It’s been interesting over the past year or so to keep track of what’s going on in Hong Kong. I’ve only been to the Special Administrative Region a few times, and I missed out on going there pre-handover, which will forever haunt me as a regret. The Chinese government has been slowly tightening the screws on local rule, despite – or more likely because of – its agreement during the handover to respect local essentially English law traditions for the first fifty years of post-colonial rule. That’s kind of a powerful slap in the face for a large and lets face it imperial nation like China; once sufficient time had passed, and once it was obviously there was nothing a diminishing second class power like the United Kingdom could really do about it other than marshall “world opinion”, that clause would be ignored. And so it has been: the Communist central government in Beijing has essentially passed a set of laws which eliminate any pretense of “one country, two systems” with respect to the HKSAR. It’s officially one country, one system.
But when we say “system”, what do we mean? Was Hong Kong’s system “capitalism”, or “liberalism”, or “English legalism”? And what is China’s system? Is it “communism”? Is it “totalitarianism”? I think answering the question of “what country, what system” is the essential political theoretical question to be asking today.
First off, I’d argue that we are wrestling with at least three, if not more, fundamental “systems” of political power in the world today:
Statism is the exercise of power by the managers of a single government which are capable of maintaining the power of force and violence over time. By definition, force and violence are physical manifestations, so they are by nature tied to specific places.
Capitalism is the exercise of power by the managers of organizations which are capable of accumulating wealth over time, such organizations not being tied to specific geographies (except incidentally). However, wealth is a temporal construct – it moves the exercise of influence from time A to some future time B – so it is by nature dematerialized.
I’m now going to do something I hate and invent a term…
Reputationalism is the exercise of power over others by the shifting of relative personal value. This is the newest form of power: the power to shame, to troll, to be an “influencer”. If statism is tied to place, and capitalism is tied to time, than reputationalism is untied – it is our new, purest form of human abstraction. What was popular yesterday – does anyone remember M*A*S*H at all? – is meaningless, and what will be popular tomorrow is just as worthless. What matters is the now, relentlessly the now.
Statism is of course the oldest form of political power exercise, and for most of the world, it remains the fallback intuitional reaction. Power as physical violence is crude, to those of us who have never fought a war and many who have never thrown a punch, but it is immediately understandable and can be exercised by that group that is generally always too well populated: young men just past puberty who haven’t had a chance to become parents but are still pretty damn angry. Older leaders who can marshal those forces have a distinct advantage in almost every society that we’ve created on earth so far as humans, and indeed giving those pointlessly angry young men something to do – namely fight amongst themselves, but in a sort of focused way – is a good way of keeping a broader peace in most societies as well. Statism, therefore, works well for a species which is young, hormonal, and most importantly, has limited resources which will constantly need to be allocated in scarcity.
This notion of scarcity has engaged me before but it’s been continuing to weigh on my thinking. For most of our history as a species, scarcity has defined us. Twenty thousand years ago, the world was yes mostly unexplored, and if you encountered local scarcity you could easily cross the mountain range, or with more difficulty follow the meat across the Bering land bridge, or with increasing difficulty cross the straits, and find the next land of animals and good forage. But every year you’d encounter seasons of want and seasons of plenty, and you’d encounter ages of want during droughts and the ages of plenty would have no capability of transferring the plenty to the ages of want. Statism naturally emerges from such a world: essentially, those who can control violence and the power of force will take the surplus during times of plenty, but more importantly, take the means of survival during times of want.
This eventually emerges into more of a philosophy, which in my mind is most perfectly described by Joseph de Maistre – he’s the most transparent, the most cynical, the most honest about it all, including the role of violence. He’s modern, though, and speaks in a Western voice, so maybe that’s just me. But if you look across cultures, what I find striking is that this rationalization of the existence of the power of violence and force permeates nearly every culture. Confucianism, for example, is basically an explication of this need to justify the power of the state. Hinduism projects the power of the powerful onto a rich landscape of castes and spiritual beings. The Mesoamerican cultures – Mayans and Incans and their predecessors – worked that same projection art, of describing why violence had to be embedded in the language of the spirit and of the earth.
We find no essential difference in the language of Marx and Engels, or in the ravings of Spengler and his Nazi followers, or in the Gaullists or the Falangists or the poorly-named Fururists and their more colourfully named successors the Fascists. Power is the exercise of violence, it is the role of the state to use that power. Today’s modern advocates of the statist tradition – and it’s old, it’s deeply embedded in our languages and in their expression of political will – are the Chinese communists, the tinpot dictators in all continents (save Australia, which lucks out as the only continent which is just one country), the Russians – and in the language of the populists would-be autocrats in the West as well, which have never really gone away despite the silly wishful thinking of liberalists…
… which brings us to Capitalists. Most people associate capitalists with free markets, but this is an historical delusion. Free markets are a means of exchange – basically, they are an exchange format which assumes no external force imposes a pricing regime, or is able or willing or desires to impose a supply or demand cap or floor regime. Free markets existed and still exist in statist regimes; in fact, most statist regimes find themselves relying on markets to establish pricing signals which allow them to rule effectively. Violence is expensive, especially in the long run; it’s much cheaper to extract taxes, in the form of forced or coerced labour, or in the form of dematerialised money as exchange networks grow more complex, than it is to find enough people to club other people over the head to coerce action. Let people act as they (more or less) want, and then take once their done: that’s an efficient statist solution.
Capitalists, however, make the critical intellectual leap during that period of economic diversification and its accompanying explosion of complexity. They realize that the state will never make particularly efficient decisions about the exercise of power – because their decisions are rooted in action and thus in space and time. Capital, though – by which I mean the stored concept of value, however it is stored: gold, dollars, bitcoin, Blockchain! – is not rooted in space at all, and it is designed to transfer across time. Capital only means anything in a world of bounded time, where tomorrow has real meaning. Capitalists start to emerge in a world where people begin to realize that states can change, but the world continues to move on – not necessarily better (pace Machiavelli) but also not with the permanent end of all things.
The critical moment in the West for this is around 1500, for a wide variety of interrelated reasons, and the fact that the West found this out first is the real reason for the rise of imperialism in the form we so vilify today, for colonialism, for Orientalism, for racism, you name it. The discovery was not that the Church was wrong about indulgences and the vernacular Bible, or that the New World exists; no, it was a set of interlinked discoveries that led first and foremost to the calculus, and to double-entry bookkeeping, and to the end of slavery, interestingly. The capitalist revolution was all about the entry of continuous time into the Western intellectual landscape. That key insertion – which happened ahead of other cultures, just sort of randomly – gave the West the intellectual energy to invent the structures of the modern world, and crucially, enabled the erosion of the state’s power over physical world by introducing notions of a multivariate world – a world of not just physicality, but of time and time transfer – that the state’s power of violence couldn’t really contend.
Now I say that “in a nutshell” – obviously the state can contend with it, by killing people. But that’s a losers solution, and every state comes up against the limit of that: what’s the point of exercising physical power when there’s no one left against which to exercise it? Long before you reach the reductio ad absurdam of one man having killed everyone else, the point of the exercise is lost. But there’s still a long row to hoe to get there, and thus for five hundred years – maybe more, as I think there is room for an essential argument that the Axial Age thinkers in general were the ones who began to see this capability of working time into power, the Buddhas and the Christs and the Aristotles and Lucretius’s of the world back in the day – there has played out an existential battle between the power of force and the power of exchange.
But with the opening of the New World and trade routes smoothing the links even among the Old, there was also a distinct leavening of the time-rootedness of power. In times of want, merchants could increasingly bring in the grain and the cattle and the supplies needed to alleviate the shortage. In times of plenty, exporting to the broader world was getting easier and easier and the prices available in those places which were seeing times of want made the risks of sea wreak – natural risk – and piracy and tariff – the risk of the state – still pay off. That diversification of risk brought about, over time, the end of the cycle of plenty and want. It brought abundance. It didn’t happen quickly, mind you – but in the last 100 years that cycle has been completed, despite the best efforts of statism (Bengal famine of 1944, Great Leap Forward, 1930s Stalinist Kulak massacres, ad infinitum) to prevent it.
The roots of statism – which remember are less to do with the “state” as a form of governance as the “state” as an instrument of physical power rooted in space – run deep, however. We can’t escape our physical nature entirely, even as we become associated with concepts of value which transcend place and even time. And yet we have recognised that that transcendence has made us more secure – has made the threat of physical violence, indeed, less meaningful.
In fact, it’s not only not meaningful, it’s started to erode the concept of value transfer across time itself. What, really, is the marginal value of “wealth” across time when it’s not that difficult at all to secure a comfortable life without marginal cost? Technology – coupled with the value accumulation mechanisms implicit in capitalism which incentivise people to continuously innovate to extract that extra vig from the system – has led to an environment where not just survival means, but comfort means, are accessible to nearly everyone. This has struck me in reading recent African and South American novel-length fiction – indeed the fact that I can read so much fiction, which is itself an artform which requires time and energy which only a robust post-survival baseline economy can provide – has led me to this observation. Why bother saving, or investing, when we are confident that the means for future comfort (not survival! comfort!) are reasonably secure?
So here we stand in 2020, and we’re struggling with this. On the one hand, there remains a core of humanity which, understandably, rooted in the real, rooted in the physical, instinctively is drawn to statism and the power of physical violence in its various forms; on the other hand, there is seemingly a separate and equal group which is tied to the exercise of power across time, which invests (pensioners and billionaire hedge funds alike, often one and the same) and demands that their investments retain value. The Chinese communist party and the Social Democrats of the Federal Republic of Germany cannot coexist, it seems. But we also have screams from seemingly off the plain, from the QAnon theorists of the interweb and the Arab Spring and Green Revolution advocates on Twitter and WhatsApp and Facebook, who also can’t coexist with either one of them.
We have, I think, started the next wave of dematerialisation of power, and the tensions and terrors of our age involve the scaling complexity of having three, not two, visions of the nature of power compete with one another for precedence. Since physical violence now only has meaning in the direct application of it – the state can pretend it can withhold food but the market won’t really allow it to, and the state has even admitted it doesn’t want to withhold plenty as long as it can skim the vig from a well operating system – and since the application of value across time is now relatively secure, we’re now looking about to what is the meaningful space in which to exercise power. And so we arrive at Reputationalism.
This new era – which seems to be taking over rapidly – is one in which our influential power among others rises to the level of power. I think this is where the Trump administration has, in a rare, “10,000 monkeys typing will eventually type Hamlet” way, gotten it right with their Silicon Age jihad against TikTok’s Chinese owners. Or maybe it isn’t that random: the soon-to-be ex-President recognised earlier than most that social capital was, in a real sense, worth more than physical or actual capital combined. That’s how he got elected. He may have used that insight for evil, but it’s a powerful insight.
Reputationalism in a technologically dispersed, physically abundant age is actually quite terrifying. It’s beyond an Orwellian dystopia; Orwell could only imagine statism as applied with televisions. Reputationalism disperses the oppression to all of us, individually, and if we look at our behaviour as individuals, we are awful to one another. Giving 7.8 billion of us the power to ridicule, shame, promote, exalt, shielded by terrific EU-directed privacy walls and US-endorsed network provider liability protections is a terrible, terrible idea. We will be worse to one another emotionally and spiritually when given that power than any state could do to us physically, any capital construct could do to us intellectually.
There is a way out, of course, but it’s been the same way out that has always been there, back pre-statism. It involves the dematerialization of power itself. Surely at some point we’ll realise that power is simply a construct of viewing other people as an “other” and as an “object”, not as a “self” and as an equal? It involves viewing the world beyond our human conception as our world to relate to, not as an object to manipulate. That option has always been on the table, it’s just hard to exercise. It’s harder to work with an equal than it is to try to convince another that they are an object and manipulate them. It’s harder to trust your dog to come back from the forest than it is to put them on a leash. It’s harder to help your neighbour get what they need too than it is to just pay them.
Power, though, inevitably cuts off. As power relationships have evolved in a world of increasing complexity, it hasn’t gotten any better, really, with a long term view. Power is a flawed way of inhabiting the world, even if it may be a good concept with which to understand the world we humans have created. Shouldn’t we really be trying to reshape our relationship to one another in a mechanism which moves away from power – whether physical power, power across time, power across souls – and which moves towards something new? Because I think with the evolution of the social landscape and its reputational exercise of power to the souls of individuals, we’ve reached the end of the road on how we can extend the concept of power in the real world. We can’t enslave one another with more refinement any longer, and we know from experience that that exercise of power is a dead end anyway.
Interestingly, this essay is a response to an essay in the latest New York Review of Books by Pankaj Mishra, entitled “Grand Illusions.” It’s not a particularly good essay, largely because he looks to non-Western traditions to try an find a way out of our current intellectual cul-de-sac. I’ve done enough reading of non-Western traditions to see that there aren’t many ways out – maybe a few really original ones but they are rare and obscure. What I think is needed is no longer a critique of capitalism, or an appeal to the statist traditions that have broadly informed world philosophy prior to the 20th century, or even a critique of the emerging world of online culture value that we’ve seen explode in the last decade. We need a reimagination of what it is to relate to others in a way that does not require a construct of power and the assertion of control, regardless of the dimension of that control. Simple critiques won’t work. We need to collaborate and care. I’m actually quite proud of what we’re constructing here on The Essence of Water in that regard, and want to thank you – especially those of you who have gotten to the end of this long and unusually theoretical essay of mine – for being a part of such an attempt.
As always, thanks for reading.