The Iron Law of Oligarchies

 I thought tonight would be a good time to review Peter Turchin's book on Ultra Society. More than a few people at work are very concerned about the US' political instability. There's an equal number worried about the monoparty's authoritarianism as there are about the monoparty's media narrative.

The Iron Law of Oligarchies says that democracies and authoritarian states both tend, over time, to Oligarchies. Peter Turchin favours this view. That's pretty strong evidence. After all, he's got a good database to work from that most other social historians don't.  (see his book Ultra Society)

One of the drivers into the Iron Law of Oligarchies is bureaucratization.  I think you need to go a bit deeper though.  That seems to be a symptom, not a proximate driver.  I think we've got 3 main biologically selected drivers.

1. Progressivism - kings and dictators need to provide some adaptive benefit to their group. That is often in the form of good military leadership in times of threat. But, I'd suggest progressivism also works. And, perhaps works better.  This might be Egyptian grain stores or welfare pyramid building work. Progressivism also seems to be an ideal solution to group expansion. Selection at the elite levels for progressivism seems to me to be a natural evolutionary well.

2. Intra-elite competition (multi-level selection)- you can tell I'm reading Turchin right now... :)  You always have intra-elite competition. Turchin's data is hard to deny here.  If that's accurate I have a hard time seeing how natural tendencies for hierarchies (think Jordan Peterson's lobster logic here) don't get expressed here.  Control just seems to fit a power law distribution too well for it to be coincidental.  Instead intra-elite competition I'm fine with the term multi-level selection.

3. Technocratic detachment - I think this is the last driver. Systems gradually and inevitably become detached from their current niches. This basically happens as per strange attractor dynamics. Over the last few years I've typically thought biological systems in terms of a Lorentz Butterfly attractor.  That's because multi-level selection logic has two attractors. Other two attractor solutions are possible. I'm no expert here. Technocratic detachment can be seen as related to transformational exploration. For example, the only way to see if globalism is good is to disregard the nay sayers, jump in, and let people see that it isn't so bad after all.  That such moves almost always fail isn't an evolutionary reason not to do it. It just reflects the fact that transformational moves which occasionally succeed bigly are adaptive on long time scales and landscapes with significant intergroup competition.  I'd also note that technocratic detachment is best done at the elite level and not at the commoner level. That's because at the commoner level, technocratic detachment has major existential risks. Your masses are conservative. At the elite level, the risks are mostly offloaded onto commoners. This minimizes the size of failure, making a sub-group of people more risky, but less able to get everyone on board.

If I was being more concise I'd probably sum up these three drivers as 

1. an evolutionary arrow for progressivism 
2. an evolutionary arrow for larger group size
3. selection for a complex dynamic of transformative exploration (and pull-back/failure)

The net result for the US, as I see it, is an inevitable strengthening of its Oligarchical dynamics. The hysterical reaction to Trump shows that the system doesn't want populist outsiders. You don't really have a true representational democracy down there anymore. Trump (and Trump party 2.0 in 2024 if impeachment doesn't happen on Jan 21 may be the last kicks of the can here for a while.