The Law of The Cycles of Political Orders

Eric Danelaw shared a link.

Mar 2, 2020, 12:14 PM

Class: The Little Word the Elites Want You to Forget, from truthdig.com

THE LAW OF THE CYCLES OF POLITICAL ORDERS

(thanks for the invite to comment)

Organizations evolve to exploit an opportunity that can only be exploited by organizations.

The organizational myth, history, tradition, rules, methods of description, persuasion, and argument expand until all available opportunity, rents, extractions, and predations under it are exhausted and all incentives to persist the organization are exhausted by enough of the population that they are incentivized to seek other opportunities.

At that point in the shift of incentives, the opportunity that evolves is radical extra-political reorganization of capital, elites, and institutions, to eliminate the accumulated, rents, extractions, and predations so that incentive to persist organization of the polity, society, community, is restored.

This reorganization can consist of three possibilities, including i) retention of strategy but redistribution of capital and restructuring of institutions (best if say, under rule of law), ii) rotation of strategy, elites, and restructuring of institutions (best if say, under rule of legislation), or iii) replacement of strategy, elites, institutions altogether (best if under tyranny).

For example Picketty is right in some sense, but it turns out that the aristocracies were actually better than we thought because they had Hoppeian incentives to avoid the tragedy of the commons, and to persist the polity and society while continuously reorganizing the institutions and elites.

This is why we ( or at least I) have recommended (in the new constitutional amendments) capital reallocation, institutional reformation, and a shift back to intergenerational elites, on a scale not seen since the roman reforms.

We don’t do things too badly. But our 20th century experiments in variations on the ancient tripartite order under rule of law largely didn’t work. There is a reason we evolved so quickly compared to other civilizations despite the dark ages. We already invented perfect government. We just didn’t adapt it correctly in response to the industrial revolution. Because we didn’t understand why we’d been successful.

Now we do.

Cheers.