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Chapter 6. Patterns

Carroll Quigley never intended to become an historian. As a teenager, he was a science geek, interested in rocks and minerals. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he intended to become a biochemist, and in his first year he came top of his calculus and physics classes. But he was forced, in the interests of intellectual breadth, to also study one humanities course. He chose the history course “Europe since the fall of Rome,” and was awarded a ‘C’ grade. Despite this mediocre result, he decided to abandon his previous plans and transfer to the history department. Eventually, he graduated top of his class in history and went on to a PhD at Harvard. note 61

He moved in 1941 to the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where he remained until he retired in 1976. Quigley devoted himself to teaching, and his course “Development of Civilization” was the centrepiece of the Georgetown history department, enthusiastically praised by his students, even years later. Former student Bill Clinton even mentioned Quigley’s inspirational influence in his speech when he accepted the Democratic party nomination for President in 1992. (Clinton had taken Quigley’s class in the 1960s.)

Quigley was both an insider and an outsider. As an insider, he consulted for the State Department, the Department of Defence, the Brookings Institution and other bodies in government or close by. He regarded himself as in the intellectual mainstream of Western civilisation, but at the same time he was an unusual historian, an outsider who attempted to apply the methods of science to the study of history. This meant studying many different periods of history to find common patterns — patterns which were never perfectly developed, but always distorted. Most historians, then and now, prefer to concentrate narrowly on a particular topic in a particular period, so they can be an unchallenged expert on one thing. Breadth is dangerous, because it invites mistakes, and Quigley did make some mistakes. But the patterns he saw are a tremendous help in understanding our history and our world.

To understand any subject deeply, you need to see patterns. You need to have a structure on which to arrange detailed facts. Through all of history some particular patterns of social organisation and national government seem to recur again and again. One pattern noticed by Quigley, which I will call instruments and institutions explains why all social organisations tend to degenerate and deviate from their original purpose over time. Another pattern, finite and infinite games, invented by religious scholar James Carse, explains very neatly why the “establishment” elite in any society often makes decisions against the best interests of the society and even against the best interests of the establishment itself. A third pattern, noticed by Quigley, which I will call aspects of sovereignty, catalogues the levers of power in a nation and illuminates exactly how some governments have less control than others.

Let’s start with Quigley’s instruments and institutions. In his book The Evolution of Civilizations, Quigley talks about the various needs of humans living in groups. For example, we might think about the following different human needs: note 62

• Military: for group security.

• Political: to organise inter-personal power relationships.

• Economic: for material wealth.

• Social: for companionship.

• Religious: for psychological certainty.

• Intellectual: for understanding.

Quigley suggests these categories, but doesn’t claim they are “correct” — he’s keen to emphasise that the precise number of categories isn’t important. If you don’t like those categories, feel free to invent your own. The important thing is to notice that in groups of humans, social organisations come into existence to satisfy particular needs. These organisations don’t attempt to satisfy every need; they each concentrate on some particular category. These organisations don’t need to be formal or “official.” They consist mostly of personal relationships, of people working together to get things done. Quigley defines a social instrument as an organisation which is satisfying a particular need, its purpose, with relative effectiveness. But over time, all instruments tend to deviate from their original purpose, and become institutions. Quigley explains:

This particular pattern is almost a golden rule of history,: all social instruments tend to become institutions. There are three reasons for this:

• Firstly, an instrument consists of people organised by personal relationships. These relationships and duties are like shards of the original purpose — they can be reassembled into the original purpose, but they also have an extra structure. These relationships and duties become an end in themselves. Most people think only of their own petty concerns, and almost no-one holds the original purpose as their personal day-to-day aim. For example, the purpose of an army is the defence of a society, but hardly anyone in the army has that as their day-to-day aim. Instead, they are concerned with discipline, feeding and paying the troops, training, providing intelligence, entertaining visiting dignitaries, and so on.

  Another way to look at this is to notice that an organisation as a whole has a “global” purpose, but individuals in it usually act “locally.” Since Quigley’s time, the business world has realised that this leads to inefficiency, a point demonstrated by the success of books like The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt. (This book is a bizarre combination of a love-story and a textbook on queueing theory. It tells the story of a manufacturing company which escapes from the curse of local optimisation and turns an institution back into an instrument. The heroes of Goldratt’s tale are rebels who break the rules to restore the original purpose of their organisation.) note 64

  In a very small organisation, people have a clear idea of the purpose, so it’s less likely to be an institution. Often a big organisation relies on a charismatic leader to maintain a sense of purpose, but when they lose control, leave or die, the organisation can rapidly regenerate into an institution. Managers can try to enforce the original purpose by imposing more rules or central decision-making, but these measures are self-defeating. When rule-books expand, some people follow the letter of the rules, however perverse. Others spend time and energy working around the rules, “to get things done.” Either way, the organisation is inefficient. Central decision-making is just as bad — it takes too long for decisions to go up and down a chain of command and there’s seldom enough information at the centre to make the right decision anyway. Again, the organisation is inefficient.

• Secondly, people in organisations have their own individual goals, quite distinct from the purpose of the organisation. They have human weaknesses and ambitions. They seek their own advantage and seek advancement within the organisation. This takes time and effort which is not then available to fulfil the original purpose of the organisation.

  This effect has been observed by others, in particular by historian C. Northcote Parkinson who noted in 1955 that in a bureaucracy “the number of the officials and the quantity of work to be done are not related to each other at all.” Parkinson saw that officials want to multiply subordinates, not rivals, and officials make work for each other. They want to multiply subordinates because this automatically brings greater importance, pay and prospects for promotion. (Rivals would reduce their prospects for promotion.) Officials make work for each other because of the extra administrative overheads and communication required when a group of people address a single task together. note 65

  “Parkinson’s Law” is usually quoted as “work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” This phrase is in the first sentence of his original article, which shows how far most people read. His conclusions were actually more scientific: he also derived a mathematical formula for the rate of growth of a bureaucracy, in the absence of extra real work. This formula usually gives a figure of between 5% and 6% growth per year, a figure which is well-supported by Parkinson’s data for the growth of the British Admiralty and Colonial office in the early twentieth century, at times when the responsibilities of these organisations were constant or declining.

  People may also join an organisation because of the social opportunities it brings, rather than to help achieve its original purpose. This is illustrated most graphically by the work of terrorism expert Max Abrahms. Building on the “natural systems” model of organisation-theorist Chester Barnard, Abrahms marshals a convincing body of evidence to show that the vast majority of terrorists join terrorist organisations for social reasons, rather than to achieve political ends. So, in our terms, almost all terrorist organisations are institutions rather than instruments of political change. This explains some otherwise puzzling properties of these organisations: they recruit from lonely, alienated young men, rather than from the politically committed; they seek to prolong their own existence regardless of the political consequences, and struggle most fiercely against groups similar to themselves; most of their foot-soldiers and many of their leaders are ignorant or uncertain about their organisation’s political purpose. note 66

  Psychopaths are another problem for organisations. Almost by definition, they focus on their own interests, rather than the original purpose of the organisation. They seem to be over-represented in the upper echelons of organisations — although only 1 in 100 of the general population, psychopaths are thought to form a much larger proportion of company executives, perhaps as many as 1 in 10. They show the qualities of confidence and decisiveness admired in leaders, and they have no qualms about shifting the blame for failure or stabbing colleagues in the back.

• Thirdly, times change, and today’s world is not the same as the world that gave birth to an organisation. To continue to achieve its original purpose, an organisation must change to match the world. However, individuals with “vested-interests” will resist change if they would personally lose out. On the other hand, even people who would personally gain from the change will not be so eager to press for change. This is because of “loss aversion,” which we previously encountered in chapter four. The prospect of a loss is more motivating than the prospect of a gain, when the loss and the gain are of equal size. So individual selfishness tends to favour the status-quo.

  Also, in long-lived organisations, old members leave or die, and if the organisation is to survive at all, they must be replaced by new members. However, the new members may not be adequate replacements for the old members — the old members will have tacit knowledge, which even they are unaware of, but which is necessary to achieve the organisation’s original purpose. So any organisation which fails to nurture tacit knowledge will in time become less an instrument and more an institution. The skill to re-create the organisation again in each new generation is itself tacit knowledge. If this is lost, the organisation is doomed to eventually become an institution.

For all these reasons, all social instruments tend sooner or later to become institutions. But when an instrument has changed into an institution, what about the needs it should be addressing? Often those needs will still be pressing on the society. In fact, the society may not be able to persist in its current form unless those needs are addressed. Quigley suggests three outcomes:

• Reform. The organisation is rearranged so that it is once more an instrument, more-or-less satisfying its proper purpose. Clearly, the vested-interests in the institution will resist this course of action.

• Circumvention. The vested-interests of the old institution are left with their privileges intact, but a new instrument is created which fulfils the original purpose. The more foresighted of the vested-interests might notice that the new instrument must necessarily grow and the old institution shrink, so the privileges of the the vested-interests could be at risk in the future. This worry might inspire the vested-interests to resist circumvention more energetically.

• Reaction. The vested-interests of the institution prevent either reform or circumvention. The pressing needs are therefore addressed by no-one and the society suffers some change, perhaps a decline or even collapse.

When we look at military history we can find some particularly good examples of instruments turning into institutions. In the Hundred Years War, says Quigley, “the inability of the French knights to analyze their defeats is one of the best examples we have of the reactions of an institutionalized force to weapons innovation.” Faced with longbow-armed common-folk from England and Wales, the French were unable to register that men of noble blood could be killed from a distance by their social inferiors. note 67

But you don’t have to go far to find institutions. Think about schools — what is their purpose, and how well do they really achieve it? Do they really help transform children into self-reliant mature adults? Why not? What are they doing instead? Think about hospitals, police forces, trades unions, charities. All around, you can see instruments and institutions in your own life. Instruments solve problems; institutions perpetuate the problems they should be solving. And all instruments tend to become institutions.

 

Another way to look at social groups is to think in terms of finite and infinite games, an idea proposed by religious scholar James Carse. The simplest definition of a finite game is one that you play to win. For example, football and chess are finite games. By contrast, an infinite game is one that you play to keep the game going. Carse gives an example of an infinite game from his childhood. Near to his house there was an empty double-lot where children would gather and play softball. In the summer, with no school, they would play all day long. Sometimes they would keep score, sometimes not. It was, says Carse, an endless game. note 68

Although infinite games share many of the characteristics of finite games, there are some critical differences. In an infinite game there is some ambiguity about who is or isn’t a player and exactly what the rules are. A finite game has definite rules and definite boundaries. The rules are unchangeable, because otherwise there would be no way to tell when someone had lost. For the same reason, in a finite game everyone has to understand and agree where the boundaries are.

Carse explains that an infinite player has the talent to see when someone is about to lose, and is able either to change the rules or otherwise find a way to get that person back into the play. In his childhood softball game, at the end of the summer the Catholic school a few blocks away went back a week early. So each day, in the late afternoon, a stream of high-energy Catholic kids looking to let off steam joined in and nearly broke up their game. Carse recalls how one of the players saved their infinite game. A little kid with a gift for poetic names called the interlopers “Speed, “Ace,” “Slugger,” “Champ,” and so on. The kids, says Carse, were charmed. The infinite game went on — not entirely easily, but it went on.

Infinite games can contain finite games. The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club in Wimbledon is an infinite game, but each year’s Wimbledon tennis championship is a finite game. Some lunchtimes, I play badminton in an informal club that’s been running for years. It’s an infinite game. Some days there are twenty people, some days only a couple, and there’s a steady turnover from year to year. We play doubles, singles and when there are odd numbers, two-against-one, which is not an official variant of badminton at all.

When you understand the concept, you can easily apply this classification to other social systems. Most religions are infinite games. An army is an infinite game, but a battle is a finite game. A trading company is an infinite game, and so usually is commerce in general — people like to band together in guilds, cartels and unions to seek their mutual advantage and to “keep the game going.” They resist the efforts of outsiders to shut the game down.

However, not all commerce is an infinite game. Sometimes one firm gets close to a monopoly, then concentrates on removing all remaining competitors by any means available — in other words, winning a finite game. Capitalism is not supposed to work like this — it is supposed to always be an infinite game, but in practice it sometimes becomes a finite game. The only real defence is to have a bigger infinite game called “government regulation,” but of course even that is not infallible. Since money brings political power, someone with enough money might use that power to change the regulations in their favour — again turning an infinite game into a finite game that they can win.

Most political elites or “establishments” can be viewed in terms of infinite games. When you see them this way, it becomes clearer why they take some otherwise strange decisions, harming their society and themselves in the longer run. Although he doesn’t use the term “infinite game,” Quigley gives a good example from the the Roman republic in his book Weapon Systems and Political Stability: note 69

Political power in the Roman republic was in the hands of an “establishment” drawn from a couple of dozen noble families. These families were playing an infinite game that they called dignitas. There was always a danger of outside power in the form of military force, money or popular uprisings upsetting that game. The political rules used to dole out power in the Roman republic appear to modern eyes quite strange. But the rules had a purpose:

This was the point of winning office as consul or censor; it was the point of military victories and foreign conquests. Force was excluded from the system by ensuring that the armies of Rome remained at a safe distance from the city. Wealth was excluded from the system by effectively restricting high office to the nobility, and although wealth was always useful, it was not possible to directly buy dignitas. Numbers were excluded from the system by a voting method where the establishment votes counted for more than common folk and where election days could be declared “inauspicious” by the official soothsayers and delayed until the lower classes had dispersed. The celebration of dignitas was most obvious at establishment funerals:

The establishment in every society play their own infinite game, though they keep score in different ways. One of the strange anomalies of our own age is the persistent greed of the fabulously rich. For these people, as the Pet Shop Boys put it, “too much is never enough.” This is because the score in their infinite game is measured in wealth. Trophies include the obvious mansions and private jets, but also “charity”: a new wing at a museum or a university building. (In nineteenth century Britain, similar philanthropists built public infrastructure too. This is not fashionable with the modern elite unless it is infrastructure in a third-world country.) For the very rich, money is an end in itself, because it buys the trophies in their infinite game of wealth. Given the choice of further enriching themselves or allowing the lower classes to have slightly more wealth, they make the obvious choice. They can never have too much wealth, just as the Roman establishment could never have too much dignitas.

The British establishment of the nineteenth century had a somewhat different way to keep score. I don’t want to paint too romantic a picture — these were the men whose self-serving “free trade” policies starved to death a million people in Ireland — but they were motivated by something more than mere wealth. “Honour” could not be bought, and it was a gentleman’s most prized possession, sometimes higher than life itself. Their infinite game was closer to dignitas than to wealth. How else can we explain the dedication of middle ranking men who spent decades as “political agents” on the North West frontier of India and then quietly retired to Eastbourne?

There is a danger within all infinite games that the players just assume that the game maintains itself, that they don’t need to make any effort to keep it going. If too many players just assume that the game will continue, regardless of their actions within the game, then it can collapse — perhaps into nothing at all, or perhaps into a finite game with winners and losers. This is how the Roman republic ended. The thirst for dignitas drove the expansion of Roman power abroad. These conquests transformed the countryside around Rome, and changed the balance of Roman society. Once a patchwork of small farms, worked by free yeoman farmers, the countryside became a gulag of slave-labour estates. The free farmers had to sell-up and move to the provinces they had recently conquered as foot-soldiers. The previous inhabitants of those provinces were shipped to Rome, where they worked the fields as slaves. The establishment paid for both the land and the slaves with their war profits.

The game was changing. Where once the Roman army had been an army of land-owners, fighting for their property, now it became an army of the poor, following a particular establishment general, hoping for a payoff when they were triumphant. Once land had been a prerequisite for military service; now it became the reward. The thirst for dignitas concentrated power more and more in the hands of individual establishment generals. From time to time, the establishment united and turned on individuals from their own ranks whose success might break the infinite game. The last, and most successful, of these generals was Julius Caesar. When the dust finally settled, Julius Caesar was dead, but so was the Roman republic. The first Emperor, Augustus, ruled in Rome. Someone had finally won.

 

Let’s now turn to the last of our three patterns: aspects of sovereignty. We say that nations are “sovereign states” and have something called “sovereignty,” but what exactly is that? Sovereignty is usually something that governments have — but there are organisations which are not governments, and yet seem to have something like sovereignty. On the other hand, there are places even nowadays where claims of sovereignty by any government look pretty thin.

Political theorist Max Weber suggested a useful definition of sovereignty: it’s a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force in a particular place. Your government has sovereignty because if you decide not to pay your taxes, they will send round the police and force you to pay. Their use of force is legitimate, in contrast to a loan-shark’s use of force if you don’t repay him. The government has a monopoly on force: they choose how much force other organisations can use and when they can use it — the police are allowed to use limited force, but the loan-shark isn’t supposed to use any. note 70

However, some states seem to have partial sovereignty, and don’t quite meet Weber’s definition. For example, what about Mexico, where drug cartels use anti-tank missiles to blow up police cars? Where uniformed gunmen from the cartels walk around with the name of their organisation stencilled on their bulletproof jackets? Where gunmen emerge from prison at night to kill their rivals, then return to safety before the sun rises? The Mexican government has no monopoly on force. On the other hand, the cartels are not “legitimate,” but that just raises a further question: who decides?

On the other hand, some organisations not recognised as states do seem to have something like sovereignty. We could call these organisations quasi-states — good examples would be FARC in Columbia or Hezbollah in Lebanon. We need a definition of sovereignty which is a bit more discriminating, and fortunately Quigley provides it in eight aspects of sovereignty, arranged in the order in which they historically tend to appear. Quasi-states tend to have only the first few of these aspects, mature nation-states have most of them.

• Defence. A community must be defended against attack and exploitation by outsiders. Without this, the other aspects of sovereignty cannot be preserved; some other organisation will come and steal them. The subject of defence against external threats is too large to properly explore here, so we will have to return to this in the next chapter.

• Settling disputes. There will be disputes within a community, and whoever is recognised as the effective and final arbiter of these disputes has this aspect of sovereignty. Note that this has nothing to do with laws and the enforcement of laws. It concerns things like feuds, rebellions, strikes and insurrections. It is purely about force or the threat of force, but this time force used against insiders in a society. This is the aspect of sovereignty which the government of Mexico lacks, and which the drug cartels, legitimate or not, have taken for themselves. To a significant extent they also have this power immediately across the border in the USA. note 71

  The drug cartels didn’t at first realise that they were quasi-states. For example, the Cartel Del Golfo, operating in the eastern part of Mexico, saw itself primarily as an import-export business, because it did not produce its own drugs. So in the 1990s, along with many other businesses, they decided to outsource activities which were not part of their “core competence.” They decided that settling disputes was not a core competence, and they contracted this out to an external organisation composed of former soldiers and American-trained counter-insurgency experts — the Zetas. note 72

  It turns out that the sovereign power to settle disputes is a core competence of a quasi-state which runs an illegal import-export business, because without this power there is no business. The Cartel Del Golfo was forced to bring this activity back “in house” but by then they had inadvertently created in the Zetas a rival quasi-state and a business competitor.

  As with all categorisations, sometimes real-world events don’t exactly fit. For example, what if an insurrection is promoted by an outside power? There is a grey area between defence and settling disputes. The important thing here is not to nit-pick about dividing lines, but to notice that there are different aspects to sovereignty, and that it’s possible for a state or quasi-state to have some aspects without having the others.

• Administrative power. For a community to continue to exist, there are certain things that need to be organised. For example, food has to be grown and distributed, fuel needs to be available, and so on. All these minutiae of life go unremarked most of the time; they are too ordinary to notice. The administrative power only becomes really noticeable in an emergency. For example, if there were a plague, someone would have to organise the quarantine of those infected, set-up improvised mortuaries, distribute medicine and vaccines. Who has the power to do this effectively? This is administrative power. It isn’t following the prescriptions of a law — usually there could be no law in advance, and it wouldn’t really be useful anyway.

  Who chooses the new assistant secretary of the Treasury? Who selects the the new chief of police? Whoever has the power to make such a choice, at their own discretion, has administrative power. We also see administrative power at a small scale, at the scale where it makes no sense to have laws, where society operates through “common sense.” For example, a traffic policeman who directs cars to stop and start at a junction has administrative power. Who stops and who goes is purely at his discretion. He decides and the drivers obey him. The operation of an army also depends on administrative power: the officers invent the orders they think appropriate for each situation, and their troops follow those orders.

  After hurricane Katrina, it was administrative power that was missing in New Orleans. The national and local authorities dealing with the aftermath concentrated almost exclusively on enforcing laws, particularly laws protecting property. The state demonstrated an almost complete lack of administrative power, and even attacked local groups organising their own survival.

• Taxation. The resources of a community are mobilised for public purposes via taxation. Almost all the other aspects of sovereignty incur some cost, and they must be paid for somehow. A state with the previous three powers still might not be able to raise taxes effectively: it’s only worth trying to tax those who have wealth, and the wealthy may have enough power that they can resist the state’s claims. It’s worth looking more closely at a government which appears to have financial difficulties: although it may seem to have many aspects of sovereignty, it may be weaker than it appears. Power to tax seems to be a worthwhile diagnostic for this weakness. For example the “absolute monarch” Louis XVI did not have the power to raise adequate revenue through taxes — that’s why he had to call the Estates General in 1789. We know what happened after that. In recent years, the government of Greece hardly has any power to collect taxes, so we might eventually expect a similar outcome.

  Taxation can take different forms: where gangsters run a quasi-state, their tax gathering looks like collecting protection money. States sometimes contract-out this aspect of sovereignty to commercial organisations, which on the ground can be indistinguishable from gangsters. Taxation need not be in money — the government of the later Roman empire gathered taxes in kind (shoes, grain, clothing and so on), to defend against the inflation which they themselves created.

• Legislation. This is the power to decide on and adopt new laws. In the early centuries of Western civilisation this power did not exist. There were laws and rules, but these were based on tradition and custom, community by community. The law was found, not created, by recording these local customs. Writing down the rules was not at first considered to be making new law, because it wasn’t. This changed over time, so that in some places, the law was what was written, even if that contradicted what was customary. But not all states have this power. For example, the law of France before the French Revolution was the first kind of law, mere transcription of custom. After the Revolution, the Code Napoleon was the second kind: laws contrary to custom, created out of nothing. Napoleon had legislative power where Louis XVI did not.

  In modern America, there has been a curious transfer of this sovereign power from the official legislative body, Congress, to corporations and to their masters, the merchant princes of the modern world. New laws with dense texts like telephone directories are proposed, debated, amended and passed without the members of Congress reading them at all. It’s not clear who wrote the post-9/11 PATRIOT act, but it wasn’t Congress. The 2005 bankruptcy law, making it harder for individuals to get out of debt by going bankrupt, was mostly written by lawyers working for the banking corporations, according to bankruptcy expert Elizabeth Warren. When threatened with regulation in 2010, the same banking corporations hired thousands of lobbyists, at a cost of over a billion dollars, to write and re-write the proposed law. Members of Congress were essentially their shills. The bankers got what they wanted. note 73

• Executive. This is the power to enforce the law, to impose “law and order.” Notice the difference between this and the administrative power — administrative power is arbitrary and discretionary, while executive power is a limited power to enforce the rules. Most customary law requires little power to enforce it because most of the enforcement is informal. But when new laws can be created out of nothing, some power is necessary make sure they are enforced even when many people don’t want to obey them. For example, during the Prohibition era, a large and mostly fruitless effort went into enforcing the unpopular law against alcohol. An even larger and more fruitless “war on drugs” is still being waged nowadays against other drugs, most of which were once legal. (On the other hand, even popular laws will be ineffective if those with executive power refuse to enforce them.)

• Money control. Control of coinage has been the prerogative of royalty from ancient times, with counterfeiting close to treason. But in the modern world, many states do not have the power of money control. Nowadays money control is about much more than coinage — only a tiny fraction of money is in the form of coins. Most money is just numbers in a computer, and is literally invented out of nothing by banking corporations. The subject of money is another topic which is too large to explore properly here, so we will come back to it in another chapter.

• Incorporating power. This is the power to create and destroy corporations — legal entities which are treated in some ways as if they were people. Corporations are make-believe people who are granted limited rights, for example the right to own property, and the right to sue and be sued in court. Until relatively recently, corporations in the English-speaking world were closely controlled, with very specific purposes and often with limited durations. The reason for these limitations was to stop the wealthy hiding behind these pretend “people,” pulling the strings but shielded from the consequences of their actions. The United States does not currently have this power, because the government has no control over the rights of corporations; nor does it have any control over their purposes or duration.

  This situation arose in a rather bizarre way, with a Supreme Court judgement in 1886. After the American Civil War, the fourteenth amendment to the constitution was adopted in 1868 with an “equal protection” clause intended to prevent discrimination against freed black slaves. It said that all persons were entitled to equal protection under the law. Well, not all persons — an attempt in 1874 to win votes for women on this basis failed when the Supreme Court said it was intended to apply only to black males. This didn’t stop corporate lawyers claiming over and over again that it meant that corporate “persons” should also be entitled to equal protection. In 1886, one of the Supreme Court justices made an off-the-cuff-remark before delivering judgement on a case. This remark, to the effect that corporations were persons, technically had no legal standing. Nevertheless, this apparent precedent was wheeled out again and again by corporate lawyers over the decades and used to claim more and more rights for corporations. In 2003, a broadcasting corporation even won the right to tell lies without penalty, on the grounds that having to tell the truth would infringe its “constitutional right” to free speech. note 74

  (At a risk of digressing from the main line of my exposition, I feel the need to point out an unnoticed contradiction at the heart of this scam. A corporation is undoubtedly property, and is also claimed to be a “person.” There is a name for a person who is property: a slave. All slaves in the United States were freed by the thirteenth amendment. So surely, if corporations are persons, they must be freed too? And freed without compensation to their former masters. But like a person in a coma, they are not competent to run their own affairs — if we ask them to say what they want, they will be unable to speak directly. Nowadays they only “speak” via a representative appointed by their master. So some sort of guardian will have to be appointed, and certainly not the representative of their previous master. Following this line of argument, its hard to see how the corporations can avoid eventually being made “wards of court,” administered by the state.)

When we split up sovereignty into aspects like this, we can see that some states have many of these aspects, some have only a few. Some states have these aspects in some part of their territory, but not everywhere. Some quasi-states — not recognised as nations by the UN — actually have more sovereignty than the official government. When we break up sovereignty into aspects like this, the issue of legitimacy fades away. We no longer have to decide whether an organisation has a legitimate monopoly on force. All we need to decide is who, if anyone, controls each aspect of sovereignty.

 

These patterns allow us to look at history and current affairs from different angles. In every society there are “elites” or establishment groups who have dominant political power. By “political power,” I mean the power to get other people to do what they want. The levers of political power are force, money and persuasion. Of the three, persuasion is most reliable. When you persuade someone that what they already believe means that they should do now what you want, then they are likely to keep doing it when you go away. Take away force or money, and there’s a good chance that they will go back to their old ways, because they never really changed their mind. (In case you didn’t notice, most of the previous chapters were about persuasion. The next two chapters are about force and money.)

Every elite or establishment group plays some kind of infinite game. In order to succeed in that game, the players want political power, and to get that power they each try to control some aspects of sovereignty. Or, since only relative strength is important, they might try to make the aspects controlled by rivals less effective. (Establishment groups can sometimes span several states, and disputes which are apparently between different states may may in fact just be jockeying for position in the infinite game played by their common elite.)

The social organisations supporting these aspects of sovereignty are themselves to some degree either instruments or institutions. The members of the establishment have little interest in whether these organisations fulfil their proper purpose, satisfying some human need in the society. Instead, the most important consideration is how much each organisation satisfies their personal need as a player in the infinite game. To satisfy their needs, they may want some organisations to be instruments, and others to be institutions.

Within the establishment there will therefore be a tension between two groups of people, with different approaches to the infinite game. One group, the long-termers, understands that winning and losing are secondary to keeping the infinite game going, and accepts that it is worth paying to keep society and its instruments in working order. They understand that it is necessary to “leave some money on the table” to preserve the infinite game. The long-termers are really conservatives, but they often look like radicals, because they have to work against vested-interests to reform or circumvent institutions.

The other group, the short-termers, are intent only on winning. (And, of course, psychopaths are most likely to fall into this group.) They assume that the infinite game will continue with no special effort on their part. They might appear to be conservatives, protecting the institutions that benefit them, or they might appear to be radicals, carelessly upsetting the status-quo and going “all in” without thought for the consequences. Although most will be knocked out of the game completely, just by chance one of the gamblers might win big.

Infinite games do sometimes end. Perhaps a short-termer wins so big that they believe they can knock out all the other players for good. Perhaps the game runs up against some resource limit. In a game of accumulation, when there is no more stuff to accumulate, most players will realise that they can never beat the current winner, unless they change the game completely. Long-termers might engage in a rearguard action and try to prolong the game. Short-termers will of course do their utmost to be winners. One way or another, when most of the players want the game to end, it will end.

This was the situation at the end of the Roman republic, and it might be the situation today in the West in general and in the United States in particular. Author William Gibson, in his novel Spook Country suggests that the United States is in the grip of a kind of “cold civil-war” within the establishment, a civil war between long-termers and short-termers. He could be right. Despite its apparent military strength, the United States is in a difficult financial position. The infinite game of wealth has sucked money out of the pockets of ordinary people for decades, but this cannot go on forever. When something cannot go on forever, at some point it will stop. What then? note 75

 

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