What happens when an imperial oligarchy gets overrun by quasi-marxist postmodernists who only care about deconstruction and petty power games to control the masses?
Interesting. How would you say all of this lines up with other forms of governance? Is any large dictatorial regime eventually forced into oligarchy? Or are they secretly that way from the get-go? Are communist governments also subject to oligarchical tendencies, or do they manage a different tact?
Gotcha, wasn't sure if access to more brutal methods of keeping people in line changed the dynamic for you. Interesting to view the violent tendencies of a dictator as being essential to their power, because they otherwise lack it.
I guess, with the communist angle, I was looking to see if there are any governments which are more disperse than oligarchy. Representative democracies might be a better example, actually. Several dozen or hundred people in competition, rather than a handful. Your essay points out the pressures pushing power down and out pretty nicely, but what's pulling it back up and in?
Have you heard of the Australian aborigine method of government. They use consensus government where EVERYONE gets to have a say, shares data, expectations, goals, availability of resources. Only when based on the FULL data set available to EVERYONE having come to the SAME LOGICAL conclusion is a policy made.
I like the idea a lot. There is no king, everyone tacitly accepts the penalty for not following protocol because everyone WROTE and SIGNED the social contract, there is no case of 49% of the population hates the government. Instead 100% of the population trusts the government because it is the same 100% of the population.
In the modern era this could be done quite easily. Keep pouring verifiable data at a problem until the logical solution presents itself. Keep going until no new dissent is recorded. Lock it in place.
If consensus cannot be found then break the problem down or re-frame it until consensus can be achieved. This can work because in the end people can be rational and on an individual basis they can see that they do not have to cave into an irrational individual. However when the mob has the weight of 51% if the brainwashed population then having a logical point to make that is ignored causes disenfranchisement.
Also see if there is any blog writings by Denis Beckett on Demogarchy are online still. He also had a little book.
Does it follow that the range of things the government does is endogenous and partly depends on your ability to get people you trust in charge?
So a monarch (or whoever) will only try and do more things if they think they have the agent who can reasonably do a job (or at least are more likely to do those extra things)?
"how does the ruler incentivize the general to solve the problem, and how does he know the general is doing the best he can and not secretly encouraging the rebels to have an argument for funneling more resources to the military?"
An interesting thesis by Martin Broszat is that organised competition and uncertainty about the remit and standing of underlying administrators helped centralise power in Nazi Germany. https://x.com/page_eco/status/1528009921685770240?s=20
Excellent description.
What happens when an imperial oligarchy gets overrun by quasi-marxist postmodernists who only care about deconstruction and petty power games to control the masses?
Interesting. How would you say all of this lines up with other forms of governance? Is any large dictatorial regime eventually forced into oligarchy? Or are they secretly that way from the get-go? Are communist governments also subject to oligarchical tendencies, or do they manage a different tact?
Gotcha, wasn't sure if access to more brutal methods of keeping people in line changed the dynamic for you. Interesting to view the violent tendencies of a dictator as being essential to their power, because they otherwise lack it.
I guess, with the communist angle, I was looking to see if there are any governments which are more disperse than oligarchy. Representative democracies might be a better example, actually. Several dozen or hundred people in competition, rather than a handful. Your essay points out the pressures pushing power down and out pretty nicely, but what's pulling it back up and in?
Have you heard of the Australian aborigine method of government. They use consensus government where EVERYONE gets to have a say, shares data, expectations, goals, availability of resources. Only when based on the FULL data set available to EVERYONE having come to the SAME LOGICAL conclusion is a policy made.
I like the idea a lot. There is no king, everyone tacitly accepts the penalty for not following protocol because everyone WROTE and SIGNED the social contract, there is no case of 49% of the population hates the government. Instead 100% of the population trusts the government because it is the same 100% of the population.
In the modern era this could be done quite easily. Keep pouring verifiable data at a problem until the logical solution presents itself. Keep going until no new dissent is recorded. Lock it in place.
If consensus cannot be found then break the problem down or re-frame it until consensus can be achieved. This can work because in the end people can be rational and on an individual basis they can see that they do not have to cave into an irrational individual. However when the mob has the weight of 51% if the brainwashed population then having a logical point to make that is ignored causes disenfranchisement.
Also see if there is any blog writings by Denis Beckett on Demogarchy are online still. He also had a little book.
Does it follow that the range of things the government does is endogenous and partly depends on your ability to get people you trust in charge?
So a monarch (or whoever) will only try and do more things if they think they have the agent who can reasonably do a job (or at least are more likely to do those extra things)?
"how does the ruler incentivize the general to solve the problem, and how does he know the general is doing the best he can and not secretly encouraging the rebels to have an argument for funneling more resources to the military?"
An interesting thesis by Martin Broszat is that organised competition and uncertainty about the remit and standing of underlying administrators helped centralise power in Nazi Germany. https://x.com/page_eco/status/1528009921685770240?s=20