Conflict between freedom and organization

The following has been excerpted from the book, The Concentration of Power: Institutionalization, Hierarchy & Hegemony,

While in Saudi society there is some distinction between the interlinked types of power, totalitarian leaders go one step beyond typical authoritarians to seek the seamless fusion of power. Under totalitarianism, there is little limit on the ability of the ruler to determine the exact nature, interplay, and deconfliction of force, wealth, and knowledge hierarchies. This is a strength and weakness of totalitarian forms of government. The strength is that totalitarians can better coordinate the wealth and knowledge resources available to the state. Totalitarians, thereby, see themselves as bringing a beneficent order to political, economic, and intellectual chaos.

The weakness is that in the process, knowledge must be constrained to the official version, which clouds the totalitarian’s power of perception and innovation. Without allowing knowledge to be free, the disincentive to transmit knowledge and the failure to transform intellectual labor into guidance or property remove the incentive to think productively, and civic engagement degrades. What knowledge is transmitted must cleave to the official version even when fatally inaccurate. This dynamic leads to information failures that cause wars, famines, and the stifling of scientific progress, along with the acceleration of ethical decay due to intellectual and moral lassitude.

With respect to domestic politics, totalitarianism is one extreme of the continuum between centralization and decentralization of power. The other extreme is anarchy. Anarchists and libertarians have an almost religious hope and faith that, without the state, society will develop into some form of utopian collectivism, or consensual market relations marked by egalitarianism. More often, if not always, a lack of government devolves into violent chaos, as found in the interstices of power during the European Middle Ages, the warring states period in ancient China, and failed states such as Somalia and Afghanistan. A lack of government transforms societies from one of laws that reify hierarchy to one of violence that establishes hierarchy, because most humans are not pacifistic anarchists but rather avaricious and fearful opportunists.

Democracy is found in the middle between anarchy and autocracy in that it institutionalizes protections—at the domestic level—for the freedom of individuals, political associations, and corporations from arbitrary control or victimization by state and criminal violence. Relatively powerless and unorganized individuals are thereby protected through laws and regulations that limit, but do not destroy, the economic power of business, the knowledge power of intellectuals, and the political power of government and the military. Democracy is inherently conservative and risk averse, because, unlike other forms of government, it requires deliberation and agreement for the state to take action. With deliberation comes a consideration of proposals from multiple perspectives, including by those who are against the proposal and sure to highlight its risks. However, it does allow for change and progress where most people believe that “progress” should take place.

Democracy is a stable political system, as is totalitarianism. Transition from democracy to anocracy, which is an only partially autocratic state, runs counter to public expectations of democracy and progress, and thus increases the likelihood of instability, civil war, and the overthrow of government. Statistical analysis of regime types and transitions, historically, provides support for this theory.

The Dominican Republic in the early 1960s is an example. The country enjoyed established democratic institutions, but in 1961, President Trujillo was assassinated. A coup took place, and a power struggle ensued. At the end of 1963, counterrevolutionaries ousted the government and the country devolved toward civil war, which included an armed citizenry and constitutionalist military rebels who sought a return to democracy through revolution.

The constitutionalists had occupied a rebel zone, but some radicals among them were getting support from Castro’s Cuba. Their leader and the former president, Juan Bosch, was seen by the US as too weak and incompetent to resist this communist influence. US President Lyndon B. Johnson responded in 1965 by sending in a detachment of marines, who isolated the rebels and stabilized the country in favor of the autocratic government.

The broader global contest between autocracy (today represented by China, and previously represented by the USSR) and democracy (represented by the US and its allies) trumped the narrower struggle for democracy in any one country if that so-called democratic struggle leaned politically toward communist dictators and their allies, and thus risked democracy on a global level.

In the context of its 1978 election, the Dominican Republic returned to democracy through pressure by US President Jimmy Carter and democratic politicians in Europe and Latin America. Supporters of the authoritarian in power, President Joaquín Balaguer, attempted to utilize fraud, intimidation, theft of ballot boxes, claims of election fraud, and rumors of a military demand for a “subsidiary election” to overturn the election he lost. But international pressure worked. The democratic socialist opposition candidate who won, subsequently freed political prisoners and eased press censorship.

Each society arrives at its own temporary equilibrium, with adverse regime change into anocracy occupying the unstable space between autocracies and democracies, and tending to cause civil war and gravitation toward one of those two relatively stable poles. Transition in the other direction—from autocracy to anocracy—is seen by the population as a benign change, and therefore does not tend to cause civil war.

To understand why autocracies are stable, it helps to consider the position of citizens in China or North Korea. They cannot do much, unfortunately, to liberate their countries. Censorship, surveillance, targeted travel restrictions, and the banning of even small protest groups from meeting privately, much less publicly, make it nearly impossible for social movements to overthrow the government.

Conversely, the structure of voting in the US, where both candidates try to appeal to the median voter, yields a government in which, whoever wins, most moderates are relatively satisfied. Moderates are uninterested in overthrowing the government if their candidate does not win, and there are not enough extremists to do so, as evidenced by the small size of violent groups on the fringes of massive BLM protests, and the slightly larger relative size of the rioters at the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. Of approximately 30,000 protesters at the legal Trump rally, approximately 10,000 got onto Capitol grounds, and only 800 made it into the Capitol Building itself.

The 800 people who got into the building, and scattered violence by BLM and Antifa protesters, were insufficient to overturn an election, much less overthrow a democratic government such as the US. But they are enough for the opposite political side to tar their moderate political allies.

Despite occasional insurrections and revolutions, the entire system of polities evolves over time toward the centralization of power and is only arrested on that path when subunits congeal into institutions that deliberately seek to impede the concentration of power. Yet, such institutional attempts to impede concentration do not typically roll back concentration—in fact, they often fail, or, if successful, the institutions themselves become a means, and new locus, for the concentration of power.

For example, nationalism and patriotism can protect a relatively weak state’s power and sovereignty from aggregation into an empire, sphere of influence, or international institution. Indian nationalists broke their country free of the British Empire in 1947, and are still independent. But nationalism can also lead a powerful state to impose its will on weaker citizens or foreign states. Hindu nationalism in India today is used to discriminate against Muslims. Thus, nationalism is necessary to deconcentration (or stasis) of power for a weak state in its defense against a powerful state, and for concentration of power by a powerful state if it is totalitarian and territorially aggressive, and the totalitarian leader buys public support through successful military campaigns abroad.

In China, Han nationalism succeeded in imposing rule from Beijing on East Turkistan (now Xinjiang) and Tibet in the early 1950s. A civil war ensued in Tibet, and Uyghurs in Xinjiang, perceived by the central government as disloyal, are currently enduring a genocide, according to UN and US legal definitions. These previously independent regions are now under virtual occupation by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), with dissent or even the display of ethnic or religious diversity harshly repressed. Nationalism can therefore be a force for independence or for domination.

There are many small countries that are highly patriotic, but not expansionist. And some behaviors that appear expansionist to some—for example, American military bases abroad during the Cold War—are not driven by American nationalism or imperialism, as its detractors allege, but by an ideological belief in defending democracy and the independence of others abroad, or because by supporting and creating allies, those allies might one day do the same for America.

Likewise, an international institution such as the UN can, according to its charter, protect the sovereignty of states in the international system and the human rights of citizens in repressive states. Or, it can be influenced by large powers, including repressive ones, to pull that sovereignty away from weak states and, through a process of hierarchical skimming and pumping, erode human rights and freedoms in the entire system. Nationalism and globalism are not good or evil in and of themselves, but tools used against, or for, freedom and democracy. Knowing the difference requires an understanding of the political context and motives of the powers behind a particular initiative.