The ecoDarwinian Paradigm:

In a Landscape of Suggestions

Richard Ostrofsky
copyright © Richard Ostrofsky, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4357-1325-3

Talk #13 Groups and Governance

Man has an inclination to socialize himself by associating with
others, because in such a state he feels himself more than a
natural man . . . He has, moreover, a great tendency to
individualize himself by isolation from others, because he
likewise finds in himself the unsocial disposition of wishing to
direct everything merely according to his own mind . . . [This
mutual antagonism] . . . impels him through the desire of honor
or power or wealth, to strive after rank among his fellow-men –
whom he can neither bear to interfere with himself, nor yet let
alone.
– Principles of Politics, Immanuel Kant

Thea: You were going to talk about government this evening – the role
of government in a self-organizing society. That’s a bit of a contra-diction,
isn’t it? If you have a central government taking and enforcing decisions
on society, how can you speak of self-organization?

Guy: It’s the same paradox, if you care to see it so, as self and
consciousness in a human brain. Or global meaning in a text made up of
individual words. There’s no real contradiction.

Thea: Well, that’s something you’ll have to show me.

Guy: In part, I already did when we talked about context and the
hermeneutic circle.1 The ecological stability of thought patterns in a brain
bears about the same relationship to individual suggestions that the
meaning of a text bears to its words. In both cases, the parts comprise the
whole, but acquire their exact significance only from the context in which

1 In Talk #5.
they occur. The same is true of society and government. The actions of its
innumerable persons and organizations derive their public meaning from a
context that they themselves comprise. Government articulates and
codifies this context, and enforces it to the extent it can. If you think of
government as a reflexive action of the society upon itself, the
contradiction disappears.

Thea: Not much consolation when you get caught in some money-
grabbing speed trap, and the cop is giving you a ticket. Government feels
alien enough then.

Guy: Or when it demands that you pay taxes to finance hare-brained

military ventures that make you less secure and poorer year by year. Sure.
Many feel robbed or subjugated by their governments. Many feel that
vital needs are being ignored. Many feel, often correctly, that their
governments are acting with disastrous folly. Nonetheless, our
governments and their policies must be seen as the current outcome of our
collective action and inaction. What else could they be?

Thea: Perhaps. But on the surface, at least, we perceive that societies are
manipulated from the top down, often against their spontaneous tendencies
and clearly articulated wishes, by powerful individuals and factions that
compel the rest of us go along.

Guy: No argument. But such individuals are themselves the products of

a society and its socializing processes, installed and removed through a
social game that we call politics. Too often, these individuals and their
organizations forget their limitations – how they are shaped and
constrained by the societies they hope to govern. Political hubris is all to
common. What’s clear though is that bottom-up and top-down processes of
social life and government reinforce and interfere like ripples on a pond.
Government works best when it channels and expedites the spontaneous
trends of a society. It’s at its worst – most dangerous and least effective –
when it seeks to thwart those trends. Soviet Russia’s attempts to
collectivize agriculture and those of the United States to curb the use of
recreational drugs like alcohol, marijuana and cocaine are notorious
examples of what can happen when governments intervene clumsily to
effect social change against the customs and trends of the society itself.

Thea: It’s true, of course, that every action of government has undesired
side effects. But your examples show precisely that governments are not
effectively constrained by their societies. Any faction that captures the
machinery of government can run the state for its own agenda or to fill its
own coffers. In the long run, there may be the devil to pay – but only in the
long run. In the short term, there’s hardly any constraint at all.

government as an industry
Guy: I surely do not deny that fanatical or kleptocratic governments are
all too familiar. In fact, what Samuel Finer called “the extraction-coercion
cycle” is a central function of the beast. 2 If a goodly portion of what is
extracted finds its way into the private bank accounts of the rulers and
their supporters, that is only to be expected. The political system does
well to keep this within limits, under some reasonable control. It is
impossible to prevent.
My point, rather, is that despite all fantasies to the contrary,
governments do not really control the societies they govern. Governments
receive suggestions from their societies as societies do from their
governments. In both directions there is influence; in neither is there
anything approaching real control, partly because the individuals
concerned, even threatened with torture and death, are never wholly
deprived of autonomy, and partly because the whole cultural ecology
(society, government and all) cycles and changes unpredictably on the
edge of chaos.

Thea: If governments don’t really control society, then why do we have

them? What real function do they serve?

Guy: I think we should regard government as a peculiar industry within

society, specialized for the production of various public “goods.” And we
should not forget that much of the governance of any society is carried on
outside the official institutions of government by lesser organizations,
groups and individuals which, of course, must face the task of governing
themselves. The governance of society self-organizes spontaneously in the
construction and maintenance of its social relationships (including those of
rulers and ruled), and in the feedback loops of relationship.

Thea: That concept of a “public good” has always bothered me. The
productions of government are not always good, and never benefit all
citizens equally. A beautiful park benefits the rich people who can afford
to live around it much more than poor ones who live miles away in slums.

2 The History of Government, S. E. Finer

Guy: No argument. By definition, public goods are facilities and
services that cannot be financed on a pay-as-you-go basis in the way that
people buy their groceries. The textbook example is a lighthouse which
warns a fisherman off the rocks whether or not he helped to build it or
keep it running. Street lighting and police protection are further examples.
If the streets are well policed, they are kept safe for tax evaders and tax
payers alike. The ultimate public goods are things like territorial defense
and security of life and property, that require a monopolized capability for
effective, organized violence.
Such goods are not called “public” because everybody wants them.
Indeed, the “goods” produced by government may be very great evils that
only a powerful few really want. They are called “goods” strictly in the
economic sense that people are getting paid to produce them; and they are
“public” because they must be collectively agreed and planned and paid
for through some political process. For that reason, they always entail an
element of coercion against dissenters who do not want these alleged
“goods” at all, and against “free riders” who would prefer to have the
benefits without paying their share of costs. Both these problems will
appear to varying degrees in any group of any size, as a downside of the
cooperation, sense of community, heightened identity, and whatever else,
that the group affords to its members and welcome guests. Accordingly,
some form of sanctioning is needed in any group to ensure that members
“pay their share” by observing the group’s norms.

Thea: In any group? That I don’t see. I don’t see what your “public
goods” have to do with private groups – like our relationship, or like one
of my therapy groups, where each client has paid to be there. Whatever
“goods” such groups produce are surely financed pay-as-you-go.

Guy: Not entirely. It’s true that your therapy group is financed by clients
or by insurance plans that pay directly for your services. But it also
observes a group culture that represents both cost and benefit to the
members themselves – much like the safety of a public street. In any
group,”going along to get along” is a cost that members pay for the
benefits of membership. We could say that any group exists as a pattern of
suggestions, promising some mix of public and pay-as-you-go benefits if
its norms are observed, while threatening sanctions if they are not.
We can think of any group, any association of individuals, as a kind of
local public – private against the rest of the world, but public amongst its
members. Society is fractal in this way – self-similar on every scale, as
the predicament of the individual in any group is essentially the same, be it
his family, the organization he works for, or the entire nation. At every
scale there is a permanent tug-of-war between centripetal suggestions
urging greater commitment to the group and its values, against centrifugal
suggestions prompting toward withdrawal with greater autonomy and self-
interest.

Thea: Do you think of personal relationships in this way? Our marriage,

for example?

Guy: Why not? At a minimum, a viable friendship or love relationship

involves the “production” of pleasant time spent together. But nearly
always in a marriage, there will be other locally public goods as well,
involving all the familiar kinds of marital coercion – nagging, cold
shoulder, shouting matches, and even violence. That’s why it is so much
more difficult to live with people than just to love them. Love wants good
time spent together – no more than that; cohabitation needs many other
locally public goods, always requiring negotiation, compromise and
sanctions against defection from explicit or tacit agreements. A love affair
is relatively free; marriage is a politicious relationship.
Thea: Then why do we enter into it?

Guy: Economists ask essentially the same question: Why do people

band together in organizations instead of dealing with each other at “arms
length,” on a contractual basis – ad hoc and case-by-case. Part of the story
is that permanent employees have much more opportunity to develop a
group culture and knowledge base than would be possible with sub-
contractors or temporary help. Of course, that group culture and
knowledge base represent locally public goods for the individuals
concerned. Also, good organization reduces the cost of individual
transactions, making them more efficient.

Thea: Your emphasis on sanctions and the free-rider problem seems

over-stated. What about group members who do more than their fair share:
exceeding the norms, policing the group’s norms, volunteering when there
is work to do? Some people join and participate in groups as expressions
of their individuality. Far from regarding the discipline of group
membership as an irksome constraint, they experience it as an expression
of their freedom.
Guy: Well, why not? There is no claim that everyone will dissent from
group projects, or try to freeload on them – only that some people may.
The point is simply that people join and participate in all kinds of social
groupings from motives that remain essentially private and personal. They
hope to share in such goods as the group affords, but may not be eager to
pay their share of the costs – like showing up for a work party or a battle.
For this reason, even the most voluntary groups defend their norms and
customs with a variety of sanctions, deployed either on a formal or on a
casual and customary basis by the group members themselves. Your
therapy group is policed not only by the clients but also by you, the
therapist; accordingly, it may be said to have a form of “government.” But
even kids playing stick ball in a field will police each other sufficiently to
keep the game going – and will do so quite spontaneously when no adults
are present. They act as players, but sometimes as informal umpires as the
occasion warrants.

Thea: So, as you said last night, they sometimes behave like role players
and sometimes like self-interested agents, but are primarily neither.
Guy: Primarily they are suggers who contribute to, but also exploit or
withdraw from groups they belong to, as the suggestions move them.

Thea: All right. But then one still must ask: If groups can regulate their
members spontaneously, then why is government needed, and how did it
evolve? Perhaps there is no paradox, but there will be permanent tension
between a central power and the self-organizing processes you speak of.
How this tension plays out, and why formal governments arose to begin
with, are questions you’ll have to answer.

Guy: The short answer is that formal government evolved because it

could, and because it was needed.

Thea: Needed for what?

Guy: To suppress conflicts and set a context, as we’ve already seen. In

groups as in single persons, there are competing suggestions – competing
demands arising from competing interests. On any large scale, the
conflicts are more easily suppressed and competing suggestions more
easily integrated through a Hobbesian state with a near-monopoly on
violence than through any informal arrangement. Through such
integration, and much as happens in the brain itself, government performs
a crucial context-setting function, providing a framework for the private
lives and private transactions of its people.

Thea: The notion of government as a device for containing conflict is

pretty well understood. Its role in social context-setting is still pretty
vague. At least, our expectations are vague in many areas. We expect
government to make and administer a body of law – the rules under which
people’s economic and private lives are conducted. We expect it to
maintain harbors, roads, bridges and other public facilities. Most people
today expect that it will play some role in regulating the economy – though
precisely what it should regulate is disputed. There is no consensus on the
terms of that context – on what exactly it should specify or leave free.

Guy: Government’s context-setting function traditionally began with

and focused on the seizure and defense of some national real (or royal)
estate. In time, its functions came to include protection of life and
personal property, establishment and maintenance of the public
infrastructure you were just describing, and a degree of leadership – or
rather a focusing, financing and exemplification – in the direc-tions toward
which people’s aspirations and energies are turned – in war, religion,
colonization, research, art, and whatever else.
Leadership is the wrong word, really. Governments seldom lead, but
rather mark as salient the directions a society is already pursuing –
blessing some enterprises, hindering others, raising a standard and
pointing a way, making strong suggestions to go one way rather than
another.

Thea: And all this is what you mean by “setting a context”?

Guy: Yes. The infrastructure of harbors, roads, and other facilities; the
codes of law; the marking of salience; the administrative machinery. Yes.
As I’‘ll suggest in a moment, all these features and facilities comprise
what may be conceived as a form of capital – public capital.

Thea: I could buy that. But there is a further question here: If

government is a kind of industry as you are saying, then who are the
industrialists? For that matter, who are its customers? How did societies
come to form and submit to governments in the first place? Political
theorists talk about some kind of tacit “social contract,”but it couldn’t have
happened that way!
the political entrepreneur
Guy: It didn’t. Forget the “social contract” myth. There never was such
an agreement anywhere. At most, there is often a rough consensus that the
existing structure of power, authority – and yes, exploitation – is preferable
to the chaos and bloodshed entailed in replacing it. Hobbes was correct
that rational men should prefer a single tyrant to the lawlessness of
competing tyrants. Usually, they will do so.
To get at the origins of government, we must imagine not just one
monopolist of violence, but a variety of “political entre-preneurs” who,
from whatever motives, take various aspects of public business upon
themselves – including collective protection, of course, but other tasks as
well. A group acquires the rudiments of formal government when even one
such individual is in business. The history of government is a history of
political entrepreneurship.
Thea: Which tasks? And what does “in business” mean in this context?

Guy: The tasks need not appear all at once, nor be combined in a single
person. Notoriously, as Hobbes said, there are tasks of defense,
peacekeeping and adjudication. There are numerous tasks of leadership.
There are priestly tasks of suggestive authority, and the sovereign’s
symbolic task of standing for and representing the group as a whole.
These and other tasks present themselves in due course.
For a political entrepreneur to be “in business” means simply that the
task(s) he is performing are recognized as his responsibilities, and that
compensations and prerogatives for performing them are conceded to him
accordingly.
The thing to be clear about is that government, however it emerges and
whichever prerogatives it claims, is a matter of arrogation and
acquiescence, not of contract. A political entrepreneur takes certain powers
to himself, and (unless he runs a pure protection racket) performs certain
recognized tasks and produces some public goods. Others become his
customers insofar as they submit to his demands and benefit (if they do)
from his “goods.” There is no contract. Contract would imply a
symmetrical bargaining process that rarely exists between political
entrepreneurs and their constituents.

Thea: For just that reason, I doubt that people can be said to “buy” the
services of their elected office-holders – still less of hereditary monarchs
or dictators.
Guy: You are right, of course. I’m using the market as a convenient
metaphor. But it’s not hard to unpack, nor to correct when it becomes
misleading. What we can say is that there is are felt wishes for public
goods of every description; and corresponding offers to organize for the
satisfaction of such wishes. It is true that these offers are often
accompanied by violence and threats of violence, as is not the case in an
orderly market. In politics, it is routine to make Godfather-type
suggestions that people cannot refuse. But there are also bids for
allegiance, exchanges of favors and promises, explicit and tacit bargaining,
and other forms of market behavior. There is even a generalized law of
supply and demand, insofar as an individual’s desire for something will
propagate through society through the promises and threats that he will
make, and the work he’ll do to obtain satisfaction. The economist’s “law
of supply and demand” is the special case (for an organized market) of a
more general law of “propagating wants.”

Thea: You need to explain that last point. I didn’t follow it.

Guy: Efforts that you will invest to get what you want will always
suggest motivations to others, either to supply your desire or thwart it. The
work you then do, or promise to do, represents a “price” you are willing to
pay. Since others also have desires, the resulting flow of suggestions tends
to settle into loose equilibrium – a kind of semi-stable market.

Thea: What you’re saying is that despite obvious differences between the
political arena and the marketplace, you can treat them in similar language,
with almost identical concepts.

Guy: Yes. I think the separation of economics from political theory was
at best a mere academic convenience – at worst an ideological fraud.
Markets have always needed political services – contract law and
protection from thieves and bandits. The modern marketplace, treating
land and labor as alienable commodities is definitely a political institution
in an historically conditioned, political context.
Conversely, as a matter of historical fact, our present political order of
more-or-less liberal and democratic nation states was the invention of a
rising “middle class” of craftsmen, merchants, industrialists and bankers,
who could no longer be excluded from government by a land-owning
aristocracy of knights and clergy, the traditional political classes.
My sense is that the history of government is seen most clearly as a
reflection of the history of capital.3 A rising global population led to
conflicts for access and control of the Earth’s resources. Both conflict and
the need for increasingly efficient exploitation of resources drove advances
in technology and science, which in turn, stimulated the accumulation and
diffusion of capital equipment. The expanded production that followed
intensified the competition for resources and led to a further struggle for
markets. As well, the more powerful and complex the capital equipment,
the greater the problems of financing, deploying and utilizing it to best
advantage, and of distributing (or not distributing) the wealth produced.
Social conflicts and wars became larger, deadlier and more expensive –
necessitating further concentrations of power and advances in the
techniques of government. Our world today is the result.

Thea: Now this is interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever seen government
discussed in those terms before. What exactly is capital, and how does it
relate to government?

Guy: Capital is wealth used instrumentally in the production of further

wealth. From that perspective, good government is itself a form of public
capital, insofar as its products – protection of life and property, transport
and communication, the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, and
so forth – contribute to production.

Thea: Yes, I can see that. From the perspective of a whole society, most
public goods will be forms of capital, and political arrangements for their
production likewise. So, much in line with the social contract theorists,
you’re saying that people gave authority to others and acquiesced in their
own domination because it made them safer and richer.

Guy: Rather, what happened was that bandit chiefs and war lords who
organized the more-or-less voluntary obedience of a relative handful of
followers could use this cadre to extort involuntary obedience from a
whole population not so organized. Then, in alliance with priests, and by
subsidizing the work of artists and intellectuals, they could shape habits of
mind in their subjects, making a virtue of docility and precluding any
thought of alternatives.
Notice that bandits and war lords have a long-term interest in their
peasants’ prosperity, up to a point. Until the peasants are rich enough to
3 As Marx believed, though he was dead wrong that under communism the
state would wither away. Quite the contrary, in fact. When all goods are
public goods, the state must be ubiquitous.
organize resistance to their rulers, the more prosperous they are, the more
can be taken from them. Hence the concept of the “plantation state” – run
by its masters to maximize their profit. As Colbert put it, “Taxation is the
art of plucking a goose in such a way as to obtain the most feathers for the
least squawk.”

Thea: Those same techniques remain the basis of every modern state.

Guy: It was the basis of the modern state as we knew it, though dumb
submission to a governing elite went much further in some places than
others. But today, the habit of submission is breaking down. Politics was
always a precarious business, but today it is becoming more dangerous and
less profitable to all but a very few. Governments all over the world today
give an impression of thrashing around – often, of losing their grip.

Thea: Why is that?

Guy: One reason, probably, is that the world keeps getting more
complicated, and that the demands on government to “do something” are
now far beyond any consensus on what needs to be done. Another reason
is that there are safer and easier ways to make money these days. With the
ethic of public service also waning, ambitious players may be choosing
other venues, leaving politics to smaller, sillier, more driven ones. Still
another reason is that the education requirements of a modern economy
have made it harder to keep the public docile and submissive, even as new
techniques of mass manipulation have made it easier. These are just
guesses. My serious point is that government is one industry and one route
to social advancement among others, and that the political process can be
seen as a kind of marketplace. The analogy is fairly strong.
Thea: How, exactly? You’ve been saying this all evening now, but I still
don’t really see it.

Guy: As in any market, there are potential “buyers” for public goods,
and suggestions regarding their production. These buyers create
opportunities for potential producers, the “political entrepreneurs,” who in
turn seek to maintain and expand the markets for their products through
the political equivalents of advertising, packaging and other marketing
choices.
Also, like any ecology, this market co-evolves toward loose
equilibrium: The offerings of political vendors adjust against the wish-lists
of prospective buyers; and the suggestions coming top-down from
government must encounter and stabilize against those coming bottom-up,
from society at large. Under any political system, “democratic” or not,
there will be political entrepreneurs mounting displays and making
speeches to ordinary folk. There will be flows of suggestion in both
directions, and a rough balance between them – on the top, a more or less
stable regime and state; on the bottom, a fragmentation and marginalizing
of rage.

Thea: What I don’t see is how your political entrepreneurs contrived to

organize all the institutions of modern state. That isn’t obvious.

Guy: It didn’t happen overnight. The tribal headman governs mildly, by

suggestive influence, because he has no real power other than that which
his fellows accord him voluntarily. A modern regime backs its suggestions
with an army, a police force and a penal system that its subjects are
compelled to finance for their own subjugation. Modern government is
scarcely possible until deference and obedience to a central state become a
matter of habit.

Thea: You could say that government is a form of addiction.

Guy: Indeed. An addiction not easily cultivated, because people are

jealous of their autonomy. The government meme was as successful as it
is because wars are much easer to start than to end, and because human
suggers fall into paralysis when suggestive guidance is lacking. Even so,
the evolution of modern government was a long, bloody business.
Thea: But, as you’ve said, modern government is a formal organization
and infrastructure, not just a crew of entrepreneurs in competition for
influence. How did that organization come about?

Guy: At first, there is no real organization – only the entrepreneurs with

their henchmen, contending for political market share. But in time, there
must be organization because these rival entrepreneurs cannot be
everywhere, and have to delegate to subordinates. They also have to deal
with each other, and with their counterparts elsewhere. In doing so, they
find it preferable to share the pickings rather than fight to the last drop of
each other’s blood. Doing all this, they become more knowledgeable and
politically astute than their fellows and, correspondingly, their suggestions
acquire greater authority. In time, despite their rivalry, they tend to become
a privileged class within society, with class prerogatives and class interests
that they guard in common.
Thea: You will say the relationship of these entrepreneurs to one another
is highly “politicious,” an inextricable tangle of common and conflicting
interests.

Guy: Just so. In the pursuit of common interests, the elite may allow
itself to be organized and led by a chief of chiefs – a king. The
mobilization of loyalty, obedience and discipline becomes a public good in
its own right. And, of course, the political process here only mirrors of
what is happening there. Organization of one state forces countervailing
organization by its neighbors. In this way, the society as a whole may self-
organize as a state system of mutually hostile, sovereign powers.

Thea: You’re saying that concentrated power, under some conditions,

may itself be seen as a good – not just by those who wield it, but even by
those who submit. Or if not by all of these, than at least by many.

Guy: By a sufficient following. Yes. Look at it this way: If we measure a

man’s power by the scope and weight of his suggestions, then it’s obvious
that nearly all that power must be given him by others. His suggestions
have weight because other people give them weight; he is obeyed because
people expect him to be obeyed, and expect his orders to be enforced.
Before he can enforce obedience, a cadre of supporters, administrators,
men-at-arms, with significant power of their own, must have hitched their
wagons to his star. His power, finally, is the outcome of a feedback loop –
an expanding spiral of investment by others. The language of suggestion
may help us understand how the shifting perceptions of power are bound
up with its reality.

Thea: We are all political investors, aren’t we? We cannot live except by
investing in other people, and in the relationships we develop with them.
Through such investments we form and maintain our attach-ment systems.
We draw the support – material and emotional – by which we live. I invest
much of my time, attentions and hopes for happiness in you, as you do in
me.

Guy: I’d say that political investment is a special case of this more
general kind. The political entrepreneur puts forth suggestions at two
levels: To society at large he suggests that people entrust themselves to his
policies, and that they contribute to and enjoy the public goods that he
holds up before them and promises to deliver. This is the sort of
investment we make in all our relationships. But the political entrepreneur
also invites and buys the allegiance, collaboration and complicity of a
cadre of henchmen – persons with substantial power of their own. To these
he offers opportunity: Through him, they can merge their several powers,
form a regime, and dominate the rest. Both these suggestion streams are in
the nature of politics as a game – of government as an industry.

Thea: We don’t like to think of those who govern us in these terms – any
more than we like to think that our parents made us for reasons of their
own: reasons private to themselves and their relationship, having nothing
to do with us. But what you say is obviously true.

Guy: And we should not forget that politics is about the assembly and
deployment of wealth and power. Disinterested politics, altruistically
benevolent governments are figments of utopia – not of the real world.
Those who contribute substantial time, energy or money to politics will
almost always have some personal stake in the way that public business is
conducted. We should not expect otherwise. Just as in business, the
political entrepreneur is self-interested, and must attract the investment of
self-interested supporters and employees. If we hope to be well governed,
we must find some way of harnessing these various private motives for the
public good.

Thea: If all this is true, and if wealth and power tend to concentrate
according to a power law, why does this concentration not continue until
all wealth and power are controlled through a single regime and
individual? Attempts at universal dominion have certainly been made.
They are being made today. But, for some reason, they have never come
off. Is there a reason? Or is there bound to be, sooner or later, an Emperor
(or President) of the World?

the reach of government

Guy: I don’t think there will be such a regime any time soon. In the past,
the reach of government was limited by available technology. The means
of transport and communications were just not good enough. Today the
technology for world government may be available, but the political
conditions to create and submit to one are nowhere in sight. Also, there
may be reasons in principle why no government can monopolize the
suggestion marketplace, nor even attempt to do so, without wrecking its
own long-term prospects.
Thea: Which reasons? What are you thinking of?

Guy: When you get right down to it, what we might call the reach of
government – its ability to influence society – is rather limited. It is one
thing to build working consensus for a certain policy amongst a governing
elite. It’s entirely another to shift public perceptions, values and behaviors
to make that policy effective. Anyone who has worked in government is
surprised at how blunt its tools and weapons actually are.

Thea: Blunt and heavy-handed.

Guy: Yes, exactly. In itself, a government can do nothing. To

accomplish anything at all, it must get people to do its bidding by issuing
effective suggestions that prevail over suggestions to the contrary. And
when you come right down to it, there are only three ways to do this. You
can try to persuade people, you can threaten them, or you can buy them –
offer them money to do your bidding. When persuasion fails, as it usually
does when a government attempts to move society against its spontaneous
wishes or trends, rulers soon discover that large-scale purchase of
cooperation is prohibitively expensive, and that threats always have
unintended consequences.

Thea: When you put it like that, it seems strange that governments can
accomplish anything at all.

Guy: It is strange, when you think about it. The only recourse
governments have is to bureaucratize the behaviors it wants to influence
by setting up what is called a “program.” Typically this will involve all
three classes of suggestion. It will demand some forms of cooperation with
salaried civil servants, whose activities can be managed directly – up to a
point, anyway, since these officials can be bribed and will, in any case,
have private agendas of their own. Then it will use some combination of
threat, payment and persuasion to get people to cooperate with the
program. Finally, it will have to carry through on some threats, so that it is
at least feared, if not respected or loved. If you imagine an autocrat or
dictator, with theoretically limitless power over the lands and peoples he
rules, that is still the utmost that he can do.

Thea: One of the Tsars is said to have remarked on his death-bed: “I

never ruled Russia. Ten thousand clerks ruled Russia.”
Guy: Perhaps one ought to sympathize with tyrants, at least with some
of them. They may have a clear idea of what needs doing but still find
themselves, for all their supposed power, unable to get their people to go
along.

Thea: You’re being facetious!

Guy: Only a little. With the best will in the world, the creative reach of
government is extremely limited. For a man whose notional power is
absolute, how frustrating it must be to discover that his practical power is
rather small. He can kill people, if he chooses. He can kill a lot of people,
but he still cannot really get them to behave – never mind think and feel –
as he would wish. How frustrating it is proving for politicians in modern
democracies to make the same discovery.

Thea: If you put it that way, is there anything at all that governments are
good at? Or good for, if it comes to that? If governments are so clumsy and
heavy-handed, perhaps the anarchists are right. Perhaps society would be
better off without them.

the future of government

Guy: I doubt that option is open to us. I think governance and formal
government evolve because they can and must in some form or other.
Certainly, having evolved, they cannot simply be wished out of existence.
Government in some form will probably be around as long as we are, and
might as well be accepted as a feature – an odd by-product – of human
biology, along with language and tool use.
Since we cannot do without government, we must learn to govern
ourselves better; and to do that, we need to understand government much
better than we do. I think political science is still in its infancy.
Everywhere you see people who want more government, and people who
want less; and everyone wants it to control the bad behavior of someone
else; but there is remarkably little willingness to think clearly about
government’s relationship to an increasingly global society – about what
government can and cannot do.

Thea: Well then, what can it do?

Guy: In the end, government simply articulates the collective will of its
society, and sets a context (really, only part of the context) for the life-
choices of its people. In doing so, it acts as a kind of air bag or shock
absorber. It can organize the production of some public goods that can be
produced at a political profit. But, above all, it’s in the business of
containing and defusing social conflict, “spreading the discontent” as
thinly as possible, and pushing it downward onto those who lack the
means to protest. When government is working well, that is the end result:
a fairly tranquil civil society, in which people who do not like each other
much can still tolerate each other’s presence and get along. When
government breaks down, what you get is civil war.
Modern government has become a very difficult problem, looking
more difficult every day. It must be global and local at the same time. It
must be technically competent, democratically accountable and minimal in
its interventions. And it must exist in ecological balance with the society
around it, and with Nature itself. I don’t think we have the first idea how
to think about government in the society that we’ve become. How to
respond to, hold accountable and ultimately manage all those political
entrepreneurs who are trying to manage us! In self-organizing society, the
central question of political theory is not “How to govern?” but “How to
be governed?”

Thea: How to be governed in such a way that society’s self-organization

can produce a humanly acceptable result . . .?