a concrete answer. Much like money, power is an abstract concept that attempts to describe how human beings behave and how they interact. Similar to money, how you view concepts around power is heavily dependent on your starting assumptions. For a good starting point then, we should look to the plain language descriptions. Obviously, power has a number of connotations, but the definitions of power pertinent to the discussion at hand are:

1. Political or national strength: The Second World War changed the balance of power in Europe.
2. The possession of control or command over people: Words have tremendous power over our minds.
3. Political ascendancy or control in the government of a country, state, etc.: They attained power by overthrowing the legal government.
4. Legal ability, capacity, or authority: The legislative powers vested in Congress.
5. Delegated authority; authority granted to a person or persons in a particular office or capacity: A delegate with power to mediate disputes.
6. A document or written statement conferring legal authority.
7. A person or thing that possesses or exercises authority or influence.
8. A state or nation having international authority or influence: The great powers held an international conference.
9. A military or naval force: The Spanish Armada was a mighty power.

Are you starting to see the issue? When we speak of power it is quite easy to assume we are talking about something specific. Once broken down, however, power can be a very nebulous word. As the old saying goes, “The biggest problem with communication is the illusion it has been accomplished.” When speaking of power, there are clearly many barriers to effective communication. If we take a closer look at the definitions above, we can see some common themes. Power can and does — often interchangeably — represent:

1. Strength
2. Control
3. Authority; and
4. Force.

Yet, if we boil this down even further, it does little to help us. Speaking about strength, for instance, what does strength really mean? Take the sub-text from the first definition of political or national strength and fill it out. “The Second World War changed the balance of STRENGTH in Europe?” Strength of what though? Moral strength? Physical strength? Defensive strength? Military strength? Diplomatic strength? Moreover, if you look at the definition of strength you’ll find the word power used throughout. Let’s take it a step further and think about control for a moment. The sub-text of the next couple of definitions say, “Words have tremendous power over our minds,” and “They attained power by overthrowing the legal government.” That certainly sounds logical enough, and yet it tells us nothing about how that control is occurring. “Words have tremendous control over our minds?” “They attained control by overthrowing the legal government?” What forces are acting upon your mind as you read this, or anything else for that matter? Emotion? Reason? Logic? All of the above, or none of the above? Which one is controlling you?

Likewise, what happens when a revolutionary overthrows a government? Did they simply kick some people out of a room? Did they have to announce they are in charge? Was it only a matter of raising a flag? Did they have to gain consensus of the newly controlled? Or did they just point a gun at everyone? If they were pointing guns, how did the holders of the guns decide who is in control of them and where those guns should be aimed? Who recognized this control and what made them do so to begin with? Was it by force? Philosophy? Was it the triumph of better ideas, or just better salesmanship? What legitimized that seizure of control and who is to say whether or not it is legitimate? Is it by consensus of the other “controllers” in the region? Or does legitimacy solely rely on the will — or the fear — of the people subject to the new control?

Likewise for authority. Authorized by whom, exactly? Through what mechanism does this authority flow? Was it ordained by God? Or does the authority derive from the will of the people? And if so, how do we know? What if the people were misled? Does that negate the power of the people wielding authority? Our current Congress is completely untrusted by 80% of voters, yet they still retain authority with scarcely a second thought. Similar issues arise with force. Are we talking force of will? If so, how does that will get imposed on another? Is it because of a threat of physical violence? Is it fear? Hope? Is it aspiration, or is it driven by greed? Or is it the result of actual physical violence? Does the act of physical violence suffice to gain power? Or is there more to it than that? As I hope you are starting to understand, much like money, power is not a straight-forward concept. Indeed, it is risky to assume that we know what power is, let alone make assumptions about who wields it and how or why they are able to do so. Those risks become far more dangerous when we assume that modern power structures in society are a natural phenomenon. They are not.

They are an abstract construct, just like money.

Similar to the earlier chapters on money, what follows will likely challenge a number of deeply held convictions. Ideas and concepts around power are rarely parsed-out in detail beyond a select few academic fields. For most, discussions around power too often rely on heuristic assumptions. Far too rarely do they go any deeper. With this in mind, if we are to unpack ideas around the alignment of incentives throughout the global political economy, it is imperative we give thought and weight to concepts beyond mere economics. It is a fine start to understand where money comes from and why it takes the form it does today. It is a great improvement to understand the structures that evolved to create and support that money in the first place. It is an error to assume that we know what power is without detailing how power exists. It is a much larger error to give scant weight to those dynamics while presuming good ideas and simple measures will suffice to overcome them.

To briefly recap, power is often interchangeably used to describe strength, control, authority and force. Much like money, a lot of ink has been spilled detailing power, power hierarchies, and power dynamics. The aim for this section is to break those concepts down to their constituent parts in a systematic fashion. To achieve this, we’ll start by tracing out the first component-part of power: Strength. Subsequent chapters will likewise be devoted to the sub-concepts of control, authority and force. The end-goal of this endeavor is to provide a coherent understanding of power within the greater picture of modern global human interaction. It is also to reveal that, like money, the concept of power is much more complex and nuanced than what is commonly assumed.

Strength

When you think about strength what first comes to your mind? A large, well-muscled man? A thin woman working two jobs while raising a child? A sturdy building? A military parade? Like power, strength has a number of connotations and invokes a number of different images. Oftentimes the mere mention of strength invokes a convenient bundle of all the images above together. Strength can then, and often does, become an all-encompassing character trait that loosely coalesces around combinations of attributes. Commonly lumped together are traits such as endurance, tenacity, perseverance, and the ability to use or project physical force. If you lump those traits together in a little heuristic basket it becomes easier to see how we arrive at our nebulous understanding of strength. If we trace these notions back even further, the root of these concepts can arguably be found in Charles Darwin’s work.

“Survival of the fittest” forms the cornerstone of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. So ubiquitous is this phrase in modern parlance, it is dogmatically accepted. Its meaning is rarely questioned. As such, and more often than not, the phrase is bastardized to imply, “only the strongest survive.” Contemporaneous in this bastardized understanding is the implicit acceptance of another common aphorism, “life is a competition for scarce resources.” Expanding this understanding out, we arrive at the rough notion that only the strong can succeed in this deathly competition to acquire survival resources. Through that strength, it is presumed, survival is assured. This is all well and good, save for the minor inconvenience that none of it is correct. Let us dispense with some of the myths, starting with the survival portion of “survival of the fittest.” I’ll defer to the inestimable Dr. Robert Sapolsky here for the definition of evolution:

Evolution rests on three steps: (a) certain biological traits are inherited by genetic means; (b) mutations and gene recombination produce variation in those traits; some of those variants confer more “fitness” than others. Given those conditions, over time the frequency of more “fit” gene variants increases in a population.

You might notice, and as Dr. Sapolsky goes on to say, survival is not a component here. Evolution is about reproduction, not survival. The better a species is able to pass on genes is what is meant by being the fittest. Which also means, fitness is not necessarily about being the strongest either. There are, in fact, inherited genetic traits that confer a greater ability to reproduce at the expense of the life span of the genetic donor. Life span, of course, being a fundamental characteristic of surviving. This function of increasing the odds of reproduction at the expense of survival is referred to as antagonistic pleiotropy. The effect of which is demonstrably present in everything from salmon to primates. This leads us to another issue with misconceptions about survival of the fittest and selection.

We often hear people speak of “alpha” males. In fact, a cottage industry has veritably sprung up around the notion. In the lay understanding of an alpha-male, it is the strongest and most fearsome that gets the first crack at the food. Likewise, so the story goes, these alphas also get the first crack at mating. All this occurring while they stand atop a dominance hierarchy they seized through physical combat. Wolves are regularly paraded as the prototypical pack animal that adheres to this supposedly Darwinian hierarchy. Trouble is, and especially with wolves in particular, it’s not true. The biological problem with the idea of big, powerful alpha males dominating a pack comes down to variations of what we mean when we talk about selection. There is natural selection, which tends to favor traits that ensure genes are passed on. Traits like resistance to disease, better blood flow, stronger kidney function and the like. Then there is sexual selection, which tends to favor things like big horns, large muscles, or brilliant plumage.

The biological trouble arises from the fact that those traits can be at odds with each other. Big horns, or bulky muscles might win the affections of a female, but they are also metabolically costly. Those with a lower metabolic cost may well live on to reproduce for longer than their bulky sexual rivals. As Dr. Sapolsky asks, “Which wins — transient but major reproductive success, or persistent but minor success?” As you may have guessed, the answer is, “It’s complicated.” The point here is not to retrace Biology 101. It is rather to demonstrate that commonly held assumptions about strength and its relationship to power do not necessarily hold true. The issue we run into occurs when discussions around power are unconsciously rooted in ideas that are not fundamentally sound to begin with. “Survival of the fittest” has a nice, easy ring to it. Within common parlance, it also conveys a false sense of how human beings achieve positions of authoritative strength. Likewise, when combined with an idea that says, “life is a competition for scarce resources,” we mistakenly paint a picture that is far too simple to convey the reality of human social dynamics.

In the animal kingdom, hierarchies certainly form. Yet, those hierarchies are neither always, nor are they necessarily related to power dynamics. Worker ants are not relegated to the role of a slave serving a queen. Rather, when looked at scientifically, the reality is the ant colony is more akin to a single living organism. The mistake we made before this discovery was to anthropomorphize the ant colony and assign familiar roles based on human experience. Likewise for the wolves, where the mistake there was through observation of captive specimens, rather than their wild counterparts. The point being, it is a tricky business to discuss strength in the abstract, such as when discussing a “balance of powers” between nation states. That power structure has a long history of development. Make no mistake, it was developed by man, flawed as he is. It certainly did not emerge as part of an inevitable evolutionary process in harmony with the laws of nature.

As noted at the outset and above, modern political power structures are not a natural phenomena. Much like money did not evolve from barter to currency to credit and debt, neither did the power structures we live under today evolve from brutish dominance hierarchies to representative democracies. Meaning, these power structures did not evolve from natural pecking orders inherent to our species. If they had, then power structures throughout humanity would all adhere to the same model. What we find are similarities in some cases, whereas in others we find complete divergence. The governance structures found in North American native tribes were incomprehensible to the Euro-Christian immigrants arriving on the Natives’ shores. As the saying goes, history is written by the victorious. Without question, the victorious in the so-called “new world” of the Americas were very much the European Christians. But just because they won doesn’t mean the Natives didn’t successfully manage their political affairs prior to European influence.

With that lengthy preface in mind, we can proceed apace with the discussion at hand. Ideally, that brief foundation will allow us to unpack and better understand where the notions of strength and power loosely outlined above take their root in Western society today. I hope it obvious why the focus is on the political economy of the industrialized west. If it is not obvious, that focus simply stems from the observable reality that the global political economy is dominated by Western ideology and structures. Central to that ideology and those structures are the concepts of nations, nation-states, and national identities. Within those broad concepts lie the ideas of authority and sovereign control. Moreover, and as noted in Part One, the entirety of the modern global economic system is built upon the United States dollar, a western construct to its core.

That said, a good starting question is, “Where does political strength in a nation come from?” The students of political science and political economy know at the outset that the origins of the idea of a nation are not easily discerned. Scholars trace the concept to a number of periods and for a number of reasons. For the purposes of this discussion, we will affix a somewhat arbitrary starting line at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. This document, which ended decades of conflict in Europe, was one of the first to clearly articulate ideas of territorial sovereignty and the right of sovereign control. This is not to say those notions did not exist previously. This document rather provides a convenient starting point for the broader discussion.

Recall from Part One, if traced back far enough, the dynasties that became the sovereigns of Europe by the age of the Treaty of Westphalia, were rooted in what could only be called protection rackets. For a mostly accurate and clear modern example of medieval European power structures, one only need to look at Afghanistan today. After nearly 100 years of civil war and military occupations by the Russians and the Americans, the country has essentially been bombed into the early Middle Ages. What arose in the vacuum created by all this conflict are locally powerful groups. Gangs, if you will. Their governance structures are nearly impenetrable to outsiders without verifiable familial connections. Within their spheres of influence, they impose their will on the local populace through force of arms and sheer intimidation. Through that imposition of their will, they also enrich themselves through extortion. This is especially true against oppositional forces and non-familial, or other out-groups, such as those with different religious views. Once in control, these groups pick and choose the targets of extortion and to what extent. In-groups are heavily favored in those decisions, which leads to greater loyalty to the local gang. This helps distribute power down, as out-group members are at high-risk during any conflict or disagreement with an in-group member. Thus, on balance, localized inter-personal conflict diminishes, with out-group members suffering the most inequity.

In turn, the expectations upon social and personal conduct are heavily dependent upon complex code-based honor systems within both the in- and out-groups. Those honor systems are such a fundamental component to governance that violations of the honor code and challenges to personal or familial honor are potentially lethal affairs. Perceived or actual affronts to someone’s honor can, and often will, lead to protracted conflict and blood-feuds that can span years. These conflicts are often to the benefit of the local gang leader, who may actively encourage them to further cement in-group loyalty by “playing sides” and encouraging conflict with oppositional groups. Across the nation, these low-level conflicts between various local gang leaders led to sustained periods of economic decline and general chaos, especially in densely populated regions. In response to that general chaos and decline of social order, a group of these “warlords” banded together with local religious leaders and enacted a generally applicable code of conduct throughout the country. This code of conduct is based on Islamic law and tradition, and is strictly enforced. Violations of these codes of conduct are met with harsh punishments, up to and including public executions for things as trivial as theft or adultery.

Through this fear mechanism, and other heavy-handed and repressive tactics, a semblance of order has generally been restored throughout the country. The unfortunate after effect is that this structure favors and incentivizes in-group abuses that must be continually checked by the coalition leaders. However, that is a delicate balance for them to maintain. If their attempts to restrain behavior are perceived as dishonorable, or unfair, it invites challenges to the coalition leadership by violent upstarts who may be profiting handsomely from their extortive or other self-serving behavior. The need for these leaders to maintain this delicate balance provides ample opportunity for abuses by lower-order members against the populace to continue largely unabated. This tends to suppress overall economic activity and growth. Of course, this is a vicious circle, where general prosperity remains low and depressed. Meanwhile the favored few are able to exist in relative comfort. The incentive structure is heavily weighted towards general stability, with only the most basic needs being met at a subsistence level. From the perspective of the coalition leaders, however, it is much superior to unchecked internecine violence, chaos, and ultimately, mass starvation and death.

Put another way — from their perspective — they’re doing the best they can with what they have available. After over 100 years of civil war, invasion, and occupation, what they have available is very little. What has worked best for them so far are:

1. Strict behavioral edicts enforced through violence,
2. The imposition of strict religious code adherence; and
3. Prevailing upon and exulting honor codes to better regulate interactions between previously warring factions.

With all that in mind, if we trace back the history of England — our legal and structural forbearer — to the time before the Magna Carta, we will see some very familiar themes. After hundreds of years of invasion and civil conflict, locally powerful groups, reliant upon strict admission criteria based on familial ties, rose up and imposed their will upon the local populace through violence. Through that imposition of their will, they also enriched themselves through extortion, especially against out-group members. This led to a lot of conflict among the locally powerful groups, which resulted in chaos and decline of social order, especially in densely populated areas. In response to that general chaos and decline of social order, a group of warlords banded together with local religious leaders and enacted a general code of conduct throughout the country. This code of conduct was based on Christian law and tradition, and was strictly enforced. Violations of these codes of conduct were met with harsh punishments, up to and including public executions for things as trivial as theft or adultery. In fact, if one traces the roots of criminal law, there were only nine felony crimes under English common law: Murder, robbery, manslaughter, rape, sodomy, larceny, arson, mayhem and burglary.

All were punishable by death via public execution.

As an interesting side note, the term “common law” refers to the idea that prohibitions against things like murder didn’t need to be spelled out. Everyone, throughout the realm, knew that murder (for instance) was wrong. Therefore, it was common throughout the realm to prohibit murder. That note aside, governance and control of behavior in the early Middle Ages in England was, much like Afghanistan today, dictated by an honor-code system. For a case on point, small English settlements were often referred to as shires. Each shire would have a handful of families living within it. Each family was liable for the behavior of every other member of their family. If your uncle stole something, you, as a nephew or niece, were responsible for that theft just as much as if you had stolen something yourself. Thus, every interaction you had with your neighbor implicated the family honor. If your uncle was caught stealing, the code demanded the family preserve their honor by harshly and publicly punishing their own kin.

Carrying this socio-behavioral regulation methodology further out, each shire would elect a shire member to be a representative for everyone in the shire. This person was called the Reeve and they were sent to mediate disputes between the shires and to coordinate trade rules and other matters. The Reeve was also responsible for mediating disputes within the shire and could compel punishments for violations of the honor code, as well as make determinations of whether or not honor had been satisfied. In this regard, these Shire Reeves were empowered to be part legal representative and spokesperson, part police officer, and part judge. If you trace it out a bit, this early English power structure and authority still exists in the United States to this day. In fact, we still call them Shire Reeves, though a few hundred years have truncated the term to Sheriff.

The Shire Reeve was a noteworthy advancement in early English society. Within that structure we start to see the beginnings of representative government. It also marks a milestone for the softening of the highly punitive and strict behavioral controls that preceded the Shire Reeves. The broad argument here being, if you give the Afghans enough time, they’ll probably come up with something similar, if they haven’t already. Nevertheless, as these English honor systems refined and ossified, they gave rise to the incredibly complex honor system still in use by the English nobility today. Title and rank being bestowed for great acts, sacrifices, bravery, and so on. The Magna Carta itself was another milestone achievement, as with its introduction we can see the first formal steps to codifying a set of principles intended to check and prevent the abuses by local warlords that are readily observable in modern day Afghanistan.

Ultimately, the formation of these systems, diverse by hundreds of years, reveal striking parallels. Like Afghanistan today, the early English system of governance formed in much the same way and with the same core outcomes. Reflect for a moment that, in early England, governance and behavioral regulation was achieved via:

1. Strict behavioral edicts enforced through violence,
2. The imposition of strict religious code adherence; and
3. By prevailing upon and exulting honor codes to better regulate interactions between previously warring factions.

It is important to note here, however, that when discussing power structures such as the one in its infancy in Afghanistan, and the much more developed version in the United States, the foundation of both resides in behavioral edicts enforced through punitive violence and expectations of code-based honorable conduct. Oddly enough, there is another strikingly similar, and parallel, power structure that exists in the United States. It arose within the US prison system. As author David Skarbek lays out in great detail in his book, The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System, the prison population expanded dramatically during the 1970s. Prior to that expansion, prison social dynamics were loosely governed by an honor system known as the convict code. Strict adherence to the code provided a quantifiable measure of honorable conduct. The reputation gained by adherence to this code was valuable to the holder. Their honorable reputation was the yardstick by which they would be measured when they found themselves housed in a new, or unfamiliar prison. However, once prison populations exceeded the convicts’ ability to rely on honorable reputations to maintain order, mass violence and chaos ensued. In response to this violence and chaos, prison gangs began coalescing around local leaders. These leaders, much like their ancient counterparts in England, and their contemporary counterparts in Afghanistan today, are all particularly effective at both violence and persuasion. Once these prisoners coalesced around selected leadership, they enacted forms of governance not dissimilar to the ones seen in medieval English shires.

Much like the families of the shire, each gang is responsible for the conduct of all other gang members. If a member cheats or steals from a rival gang, the expectation of the rival gang is that the offender will be held to account by his own gang members. Depending on the severity of the honor violation, gang leadership may impose punishments that range from forcing an apology, to beating their own misbehaving member, all the way through to killing them. In this way, the gangs, by agreement, use the collective honor of the gang to enforce social norms and prevent wide-scale violence and chaos. If the other gangs’ honor is not satisfied, then violence between the groups may erupt. Thus the honor code among the groups is highly prized and earnestly defended. I point this all out here because it demonstrates that, among these disparate groups, a very similar pattern emerges.

Authoritative rule-making power, in all these cases, is granted after leaders emerge that seek to reign in widespread chaos and disorder. Because the chaos and disorder is so great, in all these cases, it requires harsh means and strict edicts to control it. In-group favoritism helps cement the loyalty of lesser members of the leadership group. But this also makes that leadership tenuous and difficult to manage, as missteps may have fatal consequences. Thus, abuses by lower level leaders may be difficult or impossible to reign in, unless they are egregious. In an effort to combat this problem, all of these structures exalt and foment honor codes. They demand honorable conduct of both the group and the individual. To ensure honorable conduct is adhered to, these honor systems all require in-group self-policing and appeals to out-group consensus on the sufficiency of honor satisfaction.

However, when it comes to achieving and wielding leadership roles in these disparate settings, what we see is not simply a matter of using violence. Subservience to the power structure is achieved through deference to leadership that arises in response to chaos and unchecked violence. Requisite to this idea, though, is the need for collaboration, compromise, all while ensuring incentive alignment among the in-group members, and treaty-like conditions with out- or oppositional group members. Strong leaders do not simply appear, beat the others down and then lord over them. Rather, they are highly effective at achieving consensus among brutes. This is no small task. The reasons hierarchical authoritative rule-making leadership becomes recognized are certainly buttressed by the capacity for those leaders to wield violence. But that is not the foundation of their authority. Wisdom, political savvy, risk management, and competency all play a crucial role. Maintaining the position requires even more finesse and it rarely lasts.

Given these constraints, it is no surprise the institutions that evolve from these lines of authoritative leadership can take decades or even centuries to develop. Such is the case with the English through the Middle- to High-Middle Ages. That system of authoritative rule-making — replete with courts, judges, parliamentary rule, representative participation, and written law — was entirely derived and refined from the rather brutish conditions outlined above. Likewise, how those systems are administered and maintained today reveal their very clear lineage to strict behavioral edicts enforced by violence and appeals to code-based honor adherence. Nevertheless, it is important to stress the fact that the origins of authoritative leadership were achieved through rough consensus and cooperation. They were most certainly not created solely through the use of coercion or coercive force. Moreover, in all the cases described above, those lines of authoritative leadership were reactionary responses to chaos and disorder. Which is to further say, they did not necessarily evolve from base impulses to seize power. In fact, it is rather the case that leadership and rule-making authority emerges in response to extortive and chaotic seizures of power. Once in power, these rule-makers often come to realize their position is tenuous and entails great personal risk.

Understanding this as we do now, it is appropriate to trace back to the start of the discussion. Recall, local leadership begins with verifiable close familial connections. Those groups then tend to impose their will upon the local populace through violence and extortion. Conflict between similarly situated neighbor groups eventually declines into chaos and disorder. In response, these groups coalesce into a rough governing body, usually with the assistance of recognized religious leadership. From there, authoritative rule-making leadership gradually expands outwards to more distant groups that roughly share language and religious traditions. At some point, however, that expansion runs into a language or religious diversity that is hostile or resistant to incorporation. It is roughly at that boundary line of religious and language divergence that one groups’ authoritative rule-making leadership ends and another groups’ authoritative rule-making leadership begins. What the Treaty of Westphalia did was to draw those lines on a map and say that, once and for all, everyone behind one line belonged to one group, while everyone on the other side of the line belonged to another.

Thus, the modern nation was born.

I hope it obvious that much history has been skimmed here. A definitive description of the historical record laid out above would require volumes. The effort thus far is not to ensure historical fidelity. It is rather to sum the core historical underpinnings of the modern power hierarchy, especially as it applies to the west broadly, and the United States specifically. More importantly, it is to point out that the power structure we live in today was born of very practical considerations. When discussing strength as a prelude to achieving or maintaining political power in the western world, the takeaway is that rule-making leadership tends to arise in response to chaos and disorder. But that chaos and disorder usually originates from the unchecked use of semi- to formally organized violence by an in-group for that in-groups’ benefit.

Perhaps counterintuitively then, often it is these same groups that end up creating a power structure with rule-making authority. Which leads to the conclusion that sustained chaos and disorder is simply an intolerable condition, even among those who create and exploit that chaos to begin with. To trace the process out a bit, in a power vacuum, the short-term incentive is to gang-up and competitively seize as many resources as possible. That short-term resource competition leads to increasingly negative and costly outcomes. This then paves the way for cooperation and coordination under a unified ruleset. Within a unified ruleset, rudimentary institutions such as dispute resolution, collective defense, and representative bodies are given latitude to form. These institutions gradually codify hierarchical roles in the new power structure. Over time, those institutions grow in complexity and sophistication. Through this growth, the power structure naturally becomes increasingly bureaucratic and leviathan. If the power structure is adaptable, it tends to survive for extended periods. If not, the power structure collapses and the process begins anew.

The point being, when discussing the creation of state power or state authority, what we find is the process is not simply born of brute force. It is rather a response to brute force that requires some level of cooperative engagement between competing factions. Whether that cooperation proves sustainable tends to vary widely, and is often dependent upon the wisdom and foresight of the brutes that decided to work together in the first place. Since brutes often lack wisdom and foresight, successful implementations tend to favor power structures that interweave religious doctrine as a cornerstone for their rulesets. Moreover, a divine purpose, and indeed, a divine blessing can serve as a useful motivator to achieve broader consensus among the governed. A religious foundation also serves to limit or remove perceptions of self-motivation among those seeking to solidify or increase their rule-making and rule-enforcing authority. But at its core, deference to authoritative rule-making is almost exclusively granted because the rule-makers are providing relief from chaos and disorder.

Meaning, for the purposes of the discussion at hand, and only broadly speaking, political strength is often first achieved by bringing order to chaos.

With that said, I hope it obvious that political power dynamics are not that simplistic. The aim here is to establish a very generalized baseline for where concepts of authoritative rule-making and deference to that action likely emerge. Among all living beings, a very clear through-line is the quest to reduce or mitigate entropic forces. Biological systems, by their very nature, are continually seeking homeostasis. Biological entropy is death. Thus, it is a natural point of origin for hierarchically cooperative species, such as humans, to elevate group members that are most effective at reducing perceived or actual chaos. Whether it is an office worker that “takes charge” in an emergency, a fireman at the scene of an accident, or indeed, a local gang-leader holding a peace summit, people naturally gravitate towards those that most effectively keep chaos at bay. Thus, while political strength may shift and turn, at its core, respect for that strength is principally reliant upon the perceived or actual ability to achieve, or maintain order.

Control

As we learned in the last chapter, a governed population will readily defer to actual or perceived strength when confronted with sustained chaos and disorder. That the chaos and disorder was often brought about by the very same (or closely related) people that end up stopping the chaos and disorder is rarely questioned. To quote Littlefinger from Game of Thrones, “Chaos is a ladder.” Once chaos and disorder are set in motion, relief from those forces is a powerful and soothing tonic. This, however, has a number of implications for achieving political strength in a given nation. In a legitimate power vacuum, like one might find in a failed state, when a group arises that brings order to chaos, the strength is usually self-evident, locally sourced, and generally well-tolerated — if not outright embraced. However, as the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has figured out through the years, you don’t always have to wait for chaos to emerge. Sometimes you can just go and create some chaos of your own. Then, if you’re really clever, you can shape internal power structures to better suit your needs or desires. Oftentimes, and under those external conditions, the need for that strength display will be less self-evident. Creating conditions to reinforce the “need” for intervention will also require more convincing, such as through propaganda campaigns, to get the point across. Regardless, whether your demonstration of strength was in response to internally created chaos and disorder, or if the chaos and disorder was externally manifested, it is the perceived or actual ability to bring order that generally grants you authority to make rules.

Once you have rules in place, then your next step is to figure out how to enforce them. One of the reasons western societies tend to gravitate towards honor systems is they offer an easy conduit for self-imposed behavioral regulation. When your reputation is exulted and given high status then protecting that reputation becomes very important. This is as true for inmates in US prison gangs today as it was for medieval soldiers in an English kings’ army. This begs the question though, “where does this highly prized sense of honor come from?” The short answer is: fairness. The trickier part of that answer revolves around whether or not expectations of fairness arise from competition, or through cooperation. This traces back to the discussion about money. Recall, most trade between trusted parties is based on cooperation and mutual benefit. For an easy illustration of this process unfolding in chaotic situations, just imagine if you and your best friend were stranded in the Canadian wilderness during the winter.

If your friend is adept at making bows and arrows and you are adept at making clothes, it is beneficial for each of you to supply the other. Obviously, if you have a bow and arrow and your friend is not freezing to death, the likelihood of you both surviving goes up. This is the essence of group cooperation among humans at the survival threshold. Similar behavior is readily apparent among wild dogs, wolves, lions, other primates, herd animals, etc. Cooperation is a cornerstone of pack animal survival. Yes, individually, they may squabble about things from time to time. Often those squabbles revolve around issues of fairness, like what might unfold if someone snatches fruit out of your hand. But at the group level what we find in these dynamics is cooperation generally trumps individual desires. The group acts in concert to acquire resources, such as food, and bands together for protection. General cooperation is the through-line. Pack leaders guide the gathering of resources and expend a fair amount of effort to ensure that the weaker members, such as the elderly and the young, are provided for. Group members that egregiously violate the “rules” of fairness are often ostracized, or put in check by the pack leadership.

Where this starts to go wrong is when competition is introduced. While it is a common assertion that warfare among humans is a natural condition for mankind, this is not necessarily true. As Dr. Sapolsky points out, among pure hunter-gatherer tribes, wide-scale conflict, such as warfare, is a rare occurrence. An example he gives is of a group hunting in a particular location. If they come across another group hunting in the same area, they wouldn’t fight over who got to hunt. They’d simply go somewhere else. One of the few archeologically documented instances of wide-scale conflict among “pure” hunter-gatherer groups was in a location that had abundant fish and wildlife. What seems to have occurred was a group set-up shop and then tried to exclude others from fishing there. Or in the alternative, another group simply decided to muscle in and kick the first group out. Meaning, once competition is introduced through exclusion or attempted exclusion from a shared resource, group fighting becomes more likely. The larger trouble is the historical record is spotty at best. Warfare may well be a natural impulse to humans. However, what we can glean from the spotty historical record rather supports the idea that, prior to the adoption of agriculture and animal husbandry, nomadic hunter-gatherers tended to be relatively cooperative and peaceful. This is not to say they existed without violence at all. It is rather to say that organized campaigns of violence like what the European, or the Middle-Eastern and Eastern dynasties routinely engaged in, tended to be rare.

As alluded to above, it seems that once agriculture and animal husbandry became a regular thing, organized campaigns of violence followed. This makes intuitive sense, especially when considering the otherwise cooperative nature of the human species when living at the survival threshold. Again, what is implicated traces back to the idea of fairness. Who should benefit from the work of raising and harvesting a crop when the yield of the crop far exceeds your ability to consume it? Likewise, if I am hungry, but you’ve captured all the goats, what gives you the right to keep all the goats from me? Meaning, where it all goes a bit askew is when resources are gathered in mass, like from a harvest, or with herds of domesticated animals. Whether by ingenuity or by force, once the notion of “haves” and “have-nots” sets in, it gets tricky to figure out what is fair. It gets even trickier when a bunch of strongmen come around and lay claim to all the land and everything on it. As roughed out in the previous chapter, what this type of competition for resources eventually devolves into is chaos. The thing with farming or raising animals is those actions also require some level of cooperation, depending on the crop or the animal. This is evidenced by the philosophies and the gods that emerge from those societies. For instance, growing rice requires significant labor input. To successfully feed people with rice requires all hands be on deck. By contrast, growing wheat, which is a grass, requires very little labor by comparison. Likewise, shepherds can corral a great number of animals by leveraging and manipulating herd animal behavior. However, if fish are your primary animal protein source, it again requires cooperation and group effort to harvest a large number of fish.

Thus, what we find are societies that grew around rice and fishing, like those found in the East, tended to create philosophies and gods that oriented around collectivism. Meanwhile, societies that grew around wheat and herd animals tended to create philosophies and gods that oriented around individualism. Tracing back further, societies that grew around hunting and gathering tended to create philosophies and gods that oriented around natural forces. Of course, bits and bobs of each find their way into all of them. But generally speaking, the major through-lines are self-evident in the major religious doctrines of each: the duality and balance of Taoism and Buddhism in the East; the righteousness and vengeance of Islam and Christianity in the Middle-East (and eventually into the West); and the anthropomorphization of animal and weather spirits among the hunter-gatherers.

What is noteworthy here is that notions of honor are prevalent throughout these divergent systems. How that honor is expressed and reified, however, can be markedly different. If you are a member of a society that relies on wide-scale collective effort to ensure everyone is fed, then honor will naturally coalesce around actions that are beneficial to the group effort. By contrast, if you are a member of a society that relies on individual effort, then honor will naturally coalesce around actions that are beneficial to each individual’s effort. Turned to the negative and boiled down to a simplistic frame, if you bonk someone on the head and steal their rice, it is an affront against the effort of the group. Yes, that theft affects the individual also. But if that is allowed to happen often enough, you will eventually lose the labor of the victim, which negatively impacts all. By contrast, if you bonk someone on the head and steal their goat, it is an affront against the effort of the person tending the goat. In that case, the goat only changes ownership. But any larger group associated with the shepherd remains in the same position relative to the goat pre- and post-theft.

The group didn’t put any labor or effort into the goat to begin with, only the shepherd did. Meaning, unlike the rice farmers, they had no claim on the goat regardless of the current owner. Group censure and ostracization are natural and predictable responses in the first instance of collective affront. Vengeance and retribution are natural and predictable responses in the second individual affront. For a modern analogy, imagine you are on a baseball team and you discover one of your teammates is cheating while betting against the team. How do you imagine the team will respond? Change the scenario a bit and imagine instead that you are a boxer and you discover your opponent was cheating by loading his gloves with metal. How would you respond then? In the first instance, it can be reasonably anticipated that — absent a governing body — the team would shun or remove the offending member. In the second instance, it can be reasonably anticipated that — again, absent a governing body — your next match would likely find you sporting some metal (or worse) of your own.

Thus, it is unsurprising that honorable conduct in the East is generally predicated upon doing actions that do not dishonor the collective or the group. In the West, by contrast, honorable conduct is generally predicated upon doing actions that do not dishonor yourself or another individual. This is not to say that honor exclusively orients between the collective and the individual in these spheres. It is rather to delineate the relative weighting of incentives within each respective backdrop. Expanding the collectivist versus individualist orientation outward a bit, it has been argued that military advances on the European continent were not simply a product of military competition. Instead, as the theory goes, it was specifically tournament-style competition among individual states that led to rapid advancements in military tactics. By contrast, the dynasties of the East, such as in Japan and China, enjoyed similar technological instruments, like siege weapons and firearms, as the European counterparts. But it was the lack of tournament-style military competition that caused those empires to lose ground to European tactics. What prevented tournament-style competition in the East? Unification of competing interests into singular territories — Japan and China respectively. On the European continent it was quite the opposite, as was demonstrated earlier with the Treaty of Westphalia. What we see with that document is the codification of individual sovereign rule over specific territories, rather than combining into a singular European nation like the Chinese and Japanese did.

Recall the earlier question of where a sense of honor originates. The supplied answer was fairness. The caveat to that answer was whether notions of fairness are rooted in competition or cooperation. Christianity in particular traces its philosophical origins to the agricultural and nomadic shepherding practices of the Levant. Wheat was a staple crop in that region. Likewise, animal husbandry in the Levant primarily revolved around herding sheep and goats. As noted above, these practices tend to favor individual or small group effort. A hopefully obvious corollary to this is, an individual or small group is more vulnerable to robbery. One good bonk on the head and a thief can make off with all your goats. Once bonked and stolen from, a natural impulse is to try to find the assailant and retrieve the ill-gotten herd. If you find them and they don’t want to give the goats back, then you’ll probably have a fight on your hands. But what if you get it wrong? What if the person you find has a herd that looks like your goats, but they aren’t? What happens if you bonk him on the head and take his goats by mistake?

Well, he’ll probably come looking for you as well.

Take it a step further. What if you really do find the guy that stole your goats, but when you try to get them back, he bonks you on the head again. What if he’s so good at bonking you on the head that you physically can’t take your goats back? Are they his goats now? Now that you’re competing for ownership of the goats, what rules govern in the absence of rulers? This is the essence of where honor systems based on competition for resources are created. With a little imagination, it is not difficult to trace out how these competitive honor systems develop into notions of fighting fair, taking an eye for an eye, or not preying upon the weak. One of the big problems that arises from competition, however, is that competition itself has been shown to lead to unethical behavior, especially among the winners. Coupled with the incentives for competitors to test the limits and push the boundaries of rules, it’s not hard to see how competition for resources can quickly develop into a system of “might makes right” with only the thinnest of justifications. Thus, if you find yourself at the top of a dominance hierarchy, in control of vast resources, and are now ethically compromised from the effort, it kind of makes sense when you become a despot.

Moreover, it makes it very easy to take the next logical leap, which is that you arrived at the top of this dominance hierarchy because of your superiority in competition for scarce resources. That the resources were scarce because of the type of crops your ancestors grew, the animals they chose to domesticate, and the people that tried to control them is immaterial. This is especially true if you are many generations removed from your hunter-gatherer ancestors. The idea that food and other resources are scarce can begin to seem very natural when your food and other resources are concentrated and the means of production is “owned.” Meaning, this scarcity mindset is magnified when the only visible source of those resources are being piled up in someone’s barn and you can’t get to it. Mind you, resources can also be scarce due to poor weather, bad yields, or disease. But once someone starts laying claim to parcels of land — or indeed people — the scarcity is more often than not going to be driven by theft or capture, and subsequent mismanagement of those resources. As alluded to above, the larger problem being, all of this is easily mistaken for the “natural order” of things. One only need look at a wolf tearing at a deer to presume that violent competition for life sustaining resources is the way of nature. What it fails to account for is the larger biological system, which is actually trending towards homeostasis when that wolf consumes that deer.

None of this is to say that animal husbandry and farming are the cause of all woe. Indeed, a few hundred years of rapidly expanding human populations very clearly demonstrates that both have led to enormous advancements for humans to thrive as a species. Moreover, if 8 billion people were to suddenly try and hunt and gather their way to sustenance, the planet would be stripped bare in a matter of months. Agriculture is essential for continued human existence at the scale of the current global population. The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate that the Euro-Christian philosophical worldview that underpins the current global economic order is built on very problematic foundations.

Authority

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Force

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