Confucius claimed that dynasties received mandates from heaven that lasted, approximately, 100 years. Anyone familiar with history and complexity theory, or if you have read works of Nasim Nicholas Taleb, you would already be convinced, that there is no guarantee that one received, a mandate that would last 100 years in our day and age (or in any day and age). The world and its forces are too complex to be predictable.
In Defence of Technology
Indeed, technology makes centralization easier, but it also unleashes such varied and incalculable avenues of differential growth among individuals, groups, and nations that result in greater potential for instability and the upending of centralized power. I am inclined here to disagree with Yuval Noah Harari that technology’s major downside would be greater vulnerability to dictatorships. Indeed, technology does make a totalitarian state more possible, and easier to maintain, but anyone who has had any interaction with digital security experts working with governments, which I have had a chance to do across India, USA, UK, and UAE directly and with other nations more indirectly, would understand that governments are at a loss on as to how to stop various avenues of communication that go undetected (thousands of apps originating from unknown countries accessible through VPNs, etc.).
Similarly, forensic experts have constantly played cat and mouse with financial fraudsters who exploit technological gaps or technologies that facilitate financial fraud. Many-a-times, government, and ethical hackers are able to thwart incidences that the general public does not even get to know about (now they do with greater reporting and disclosures); most of the time the bad actors are two steps ahead and authorities play catch-up.
With cryptocurrencies, governments face a new threat of losing control over money (a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value).
However, the discussion on technology is beyond the main point of this article but serves the purpose of underscoring that regimes (with or without technology) have always been unstable, as is the case with any human-made systems.
The Purpose of this Article
The purpose of this article or essay is to learn the real causal factors behind political power. What is article does not aim to do is to simply enumerate the sources of power or types of power. This many illustrious philosophers have done, the most useful of them being max Weber, Bertrand Russel, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Robert Dahl, Steven Lukes, etc. My quest for exploring the topic of power has led me to many dissatisfying pathways and therefore, I make a distinction between sources and causal factors of power.
The sources of power may well be economic resources, information, force, propaganda etc. but the sources do not explain the causal mechanism of power. It is one thing to say that a vehicle runs on fuel and quite another to explain that it is through certain principles of combustion that leads to the release of certain energy from the fuel, which is harnessed in a particular manner to make a vehicle mobile. Hence, the aim of this article is to understand what causes power (from here on I use political power and power interchangeably).
The Causal Factors Behind Political Power
Political power refers to the ability to influence, control, and make decisions that shape the behaviour, actions, and outcomes within a political system or society. It represents the capacity of individuals, groups, or institutions to exercise authority, enforce policies, and enforce their will on others.
The causal factor behind political power is not violence. Various dynasties indeed resorted to violence to gain political power, but they had something else in advance which was causal and when that was directed towards the quest for power with violence as a medium or a tool or an instrument, it led to the gaining of political power. Non-violent movements, democratic elections, and other types of pressure group politics are also other pathways than violence to gain political power. The method is context dependent but the method is not the same as the cause.
Sometimes, violence could also be a method or an instrument to protect political power, just as economic resources, propaganda, or technology could be, but all of these are instruments of power, not causes of power.
One often described cause for political power is the feeling of “cooperation” or what can be defined as the “ability to cooperate” in a given group of people. Let us examine this causal factor more closely.
Cooperation as a Causal Candidate for Political Power: Ibn Khaldun and Mancur Olson
The ability to cooperate or what Ibn Khaldun called the “Asabiyyah” is one of the strongest causal candidates behind political power. According to Khaldun “Royal authority and large-scale dynastic power are attained only through a group and group feeling”. When a group without Asabiyyah is faced with a group that possesses it, the latter wins because they are fighting for a higher cause, for each other, or for the survival of their group; on the other hand, the group devoid of Asabiyyah disperses as individuals in that group are fighting for self-interest. As soon as their self-interest is in jeopardy, they dissipate and cannot put up a united stand.
Now one may be tempted to ask, why would self-interest be a deficiency here? Aren’t soldiers mustered to defend their family, property or possessions in the face of an enemy? Surely, that gives them the courage to cooperate and put up a united stance. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Without the concept of nation, love for one’s culture, or the larger group (even smaller groups such as military companies, battalions, and so on), soldiers would not fight. Consider a soldier who calculated in a rational manner – if the situation has come to demand that one needs to fight with the looming possibility of death to protect personal belongings and family members, wouldn’t it be better to strike a clandestine deal with the enemy and protect one’s own belongings? To live and enjoy personal belongings than to die for them? This calculation should hold true especially when the enemy is stronger. But this doesn’t happen. Sometimes it does, but many a time it does not simply happen. Soldiers lay down their lives for their group, nation, etc., not for narrow or rationalist private interests.
Indeed, there is a limit to this thesis. A group of 10 with an “Asabiyyah” and no arms faced in an immediate battle with 10,000 people with low or no “Asabiyyah” would not stand a chance of winning, just as a sports car with no fuel would barely win a race against a horse cart with two horses and an able driver. However, a relatively smaller group with a stronger group feeling is more likely to win against a relatively larger and better-equipped group with no “Asabiyyah”.
Khaldun explains that once rulership has been established on the basis of “Asabiyyah”, it can be perpetuated for a long period even without it but eventually decline sets in. Here Khaldun becomes as formulaic as Confucius. He claims that “no dynasty lasts beyond the life span of three generations”. Here again, complexity theory suggests that these things are unpredictable.
However, here Mancur Olson proves helpful in offering a theory on the decline of cooperation through his works such as The Rise and Decline of Nations and the Problem of Collective Action. Olson also seems to argue (I am paraphrasing and taking some liberties in explaining a more nuanced concept than what is presented here), that Nations or any group finds success in their motives because they have effectively addressed the problem of collective action and they fall when free riders make collective action difficult. Essentially, he argues that small groups are more effective than large groups in successful collective action because they can easily coordinate, communicate and more importantly catch free riders. Now with technology, these actions can be more easily performed with ever larger groups. In any case, once groups are able to locate who is contributing to the ultimate purpose of the group and who is not, then they can apply selective incentives (rewards and punishments). This keeps free riders in check and incentivizes everyone to contribute to the group’s goals.
At some point in society, when groups get large or are formed of multiple smaller groups, the problem starts to set in. This can be especially noticed in the provision of public goods. Suppose in a nation there are two groups, one badly motivated (willing to deliver a public bad for its own benefit) and another nicely motivated group (willing to deliver a public good). Now in this situation, according to Olson, the badly motivated group would be more incentivized (hence more motivated, and hence more successful) in pursuing its goals. Let us understand it with an example: The badly motivated group, let’s suppose, wishes to create a loophole in the tax system, while the nicely motivated group wishes to bridge or close or seal a loophole in the current tax system. Who is likely to be more motivated? Let us examine the incentive structures:
· Incentives for the badly motivated group: “As a group, by creating a loophole in the system, we stand to gain disproportionate benefits even though it may take some effort, and the harm is diffused and distributed through the society at large. In most cases, the harm will be so marginal that any individual would hardly take notice and even if they do, it would be too costly for them to band together leaving aside their other vocations to fix it.”
· Incentives for the nicely motivated group: “As a group, if we are to seal a loophole for the public benefit, we will have to do all the leg work, bear the costs, put in effort, time, and toil, so the costs are concentrated upon the members of this group while the benefits are diffused across the society. The benefits may be marginal enough that society may not even notice, let alone reward us. So, what is in it for us?”
Therefore, after a point of growth, in any society or in any large political group, more and more free riders emerge, and more subgroups prefer playing the badly motivated group working in their own narrow interest than the interest of the larger group. Eventually, when there are enough badly motivated groups in the society, they choke its growth as the public goods dry up, collective action which is so important for success and growth starts becoming difficult and the society or nation sets into decline. We see this with political parties too.
Ibn Khaldun seems to be in agreement with Olson that Asabiyyah is eventually lost when narrow self-interest overpowers Asabiyyah. Here, he emphasized the role of religion – an important, very important consideration, which we will tackle in detail later. For now, according to Khaldun:
… Religious colouring does away with mutual jealousy and envy among people who share in a group feeling … They are willing to die for (their objectives). The members of the dynasty they attack may be many times as numerous as they. But their purposes differ, inasmuch as they are false purposes, and (the people of the worldly dynasty) come to abandon each other, since they are afraid of death. Therefore, they do not offer resistance to (the people with a religious colouring), even if they themselves are more numerous. They are overpowered by them and quickly wiped out, as a result of the luxury and humbleness existing among them.
Thus, according to Khaldun, the dominance of self-interest, expressed in the form of love for life, luxuries, etc. leads to the decay of the power of a group.
This is where things start getting complicated and several questions emerge. First, is that if self-interest is deleterious to group feeling then, what is the causal mechanism behind group feeling? The answer to this according to Khaldun is that Asabiyyah is more easily cultivated in the Beduin way of life. Their social organization enables people to cooperate and fulfil their basic needs as they keep moving around and remain hardy for survival. On the other hand, the settled people become docile and sedentary, they are accustomed to laws and dependent on others’ militaries (maintained by the state) for their protection, and therefore become fearful as well as addicted to luxury. Hence, the sedentary people do not develop Asabiyyah as easily as the Beduin nomads.
It is easy to find similar arguments across various cultures. Even in modern elections where relatively more rural and “attached to the ground” candidates are assumed to be more powerful than the more urbanized ones.
Olson may well agree with Khaldun. He would explain that Beduin tribes are smaller and operate under such hard conditions that free riding is costly, easy to catch, and quite exceptionally dangerous to the survival of the group. Hence, the group, as long as it remains under these conditions of instability and smallness of size, can cultivate a culture of cooperation.
If you look closely enough there are many challenges in the explanations thus far. I have already pointed out one - if self-interest is deleterious to group feeling then, what is the causal mechanism behind group feeling? It already seems that group feeling is not the ultimate cause but there are causes that lead to a group feeling and these causes include, the conditions under which a group survives (sedentary or unsettled), which necessitates cooperation and the emergence of a culture of cooperation or Asabiyyah. Described in another way, it is enlightened self-interest that leads to group feeling.
This in turn leads to an explanation that says that self-interest, under certain conditions, leads to cooperation, and in other conditions (when the group has grown large and sedentary) leads to the dissipation of cooperation, as Olson has explained about self-interested groups working towards narrow gains at the expense of the larger society thereby choking growth. So, it is self-interest all the way? Then the real cause must be the context or the conditions under which individuals and groups exercise self-interest.
This reduces the theory of power to a theory of chance or a theory of cycles. We are back to square one. Since self-interest is perpetual and only conditions change, sometimes directing self-interest in a way that leads to the growth of Asabiyyah in a group, and later the dissipation of Asabiyyah in the same (but now a much larger) group, the ultimate cause is the set of circumstance. This is the success breeds failure, breeds success type of a theory.
Are there any competitors to it? Well, our friend Khaldun has hinted at one: Religion, or what Yuval Noah Harari has called “myths” or stories.
Collective Myths as a Causal Candidate for Political Power
Yuval Noah Harari and before them, many historians and psychologists have talked about the role of collective myths or the stories we tell ourselves as human beings that let us cooperate flexibly as a group. Carl Jung's archetypes help tap into the collective unconcious to tap into these images, symbols, stories and narratives that me recure between epochs and cultures.
Remember Khaldun saying:
… Religious colouring does away with mutual jealousy and envy among people who share in a group feeling … They are willing to die for (their objectives). The members of the dynasty they attack may be many times as numerous as they. But their purposes differ, inasmuch as they are false purposes, and (the people of the worldly dynasty) come to abandon each other, since they are afraid of death. Therefore, they do not offer resistance to (the people with a religious colouring), even if they themselves are more numerous. They are overpowered by them and quickly wiped out, as a result of the luxury and humbleness existing among them.
He is talking about the collective myth as a facilitator of group feeling. Harari would agree and is arguments are worth mentioning here. But instead of going through the effort of reaching out to the hard copy of his book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, within my hands reach, I would pay a Hararian tribute and rely on ChatGpt to summarize his arguments in this regard:
Collective myths, or imagined realities, are shared beliefs and stories that bind people together and enable large-scale cooperation. These myths can take various forms, such as religious beliefs, national identities, money, or legal systems. Harari argues that these shared myths are not based on objective reality but rather on human imagination and the ability to create and believe in abstract concepts.
Flexible cooperation, as opposed to the limited cooperation found in small groups of closely related individuals, is essential for the functioning of complex societies. Harari suggests that collective myths play a crucial role in fostering flexible cooperation by providing a common framework of meaning and values that allow strangers to trust and cooperate with one another.
For example, money is a collective myth that facilitates economic cooperation. People agree to assign value to pieces of paper or digital records, believing in the shared myth that these representations hold worth. This collective belief enables individuals to engage in complex economic activities and trade with people they have never met.
Harari also emphasizes that the power of collective myths lies in their ability to create imagined orders and hierarchies, such as political systems or social classes. These hierarchies provide a structure for cooperation but can also lead to inequality and oppression. However, they are not inherent in the natural world but are constructed by human societies.
In summary (typical Chatgpt style), Harari argues that collective myths are instrumental in enabling flexible cooperation among large numbers of people. These shared beliefs and imagined realities provide a common framework of meaning, fostering trust and cooperation in complex societies.
All right, so if collective myths are causal for group feeling, then should we just throw self-interest out of the window? Not so soon. Collective myths have this hidden power – they can change or model one’s self-interest and induce people to interpret their self-interest in various ways. This is what Steven Lukes calls the “third face” or the “third dimension” of power. According to Lukes, the first face of power is quite visible. Any easy way to understand (though there are many) it is the way this concept is explained by the Power Cube (https://www.powercube.net/other-forms-of-power/the-power-in-the-powercube/). The three faces, are “visible power”, hidden power”, and “invisible power”.
Visible power is the first dimension or face and it is the form of power that is noticeable in contestation of issues. Here an issue is already identified as a problem and some groups are for it (or take one side of the issue) while others are against it; there is a contestation and eventually, there may be winners and losers. Budget decisions, farmer protests, labour strikes or anything that is discussed and contested as problematized issues fall in the first dimension.
The second dimension is the power of agenda control. What if some bodies or groups had the power of not even letting some issues into the forums of discussion? For example, what is some issues are identified as problems by a certain group of people but they never even enter the discussion in parliaments, or in the mainstream media? They remain unproblematized in the larger socio-political arena. Agenda control is therefore, the hidden, second face of power.
The third face of power is the most invisible and insidious. It is the power over people’s interpretation of their own interests. According to Lukes, there may be instances where people may interpret their self-interest in a kinked manner. A Victorian lady imprisoning herself in the confines of her house considering it to be the ultimate good, as a causal factor behind the betterment of her husband, her family, and the whole society, may consider her forgoing of her immediate self interest (to be relatively free or unshackled) as a sacrifice for the greater good. Society may even psychologically reward her for it. She may be acting against her immediate self interest, rationally speaking, but she interprets her interests in a manner, that she concludes that forgoing her self-interest is indeed in her ultimate interest and that of her family and the society. She is under the spell of the third face of power. This is the collective myth that keeps a soldier on the borders and keeps teachers in school despite lower pay scales. In flashes, Lukes admits, people under the spell of this third dimension, realize or ponder that they are probably not acting in their immediate self-interest, but rationalization, some real benefits, and layers of meaning attached to their position anchor them to the third dimension.
Here, myths model the interpretation of interest. Therefore, powerful are those who can define the hierarchy of values and create collective myths. Eventually, everyone is acting in their own self-interest, but what their self-interest is, is defined by a select few who have a monopoly over meaning (think: religion, media, analysts, etc.). This is like soft power. Remember what Joseph Nye said (not exactly, but something like this, at least this is more interesting): “Hard power is getting others to do want you want them to do; soft power is getting others to want, what you want them to want”.
Is it that Simple? Just Mythmaking? Not Quite. It is Critical Realism.
It is not as if arbitrary stories or any myth could lead to power. Not all myths can even generate Asabiyyah. Here we come to the definition of “value”. To understand the value, we need to understand the three schools of epistemology: Realism or Positivism, Post-modernism or Constructivism, and Critical Realism. Realism postulates, quite simply, that there is a real and objective world out there and what you think about it does not change its behaviour. When your mental models are not in sync with reality, you are in for a rude shock. Principles of the world, do not change based on what you think about them.
Postmodernism, unlike positivism, claims that all reality is interpretation dependent – even science. What scientific ideas gain prominence also depend on the social networks of the scientists and as some networks become dominant over others, some ideas or claims of truth depose the previous ones (examples include Newtonian physics vs quantum mechanics, Randomized Control Trials over theoretical or inference-based policy interventions etc.). Essentially, postmodernism or constructivism’s motto is that our collective mindsets shape reality and we are then shaped by it.
Critical realism is much more balanced. It reminds us that positivism was an important human advance but even science is eventually a social phenomenon and has its limitations. The quest for reality is an inherently limited, biased, and iterative social process. It is open to the possibility that some reality does exist “outside of our own minds” and some reality is shaped by our collective mindsets. Both are in constant interaction with each other. We change some part of reality and we adapt to some parts of it. It is a much more tentative and iterative approach in pursuit of the never completely achievable truth or reality.
What does it have to do with power, you may ask? Remember Mahatma Gandhi’s and similar claims that power lies in truth, they were perhaps pointing towards a critical realism perspective of power. This brings me back to values and to Bertrand Russell. When we say “this is valuable” or “these are my values”, what do we actually mean by value? A value is not merely an aspiration and it is not merely utilitarian – it is an intersection of those two sets. Is “justice” an aspiration, or is it a real utilitarian concern for the survival of society? In a way, it is both. You may argue that it is aspirational because it is in the larger good or that it has been encoded in us through culture as aspirational because past historical experiences have shown that justice leads to a higher survival rate and longevity of a society, i.e. has a clear utilitarian purpose; and you may well be correct. But there are limits to both sides. All aspirations cannot be encoded as values and all utilitarian needs cannot be encoded as values. There are trade-offs in these combinations and multiple equilibria could exist. Typically, values are those aspirations that have useful collective action agendas encoded into them.
Security is a value but it cannot be provided in a society if everyone is motivated towards their own narrow self-interest. So, the collective good of security requires this value to be encoded, disseminated, and exercised in the third dimension of power with the layering of narratives, stories, icons, and figures of sacrifice, valor, glory, etc. But there are always trade-offs. The aspiration for individual freedom and the utilitarian need for societal security often come into tension. While freedom is an important aspiration that values personal autonomy and liberties, excessive emphasis on freedom can compromise security. On the other hand, prioritizing security at the expense of freedom can lead to authoritarianism and jeopardize the security of individuals within the state.
How do we deal with this? Critical realism.
Let us deal with belief “the constructivist part of the equation” and reality, “the positivist part of the equation” one by one with the help of Bertrand Russell. In Power: A New Social Analysis, he observes that beliefs, mass beliefs, and propaganda are important sources of power. You cannot make the masses believe just about anything. They must have some inclination in believing certain things. There are some thoughts that people just like to believe in – there is an intrinsic pleasure in believing in certain thoughts. In psychological terms, one may consider thoughts that are in line with one’s self-image or narratives. Thus the “desire to believe” becomes an important factor in shaping the belief system. In addition to the “desire to believe”, “evidence” and “iterations” are important factors facilitating a belief system.
According to Russell, “If one element is increased while another Is diminished, the resulting amount of belief may be unchanged. More propaganda is necessary to cause acceptance of a belief for which there is little evidence than of one for which the evidence is strong, if both are equally satisfactory to desire; and so on. It is through the potency of iteration that the holders of power acquire their capacity of influencing belief….”. “The opposition between a rational and an irrational appeal is, in practice, less clear-cut”, he adds.
He concludes in a critical realist's tone:
To arrive at the truth in this matter it is necessary to find a compromise between two opposite truisms. The first of these is: men who agree in their beliefs can cooperate more whole-heartedly than men who disagree. The second is: men whose beliefs are in accordance with the fact are more likely to succeed whose beliefs are mistaken.
He gives the example of a British military expedition that invaded Tibet in 1905, the Tibetans at first advanced boldly because the Lamas had given them magic charms against bullets. When they nevertheless had casualties, the Lamas observed that the bullets were nickel-pointed, and explained that their charms were only effective against lead. After this, the Tibetan armies showed less valor.
We may now conclude that values are founded on critical realism. That mysterious combination of fact and fiction, in service of the public good. There are trade-off between values, and the interlinking and nesting of values creates a value system that may accord priority to some values over the others. Values can help and do play a critical role in people’s lives to navigating and interpreting their interests. After all, everyone wants to work in their own interest. However, not any value or every value can be accepted by society. For it to be accepted, it needs to contain elements that are in consonance with people’s desire to believe in certain myths which are inherently pleasing or acceptable to them and also have some consonance with facts. This is an iterative process. This is the art of exercising power. Once the values are adequately established, they bring about an agreement on interests. One there is agreement on interests, there is an interplay between conditions/context and values. Values interpret the context, and context changes values – again an interplay between fact/utility and aspiration. Again, an iteration of interests and the defining of a value system, of collective myths admixed with reality and utilitarian concerns. This blend creates cooperation – that group feeling that Khaldun calls Asabiyyah. Such cooperation leads to power. As long as the value systems, interpretation of interests, and collective myths balance between positivism and constructivism, fact and fiction, and aspirations and utility, there will be power.
What Kautilya, Kamandaki, and Machiavelli Would Agree On
Power is created by human beings, through human cooperation. Even economic resources, as Russel also argues, are backed by political might, and political might is backed by cooperation. Venezuela and Saudi Arabia both have oil, but Venezuela is caught in a resource curse while Saudi is not. Because Venezuela does not have the institutions that prevent various competing groups from falling into a bad prisoner’s dilemma. Or at least, Venezuela did not have adequate institutions to withstand the circumstantial pressures of competing internal or external groups to prevent the ravaging of their internal resources (oil).
Kautilya, Kamandaki, and Machiavelli are all proponents of virtuous rulers supported by wise ministers. Power is embodied in human beings and their ability to foster virtue or dharma – a complex combination of value systems, interpretation of interests, and collective myths balance between positivism and constructivism, fact and fiction, and aspirations and utility. Once you have this, it is easy to acquire the “sources” or actually the medium to power – i.e. force, economic resources, alliances, forts, treasures, and all the other aspects that form a state.
Humans who exercise critical realism and can therefore cooperate effectively are the causal sources of power.
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