Tag Archives: Authority

Legitimacy, Power, and Culture

We’ve heard it said, culture is downstream of power, or is power downstream of culture? Which controls the levers to the other?

As I’ve said before, power (the ability to force your will) comes from authority (the ability to command), which comes from legitimacy (people’s beliefs in your right to command).

The power/culture discussion is always off because it misses the underlying link between the two: legitimacy.

Power can do whatever it wants within its dominion. That’s the inherent nature of power. If you can not do what you want, you, definitionally, do not have power. The limits of power exist where you can no longer accomplish your will.

Someone with power over culture can change the culture to be whatever he desires. If multiple people have power over culture, the culture will be changed to wherever the limits of their power meet. Power creates, destroys, and changes culture.

Note: Culture is always, to at least some degree, organic, so power over culture is always widely distributed. No one ever has absolute power over culture.

But, power creates culture only insofar at it has authority. Culture is organic and of men. If men do not obey, there is no power and culture can not created, destroyed, or changed. Culture is only changed insofar as men allow it to be changed.

Men only allow culture to be changed, in so far as they think the change and the power causing the change are legitimate.

This is where culture influences power. Legitimacy comes from culture. If the culture holds to the Divine Right determines power men will obey power with Divine Right. If culture holds to patriarchy determines power, men will obey fathers. If the culture holds to popular will, they will obey democratically elected politicians.

Power is downstream of legitimacy, which is downstream of culture, which is downstream of power.

By changing culture, power can change what men view as legitimate, changing legitimacy, authority, and, ultimately, where power lays.

This is how power destroys itself. It changes the culture that made itself legitimate, which then changes what legitimizes power, changing the basis of authority, changing the power itself. Power changing culture undermines itself.

****

Culture change is slow and difficult, so changing the method of legitimacy is slow and difficult. It is easier to destroy legitimacy than to create. Culture change is also unpredictable. When you destroy culture, what replaces it may not always be what you expected or hoped.

This is why revolutions are so turbulent and unstable and often end in a strong man: one can destroy the legitimacy of the present order, but creating a new order viewed as legitimate is time-consuming and difficult. When you destroy a culture and legitimacy, it is hard to predict what form legitimacy will take, hence revolutions often destroying their instigators.

In a legitimacy vacuum, the simplest form of legitimacy to create is martial: men naturally respect strength and strength is relatively simple to demostrate. A strong-man short-circuits the legitimacy-creation process by focusing the creation of legitimacy among a group of armed men through his strength. Once he obtains enough power through this specific legitimacy, he kills those who oppose him until they obey. He is then free to influence culture until another strong-man overthrows him or until he creates a more sustainable legitimacy.

****

Power flows from legitimacy. Culture creates legitimacy. Power influences culture.

In a stable system culture will reinforce legitimacy which will reinforce power, which will in turn reinforce the culture. For example, the church supports supports divine right, which legitimizes the monarch, who in turn supports the church.

In an unstable system, power destroys culture (or its own legitimacy) and/or culture undermines power’s legitimacy. For example, enlightnment ideas and culture undercut divine right, the monarch mismanages power squandering legitimacy, and then revolution occurs.

Just War and Breivik

A couple of Ask.fm questions and a Twitter convo with Mandrake have prompted me to post on just war and Brievik.

Just war has two aspects jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Jus ad bellum governs whether a particular military conflict is justified, while jus in bello regulates proper action in war. I should note that I reject the concept international law, as it violates subsidiarity, as international organization aren’t sovereign and therefore can’t make law, and as law is and should be made by a government of a people for that particular people, making one set of laws applicable to differing peoples is harmful. So I am talking about moral law here, not ‘legal’ law.

Before we even get to just war, we must define war. War is conflict between nations, for a war to be a war it must be waged by a people against another people, not by a person; if a person is waging war on their own, they are simply committing murder, not committing war.

For a war to be just a state of war must be entered by the people. To do this a legitimate authority over a people must declare the war on behalf of the people he represents. Someone who is not an authority for his people can not declare a war. This declaration need not necessarily be a formal declaration of war. A surprise or pre-emptive attack may be just declaration of war depending on the circumstance. (I am unsure on the question of whether an illegitimate authority can justly declare war on the people he has authority over; it will require more pondering).

For a declaration of war to be just, it must meet three conditions:

First, it must be defensive, either in defense of your own nation, in defence of another nation, or in defence of justice. Defence is not used in its strictest sense, and goes beyond simply warding off an invasion. For example, an invasion to rescue a national citizen kidnapped while visiting a foreign nation would be a valid defence of the nation, while an invasion to stop mass murder or to punish the guilty may be a valid defence of justice.

Second, the war must have some real chance of success. If a war would have no realistic chance of success, then the war is unnecessary, and would therefore be unjust. A small chance of success is still a real chance.

Finally, war must be proportional. The expected benefits of a war must be greater than the expected evils of war.

Once in war jus in bello should be followed:

First two principles are necessity and proportionality, unnecessary violence is to be avoided and violence enacted should not be disproportionate to the goals.

The third is the avoidance of deliberately targeting non-combatants. Violence should only be enacted upon legitimate military targets.

Finally, there is the proper treatment of POW’s. It should be noted here, that spies, saboteurs, and the like are not POW’s and can be dealt with harshly.

Those are the basics of just war.

So, now we get to Breivik. I think Breivik did have a just cause for war; the rapes, violence, and slow genocide of his people by foreigners and hostile elites are just causes for war, but he was not carrying out a just war.

The first reason was that he was not engaging in war. He acted alone, not as a part of a people; there was no war, simply murder. As well, he was not a legitimate authority, so his act of ‘war’ could not be a legitimate declaration of war to begin a war.

Secondly, his actions had no real chance of success. Given that propaganda outlets are almost entirely in the hands of his enemies, the most realistic outcome was that his actions would actively hinder his cause.

He also failed to meet jus in bello principles. The targets of his attacks were not legitimate military targets. Given the nature of the conflict in Norway, I think a legitimate case could be made that the ruling elite and politicians are legitimate military targets, but the spawn of the ruling elites were not. He should have targeted the politicians, media, and bureaucrats, not their children.

A just war in Norway, would require the Norwegian people, or at least a significant minority of them, to have (or appoint) a legitimate authority to declare war on behalf of their community in order to expel (not genocide) the foreign invaders and remove the internal traitors supporting them from positions of power.

If this community can not be found, no amount of lone wolf attacks will matter. The Norwegian people will, sadly, have chosen their own subjugation and extinction.

Authority

Legitimate authority, as the name suggests, requires both authority and legitimacy. Authority is the ability to carry out your will, particularly through the use of others, while legitimacy is the general acceptance that your should be able to enact your authority. Authority without legitimacy is tyranny and will only hold as long as the threat of violence holds, which admittedly can be a long time.

Legitimate authority flows naturally from healthy hierarchical structures. The ur-example of legitimate authority is fatherhood which flows naturally from healthy family structures and collapses in unhealthy structures. Other forms of natural legitimate authority are generally forms of fatherhood: monarchs are the political fathers of their nations, elders are simply fathers who have unofficially adopted a tribe, while ecclesiastical authorities are spiritual fathers of their flocks. Some domain-specific authorities arise naturally from ability or knowledge and adopt many aspects of fatherhood to their specific domain: warband leaders, gangs, teachers, mentors, etc. These natural authorities flow from basic human social and hierarchical instincts and are the building blocks of civilization.

Healthy authority is generally these forms of natural authority.

There are also unnatural forms of legitimate authority. Modern democracy is the greatest example of this. It is an unnatural system derived from numerous artificial and unnatural social constructs, yet is accepted as legitimate by most of the citizens within the democracies. Democracies also tend to be unhealthy precisely because it is unnatural.

Unnatural authority is not necessarily bad, per se, but because it is unnatural, it has higher bar to clear when it comes to legitimacy and it is more likely to be dysfunctional. Legitimacy flows from God and from the people; it is not the will of the people, but the people ruled by an authority must recognize the legitimacy of an authority. Natural authority by default confers legitimacy: children do not question the right of the father to rule them until these child naturally grows to an age to rule themselves, and even then, children still accept their father’s advice and guidance. The biggest threat to natural authority is the abuse or neglect by the authority. In cases where a natural authority is abusing or neglecting his duties, legitimacy breaks down and the ruled will rebel to be replaced by either anarchy or a new legitimate authority.

Unnatural authority does not automatically confer legitimacy. Legitimacy comes through either earned merit or persuasion. Intellectual leaders and recognized experts generally gain their legitimacy as authorities in their domains through the demonstration of knowledge and skill related to their specific domains. Business leaders and the rich earn their authority through performance in the free market. Democratic leaders gain their legitimacy through persuasion, using the methods propaganda and bribery, hence the omnipresent state and state instruments in any democracy constantly trumping the virtues of democracy and providing bread and circuses. The main problem with unnatural authority is that it is much easier to persuade than it is to earn. A bribe or a piece of propaganda is easier than decades of labour excelling at an area of expertise. So, unnatural authorities will tend to drift towards manipulation over merit to obtain legitimacy.

Euler and Tradition

Scott writes on what he calls getting Eulered: when someone tries to convince you of something or rebut something you believe using arguments (particularly mathematical ones) you are either not intelligent or not trained enough to understand.

I’ve never heard the term before, but I’ve thought of this. I am intelligent, but not exceedingly so, there are a number of things I won’t be able to understand, at least not fully or without much more effort and time than I am willing to put in.

So, I follow a simple heuristic: what does someone smarter than me who agrees with me on things I understand and is willing to put in time/effort think on the issue?

If you know he agrees with you on the things you understand for similar reasons as you, you know he reasons in similar fashion to you from similar presupoositions. If he reasons in a similar fashion as you, you then know that his thoughts on another issue you don’t understand will be the most reasonable approximation of what you would think if you were either smart or knowledgeable enough to be able to form an informed opinion on the matter.

No matter how smart you are you can’t know or understand all things. In the case where you can’t, the wise course of action is to fall back on those who think the same as you, but are either more intelligent or more knowledgeable on the subject matter.

All rational organizations outsource when it’s more efficient, so why not outsource your thinking when it is more likely to be correct if someone else does it for you?

Agreeing with someone because he generally agrees with you when you don’t understand the argument in question is usually the most rational form of action.

Of course, this is not an original heuristic, and is no different than asking, ‘what does my father, my priest, my teacher, etc. say?‘

But what if you move your intellectual outsourcing beyond a known individual to something greater. This is where tradition comes in: why outsource your thinking to a single individual when you can outsource your thinking to the collective reasoning of every single previously-existing mind of your society?

Is it not much more efficient and wise to follow the collective wisdom of thousands of minds much more intelligent and knowledgeable than yourself than to go through the intellectual labour of thinking something through for yourself and likely arriving at a rationally inferior position?

From this, is not the person saying, “I believe what my ancestors, the magisterium, my intellectual forebears believe” being more rational than the one who tries to reason everything out for himself?

Maybe, argument from authority, if the authority stands firmly upon a mount of tradition, is the most rational argument of all.