The Power Trap: A common-sense look at power and natural authority

(Part II)

The face of humanity’s most powerful nation (left image from CNN, right from Evan Vucci / AP Photo)

The use of coercion is the sign of a lack of authority. – John T. Sanders

[The state is the] only human Gemeinschaft which lays claim to the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force – Max Weber

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. – John F. Kennedy

Power is, in part, the actionable potential to forestall correction. – Me

Preamble

Our planet’s most powerful nation has been able to pull the wool over its own, and much of the Western world’s eyes for so long (one of many risks that come with propaganda), Biden’s performance in 2024’s first presidential debate ‘shocked’ US legacy media outlets; at the time of writing they are in protracted meltdown, as is the Democratic party itself. For those to whom it has been clear for years that Biden has been suffering severe cognitive decline, the fact of US-legacy-media publicised shock is itself a shock (or at least a surprising oddity). From still another perspective, this inter-folded shock demonstrates how the power to forestall correction – the power to sustain self- and group-deception – must unravel at some point; reality bats last. 

At the level of the individual bully, fallout from correction to his/her precious alpha status can be bad. At the level of a mighty colonial nation enjoying (almost) monopoly power over geopolitical realities for decades – and in terms of Western civilisation, for centuries –, the fallout from correction is historic, epochal, maybe even Biblical. I believe we are living through such a moment, and have been arguing this for the last two years or so, far longer with a more generalised perspective on potential global change. And while I have erred in timing details – put that down to my idealistic wishful thinking – I’m confident I’m right about the broader trend, on which I am far from alone.

Is this merely part of a cyclical process that is historical in a fundamental way? If yes, can we learn from it and improve society despite this cyclicality, such that a manner of spiralling or ‘progress’ is effected? If not, would a nihilistic or even satanic mindset – it’s all just a game; do whatever you want! – be a more rational response?

(In what follows, I cast “power” as Bad, “natural authority” as Good. Others cast “authority” in the bad role, as in authoritarianism. This is semantics. What matters is the effectiveness of the definitions in terms of how they are then developed and what light that development throws on the whole.)

Introduction

Assertion: A state requires (almost) monopoly power to act as the state. Without (almost) monopoly power, the state cannot survive across generational time. However, the power required by a state to act effectively as a state inexorably corrupts that state towards collapse.

In theory, state power comes from the people. Those who actually wield and jealously guard state power, however, represent a tiny percentage of said people. Should all available power be distributed evenly across all individuals of a people, that people could not constitute a state; states are hierarchical. And while an individual of John F. Kennedy’s sensibilities can indeed become president and seek to expose how power corrupts and relinquish much state power to the people, look what happened to him. Moreover, the right to bear arms in the US, enshrined in its constitution precisely to mitigate the state’s power, is not truly effective in that purpose. The US state is, in my view, a de facto monopoly on power because, despite several constitutional provisions designed to constrain it, it has had to become far more than merely “Government of the people, by the people, for the people” to remain cohesive and effective. Today, the (US) state is: 

corporate-governmental interconnectivity and thus mass media and attendant propaganda/PR operations, 

• ‘elite’ control of money creation and financial institutions and corporations, 
• intelligence agencies and the infamous MIC, 
• the education/university establishment, 
• colonial interests and investments, 
• etc.,

which amounts to a partly fractious but sufficiently cohesive whole whose establishment was possible precisely because the US state had sufficient power to establish it. Armed citizens cannot properly constrain that breadth and depth of interconnected power – much of which is insidious, all of which is ferociously defended – at least not to the degree that that power is prevented from corrupting everything it touches, by degrees, mostly unnoticed, over time. I’m arguing that power – as defined herein – is the systemic ‘heat’ that slowly absorbs power from the people. No one notices clearly enough as corruption stealthily, cumulatively, and in part unintentionally, perverts what the people most cherishes. 

This pattern of creeping perversion is discernible in a concomitant and slow erosion of quality across multiple spectra (e.g. “crapification”):

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative[s] who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions. – Source (my emphases) (I would add that all organisations have a bureaucratic facet.)

As I put it in a recent post, “Mediocrity metastasises in the absence of meaningful corrective feedback.” In my view, Pournelle’s law reflects power’s core dynamic, a dynamic that ensures both the establishment and subsequent corruption of an unaccountable/unelected permanent state within the broader state, which then corrupts the host nation as a whole. This dynamic is a predictable – because systemic – consequence of the mechanics of self-preservation (fear), where “self” in this case is a very large group.

• To be permanent – to preserve itself across time –, a permanent state needs ever more power to: 
• conceal its inevitable wrongdoings, 
• demonstrably prevent accidents and tragedies to prove its utility, 
• command respect from those it instructs and so maintain national stability/cohesion, 
• castrate or destroy inevitable radical opposition (more below), 
• etc. 

In essence, these and other factors keep the state functional, alive, effective. Self-evidently, the state fears that any erosion of its power – its lifeblood, its effectiveness – would be the beginning of a slippery slope to its eventual demise. And though this instinct may initially be rational or proportionate to the systemic pressures generated by a large hierarchical society, it can become paranoia, especially as the state’s propaganda, censorship and narrative-control actions boomerang on it and blind it to reality (power as ivory tower). What happens, I sense, is that a kind of negative wisdom – instincts, skills, dark arts and statecraft, knowledge – develops that ensures the accumulation of the vast amounts of power needed to keep the state project going.

That a permanent state must emerge for a state to remain successfully effective over generational time is surely non-controversial; this is, after all, what “permanent state” means, and explains why a people would compose a constitution precisely to prevent abuse of accumulated power. It is similarly clear (at least to me) that a civilisation’s or state’s instinctive conception of power – apparently encoded in its ‘DNA’ as a consequence of its hierarchical structure – necessitates this corrupting patterning. (See Graeber and Sahlin’s On Kings for the deep history – you could even say basic group psychology – behind all this. See also Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy to get a clear sense of the inevitability of bureaucracy and how it interconnects with power.)

I do not hold that any of this is inherently good or bad in an unequivocal way. It could be, for example, that humanity cannot do significantly ‘better’ than the US constitution. It may well be that civilisational ascent and decay will continue to describe the fate of all forms of governance (more on cyclicality below). Obviously, the survival of the United States of America as a representative democracy cannot be guaranteed simply because it has a well composed constitution; moral decline towards tyranny will surely remain possible regardless of any constitution humanity can produce. It is similarly possible that other governance forms, e.g. that in China or in Russia or in Thailand, are ‘superior’ to Western models, though deciding how to weight the relative merits of each form can only be a subjective process: Gross Domestic Product, or Purchasing Power Parity, or Gross National Happiness, or some other measure?

Furthermore, technological, historical and paradigmatic change cumulatively present challenges to human governance systems that are, from time to time, epochal. That this is such a time is the position I examine at this blog. To reiterate the components of this thesis: 

• the soullessness of consumerism, 
• the impossibility of infinite economic growth on a finite planet, 
• the fact that any compound-interest-based money system requires permanent economic growth, 
• the advance of automation and robotics, 
• the terrible costs of “crapification” (including of food), 
• the fundamental dysfunction of profit-seeking ‘health’ systems, 

among many other factors, jointly apply enormous pressure on existing governance structures, such that radical change will be forced upon us whether we like it or not. In my view, these phenomena constitute the deep backstory for today’s epochal historical turbulence. I also believe that materialism is on its last legs.

Whatever the case, this last point is why I write in the first place: 

Wisdom, love and health should be systemically prioritised across the Western world. 

Should mindful and conscious promotion of this trinity (wisdom, love, health) to a prominent position in Western culture require radical change, I’m fine with that. If not, that would be even better. 

This article is attempt to shed slightly different light on this pivotal subject matter.

Signs of the times 

The recent Biden-Trump debate is exemplary evidence of this article’s opening assertion. 

The DNC, a political organisation tightly allied with most Western media outlets, gaslighted the Western world for almost four years by insisting, aggressively and relentlessly, that Biden was fit to be president. His nomination in 2016 was, allegedly, part of an effort to keep Bernie Sanders from becoming the nominee, and this despite concerns around Biden’s cognitive fitness explicitly raised by US legacy media and Democratic politicians at the time. Similar DNC manipulations – e.g. preventing any serious challenge to Biden, preventing debates between candidates, changing primary rules midstream to keep Robert F Kennedy out of the race – almost fused Biden to the 2024 nomination, and yet that abuse of democratic processes backfired; a strange ‘coup’ has just forced Biden from the race, perhaps illegitimately: How legally binding are tweets? Can we prove who issued them? And these actions may well be unconstitutional as well as illegitimate – is government by tweet constitutional?

(“In 2024, democracy is on the ballot.”)

Taking this and the attempted assassination of Trump into account, it is not unreasonable to assert a multifaceted coup is underway in the US, co-belligerents including but not limited to: the president’s political party, its major donors, and a US legacy media now so habituated to anonymous sources it may as well be an uncritical mouthpiece for the government.

Let all that sink in. When it sinks in, imagine what this is doing to the credibility of the United States of America.

These events are self-evidently the fruit of corruption, of a power struggle, which – I’m arguing – is itself the fruit of amassing excessive power in pursuit of self-preservation for its own sake, as opposed to fostering and celebrating natural authority (more below).

Acts of this sinister character could destroy the Democratic party, at least in its current form, and perhaps the United States itself through civil war. Massed power will not lightly relinquish its power, and self-destruction is virtually assured if you manage to forestall needed correction to your behaviours for too long. That much of the Republican party has played along with Democrat/establishment/permanent-state plotting and intriguing – though the recent assassination attempt on Trump, and Trump naming Vance as his vice-president for the 2024 presidential race have rallied the Republican party firmly to Trump’s more ‘populist’ – slightly less establishment – banner, and thus against what is termed the RINO (Republican in name only) faction – speaks volumes about an establishment cadre that has lost touch with reality. That Europe and the UK have also hitched their fortunes to this reckless insanity – a geopolitical posture on which the UK’s Prime Minister Kier Starmer recently doubled down when he vouched for Biden’s perspicacity and sharp political skills in mid July this year – speaks equal volumes about their wisdom and levels of corruption, and may well cost them dearly in coming years (depending on how events play out over the next incredibly dangerous 18-24 months). 

The assassination attempt on Trump is equally redolent of too much power in too few hands. As a conspiracy theorist, I’m prepared to accept the possibility that some conspiring by some people in power was involved in the attempt, people in power who deem Trump too unpredictable and vengeful to trust. As a conspiracy theorist, I am also prepared to accept that the corruption that attends monopoly power could suffice on its own to explain the astounding incompetence of the security services in securing the venue at which Trump gave his speech, though this is the less likely explanation in my view. At the moment, there is too little information to know for certain. Whatever the truth as to how and why this attempt took place, some manner of corruption, caused by an excess of power in too few hands, has again been on naked display for all the world to see.

The way Western legacy media reported the assassination attempt in its immediate aftermath is also evidence of power-based corruption. By downplaying its significance, they have further damaged their credibility in the public’s eyes. Had the attempt been on Biden, MSM reporting would have been very different. The pervasive anti-Trump bias is egregious, and is not journalism; it includes reckless assertions that Trump is an existential threat to America and democracy (in my view, J6 was clearly not an attempted insurrection), reckless because of how polarising and exaggerated such assertions are. Metastasising use of anonymous sources – narrative control by leaks to a compliant press – further destroys MSM credibility. The general rot is illustrated by BBC journalist David Aaronovitch, who tweeted that Biden should “murder” Donald Trump. If this was indeed satire as Aaronovitch claims, it would still not be commensurate with neutral journalism as I understand it; an attempt on Czech president Fico’s life occurred in a similarly polarised atmosphere just weeks ago, an ugly event of which Aaronovitch, a journalist, should have been properly aware.

We have a right to expect neutral reporting from all media outlets; partisan reporting polarises. I find it wholly inappropriate for journalists to announce their love of, or revulsion for, a president or politician, or any public figure. And there should be no hint of derision or support for viewers’ opinions and biases from any news-media outlet, no suggested tribal camaraderie, no virtue signalling, etc. Obviously, each of us is best able to form intelligent and well-informed views by being well informed. This requires neutral reporting, being widely read, and engaging in dispassionate discussion with others. I am deeply suspicious of all agenda-driven journalism that does not repeatedly disclose its biases and make attempts to mitigate them, that does not go out of its way to foster dispassionate discussion of all cogent and rational perspectives.

Consequently, journalistic decline lies behind another power-based and ugly sign of the times; people are at each other’s throats on matters like Biden and Trump, as well as many others such as vaccines, viruses, lockdowns, masks, etc. Partisan, agenda-driven reporting is culpable here, among other factors such as increasingly politicised education, and corporate vested interests. That dispassionate discussion of such issues is impossible to find speaks clearly to the quality of wisdom available culturally across the Western world, a quality of wisdom apparently willing to risk nuclear war, and with it humanity’s extinction, in ‘defence’ of Western hegemony, aka power. 

How easy it is to find dispassionate discussion on hot topics in the non-Western world is unclear to me. I suspect from my limited exposure that state-based, religion-based and monied power holds similar sway over public discourse, if not more, in the non-Western world. But its historical/national contexts are different. What is ugly about the West’s creeping propensity to censor and attack non-establishment views is its continued crowing about its enshrined freedoms as a moral accomplishment it continually references as justification for its policing of the non-Western world. To my knowledge, the non-Western world does not make similar claims to moral superiority as justification for interference in the affairs of other nations.

For the record, I am strongly in favour of freedom of speech; it ensures corrective feedback from others. In other words, your opportunities to correct towards healthier, wiser approaches to life are richer and more plentiful where freedom of expression is respected. Freedom of speech is how a people can speak truth to power, which is a dialogue that lowers the chance that any person’s or grouping’s power will become excessive. Speaking truth to power is how a people can stay in touch with itself and its quality of wisdom, its state of health. It helps to ensure that cultural skills involving dispassionate discussion of difficult topics and issues are kept honed and effective, meaning correcting problems or developing social dysfunctions is likely to occur before enforced correction becomes destructively turbulent and costly on multiple levels.

There is so much more I might reference to illustrate my point, but I think it reasonable to assert on the evidence presented that there is something about power – not natural authority wisely managed – that encourages group-based, irrational, visceral enmity, enmity that becomes almost impossible to heal as corruption roots itself ever deeper into a given society or culture. 

Why might this be so? 

One short answer could be that only low-wisdom types hunger for power. Power is a manifestation of low wisdom at the cultural level. Low wisdom equates to low humility. Low humility suggests high insecurity, concealed low self-esteem (imposter syndrome) and a consequent cowardly addiction to social status. This quality of wisdom will choose to forestall correction if it possibly can; increasing your power over others raises the probability you can successfully forestall correction by having more and more control over your world. Successfully blocking feedback from reality (correction) in this way, sustained for long enough, will slowly drive you mad, so slowly you won’t notice. This is, of course, equally true at the level of nation state, internationally, and at bloc level, i.e. the dangerous tensions between NATO and BRICS. What is interesting – and unanswered in my view – is whether the BRICS bloc is somehow wiser, collectively, than the Western hegemon, because the power it has at its disposal is further from absolute than the West’s; are they less able to forestall correction, and thus more sane, and thus wiser? And, if the BRICS bloc actually becomes hegemonic, will it too go mad in roughly the same manner as the West, and other states/civilisations before it (see historical cyclicality below)? Or will its advertised intention to remain a loose, trade-based affiliation of nation states kept together by mutual advantage – multipolarity – prove more effective at impeding hegemonic power than, say, the US constitution? Time will tell. If we’re lucky and Trump’s mercurial capacities allow it – such as they are –, his administration might manage to stop the West’s insane drift towards global nuclear war. I am far from confident that Harris has the ability or even desire to steer the US away from this horrifying outcome.

Power is a positive feedback loop

Based on the above, I think it fair to say that power coddles and protects, shields us from the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”. It turns us into spoilt brats; we become emotionally volatile, paranoid, entitled. But is it also a positive feedback loop?

Any monopoly on power breeds determined opposition to that power; who wants to be forever under the boot of some other entity’s whims and wisdom? Just watch as a baby grows into childhood, and then into adulthood; its will to independence is almost unbreakable and utterly unmistakable. This is true for all life forms, whether as ‘individual’ animals, or hive insects and flock animals as masses, or even as vegetation. Sustained power over others, therefore, cannot help but become a red flag to the determinedly opposed bull it must birth merely by virtue of its existence. 

As the saying has it: “Respect existence or expect resistance!”

For any opposition to oppressive power to be effective in its ambitions to break free, it must acquire sufficient power to mount an effective challenge. Power is thus necessarily insatiable in its systemic need to defend itself against the opposition it cannot help but inadvertently create; this is a classic positive feedback loop. Furthermore, as the price of losing power grows because of so much energy and resources invested in accumulating that power, and so much booty appropriated by means of that power, and so much corruption caused that needs to stay hidden, so the need to defend it at all costs grows. Decisions are entangling investments in the future, especially in the absence of corrective feedback.

In simpler words: If I have power over you, you are going to want to break free. To break free, you will seek to gain sufficient power to do so. Because I ‘need’ to have power over you – why else would I go to the trouble? – your growing power threatens me existentially. I then strive to acquire more power to effectively defend my position. Rinse and repeat = positive feedback loop. Monopoly power is a long-running positive feedback loop that must corrupt itself until it collapses under its own consequent imbecility.

(If, instead of contest, an oppressed person adopts something along the lines of a Stockholm Syndrome response, that would establish a fragile, unspoken pact in which the involved parties ‘conspire’ to forestall correction. The severity of the collapse of this pact would be proportionate to how long the parties manage to forestall the inevitable correction, among other factors.)

In the human realm of the state, part of this feedback loop is how the social body is poisoned by increasingly mendacious propaganda as a state’s inevitable self-corruption (Pournelle’s Iron Law) requires ever tighter narrative control to conceal its corruption, its mendacity, its creeping betrayal of its duty to its people. The tighter the narrative control, the less accurately that narrative reflects reality; ever more of reality must be filtered out, denied, rejected, censored. If a state is ‘successful’ in this endeavour, it inadvertently cuts itself off from reality through its fierce control over what is permissible subject matter, and the full truth becomes more and more toxic to permanent-state interests and survivability. Though a state does not intend it, though a state may make best efforts to keeps its finger on society’s pulse, the more control it exerts over its population, the less able the population is to honestly communicate to state power how it feels; speaking truth to power becomes riskier and riskier. This state of affairs is neither pleasant nor healthy for all involved. As the situation worsens – as it must – so determined opposite becomes inevitable. “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

It follows, then, that power, as I define it here, is constrained by its nature to loathe wisdom and natural authority, and pretty much everything else that is healthful and health-restoring (correcting). Power’s most fundamental patterning is to sustain itself in order to expand itself, indefinitely, for the systemic reasons set out above. It is in effect an addiction perpetuated by its own fundamentally unhealthy compulsion to control everything, precisely because it is constrained by its nature to prize itself over everything else. It must perceive Other as enemy; power is necessarily about opposition, and oppressing that opposition indefinitely. Opposition, in this sense, includes correction, i.e. paying your debts. (That we can also, cartoonishly, paint narcissism, sociopathy and psychopathy in these colours is more than coincidental.)

If, then, civilisation and the state are systemically constrained to create the desire for, and subsequent reality of, power over others, must humanity remain subject to power’s cyclical dawn-to-decadence vicissitudes while we perpetuate the state and our civilisational vector? 

Is it naïve and utopian of me to expect something healthier?

Is historical cyclicality inevitable?

Polybius’ cycle of history (anacyclosis)

Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times. – G. Michael Hopf

Nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know. – Pema Chodron

[This section is something of an excursion you may skip if you agree with the point I’m trying to defend in it, namely: History is cyclical and includes cultural wisdom as a form of (very fitful) progress.]

Chaos (not in image) ➜ monarchy ➜ tyranny ➜ aristocracy ➜ oligarchy ➜ democracy ➜ ochlocracy ➜ chaos …

Curiosity ➜ slow mastery ➜ automation/internalisation ➜ breakdown/decadence ➜ curiosity …

My aims in this section are: to argue for the veracity of cyclicality generally (though more narrowly in human history); that cyclicality (of various hues) is fundamental to reality; and that wisdom is a real, albeit not guaranteed, fruit of challenge and shock. I argue that the very fact of wisdom implies a wisdom-evolution potential to historical cyclicality, i.e. history rhymes more than it repeats. However, history’s ‘spiralling’ can of course cause wisdom’s erosion – wisdoms can most assuredly be forgotten –, as well as its evolution (progress), in both cases very unevenly across individuals of a given culture. Which is the more prevalent character of history’s spiralling I leave to the reader.

Historical and other types of cyclicality are discernible, many argue, in all cultures’ literature, story telling and myth making. How important is this if true? Are there fundamental exceptions? If there are, do we find a mutually exclusive difference of perspectives that indicates arbitrary interpretations of reality, from which it would be unreasonable to deduce universal truths?

Polybius’ anacyclosis is perhaps the first academic identification of a grand historical cycle. Each of its stages manifest a dawn-to-decadence pattern that drives it onwards individually towards collapse into the next stage, as does the cycle as a whole. In essence, some discomfort (chaos or historical shock/breakdown) forces creativity that births a new system and thus an initial flowering period or golden age, which slowly fades in honour and vitality to lead back into breakdown/chaos/shock, which initiates another cycle or a subsequent stage within the larger cycle. 

The second arrow-connected cycle above is my feeble attempt at boiling anacyclosis down to something yet more fundamental (the bolded stage will be explicated in a subsequent post). Its appearance here is to thought-provoke.

The Hero’s Journey, in evidence across much of human mythology, is another fundamental cycle suggestive of a somewhat similar cyclical patterning. Seasons are another cycle, though they differ at different planetary latitudes. Then there are lunar cycles, menstruation cycles, and so on. In other words, cycles are not difficult to discern. If anything, they are hard to miss.

But not everything is cyclical, even in Western literature: Hamlet is a flat, linear progression that does not result in a transformation of character. Kishōtenketsu – a Japanese story vector – is an example of a non-cyclical structuring: Ki = introduction. Shō = development. Ten = twists, the unexpected. Ketsu = the ending. This structure sets things up, causes a shock, the characters absorb the shock, the end. Whether or not we, as readers, can impute satisfactory meaning to the story is left entirely to us, is thus external to the story itself. Whatever readers learn from such stories, the characters do not mature from their experiences; they simply undergo one or more odd events, events that need not make any sense. The story’s attraction is its oddity, not some implied or explicated transformational meaning. Westerners seem to want to impose meaning on events, to imbue their literature with explicit meaning, with instructive moral lessons, etc. This appears to be far less the case in Japan, and I would guess elsewhere in the non-Western world, but I am far from expert in this subject matter, so will not go into it any deeper. (Though I do note Germany’s Kleist adopted a similar story pattern for his literature, and that much modern German literature adopts similarly non-heroic, non-transformational story vectors.) 

Do such exceptions suggest that observed historical cyclicality is in fact an arbitrary and misleading observation that is culturally subjective rather than universal?

On what little I know of this subject matter, I’m going to make a bold assertion. Such philosophical postures, or perhaps cultural reflexes manifesting as distilled observations, or techniques for encoding wisdom across generations, are not mutually exclusive; I suggest they don’t even clash. In Kishōtenketsu, for example, a shock stirs things up. This forces a reaction. For the reaction to be effective in some way, it must be intelligent and coherent, which is synonymous with meaningful, “meaningful” in the sense of appropriate to the broader context. Any successful or health-restoring response to a shock must fit well to the situation, must be accepted by the environment that has to host it, sustain it. This includes, I suggest, sanguine shrug-like responses that sweep things under the rug and so afford a full return to the old normal, with characters learning nothing more than a re-confirmation of their “shit happens” philosophy. These, too, are meaningful responses, albeit the nadir-deep antithesis of heroic, character-transforming responses. 

Regardless of story pattern, fitness of response – in the sense I’m aiming at here – is an ‘evolutionary’ element requiring coherent meaning making within the constraints of some environment, an environment necessarily composed of competing/cooperating meaning makers that somehow create a story’s tension and relief. Historical cyclicality at the scale implied by Polybius – which I am suggesting is evolutionary or spiralling rather than non-progressively or flatly cyclical – is thus the unaddressed context that serves as a hidden backdrop or meta-environment, which is required to accommodate Kishōtenketsu literature in a meaningful way, i.e. to make it palatable, valued, enjoyable, by a culture. We could argue that the shocks are containable due to the background wisdom available culturally to the story’s characters and readers, and thus net neutral where wisdom is concerned. That such shocks do indeed occur in life does not preclude the occurrence of shocks that cannot be contained by the cultural wisdom available, that therefore a step up in one’s wisdom, skills or character is required to process and survive them, otherwise collapse/failure is the result.

Another style or facet of Japanese literature I am aware of, that also reenforces my point, is where a very specific crescendo serves as a story’s entire purpose. Events conspire to drive a character or characters to some extremely unusual and rich momentary expression of what they are. I touched on this in a previous post. What matters here is not logical/intellectual meaning, or evolutionary transformation, or heroic accomplishment, but rather amazement, a demonstration of impossible beauty, an incredible and almost hypnotising Wow! moment that leaves you, as reader or audience member, speechless. These moments are the very point of the story, rather than some conclusion that answers all questions and restores comfort. They are designed to cause awe, to expose you to wonder such that you are reminded of the great power of reality. They are thus humbling experiences that also delight and inspire. But such crescendos, either presented in literature or occurring in real life, must also happen in a broader context. That context will be cyclical in some way, although that cyclicality need not be instrumental to a particular story or story structure.

In other words, there is no clash here, except perhaps in terms of cultural emphasis, style, and expectation.

So, even including non-cyclical patterns that appear to me to be just as fundamental as the cyclical – or co-fundamental –, a domain of questions now raises its head and begs to be answered: 

Must humans suffer epoch-changing suffering and violent brutality from time to time? If yes, does it therefore behoove us to ‘accept’ evil to be better able to respond to evil wisely?

Unpacked into more detail: Does complex society, aka civilisation – supposedly superior to primitive social forms and thus evidence of historical progress – require the specialisation that logically includes specialised leaders, and thus hierarchy, and thus systemic inter-group mistrust and enmity, and thus systemic scarcity as generated value is distributed unevenly, and thus a Hobbesian/Weberian monopoly on power to keep this fissiparous structure ‘stable’ over great tracts of time, monopoly power that is paradoxically constrained to bring about its own destabilisation via corruption as discussed above? 

Or, might we be justified in envisaging a healthier relationship with this cyclicality, and so a healthier – less turbulent – system at civilisational scale? Is China, for example, already like this (for all its faults)? Has China got the balance of individual and group interests about right after wild historical turbulence over the last 100 years or so, not to mention the last 5,000? 

I don’t know. 

I suspect we ought to be very careful when seeking out The Best Possible Social Structure; the exercise is too subjective, too intellectual, too academic, to translate cleanly to some globally realised Best Possible Outcome. The relationship between how individuals develop and mature within a culture, and the dizzyingly complex effects this has on that culture’s and nation’s historical progress, are so interwoven, inseparable and interdependent, the notion of cleanly exporting The Best System Out There to every other different nation/culture makes no sense to me. Which is why I am for multipolarity. 

The relevant question, in my view, is whether humans at the vast scale of nation or geopolitical bloc or indeed as a species can teach themselves to notice that wisdom has value beyond power, such that wisdom merits prominent and transparent attention and inquiry. If historical cyclicality of whatever stripe does indeed progress humanity in a spiralling manner, rather than simply repeat indefinitely without meaningful progress or evolution of our collective wisdom until some civilisation-ending cataclysm reboots the whole process, wisdom has to be real, capable of growth, and communicable – be encoded in myths, customs, stories, politics, etc. – from generation to generation.

At this blog, I have repeatedly argued that the West’s materialist paradigm is constrained to deem wisdom (and love, and health) as somehow inferior to hard, measurable phenomena, e.g. monetary profit, longevity, GDP and average IQs. This constellation of cultural reflexes that strongly prefers the measurable seems incapable of finding its way to an earnest, sustained and nuanced assessment of the trinity I have come to advocate at Econosophy after years of writing and research. By my logic, this tends the West to a kind of nihilistic/satanic quagmire of moral decay that is the rotten harvest of its systemic/structural obsession with power, as rooted in the way it manages its hierarchical structure, which, ultimately, is rooted in its humanistic materialism. A nihilistic wasteland of ugly emotions and potentially horrifying outcomes is what I see around me in an increasingly deranged Western world. And while mine is a poetic or aesthetic appeal rather than scientific or academic, humanity’s undeniable ability to experience and profoundly appreciate beauty – as suggested in the brief look at Japanese crescendo stories above – gives my advocacy a hint of ‘scientific’ validity (I like to think!). 

The sickness of moral decay is deemed sick for a reason; humans overwhelmingly prefer decency, trust, honesty, and dignity over mendacity, betrayal, tyranny, etc. We do not seek out bloody and destructive war at every conceivable opportunity and revel delightfully in it. The infamous Powers That Be are obliged to drag us kicking and screaming into the horrors of war, into its psychology-destroying terror. The infamous Powers That Be are forced by our nature to conceal their corrupt ugliness in skilfully crafted veneers of honour, loyalty and moral superiority to have a chance of initiating the wars they hunger for. Why? If humans are Hobbesian beasts, why does it take so much effort to corrupt us, deceive us, into war and violent debauchery?

In other words, I’m suggesting our very human longing for peaceful relations between nations and blocs is indicative of an (almost) inherent wisdom that we yearn to honour and further develop, just as we yearn for beauty for and good will amongst all. 

It seems to me that all we lack is a clear vision of how to go about it.

An alternative to power-based control?

Councillor Mothin Ali tackles a wheelie bin on its way to a bus-turned-pyre. Photo: Craig Gent/Novara Media

I see one group of British Asian men blaming Romanians for the disorder, which leads another group to chant “Romania! Romania!”. A Romanian woman and her neighbours argue back, saying they are trying to stop people joining in with the disorder, not contributing to it. A white English teenager comes away from the fracas claiming, apparently on the basis of a hunch, that the woman is some kind of Romanian nationalist. – Craig Gent, from a report on a recent riot in Leeds.

Though it seems impossible, the historical turbulence engulfing the world continues to intensify. Just when you think things cannot possibly get crazier, they get crazier. The whole world seems stretched taut, hyper-fragile, on the brink of collapsing into chaotic mania. (Or a mass awakening? Perhaps I have suggested this possibility too often.)

A recent riot in Leeds is a small example of how explosive things are. On the back of almost nothing, a bus and delivery van were set alight and destroyed, a police car seized and attacked. There appears to have been no sufficient trigger; apparently, a fairly innocuous event, which would normally pass unnoticed, somehow entangled itself in others that together managed to set things in motion that resulted in a wild and destructive riot.

But more important than the background tension that must have been largely responsible for all this, is how the Harehills community came together to deescalate the situation after riot police had withdrawn. Instead of falling victim to anger and recrimination, instead of shrinking back from the roving gangs of rioting youths, the community came together to take care of business. Wheelie bins were filled with water to help extinguish the various fires. Two of the ward’s councillors, Mothin Ali and Salm Arif, were instrumental in mediating between the various parties, chasing people away from adding fuel to the fires, and generally organising people into effective, spontaneous teams capable of keeping things under control.

Why do I find this relevant to this article? Because in a community of relative power equals, nobody can forestall correction for very long; corruption is much harder to sustain. Despite depression, grinding poverty and loneliness impacting negatively on the vitality and cohesion of a modern city’s community, it remains easier for those who do not fall victim to such dangers to stay sane, grounded, and wisely effective in a small community; it is impossible for anyone to amass monopoly power where intimate dialogue reigns.

“Propaganda ends where dialogue begins”. Power seeks to divide and conquer, to atomise communities such that their wisdom – i.e. cohesion, vitality – is destroyed; success in this ignoble endeavour creates a richly varied attack surface on which fears, uncertainties and doubts can be sown and grown using multiple propaganda techniques. Healthy communities are thus non-state, non-power-based environments in which people’s natural authority can be nourished and used for the good of all; there is no monopoly on power threatened by it. By definition, no person or group can attain monopoly power; their presence would mean a small state of some kind, not a community. Power and natural authority are mutually exclusive. Even gang leaders must contend with intra- and inter-group competition that keeps them grounded, exposed to reality. At intimate scales, people know too much about each other for deceptive, myth-making propaganda of lasting effect – a requirement for establishing a state – to be possible. Propaganda is required to create the necessary cohesive sense of a people at scales approaching or beyond a nation; face-to-face dialogue is a wholly inappropriate method for establishing a state.

This does not mean small communities are perfect, that states are pure evil and without benefit, etc. It does not mean all riots the police abandon will play out as the recent Harehills’ riot progressed. But there is something about this one, with its mix of immigrant ethnicities and cultures mingling with Anglo-Saxon locals, a mix which should, if the parts of MSM are to be believed, be a potentially uncontrollable cocktail of aggression, suspicion and fear, that stands out for me. Instead of a generalised collapse of order and decency, this particular community came together and successfully handled a chaotic and dangerous situation in an anarchic way (natural authority is cherished in anarchist thought). Furthermore, there is something about the rich multi-ethnicity of Leeds generally, just as in this more local community specifically, that is at least somewhat redolent of our global challenge as a species. For me, this little story is evidence that humans, regardless of their cultural background, prefer peace, decency, natural authority, and dignity over the narcissistic, power-greedy, corrupt and loveless Western system that is the subject of this article. 

This is but one of many signs of hope for our long-term prospects as a species, and supportive evidence that the will to do what it takes to promote wisdom, love and health to the centre of social governance systems exists. I am convinced that humans are not Hobbesian beasts that can only revel in a permanent war of each against all. It’s just that the state’s powerful influence on human behaviour over several millennia sure does make it seem that way.

Conclusion

Addicted to dominion, power forestalls correction for as long as it can and is thus dysfunctional. Revering love, wisdom and health, humility welcomes correction and begets natural authority.

Mine is a very generalised perspective. Nothing in this article can be translated to policy. But as the world grows crazier in the wake of the West’s demise, two things become clearer and clearer to me. The first is that interdependent historical momenta are highly determinative of future stability in the sense of inertia. The second is that the combination of advanced societal specialisation and low-wisdom and low-free-will populations on the bedrock of that specialisation mean human imagination at large cultural scale is like historical inertia: almost immovable. But, like tectonic plates, explosions can occur. The safe bet is that change is slow and incremental. But epochal upheavals happen. We are living through a major upheaval, which is the implosion of accrued negative wisdom.

What I do not know is how it will play out. I’m just some guy. However, I strongly suspect there is a very large loss of credibility on the part of Western establishment, that this loss of credibility is precisely because of too much power and concomitant negative wisdom that have resulted in an ugly betrayal of those societal essences most precious to most humans: honour, dignity, decency, trust, etc. For me, the logic that flows from these strong intuitions points clearly to wisdom – as it related to love and health – as a good bet for a valuable future commodity in high demand. It’s simple: wisdom is at a very low point, and the yearning for societal health and decency is strong. Wisdom is needed for a return of beauty, for a life on earth most of us love to live.

If we want to minimise corruption, we have to hold power in check by mindfully developing our own humility. This is not a remotely startling or controversial statement, and yet the imminence of global catastrophe in the form of nuclear war suggests humanity has failed to honour this truth at sufficient breadth and depth. What startles is how power-based, corrupt dominion lords it over peoples everywhere mostly unchallenged by those so ruled. I speculate that a kind of generalised Stockholm Syndrome is responsible for our dissonant state of affairs, but that its hold is now quickly weakening. But, because the effort to minimise state power that is the US constitution is on the cusp of catastrophic failure, we Westerners – perhaps all humans – are compelled to face the sobering fact that taming power is not remotely easy at state level, just as the historical events that led to writing the US constitution were not easy. And yet we are called to tame state power nonetheless. 

These and other sobering facts open me to earnest contemplation of the viability of all humanity’s attempts to tame power and the corruption it must deliver. My openness obliges me to consider i.e. Chinese and Russian systems of governance, the former because of how long that nation has not been colonial, the latter also because of its longevity but also its recent experience with societal collapse. That said, my own preference is anarchism. My respect for humility, my intimate knowledge of my very limited capacities demand of me, however, that I not be an ideological zealot; I am open to all viable cultures and the wisdoms they must contain by virtue of their longevity, their hard-won successes. For example, I recall hearing the aboriginal Australian culture is 80,000 years old. Not too shabby!

Is civilisation possible without state power? I believe it is, but cannot prove it. I can only present my best reasoning on how to deal with corruption effectively. My reasoning unequivocally points to love, wisdom and health as fundamental to progressing beyond our many historical challenges. 

To repeat, sustaining humility mutually excludes amassing power; states must amass power. Including humility as a civilisational reflex or wisdom surely requires explicit governance architecture that reveres and nourishes it. What might this look like?

I only know that answers begin with genuine dialogue, which requires genuine humility and that this is something of a tautology. But how else could it be? The need is great because our cultural reflexes where humility and wisdom are concerned have atrophied greatly. We are constrained to begin with what we have and are.

Typically, it takes deep shock to break open defensive psychologies and calcified emotional states into the kind of openness a robust commitment to humility requires. Perhaps the shocks exploding about us like artillery shells, perhaps the horrors of war and the hideousness of state overreach are the shocks we need.

Which actual social-governance forms should or should not emerge in the wake of growing wisdom and humility should be left unaddressed for as long as possible; the first critical stage should be studiously ideology free. If we can manage that, at least in critical-mass numbers (5-20% of any given community or population), the practical bits and pieces of what we need to do will become apparent with mysteriously sweet timing.

(Part II)