The Phenomenology of Power
How Right-Wing Progressivism Sees Power
The Principles of General and Social Power
A great deal of the world's most important intellectuals who have crafted theoretical and analytical frameworks for understanding the dynamics we see unfold in society have also endeavored to elucidate the workings of what constitutes power that drives these dynamics, yet, few-to-none of their considerations can be used outside of the confines of human society and thus they remain limited. In many of these frameworks power is associated with possessing one specific quality such as money, size, symbols and legality that in more complex frameworks crafted by the likes of Hannah Arendt’s and Talcott Parsons’ are reduced to a common denominator of agreed upon social symbols that results out of the interaction of large social bodies. While being better than a one-dimensional view of power, in their view power still cannot exist outside of the confines of those who interpret it, but as we know power is being exercised on and by geospheric and cosmospheric non-living matter, and even in the biosphere can be seen among the interactions of different species who don’t require a common language for interpreting symbols.
Even the more relevantly-crafty understandings of social power like in the case of Carl Schmitt who defined a possession of power as the ability to make particularist exceptions to the generalized, thereby triggering the state of exception are not able to explain why smaller bodies in space fall under the gravitational force of heavier bodies and nor can it imagine instances in which states of exception are impossible to be crafted in the first place such as among the dynamics of evolution and progress, universal mathematics and programming language and laws of nature. As a consequence of that, I decided to remedy this flaw with my own perception of the generalized (and social) power that is underpinned by a Tectological foundation in which the true constitution of power is uncovered by understanding the universal commonalities of power manifested in multiple spheres of being.'
There are two complementary principles that determine the constitution of universal power:
Force of element/s within the sphere
Organizing principle of the sphere
A force of an element is the summation of elements that exists within a sphere. In the least complex manifestation it can be conceived as the concentration of matter within the vacuum of cosmos that causes matter of lesser summation to be ingressed towards it. Thus the force of an element can be defined as the ability of the element to generate a condition of dependence on behalf of other elements thereby producing a state of orbitation in which the lighter element begins to adjust its internal dynamics to match the dynamics of the stronger element or be devoured by it. In instances in which two or more elements possess sufficient force to resist ingression, a condition of interdependence emerges that is analogous to binary (or more) orbitation between bodies that we see in space. These gravitational forces have predated the dawn of the geosphere and the biosphere, for the earliest matter has first emerged in the cosmosphere to then be dispersed in a differentiating dynamic across the concentration of elements that it generated across the cosmos. It is this process that has perpetually given rise to greater organizational complexity in each of these concentrations of elements thereby facilitating for the necessary conditions for abiogenesis whose triggering has provided a critical threshold for progressive evolution that would culminate in the advent of the noosphere among the biotic life forms possessing exceptional organizational design.
All that exists in the noosphere (and the biosphere), be it biological or mental strength, popularity, adjustment of self to the environment (socialization), financial possession or a superior status all are subjected to the same organizing principle of the least resistance in which the weaker element is forced to be ingressed by the stronger element across a variety of spheres that form their own concentrations of force. However, because an individuality possesses sufficient force to not be completely ingressed by a stronger unit or a collection of units (unlike is the case in lower biospheric life), individuals with lesser force adjust their own internal dynamics to match the dynamics of the stronger element which can be better explained using an orbitation analogy in which the heavier body being the center of gravity directs the trajectory of the lighter body to match his own. Nevertheless, as these elements become further away from the source of force they slowly regain independence. That is why for instance, rigid social rituals such as a soldier formation collapses the moment an individual soldier escapes the confines of the military (the examples are endless). Oftentimes when individuals may never completely escape the force of a mental concept, they may rework it in accordance with their own interpretation for such is the dynamic for political ideologies and philosophies producing new variants of themselves through the perpetual differentiation by the social forces adopting them.
These dynamics permeate across all spheres and so a social actor that is deemed as light due to belonging to a despised social group in a broader society, can be powerful within his own social group, friend circle, family and localized workplace which all exist under a broader sphere but at a different level of the hierarchy and space. But, because there are endless amounts of horizontal spheres with multiple levels of the hierarchy, such as hobbies, business, nationality there arise more venues for concentrating a force that will trigger a condition of dependence to emerge on behalf of the lighter subjects within it. Because humans largely operate within the noosphere, they are able to cause power reversal that comes with an improvement in their own organizational design relative to the organizational dynamic of the environment.
The realm of sociality whose evolutionary speed is rapid, knows endless amounts of examples in which one individual or a social group replaces another as the main center of force, but due to the complexity found within the sociosphere, social forces often yield combined aggregations governed by a high degree of interconnectedness and mutual interdependence found within its units that nonetheless tend to be predominantly shaped by the heavier elements that are found within them. These heavier elements bend the collective social organism to align with their own organizational dynamics, thus effecting change and it was John Locke who among the first has intuitively perceived power as the capacity to instigate change, for social (or any other) trajectory always bends in accordance to the highest concentration of force.
The second component of power is the organizing principle of elements and spheres in which these elements exist. These are the universal laws that scientists and intellectuals uncover in their endeavor to properly contemplate the world, for these laws ultimately drive the being and becoming of every element and sphere that has ever existed and will exist. The law of conservation of mass and energy, the laws of evolution and gravitation, thermodynamics and others belonging to the similar category are all universal laws which exist regardless of human interpretation and wishes. They applied before the emergence of the noosphere, they apply now and they will apply forever for these are natural laws that function independently of actor interpretation.
In addition to natural laws, there are also artificial (or rational) laws which were thought of in the noosphere and applied into the real world as principles of organization. Stated differently, these laws were imagined by rational actors and even though some of them may have a strong correlation with natural sciences such as the organizing principles of standardized eugenics, mathematics and synthetic chemistry - they nonetheless are being applied by rational actors and the creations of rational actors in order to shape the environment for social ends. Yet, there are laws which have a less strict correlation with the natural sciences to a point of many of them being of a complete artificial character, such as universal legal laws, market laws, moral laws, dogma laws, state laws, coding laws, game laws, sport laws, workplace laws, criminal laws, linguistic laws, international state laws and this list can extend indefinitely, illustrating the variety and flexibility of actor-devised laws that will cease to exist the moment actors carrying them will no longer be.
For practical purposes, one may view the organizing principle as the infrastructure within which elements interact with one another and in the context of the noosphere such an infrastructure will correspond to the level of development of its rational design and the gravitational weight of the elements which are most organized within it (because elements are also organized). As a result of that, laws of any kind are sphere and carrier dependent and as a consequence are subjected to rapid change into the direction of sphere and carrier pull. For this reason a social practice which was acceptable a generation or two ago became unacceptable in the present moment and only in a certain society while a completely different phenomenon which did not manifest itself five or more generations ago now manifests itself and is ingrained into the legal code.
Ultimately, both components of power in the context of the sociosphere should not be viewed as separate from one another and for as long as the powerful elements within society are also organized they will remain highly intercorrelated. Hannah Arendt once brought up an example of slaves who have greatly outnumbered the masters remaining slaves due to their internal organizational abilities not exceeding the masters’ and thus not being converted into a gravitational force (power) that would reorganize society around their own wishes. The present opposite example of this dynamic is the Western preferential treatment of its racial minorities which only became a phenomenon after the rapid disorganization of its elites and masses who still occupy most positions of power in the West as well as outnumber any other racial group living within the West among the general population. However, for as long as Westerners lack racial consciousness, they will never become threats to their minorities, just as the workers who lack a labor consciousness will never become threats to their employers for elements without an organization do not form a progressive dialectic.
The dialectic of a new organizing principle is produced through a synotic process in which multiple elements begin to be perpetually synergizing within a specific space. It is for this reason that the laws of natural (or any other general) sciences depend on the context of space, force and time. What we label natural laws are essentially a regulatory mechanism that emerged out of the interaction of elements as a means of optimizing the sphere within which they interact. Thus, self-emergence has led to the collective (spherical) emergence, however when the collective has emerged it became a power of its own that began to direct the application of force of the elements that exist within it. In the sociosphere, the most illustrative example of such a dynamic is the social media system in which users regardless of their concentration of force (following) nonetheless are managed by the universal principle of organization of the platform in which they exist.
In rare instances, an organizational principle and elemental force can come into conflict. In primitive societies, such instances were more commonplace but with great general progress these conflicts fell and rose only in recent times but not unilaterally. They are rare, precisely because overriding an organizational principle by an element of force will automatically upset a sphere equilibrium and send a signal to other actors within the sphere that the organizational principle may also be overridden by elements of lesser force or be entirely replaced with another organizational principle in which the process of organizational evolution will occur.
In the vast majority and almost in the vast entirety of length of other instances in which elements interact on a larger scale, an organizing principle predominates over and socializes the elements that participate in social interactions who are able to make only local and small scale modifications to organizing principles which in even rarer occasions can cascade into becoming a principle of organization of their own. I refer to the process in which conservative forces predominate over - as the static (conservative) selection while in the instances in which a new organizational principle changes the environment it fits the description of what I refer to as the dynamic (progressive) selection. Because the amount of spheres in which humans exist due to a noospheric acceleration is constantly expanding, humans compensate their inability to make changes in a well-entrenched environment by making organizational changes in spheres which are easier to modify such as music writing, fandoms, video game and coding spheres, but in the sphere of mathematics, organized politics, economics, nation building, academia and linguistics, a much stronger organizational force is required on behalf of the element that is attempting to make changes if they happen to be outside of the field in question.
I would argue that precisely for this reason political change and progress has been slow and driven to follow the interests of the most organized groups within politics, new nation building has ceased to exist, almost no science is done outside of academia, market economics together with mathematics remains as strong as ever and there are no basic syntax changes to any of the major languages despite accelerating increase in vocabulary size. As social systems become more complex, a force of element begins to be absolved by and converted into the organizing principles of the system thereby achieving what I refer to as integration through differentiation in which the differentiated parts act as a social organism governed by organizational dynamics leaving no room for particularist exception for that will lead to the disorganization of the social organism analogous to the death of individual organism if its organs started working independently from the whole.
Laymen often say that to understand who rules you it is enough to determine who you are not allowed to criticize. Such a statement is accurate in most of the cases, yet fails to account for moral ethics in which certain groups like veterans, the elderly, the disabled, abuse victims, the pregnant and many others become to be morally elevated by society without actually being powerful themselves for they do not form centers of gravity.
Power, on the other hand, is akin to large objects in space causing other objects to be absorbed by them if they don’t have enough force of their own or orbit them if they happen to produce a mutual center of gravity. In society power is not able to completely absorb others for they have an individuality of their own, but it can make others orbit around it, be dependent upon it and act in its interests through the application of force.
In other words, to determine who rules over you it is not enough to determine who you are not allowed to criticize but rather the removal of what element or organizing principle that would cause the system to become disorganized. In the job market it is the owner of the company and the supervisors, in the market economy it is money and market laws, in the solar system it is the sun, in primitive societies it is their charismatic leader, in the internet it is people with a larger following and the infrastructure in which these people are permitted to gather following, while in a political movement it is its leader in lower political organizations or its ideology in higher political organizations.
The next task is to determine a center of gravity in our body politic. What sort of political body causes a large portion of society to be dependent on it and become disorganized once such a center of gravity is removed?
While the Russian center of gravity in relation to politics is simple to identify, because in order to locate the main organizing force of an autocratic country it is enough to point to its leader, but for countries of increasing complexity such as the United States and frankly all other Western countries, perhaps with the exception of Hungary - a center of gravity which governs them is relatively difficult to identify to a person with a formalist understanding of the world and that is why it has been so often misidentified. There are two primary reasons for this quandary.
The first reason is that social power represents a dynamic competitive market formed at the intersection of organized groups and individuals with expiry dates inside the spheres in which they exist. Therefore, social power is by definition heterogeneous and dynamic and as a result differs in quality, extent and form from one sphere to another. That is why an individual can be in the position of symbolic and managerial power if they happen to occupy a supervising position at employment, but also in a subordinate position at home, while because they belong to a privileged social group, just by virtue of belonging to it, they will also find themselves in the position of power within the sphere which recognizes the superiority of said group.
The second reason is that West is subordinated more to ideology as opposed to individual persons as is the case among lower political orders. Nonetheless, the West exists in a perpetual transition in-between higher and lower orders of political organization and oftentimes the ruling ideology of the West finds itself subordinated to the groups and persons whose force exceeds the force of the universal mode of organization which causes people outside of these particular groups and individuals to level charges of “double standards'' and hypocrisy against them before advancing the progressive dialectic. Stated differently, in highly advanced political orders, the polity revolves around its universal principles of organization as it would revolve in programmable language and natural science while primitive political orders are too disorganized to apply a universal social contract for all of its citizens - thus causing the universal principles of organization to be subordinated to particularist interests such as political lobbying and the interests of certain identity groups or persons (a topic that I will elaborate upon in another chapter of the manifesto). Carl Schmitt would call it a state of exception, in which a powerful person decides when and to whom universal organizing principles no longer apply.
So to answer the central question of how one determines who is in power - in power are those without whom a collection of elements becomes disorganized. In other words, those elements which enforce the organizational principles of a sphere. In the manifesto that will be released in the first half of May, I will identify those who sit at the combined synthesis of powerful elements within the polity and dominant organizational principles which govern it. The manifesto will only be available to paid subscribers.
