Power Self Aristocratizes

In ceasing to govern, you only create a vacancy for that position.

Something very important that people tend to overlook. The reason that religions lead to priesthoods, attempts to overthrow aristocracies lead to tyrannies, and the FreeMarket leads to CorporateGovernment. It has a lot to do with the reason urban countries appeared in the first place, and is a fundamental result of the way people live in them.

Interesting ideas. Not sure I understand, though. Urban countries appeared because people ceased to govern, inadvertently inviting someone else to step in? Didn't cities form because all sorts of benefits arise from living in close proximity with lots of other people? Or is that not what you're talking about?

"Aristocracy" = rule by the best, or rule by a noble class. Are you saying that having power automatically creates rule by the best? That wherever power is, it takes over? Would a better name for this page be PowerAbhorsaVacuum?

I think what he's saying is that a gradation of power inevitably creates a hierarchy. (More or less.)

As for cities, my understanding of them is they were formed in order to enable more domination and control. It's difficult to dominate rural farmers and impossible to dominate hunter-gatherers. Agriculture was certainly invented for the purposes of domination since contrary to impressions, it involves far more effort for far less outcome than hunting and gathering. The benefits which we see so clearly in cities (high density allowing scientific and technological development) would have been impossible for the ancients to imagine.

Cities appeared thousands of years after agriculture, remember. They definitely had a lot to do with domination, though. It's noteworthy that the first cities were all centered around ziggurats, expensive buildings that don't actually do anything.

Except psychologically. But that's what power is about anyways.

An interesting book regarding the foundation of cities and human societies in general is GunsGermsAndSteel by JaredDiamond?

Agriculture was certainly invented for the purposes of domination since contrary to impressions, it involves far more effort for far less outcome than hunting and gathering.

I find this hard to believe. Can you back it up with an argument or some other information?

You have to realize that hunting and gathering can only support extremely low density populations, but it supports those populations very well and very easily. What makes primitive societies so barbaric is not their primitive technology but their primitive psychology. In general, primitives are the most brutal and horrifying ... animals one could ever imagine.

A great book that seriously addresses this topic (and many others) is Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. The topic is more complex than one might think. For one thing, nearly all hunter-gatherer societies do some agriculture. But I think we're getting way off the topic of this page. Then again, I still don't know what the topic of this page is.

That might as well be the topic. I wasn't trying to start a discussion on anything in particular, just have the general principle handy to refer to. That way when it comes up, you can say PowerSelfAristocratizes instead of having to re-explain that it does.

But what is the general principle? What does it mean to say "power self-aristocratizes"?

Whenever and wherever some group happens to acquire power over others, they will entrench this power and its attendant priviledges into an enduring and exclusionary system.

More particularly, I was referring to the fact that when an enduring and exclusionary system fails to develop for whatever reason, some other hierarchy will take over. It's easy for positions of influence to cement themselves unless someone else is actively preventing them from doing so, and attempts at the latter usually develop into hierarchies themselves.

That's 'Power Abhors a Vacuum' which is quite different from 'Power Self-Aristocrizes' though you may not have meant it to. The latter only applies to situations where power relations already exist, the former presupposes that power relations exist in all situations. At least, that's what it seems to me. I do not agree that hierarchies are inevitable because I do not believe that power is inevitable. Power can only exist so long as the people held in its thrall allow it to. In situations where people are not psychologically predisposed to allow power, it will not exist. Such situations exist in extremely primitive societies which lack all trust and also lack all hierarchy and also in extremely advanced societies where people realize there is no rational justification for that kind of trust.

My bad, should have said "fails to maintain it's position." I know there are primtive societies where people naturally don't start serving hierarchies (though I wonder if it is reason and not tradition), and in early days they must have been the rule; but in any sort of society where there is such a tradition, they regrow without any help. The reason it's easy to cement yourself in a position of power is because people are conditioned to them being there.

Quotes come from 'Foundations of Psychohistory' by Lloyd deMause. The man references pretty much everything so relevant references are reprinted for convenience.

Quotes:

One of the curious discoveries of recent ethnography is how easy it is simply to gather the food necessary for life in a few hours a day. Jack Harlan, a specialist in early farming, went out himself to one of the "vast seas of primitive wild wheats" still growing in Near Eastern mountain areas, and, using a 9,000-year-old sickle blade, harvested grain so quickly that "a family group.. could easily harvest wild cereals over a three-week span or more and, without ever working very hard, could gather more grain than a family could possibly consume in a year."(132) Contemporary gathering groups can do equally well: "far from being on a starvation level.. they get all the calories they need without even working very hard. Even the Bushmen on the relatively desolate Kalahari region, when subjected to an input-output analysis, appeared to get 2,100 calories a day with less than three days' worth of foraging per week. Presumably, hunter-gatherers in lusher environments in prehistoric times did even better."(133) When a contemporary gatherer is shown how to farm, he usually laughs at the notion, like the Bushman who said, "Why should we plant, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"(134) http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/p271x290.htm

132. John E. Pfeiffer, The Emergence of Man. New York: Harper & Row, 1969, p.366.

133. Kent V. Flannery, "Origins and Ecological Effects of Early Domestication in Iran and the Near East," in Peter J. Ucko and G. W. Dimbleby, editors, The Domestication and Exploitation of Plants and Animals. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1969, p.75.

134. Richard B. Lee, "What Hunters Do For a Living, or, How to Make Out on Scarce Resources," in Richard Lee and Irven DeVore?, edhors, Man the Hunter. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1968, p.33.

and:

So difficult is it for New Guinea area mothers to relate to their children as independent human beings that they are unable to feed them regularly once they are off the breast. Like contemporary pedophiles, they do not so much love their children as need them, so when the parents' needs end, the child can be emotionally abandoned. When still on the breast, New Guinea children are constantly being force-fed, so that nursing "becomes a battle in which the mother clutches the child, shaking it up and down with the nipple forced into its mouth until it must either suck or choke."219 As soon as they are off the breast, however, the mothers no longer need them as erotic objects, and they have difficulty understanding that their children need three meals a day. Although there is almost always plenty of food to eat for both adults and children, "several authors have stressed what appears to be a nonchalant attitude toward infant and child feeding on the part of Papua New Guinea mothers,"220 so that "over 90 percent of children under five have been measured as having mild to moderate undernutrition."221 In one careful statistical study, almost all children remained underweight for years, because "none were fed three times daily as clinic sisters encourage..."222 In the New Guinea-Australian culture area, meat, in particular, is rarely given to children, being eaten up by the adults first.223 Hippler reports that "parents eat all the substantial food...before the child can get any. Adults...do not believe that deaths result from anything but sorcery, they make no connection between these practices and childhood illness and attendant death."224 In a careful study of Kwanga child malnutrition, two-year-olds who had been weaned were found to average only two meals a day, so that child mortality was extremely high.225 Nurses in the clinic kept telling the mothers, "Why don't you tell me the truth? You do not feed your child properly!" but the mothers didn't seem to comprehend why it was necessary to feed them regularly each day, and so the weaned children kept losing weight and even dying.226 http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/10a_evolution.html

219 Annette Hamilton, Nature and Nurture, p. 32.

220 Carol L. Jenkins, Alison K. Orr-Ewing and Peter F. Heywood, "Cultural Aspects of Early Childhood Growth and Nutrition Among the Amele of Lowland Papua New Guinea." In Leslie B. Marshall, Ed., Infant Care and Feeding in the South Pacific. New York: Gordon and Breach, 1985, p. 29.

221 Paula Brown, Highland Peoples of New Guinea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978, p. 64; Katherine A. Dettwyler, "Styles of Infant Feeding: Parental-Caretaker Control of Food Consumption in Young Children." American Anthropologist 91(1989): 700.

222 Carol L. Jenkins et al., "Cultural Aspects of Early Childhood Growth," pp. 34-35, 47.

223 Maria A. Lepowsky, "Food Taboos, Malaria and Dietary Change: Infant Feeding and Cultural Adaptation on a Papua New Guinea Island." In Leslie B. Marshall, Ed., Infant Care and Feeding in the South Pacific. New York: Gordon and Breach, 1985, p. 70.

224 Arthur Hippler, "Culture and Personality," p. 236.

225 Brigit Obrist van Eeuwijk, Small But Strong: Cultural Contexts of (Mal-) Nutrition Among the Northern Kwanga (East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea). Basel: Wepf & Co., 1992, p. 200.

226 Ibid., p. 13.

CategoryEconomics