The gravest error: misunderstanding the division of power

I am just reading this. Taylor writes:

“Oh, and Moldbug’s claim that sovereignty is conserved is bullshit. (Update, 1-19-2014: As David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom, 2nd ed., p. 18, puts it: “Power is diminished when it is divided. If one man owns all the food, he can make me do almost anything. If it is divided among a hundred men, no one can make me do very much for it; if one tries, I can get a better deal from another.”) ”

I think this is the biggest conceptual mistake anyone who is leaning broadly rightwards could commit, a real ur-confusion. But also an understandable one, because I too struggle for the words to express this clearly, it is just not part of the generic vocab. But basically it is this:  there is a difference between dividing power or dividing the thing over which power rules.  What is a proper English term for a thing that which gets ruled over? I’ll go with domain or property.

You and I find a pot of gold together. We can share it 50-50 and do whatever we want with our share. Or we can put into a common bank account and spend it on things we both agree with. Is this really the same thing? Obviously not. In the first case we divided the gold, in the second we divided the power over the gold. In this example, the gold was the domain.

Similarly, it is different to go from monarchy to democracy in a large country or divide up a large monarchy to many small ones.  (Germany and Italy in time-reverse. Also, worth pondering: if they hadn’t unified, there wouldn’t have been world wars.)  Divide power or divide the domain?

Professor Friedman, If one man owns all the food, and we want to change that, don’t you see a huge difference between we just divide the food (supposedly broadly equally) and each privately owns his share, or keep it common property and vote democratically on who gets to consume how much? The first solution is free market capitalism, the second solution is democratic socialism.  I mean, it is almost the literal textbook definition of both.

Professor Friedman, you support free market capitalism, not democratic socialism, right?  Therefore, you actually cannot support the division of power. You can only support to divide that thing which is ruled over – divide the domain, divide the property. You probably don’t want everybody and their dog have a say in how a corporation is ran. You probably want only the owners to have a say. That means you don’t support the division of power over a corporation. What you support instead that there should be a million corporations, not one huge one. That means dividing the thing that is ruled over, the property, the domain. Not rulership itself.

(Also, if you want to take the division of the domain seriously, why not add a bit of a Distributist flavor to your Libertarianism?)

This is why democracy and socialism are inherently linked, and so are capitalism and monarchy. But my point is not to argue for monarchy here, but to claim that Moldbug’s sovereignty-is-conserved hypothesis, while far from being proven right, is certainly not so trivially wrong.  The division of power is democratic socialism, not private property. So let’s examine that.Basically the hypothesis says that if all the food is owned as one socialist commony-property blob,  it does not matter much if one king  (party secretary) decides how much you get or ten aristocrats  (party bigwigs) decide in common (by a vote), or a hundred voters in a democratic process decide it in common. I mean, if one aristocrat (bigwig) alone can decide to give you food, that is good, because then they have to compete for you.  But that again would be private property in anything but name.  (The Soviets did have this kind of virtual private property for the big dogs, but that made them theoretically less socialist.) So if it is truly socialist property, so no one can decide a thing alone,  and if it is a majority vote of 6 out of 10 aristocrats or party bigwigs, and  if it is secret ballot, so you cannot even just work for the 6 lowest offer to sell a vote for work out of the 10, yeah, then you are just about as much screwed. I am not that versed in Public Choice Theory to really work that out, but my bet is that instead of giving back rubs to the king, you end up giving back rubs to 6 out of 10 big guys. At least the king has one back only, not six.  Inflate it to 100 democratic voters, and you really have far too many backs to rub.This can be used to demonstrate the desirability of monarchyies – very small ones, dividing countries (things ruled, domains, properties) not power itself (rulership), but that is a further step, what I am arguing here is simply that democratic socialism does not make you more free than monarchy. Hence, power is not diminished by dividing it, it is only diminished by dividing the thing ruled over.

By dividing power, sovereignty is thus conserved. By dividing the domain, sovereignty is also conserved –  over the domain.  In Professor Friedmans example, the domain, the property divided is the food. Not yourself. This is the Big Idea here, really – you don’t evaporate sovereignty over a domain by dividing either power or a domain, but you can be not part of the domain and thus more free by dividing the domain. Owners of corporations have total undivided power over their corporations, but not over you: you are a customer. Not part of the domain.

By dividing the food, the total sum of sovereignty or authority or ownership and decision making or power over the sum of the food is obviously not diminished.  But power over you is diminished. (Precisely speaking, you are a customer in all of the cases, just with a vastly better negotiation position. OTOH having a truly poor negotiation position can be defined as “having power over you”. People with really bad negotiating positions can be understood as de facto parts of the domain.)

You cannot evaporate power, but you, apparently, can make humans exempt from its domain.

This is a weird thing, really. It seems to me that power is actually not a very straightforward thing to have over humans. Over things, like land or money, it is straightforward.  Humans not so much. Imagine the clearest kind of power over humans: slavery. If a slave escapes the plantation and wanders around the wilderness, he is not under his owners power, unless caught. So it seems what the slave owner really has power over is the land, the plantation itself, and over the slaves only as long as they live there. This is why they are forced to live there, and the owners try to prevent and punish escape attempts, and recapture and punish escapees. They don’t have a magic remote control to have a power over an escaped slave wandering around in the wilderness. It is the plantation only where they have true power. Hence, they turn it into a prison.

So it seems power is not so much a human-to-human relationship, but human-to-thing, human-to-land relationship. And humans just kind of get caught in the web of it.

Perhaps consider warfare, another very crucial way to exercise power. Is it really about making human bodies die, as an ultimate goal? I think it is closer to truth to say that it is about controlling land. The human bodies die whenever they attempt to contest the taking of land, when they get entangled in the relationship between an army and piece of land it wants to have power over: its objective. Maybe I am completely wrong here, but a land-based power theory would be at least a refreshing new angle.

But back to my slavery example. Suppose that later on a lawmaker liberates the slaves. But the power over the plantation itself does not change by that one act. Just the slaves are now exempt from that power: they can leave the plantation. If they prefer to stay, of course they have to work and take orders.

This is why it is perfectly possible and compatible that power cannot be evaporated and yet humans can be more free.  Power stays, power over things, power over land, just humans get disentangled from the web.

And that is freedom.

The art of human freedom is figuring out how not to get other humans caught in the human-over-things, human-over-land type of power web.