The Desolation of Trust

The Ground Shakes Beneath Our Feet

When examining a highly centralized system that is in the process of decay, it’s tempting to slip into some reactionary thinking. One might think that the centralization is obviously a social construction—a con job, even—that wouldn’t be happening (and certainly wouldn’t be failing) if it wasn’t for certain bad actors which anyone with any sense can see are the obvious villains.

“If only the Priests didn’t monopolize knowledge, then knowledge would’ve been free in the Middle Ages, and thus there’d have been no need for the Scientific Revolution and we’d be light years ahead of where we are now.”

“If the Businessmen didn’t monopolize trade, then trade would be free and equitable, and we wouldn’t have the massive inequality that we have now.”

“If the Bilderberg Group didn’t monopolize global power, then we wouldn’t now be facing down the possibility of either an effective global police state on one hand, or a civilizational collapse on another.”

All plausible hypotheses. All neat. All tidy.

And are all, in a very important sense, wrong. Social construction is not what it seems. Worse, giving into the temptation to think this way would be a mistake precisely because it ignores the forces that make centralization possible.

Annoying, given how appealing it is to imagine that that which is uncongenial or undesirable is just a social construction. After all, what’s socially constructed can be socially deconstructed, right?

We’ll get to that. First, let’s look at why centralization happens.


The Forces of Centralization

Human culture, like everything else, is subject to evolutionary pressures. Those cultures and people-groups which do not successfully survive, reproduce, and pass their cultures and ideas on through the generations eventually die out. The actual genes and ideas may continue if the people-group is absorbed into another, but sometimes a culture is wiped out entirely through famine, plague, environmental misadventure, or genocidal warfare. All of the super-cultures that we now call “civilizations” are the result of six-thousand-plus years of absorption, conquest, schism, merger, appropriation, and genocide.

At every scale, humans are inclined towards anything that feels good and anything that reduces effort—all else being equal, these two things are are reliable signals for that which enhances survival and reproduction. This is built into us, no cognition required. When cognition enters the equation, it is to solve problems that aren’t readily solved simply by these two basic reflexes.

We like to think that this means that we can reason our way to solutions based on higher ideals.

We like to think this because we live in a world far removed from daily contact with our biological nature.
We like to think of ourselves as morally deserving of our lofty position as the God-Emperor species of the natural world.

We like to think this because it means we might somehow perfect ourselves by transcending our basic animal natures.

And, because we enjoy these fantasies, we construct worldviews for ourselves that reinforce their righteousness and apparent soundness. It’s a lawyer’s trick, and since we are both the lawyer and the jury of our own mental spheres, we easily assent to lies about ourselves that are so transparent that we’d laugh at them if they came from the lips of a friend. As Robert A. Heinlein observed: “Man is not a rational animal. He is a rationalizing animal.”

This tendency to rationalize is also a survival mechanism. Human survival depends upon sociality. Unlike reptiles, no mammal comes into the world fully-formed enough to survive on his own. Our dependence upon one another doesn’t end with our birth. As babies and children, we can literally die from lack of touch (even if all our needs for nutrition and sanitation are attended to), and as we grow frail in old age we can go mad or die from heartbreak, loss, and isolation. Along the way everything from our mental acuity to the ability of our heart to beat properly depends upon our sense of connection to other people.

Or, to put it in a single word:

Trust.

Trust is the word we give to the presumption that the other fellow knows the same rules we do, will abide by those rules, and will—even when cheating—behave in a generally predictable fashion. Trust allows humans to divide labor between them. “I’ll do the dishes if you cook the dinner” is the same dynamic as “I’ll dig the ore and you smelt the metal and Bob over there will make it into tools so that Jim can plow and plant so that we can all eat.”

For some tasks, though, that kind of free-form spontaneous coordination isn’t enough. If you want to fight a war or go to the moon, you have to agree on your governing rationale, and you have to decide who’s in charge.

The emergence of hierarchies in human societies happens at all levels, in all sorts of civilizations (including the most primitive, anarchic ones). It emerges to manage disputes, and often along lines of division-of-labor. The tribe’s witch doctor might be the authority in matters of religion and medicine, while the tribe’s chieftain might be the authority in matters of property and war, while the tribe’s matriarch(s) might be the authority in matters of marriage and lineage, etc.

In each case, authority derives from only one source:

Trust.

This is true whether the authority was established by consensus or by violence or by some other means. Authority cannot continue to be, well, authoritative if it is not at some level backed by trust. Fear of disapproval (or of reprisal) may be used to maintain authority, but if such measures are employed by an authority whose agenda is transparently duplicitous they will only serve to erode the trust on which their authority depends.

Still, as long as trust remains intact, it has a great deal of power. It is often desirable—for reasons of convenience, efficiency, and security—to follow the lines of trust and use them to centralize power.

A centralized power can coordinate people and institutions at scale. It can—if well-administered—do a great deal to curtail cheating at lower levels in the hierarchy. A properly run centralized power structure is deeply appealing because all roads lead to one throne, and the buck stops there. If you need someone to resolve an injustice, you can take it straight to the top. If you have a grand idea that needs a broad base of support, you might be able to get it done by the tedious work of building a mass movement from the bottom-up to support you, or you could do the more efficient thing and just lobby the small clique of leaders who can get things done.

This isn’t just convenient, it’s shockingly convenient. All you have to be able to do is hone the skills we all have to learn to survive (flattery, persuasion, emotional blackmail, bribery) to a razor’s edge, and employ them cannily.

The centralization of power allows for the common defense, the relatively-equitable resolution of disputes (compared to blood feuds and the like), and the relatively-efficient organization of public works projects (roads, canals, etc.) which further grease the wheels for everyone. In the context of a small village, or a city-state, or even a small country, this kind of hierarchy can remain reasonably functional over a long period of time because the rulers are vulnerable to the dissatisfaction of the ruled. Corruption can be startlingly brazen, but its extent is constrained by the fact that the mob can show up at the front door of the ruler’s palace if they get sufficiently annoyed.

But, as with so many things in this universe, scale matters. When centralized power is arranged so that the administration of that power becomes insulated from local feedback, a curious dynamic develops:

Callous, abusive, or incompetent exercises of centralized power are usually met by a demand for...more centralized power.

It’s not as weird as it sounds. If you’re accustomed to seeking a higher power when you need a dispute resolved, and the power structure you have access to fails you, it’s human nature to attempt to establish a new level of authority that has the kind of legitimacy that your current authority structure now lacks.

In other words, you want to find someone you can trust to solve your problem.

This reaction creates a feedback loop—abuse of power multiplies power and sucks it upwards to new levels that, in turn, have less access to the local knowledge that creates wisdom and legitimacy, which in turn creates further demands for new supervening powers to solve that problem. We see the consequences all around us. Power has become so centralized that, frequently, the government employees whose job it is to interact with the public do not have the power to make decisions related to the matters which are ostensibly their responsibility.

And yet it is precisely because of this centralization that power has become increasingly difficult to wield—and may soon become impossible to wield.

Power and Authority

In a modern bureaucratized state, we tend to conflate two important properties of an exalted place in the hierarchy: Power and Authority.

These are not as similar as they appear. It is possible to have tremendous authority without having much in the way of power. It is also possible to have tremendous power without possessing an ounce of authority.

When I was a youngster I did a healthy amount of volunteer work, including construction and electrical and such. On these job sites, nobody could punish you by taking your paycheck. If someone in “management” was abusive, the volunteer would just leave. On the other hand, if the volunteers left the job site, the house wouldn’t get refurbished and the family we were helping would not be able to move in. The power was entirely in the hands of the volunteers.

However, the volunteers were typically inexperienced kids (like me). We had all the power, but we didn’t know what the hell we were doing. Those who were leading the project, on the other hand, were experienced in the arts of construction and remodeling, and thus we all recognized them as the people from whom to take our cues. There was no vote, we held no meetings, we just recognized that these people knew more than we did, and therefore we treated them as authorities on the subjects at hand.

In other words, while power may be coercive, may be imposed, and may be granted or delegated, authority is always (and only) recognized.

Authority, then, can be thought of as a form of soft power, while power per se is hard power. A person under someone else’s authority is vulnerable to censure, embarrassment, dressing-down, correction, and other forms of behavioral levering. On the other hand, a person who is subject onto someone else’s power can reasonably expect that they can be subject to expropriation, exile, imprisonment, violence, or execution.

This distinction can be seen at work in geopolitics. Kinetic warfare is the classic expression of “hard power,” but it’s not the only one. Early 2022 saw startling developments in non-kinetic warfare (interference with commerce) as hard power techniques both inside countries (Canada’s governmental de-banking of those who participated in—and supported—the self-styled “Freedom Convoy” protests) and between countries (America locking out Russia from the dollar-based financial system). Once upon a time, public analysts spoke of things such as economic sanctions as soft power, but this has always been a category error. A shove, a punch to the face, and a bullet to the head are all forms of violence—the question is that of degrees.

During the Cold War, America was very good at wielding soft-power. On the home front, things like welfare policy, tax policy, and corporate incentives pushed (or “nudged,” to use the fashionable term) people into certain kinds of behavior the government desired. On the war front, America’s willingness to put its own economy on the line for its allies and to defend its allies should it prove necessary was an important element of soft power, but it ultimately was the cultural products of the United States that won the day. The showcase of political and economic freedom that arrived on television sets and movie screens across the world—even behind the Iron Curtain—eroded the moral authority of the Soviet vision for the world while validating the moral authority of the American vision for the world.

Authority is recognized, not granted. Its erosion can be recognized as well. The US Dollar was the global reserve currency for nearly a century as other countries—first through necessity, then through opportunity—hitched their wagons to the American economy. This made investment in in American companies, assets, and real estate incredibly attractive. It made depositing one’s money into US banks look like the safest possible route. It meant that the United States could do no wrong.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the US Government quietly converted this soft power into hard power by finding the choke points in the financial system and the global trade system, and positioning itself to put the squeeze on these points should anyone threaten its interests again. It used this position to subtly squeeze information flows over the Internet—previously an open system—so that it could attain global dominance over public opinion.

But then, as soon as it started using these new forms of hard power, something curious happened.

It found its authority evaporating. Countries that previously snapped-to and followed wherever America led now had very much their own ideas about how things should be done. America, having gained global domination over matters military, financial, cultural, and informational shifted to an aggressive stance. Instead of leading by example and seduction, it whipped its allies into shape with threats, because hard power works more quickly than soft power.

Until it doesn’t anymore.

When power and authority are co-located, you have the recipe for good and effective leadership that can operate with tremendous leverage. Without power, authority will continue to inspire and attract. Without authority, power creates distrust, resentment, division, and other forces that erode the foundation upon which the power is built. Fear may last longer and be easier to inspire than love, but it is also more brittle and breeds the wolves that will eventually rend the prince that relies too much on it.

The original rationale upon which the modern bureaucratic state was established is “efficiency of administration.” Having specialized department overseeing different aspects of the economy, body politic, etc. would allow the government to more effectively do its job, or so went the reasoning. This would put professionals in positions of leadership, and make public service respectable again, giving the state access to the best and brightest talent in the country.

The preceding system was less far-reaching, and was based on the “spoils” tradition, wherein the incoming administration would award prestige and largess to its patrons in what we would now consider a rather shocking and obvious form of public corruption. The general governing philosophy was largely “hands-off” in the English-speaking world—and especially in the US—throughout the nineteenth century.

But the rise of science and the immense success of engineering in turn raised living standards and gave rise to the notion that everything in the world—including the messy parts of human nature—could be measured, managed, brought to heel, and turned in a productive direction. Naturally, a technological civilization needs experts in the technology to manage it—how else is one to make rules to govern telecommunications, aerospace, high finance, munitions manufacture, agricultural flows, food safety, and public health in a modern expanding industrial economy?

Bureaucracy is an old art, and when properly run it operates on a principle called subsidiarity, wherein power is devolved to the lowest possible level. By having competent bureaucrats as locally as possible, you ensure that those with local knowledge are empowered to engage with local conditions. Power and authority are co-located at the level where they are most directly useful.

The problem with bureaucracy, however, is that when good talent can’t be located to fill the vacancies, ass-kissers will do. Stock the system with enough ass-kissers, let them screw up enough, and institutional credibility demands that power be transferred upwards to a higher authority who might actually be competent. Meanwhile, the bureaucrats who have the most contact with the members of the public are rendered unable to perform any useful function. Don’t believe me? Consider when it was that you last felt inclined to call the governmental tax office (the IRS) for advice on how to understand your income tax forms.

This violation of the principle of subsidiarity has been gradual, but has far-reaching implications. By eroding its own authority, the governmental body both erodes respect for its own mission and for laws, norms, and conventions generally. Eventually, its only reliable lever is hard power.

And, because power and authority have been relentlessly conflated across domains, respect for authority in general also begins to fail. The loyalty of the expert class naturally tends towards the regime from which they feel that they derive their legitimacy, and thus they, in turn, become vulnerable to losing their legitimacy as trust in the regime, its system, and its agenda erodes.

This erosion is happening all around us right now. Tomorrow I will look at what political legitimacy is, how this erosion effects it, and explore what implications it might have for the civilizational upheavals that are now upon us.