Power is the ability to exude force upon your environment. We are all participants of power struggles. Souls set out to navigate the complex webs of influence that permeate various aspects of our lives as we pursue our own claims to power. The power to command, the power to travel, the power to produce, the power to devour. Power is attractive and therefore addictive. Power is born out of a desire to create. An inclination to evoke what is thought of always as a positive change. To construct some ideal of a future that exists only as a concept before action. To balance itself, power manifests itself also in the reverse direction. An inclination to turn, alter, or stop a force that’s seen as oppressive. Both forms of power pursuit, the advocate and dissonant are united by their aspirations of some form of action; generative or destructive acceleratory or inhibiting. Each is dependent on action. Action to grow influence and exude change or the action necessary to resist that force for change. Action is power expressing itself.
Hierarchical structures are the scaffolding that guides the direction of where power is wielded, resources allocated, and measures enacted in pursuit of power’s goal: action. Hierarchies are formed using the operator of power: coercion. Regimes of any kind are the products of the evolutionary interplay between atomized units working to express power and autonomy through compulsion tools exerted on neighbors.
Means of coercion may branch into a wide variety of apparent diversity, but all serve the same end: to entice another to relinquish autonomy in favor of the pursuit of your goal. Forms of coercion can be explicit or implicit but fall under one of two categories similar to power: either additive or subtractive actions. Coercive measures either threaten to harm or promise to make stronger whether in a physical, psychological, intellectual, social, or spiritual context. The most powerful forms of persuasive subjugation are those deemed mutually beneficial or symbiotic.
Violence, a might is right ideology gave birth to early statecraft in the form of militocracies and is perhaps the oldest and most recognizable form of coercion. Exemplified by famous statesmen such as Mao Zedong’s ‘Power grows out of the barrel of a gun’ of the CCP. Violence can be exercised or withheld against an individual or that individual’s enemies. In Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992, Charles Tilly argues that the modern state emerged through a process of war-making and state-making. He famously summarized this process with the phrase, "War made the state, and the state made war." He posited that the necessity to wage war led rulers to develop efficient forms of administration and taxation, which in turn solidified their control over territories and populations, eventually leading to the formation of centralized states. As states evolve, the threat of exclusion from the economic and relational means necessary to feed oneself, ideological appeals to divinity or rationality, bribery, and a seemingly infinite list of other means of coercion serve as tools to solidify and codify power.
Power is sovereignty, to be sovereign is to be unaccountable. King is King and Pharaoh Pharaoh because they are beyond reproach and reinforced by the hierarchical structure of the managerial staff necessary to wield the effective tools of coercion to maintain that unaccountability. Rules for thee and not for me is the credo by which all power truly measures itself. The mechanisms of coercion such as an army, treasury, and domestic police force are merely the actuators that need to be paid for and how power self-sustains. There is no such thing nor has there ever been a ruling class that has appealed genuinely to consistent, understandable governing policy for the masses. For it is the court from which the power of the kingdom is codified and therefore held accountable. Should the peasantry subjected to the strong arm of the court be made strong enough to demand accountability from of the ruling class what follows is a revolution and the installment of a new (often the same type of) ruling class.
Democracies’ elites (power holders) are not better people per se than those who sit up top the throne of an imperial dictatorship, but rather because of their thirst for ever more resources in the form of productive wealth and power are more closely aligned with the desires of the citizenship class. With a more educated, better-fed, and well-housed citizenship, those citizens can generate a much larger pie from which to generate wealth in the form of taxation. Dictatorships essentially rely on natural resources extracted by a peasantry forced to relinquish the mined resources at the coercive threat of violence. The more the wealth of a society is dependent on the productivity of its population the less susceptible that democracy is to instability and typically the more accountable the power-wielding class is. Thus are the implicit Rules for Rulers.
James Burnham, a Trotskyist activist in the 1930 turned regular contributor to William F. Buckley's conservative magazine National Review after a trip to the Kremin summarized why so often in democracies there is a shift towards groupthink and oppressive tactics of a ruling class. In The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom Burnham draws on Machiavelli to highlight the pragmatic and often ruthless nature of political leadership and statecraft. He emphasizes the importance of understanding the real motivations behind political actions: power.
Despite the seemingly cynical view of politics, Burnham contends that understanding these mechanisms of power can help defend and preserve freedom. By recognizing the reality of elite rule, citizens can develop more effective means of limiting and balancing power. He draws on Georges Sorel’s concept of the power of myth in political movements as a means of uniting people into serving power through action. Burnham sees myths as necessary for motivating the masses and achieving political goals, albeit within a framework of understanding their manipulative nature. Ironically, Sorel did end up joining Mussolini's Fascist Party, as he believed that this was the next legitimate step of modern societies.
The work also draws heavily on the three members constituting the Italian school of elitism who were able to formalize the implicit dynamics that allow for hierarchy in sociopolitical structures: Gaetano Mosca's Political Class theory posits that a structured minority always rules over the unstructured majority. Vilfredo Pareto’s Circulation of Elites suggests that societal stability is maintained through the continual replacement of old elites with new ones. Finally, Robert Michels' Iron Law of Oligarchy posits that all organizations, regardless of their democratic ideals, inevitably develop oligarchic structures. The "iron law of oligarchy" states that all forms of organization, regardless of how democratic they may be at the start, will eventually and inevitably develop oligarchic tendencies, thus making true democracy practically and theoretically impossible, especially in large groups and complex organizations. The relative structural fluidity in a small-scale democracy succumbs to "social viscosity" in a large-scale organization. According to the "iron law", democracy and large-scale organization are incompatible over an indefinite timeline.
By controlling who has access to information, and disguising accountability through the smokescreen of supposed Montesquieuian separation of powers, those who rule can centralize power successfully, often with little accountability, due to the apathy, indifference, and non-participation most rank-and-file members have with their organization's decision-making processes.
A brief explanation of the cathedral written by Curtis Yarvin on his Gray Mirror. Mencius Moldbug, writing in a way only a guy who doesn’t have a boss can, walks his reader through a gedanken experiment involving two dysfunctional dystopian states one dictatorial and the other oligopolisticly democratic. I highly recommend reading it for yourself, but the punchline behind the downfall of the hypothetical bureaucratic democracy of Mutopia stems from its market place of ideas being selected for only action:
In a bureaucracy, decisions at every level are not taken by individuals; they are taken by processes. In the lecture halls and newsrooms of Mutopia, there is a market for dominant ideas. A dominant idea is an idea that validates the use of power. And there is no market for recessive ideas. A recessive idea is an idea that invalidates power or its use.
Submission is always beautiful. In this lovely act of dominion and homage, we see a power exchange: serving power makes you feel powerful. In serving, you rule. As the regime acts, you feel yourself act through it. Your vanity is stroked. You matter. For a moment you feel like anything but what you are: which is a suka.
Power leakage as Yarvin describes it is the process of conferring sovereign power on an individual or institution not formally entrusted with it through the consent of the governed. With an ever more complex web of unaccountability an oligarchy inherently converges on ideas that justify the use of power. This leads to the understanding that corruption is a tool of power, more akin to a feature of the system with buggish consequences of a functioning hierarchical structure. The cure for this is only accountability through transparency. Exposing power for what it is. Exposing action and policy that seem contradictory and idiotic to outsiders who are ignorant to the nature of the machiavellian struggle for power but make perfect sense to those in The Inner Ring.
Action will always outperform and beat down inaction if held unaccountable. Even biblically the eventual Plutocracy or other power-thirsty and action-hungry form of governance is referenced for the imperfect man to consider. Matthew effect is based upon the Parable of the Talents taken from Matthew 25:14–30.
For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. Matthew 25:29
A biblical understanding of the platitude "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” Measures that increase the productivity of the average citizen within a society is a feature that allows for greater wealth to be extracted from them in order for the ruling class to remain in power. Understanding that unchecked or unaccountable democratic, bureaucratic, autocratic or any system built on surreptitious exploitation is just slavery with extra steps.
Sinister and duplicitous
The utterly egocentric sociopath knows only atavistic instinct
Tautologies devoid of meaning but captivating in delivery
Better a well-fed slave than a starving free man.