The Objectivist theory of politics mainly concerns itself with the normative aspects of politics. Being based in ethics, it has a lot to say about what society should be like, but very little about what it is actually like. After studying the subject for several years, I have come to the conclusion that politics is not about force, but rather about power. Here is a good place to define our terms. By "force" I mean the application or threat of physical violence. By "power" I mean the ability to steer one's environment (including any agents within that environment) towards a desired state. "Organization" will mean a given group of people that coordinate to pursue a set of common goals. I also distinguish between two kinds of power, "collective power" and "distributive power". "Collective power" is the ability of an organization to achieve its goals. "Distributive power" is the ability of an organization to allocate value (costs and benefits in the abstract) among its members and other organizations. The range of goals that an organization is allowed to pursue is as wide as possible, even if the goal makes no sense. That means that an organization can try to do anything, from producing a product, to committing genocide, to summoning Azathoth. Collective power can always, at least to some extent, be converted to distributive power. Distributive power is necessarily zero-sum, since it merely allocates what value has already been produced. Each individual may be regarded as an organization. Now, we can define "society" as the collection of all organizations. So what are the laws governing the behavior of organizations? 1. The overall amount of collective power in society tends to increase over time. This is true because humans are intelligent beings that, through the application of their intellect and technology, can steer the environment toward a desired state better than chance. This includes states where humans have even greater ability to change the environment. Thus, control over the environment is achieved. In some sense, we become more "prosperous" but this comes with the cost of us having even more destructive potential. That is, an advanced society might have the internet, but it will also have nukes. 2. Some organizations are more powerful than others. This is simply because "life ain't fair". Some people will live in deserts and not have good land for farming. That's just the way it is. 3. The amount of distributive power available to the most powerful organization tends to increase over time. This is true because collective power increases over time, and collective power may be converted into distributive power. For example, when the ancient Mesopotamians first invented irrigation agriculture, they began to trade some of their excess food with the surrounding hunter-gatherer tribes for furs and livestock. The hunter-gatherers eventually abandoned their traditional way of life and got all their food from the Mesopotamians. The Mesopotomaians figured out that the tribesmen could no longer produce their food independently and thus began to charge a higher price for their food. This is because the tribesmen's dependency increased the Mesopotomians' distributive power. 4. In a conflict among organizations, the more powerful organizations have a higher chance of victory. 5. When the contest is for power, having power makes it easier to win more power. 6. Those organizations which seek to maximize their power (not necessarily as an explicit goal) tend to do so. 7. Reversing 5 and 6, we see that the most powerful organizations probably also seek to maximize their own power, regardless of their stated goals. This is the old wisdom "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." 5 and 6 in their original forms essentially say that "Corruption empowers. Absolute corruption empowers absolutely." But now we can use these ideas to make predictions about the course of history. To illustrate the truth of number 7, we can look at the history of communism. The example of communism is interesting for two reasons. First, it illustrates the seventh law. Secondly, it is the best and most comprehensive attempt by human beings anywhere to change human society on a fundamental level ever. My theory, however, will explain why any such attempt will inevitably fail. Communists thought the economy was the sole source of collective power and that the "mode of production" determined who held all the distributive power. They thought that if you eliminated distributive power from the economy through socialism, then the distributive power of other aspects of society, such as the state, would disappear as well. Thus, after socialism, according to Marx, the state would just whither away. Only collective power would remain, and everyone would benefit from it "equally". (Not that everyone would receive the same or be paid the same. This is a caricature of communist ideology. To them, it just means that what people get for their work will not be influenced by "arbitrary" distributive power) Let's pretend we are revolutionaries in Tsarist Russia. How do we go about implementing communism? Well, in order to do that, our actions need to have the desired effect on our environment. Thus, we need to gain power. And to make the big changes communism requires, we're gonna need quite a lot of it. This is just what the communists did. They took control of the military and then the state, and then, using the state, they took over everything else. However, every organization will have competitors, even if those competitors are smaller organizations inside itself. Hence, in order to implement communism, we need to eliminate the competition. This is why there were purges within the communist party itself. When you've taken over everything, the only place future enemies can come from is from inside the organization. Since our goal is to eliminate distributive power, we need to relinquish our own distributive power to the rest of society. But the rest of society might contain organizations that don't like communism, thus we cannot relinquish any of our power. We now have a situation where people who originally sought to remove distributive power from human society entirely are doing everything they can to maintain it, while simultaneously believing that their actions are doing just the opposite. This result is not some bizarre anomaly of communist psychology. It is the outcome we should expect of any revolutionary program. The American Revolution differed only in the scope of its ambitions. In post-revolutionary America, there was slavery and only land-owning white males could vote, despite the inalienable rights of the individual that the founders sought to protect and enshrine in law. Two centuries later, and the situation is not fundamentally different. The state is bigger than ever, the government taps your phone, and Crony Capitalism is the only kind that has ever existed anywhere. These outcomes are not anomalous when you have an accurate theory of human society. They are merely to be expected. From here, we can make the prediction that the future will suck even more than the present. Thus politics is pointless because the fundamental problems can never be resolved. One can only ever change who the winners of the moment will be. Questions? Criticisms?
