 If someone gives me one sheep now, I'll give them two wood next turn. Actually, you can't do that. That's not a legal trade. I will make it legal. God, not this crap again. Politics has a few definitions. You're probably used to one that looks something like this. Government, political parties, people running for office, that sort of stuff. But politics is also the theory and practice of the allocation of power. Power also has a few definitions. But formal systems of government definitely aren't the only way that people exercise power over each other. That's really what we'll be discussing broadly here. Power over people. The ability to get others to do what you want them to do regardless of their initial desires. This can happen in numerous ways. You can convince them it's in their best interests. You can threaten to hurt them if they don't. You can offer to pay them to do it. All of these are expressions of power and we partake in at least some of them daily. That doesn't mean that they're all equivalent, of course. You probably agree that holding a gun to your roommate's head every time you want them to do the dishes is probably not okay. Some political scientists differentiate hard from soft power. That is coercion, either by force or simply paying someone off, versus enticement, getting them to want what you want. But politically, passive-aggressive notes are simply another less extreme mechanism by which you can exercise power over your roommate. This is part of the problem with naive versions of anarchism and libertarianism, which seek to expand freedom solely by limiting government. Laws are very obvious and overt expressions of power. They're publicly known written rules that the government can use force and violence to make people obey, the hardest of hard power. If you don't do this thing, our armed enforcers will shoot and or imprison you. So, if you're a person who values liberty, you might reasonably want fewer laws. But people are still vulnerable to coercion by other means. Like, how much crap do you put up with at work because you don't want to get fired? How many things do you not say it loud at family gatherings because you just know Uncle Kevin is going to start ranting about the Illuminati? Limiting government doesn't affect the practical constraints on my behavior by those other expressions of power, social, economic, physical, whatever. I mean, ostensibly, laws are actually supposed to increase my liberty by limiting how much others can wield those things to get me to do what they want me to do. That doesn't always happen, but, hey, my little Prius wouldn't get me far in New York City without the NYPD looking out for me. As with money and fame, power has a sort of gravity to it and tends to accumulate in one place over time. There are numerous reasons for this, but I'm going to talk about it in terms of specialization and coordination, and settlers of Catan. At first blush, especially if you're American, having some other person telling you what to do sounds intrinsically bad. You have all sorts of cultural narratives about independence, self-sufficiency, tyrannical dictators, and freedom! The problem with radical individual independence isn't really the state-of-nature thing is envisioned by Enlightenment philosophers. It's that it's dominated by cooperative strategies, which allow for specialization. If you've ever played Settlers of Catan against an alliance of players, you know how much it sucks. While you're trying to build roads over to a wheat field somewhere, one person rakes in a bunch of wheat, one person rakes in handfuls of ore, and before you know it, it's really just a two-player game. Specialization allows each player in the alliance to build less and get more for it. So long as our alliance holds, I don't have to worry about building roads over to grain. That's Sarah's problem. Mind you, I could. It's just totally unnecessary and would put me at a disadvantage. I only have to worry that the two of us are getting more grain than Alice or Bob, and stay in my lane so that we have a ton of ore. In the real world, I don't have to worry about buying and maintaining weapons to defend myself and my property. That's the military and the police's problem. I could, but it's totally unnecessary and would put me at a competitive disadvantage. I don't have to worry about coding video games or planting potatoes either. I can just put my head down and design stuff. Same deal. Of course, in Katan, if you wait long enough, that simple alliance strategy will inevitably break down, especially as someone gets close to winning. Game theorists would call it an iterated prisoner's dilemma. Allies get the greatest benefit working together every turn, but whoever screws the alliance first gets just a little bit more out of it. Nobody can simply focus on getting ore and be satisfied that they're going to win. They have to worry about who's going to get the best of this deal when it inevitably ends. And weirdly, if you chase it to its logical conclusion, that problem of defection forbids any sort of cooperation in the first place. Consider, to net the greatest benefit, the best time to screw over your ally is one turn before they would have screwed you over. The best time for them to screw you over is one turn before you were going to do that. So long as both parties are being perfectly rational, running that algorithm recursively in their heads, they should both ultimately conclude that the best turn to exit the alliance is right when it begins. But they'll still lose to players who can cooperate and specialize. This is an intrinsic paradox of rational actors cooperating in an atmosphere of competition. Attention between self-sufficiency and redundancy, between the advantages of cooperation and the drawbacks of being the one left holding the bag. In order to maximize everyone's benefit, we should work together, but if you decide to screw me, I'm screwed. You can see this exact problem in all sorts of different situations at many different scales. Bank runs, arms races, environmental protection, races to the bottom for labor conditions. In each case, everyone might agree on the best case scenario, but rationally refuse to take on the risk and competitive disadvantage necessary to achieve it. It's a system level phenomenon, and even the most reasonable people require a system to combat it, which is why it's actually useful to have authorities. Authorities are entities imbued with legitimate political power, however that happens, to ensure continued cooperation, either by rewarding it or punishing the alternative. Instead of fretting about what happens when someone decides to defect from our little alliance, we create some entity outside the existing agreement, tasked with reducing the allure of defection. The more people you want to coordinate and the greater the potential reward for defection, the more power you have to give that entity to ensure that everyone keeps getting the benefits of coordinating and specializing without being tempted to defect. Take this big stick and hit whomever breaks the pact first. Back in the Katan example, say that everyone in your alliance gave some cards to a third party to hold hostage, paid out to the remaining members of the alliance when someone decides to screw them. All of a sudden there's actually a rational incentive to hang together and specialize, so long as the pot is sweet enough. Of course now we also have to worry about that third party running off with the cards, which is where we can start waving the American flag and shouting about despotism. This is where all that social science we learned in elementary school comes into play, checks and balances, democracy, all that jazz. But even without all that stuff, the cooperative benefit is often still worth the risk of some authority, loyalty or Tsar or whatever, going mad with sheep power. If you iterate that idea of ceding power to an authority to optimize specialization and cooperation of groups, suddenly the large hierarchical governmental structures that we see become obvious extensions of that process. Competition and specialization can happen on the town level, on the county level, on the state level, even on the national or international level. And so long as that's happening, it sometimes makes sense to create and coordinate with even larger powers. Which is why power consolidates. So long as there are individuals or groups that would outcompete others if they work together, but still have to worry about getting the short end of the stick, the only rational way to make it worthwhile for everyone is to put someone in charge. And so they put someone in charge. And they put someone in charge. And so on. So why doesn't every country on earth report to a single world government? Well, despite how awesome it would be for humanity to specialize entire nations, authorities come with a cost beyond the resources we invest to empower them. There's some amount of competition for that top spot and all the power that comes with it. The more power it wields, the more intense the competition for it, and the more resources everyone has to invest in trying to secure it. At some point, the cost of fighting over an authority position is simply too great to outweigh the benefits of coordination it would grant. The tipping point varies, but can you imagine, say, Russia, China, and the US all campaigning for leadership of a single world government? Heesh. Anyways, all of this is just an interesting way to think about large scale hierarchical power structures as an emergent property of competition between individuals. There are all sorts of possible ways society could work, but so long as we're competing for resources, this kind of makes sense. Just for what happens in a post-scarcity society when we don't really need to compete anymore, well, personally, I'm hoping for Star Trek. What about you? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. If you'd like to exercise your power, don't forget to blah blah subscribe, blah share, and don't stop thinking.