The Theory of the General Crisis

Introduction

In a relatively short space here, I am going to describe the basic formation, function, and structure of the state. My goal is to help clarify the actual nature of the state so that we, regardless of our individual statuses, can respond to the state based upon our true position. One of the pitfalls of liberalism-nationalism (i.e. the ideology of liberal democracy) is the concept of citizenship, expressed through elections and evocations of the “will of the people” and so on. It suggests that the majority of people have a real share in government. As should not require much illustration, this is not the experience of most people in most countries. Citizenship is a kind of fake idea, meant to suggest constituency – truly having a voice in government – without actually conferring it. My hope is that by laying out what things pressure states to form and to continue, the truth of constituency will become clear. Despite the liberal revolutions and decades of reforms, constituency remains an extremely limited club. Since the constituency is definitionally self-interested, this means a limited constituency is at odds with most of the wider society it’s in.

Understanding State Formation

To begin, I’m going to employ John Rawls’s famous device: the veil of ignorance. In this device, we imagine a group of people who are all ignorant of everything: they don’t know their own qualities or anyone else’s, or even anything else’s, and they only have a vague idea that there are other people in existence. Rawls uses this to help us think about how to make decisions about fairness. I use this device to help us think about the circumstances of state formation in a general way. This is the first of three philosophical stages that a community progresses along towards forming a state. From this ultimate ignorance we hope that we can filter out any presuppositions based on specific information.

Lifting the veil of ignorance means the same thing as entering the second stage. Here is where people are able to know things about themselves, one another, and the world. People now have needs and can recognize how they can be satisfied. In the second stage, we should assume that all people are able to satisfy their needs through their own efforts or, at most, ad hoc help from one’s nearest neighbors. Any need more severe than that should be considered a crisis, something we will discuss shortly.

What should most be understood about this stage is that difference is recognized but inconsequential. Someone living on a deserted island might understand that those on the mainland have more crops, more animals, more friends, and so on, but the man on the island is still able to live with a level of comfort they would consider reasonable. Because of the inconsequentiality of difference, there is no need for people to join & remain in a social structure. Hobbes referred to life in a period like this as being nasty, brutish, and short. If we consider the second stage to have ever been a real time in history, it may very well have been like that. On the other hand, it may have been as pleasant as some now believe. Regardless, as long as the situation was not at a crisis level, the second stage is best described as a time of free association between people.

A crisis changes all of this. It’s during a crisis that the differences between people and things become meaningful, and it’s dealing with the crisis that pushes the second stage into the third stage. Any situation which threatens the well-being of many, most, or all people in a community-region, and which cannot be solved by an ad hoc group effort, should be considered a crisis. By “ad hoc” I mean that the group effort can consist of anyone available, rather than any specific person(s), because the abilities needed to resolve the situation are broadly held. A “community-region” is a region (physical or conceptual) which is closely connected by convenient and widely-available communication. In ancient times, this may have been all people who lived within 1 day’s walk of a particular spot, so they were very limited in the size of their community-region by how feasible it was to communicate. Nowadays, communication is very often cheap and found everywhere, so community-regions will be limited only be pre-conceived (i.e. political or cultural) boundaries. If a community is to survive a crisis, it must evolve in a way that has predictable key characteristics.

To illustrate this development, it may be helpful to consider crises as having two categories: technical crises and organization crises. A technical crisis is one which requires a specific expertise such as farming, masonry, electronics, and so on. An organization crisis is one where general (or “ad hoc”) effort is needed but on a scale larger than ad hoc organizing can effectively direct. Both cases require two groups of people two emerge. First is the inventor (or expert), the principal person involved in devising the solution to the crisis. The second are the contributors, the people providing the most direct crisis-related assistance to the inventor. In a technical crisis, contributors will have skills that directly impact the crisis. In an organization crisis, the contributors are those who take responsibility for motivating the workforce and directing them to complete requested tasks. All people in the community who are not the inventor or one of the contributors fall into the group of dependents; this includes ad hoc workers on the crisis. This is not to say that dependents do not have important skills, even ones which the contributors rely on, but these skills are more easily replaced (or at least are less urgently needed) than those of contributors at the time of a crisis. When a crisis occurs, the community revolves around the inventor & contributors because their success is required for the community’s survival.

Before I leave this point, I want to emphasize that the inventor and contributors should always be thought of together. As I’ve laid out, the difference in skill mastery between inventor and contributors can be significant or nonexistent. Nevertheless, the inventor cannot succeed without the contributors and the contributors cannot succeed without an inventor. This is not a pragmatic limit, it’s a definitional one; if either side could resolve a situation without the other, the situation would not be a crisis in the terms I’m discussing. If the inventor can resolve the situation without contributors then they can functionally solve it on their own, requiring at most ad hoc organization. If the contributors can resolve the situation without a supervising person/unit (i.e. the inventor), then the situation isn’t an organizational crisis (since consistent direction isn’t needed); as a possible technical crisis, not needing an inventor means that the “contributors” only need ad hoc organization to solve it. For a situation to be a crisis it must pressure a community for skills & resources as well as for deliberate organization.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that the inventor & contributors are primarily self-interested, not community oriented. They join forces in order to do what they could not do without this simple structure. Dependents will benefit from the work of the inventor & contributors but this is a side-effect of the inventor & contributors’ attempt to save themselves. The importance of this tension will become more apparent as I extend the third stage idea.

Strictly speaking, what I’ve described up until now can be considered a thought exercise, not a description of history. Firstly, I don’t know that we can ever truly discover when humans were definitely pre-social, so we can’t find anything even approaching a historical veil of ignorance. Secondly, what I have described is a community evolving in response to a specific crisis. As we’re considering societies, we have to admit that specific crises – lack of food, natural disasters, severe climate, etc. – have not actually threatened societies since the same murky prehistory where we might find a historical veil. It’s the response to the general crisis which creates what we know as the state.

The General Crisis

The general crisis is, in brief, the problem of survival. As I said, we see famines, natural disasters, and so on as specific crises; the general crisis is needing to respond to all of these and more. Unlike specific crises, the general crisis is not limited by any event or phenomenon: it includes them all. A drought ends when the rains come and a hurricane ends when its winds dissipate but survival must be ensured anew every hour. Due to this need for versatility, the general crisis is never a technical crisis. What is needed to solve the general crisis, as far as the qualities of those involved, is not expertise but the ability to produce resources for state use.

The state can be thought of as the core of a community in a special, permanent third stage. In this framework we’ll use different terms for the parts so that we preserve a distinction. The contributors from the specific crisis become the constituents of this stage and the inventor likewise becomes the sovereign (or ruler). It is these two sets that make up the state and these sets alone. There is a state analogue to dependents – these are state subjects – but such are not part of the state proper, they’re just attached to the state.

This very limited definition of the state is, I hope, illustrative. When we correctly see constituents as only (given history) being of the elite, rather than trying to include the common and the poor on false pretense, we see that the state lives up to many of its promises that we consider broken. For instance, the state always at least considers the desires of constituents, once we specify that the often-failed poor of society are not actually constituents. By putting subjects outside the state, we see that promises of representation, patronage, and protection are not forgotten but are actually stringently adhered to. The importance of this understanding is the realization that the form of a state’s organization (i.e. its government) does not, and by definition cannot, extend true state membership to the subjects, even if it calls subjects citizens.

The state cannot act as a benefactor (without complication) to subjects because this would contradict the state’s core goal. When considered in terms of the government’s responsibility, the general crisis can be divided into two duties:

1. Represent the state to (and defend it from) those outside the state.
2. Resolve issues involving constituents.

What the state ultimately wants is to continue with its structure unchanged. Any threat to that status quo – which includes, for example, subjects demanding more benefit from the government, regardless of the insignificant cost to the state – is to be dealt with by the government on behalf of the state, generally by rebuffing such demands. At the same time, the presence and the labor of subjects are a necessary resource for constituents as they’re the primary way that constituents can exploit and enjoy the other resources they control. This inescapable tension is the subject crisis (or, by historical example, the helot crisis), which is seen by the state as the threat from within their own society.

The role of the sovereign is to operate the government. The government is the means by which the constituents organize their resources and attitudes in order to meet threats to the state. The sovereign’s capability is therefore marked by their aptitude for applying those resources, a concept that can be summarized as “the justified & effective application of power”. The use of “effective” shouldn’t need explaining but the reason for “justified” is that it is crucial that acts of state power by the sovereign are accepted by the constituency at large. The failure of either part (justified or effective) might inspire a loss of confidence in the sovereign from the constituents, and this loss may be fatal to a sovereign’s reign.

States Within the State

I’ve already outlined one way of categorizing people in a society: into the constituent class (which includes the sovereign) and the subject class. This cuts horizontally, with the more prosperous or powerful on top and the less below. Another way, complimentary to this, is the vertical division of society into domains. Each domain can be thought of as a sub-society, with a controller instead of a sovereign, an administration for a government, principals for constituents, province for state, and subordinates for subjects.

Domains generally share resources in certain ways, such as shared electrical grids and employees of a large corporation being policed not by corporate security but by state forces. In return for this benefit from the state as a group, each domain acts to organize and occupy a state’s subjects such that they prevent the government from needing to directly manage all of said subjects. At the same time, domains act as the resource base of their constituent-controllers, permitting them to continue contributing to state functions when needed. Under liberal democracies, the limits of each domain are harder to draw precisely, but the concept is still relevant because it allows us to examine why particular people have their privileges and/or burdens. People do not simply raise their status in an abstract sense, they do so by proving useful to someone higher on the chain. Nearly all work that subjects do is captured by one or another domain (the government being counted among these), enriching the controller-constituent and reinforcing state order. Even that labor value that returns to subjects as wages or welfare has first been claimed by a constituent and then released, rather than coming first to the worker who created it.

In order for a complex state (i.e. most states since antiquity) to exploit its subjects, it needs to employ different kinds of people with different skills and abilities. Due to this, we can identify a number of grades in the subject class according to the kind of service they provide to constituents along with their resultant social position and practical reward. Grades common at different times include:

• High society (primarily the family of constituents, can also include long-term high-level aides and advisors to constituents)
• Government officials
• State enforcers (e.g. police & military)
• High professionals (e.g. doctors, lawyers, university academics; professions which are considered to 1) require a high degree of intellect or knowledge, which usually 2) have significant social respect (if not rewards), and which tend to 3) be disconnected from manual labor)
• Scribal-managerial workers (compare with “the professional managerial class” or “the bureaucracy”)
• Religious officials
• Small farmers
• Industrial workers
• Artisanal workers (e.g. carpenters, cooks, builders, etc.)
• Government wards (e.g. unemployed welfare recipients, orphans, etc.)
• Domain wards
• Independents (state subjects with no assigned source of provision)

By establishing different social positions for different grades, the state creates parties whose primary identities are people of the same grade and which exist in tension with the other grades. Then, by pushing all offered benefits through domains, it can control which people will go where and what they will do. This also pushes people to act against those of other grades if there is a perceived conflict for rewards. An obvious example of this are state internal enforcers (e.g. police). These enforcers are subjects, they are not members of the state but in service to it. Despite this fact, they rarely show solidarity for fellow subjects (who are not also of their grade). Because the reward for acting as oppressors of other subjects is so high (and also because they are usually indoctrinated to see themselves as holding an exalted position in society), state enforcers rarely flinch at being ordered to abuse other subjects and often do so without prompting.

The Justification of Authority

Now I want to discuss breakdowns of state order. Breakdown is the most immediate threat to the state and it is the reason that the state spends so much effort managing the subject crisis via oppression, welfare, graded rewards, and so on. In particular, the state wants to prevent political uprisings, and these come in three types:

• the coup (enacted by constituents in order to change the sovereign, using very limited enforcer involvement);
• the revolt (characterized by significant direct action and leadership by non-enforcer subjects); and
• the rebellion (primarily enacted by armed and organized groups, especially enforcer groups or domains).

I leave “revolution” out both because it is a heavily loaded term and also because historical revolutions often embody multiple types. That said, keep in mind that this typology is my own and all of these terms are generally interchangeable outside of this discussion.

Justification is the aspect of sovereign authority which sets the floor and many other parameters for the sovereign’s stability in their position. It tells the people of all classes and grades what they can expect from the sovereign and, therefore, how to interpret the sovereign’s actions. Justification can be defined as “the reason that the constituents allow the sovereign to govern”, but that doesn’t quite capture the contractual nature of the reason-giving. Each sovereign’s justification is as unique as their situation, but there are three identifiable roots of justification: pragma (i.e. pragmatic concerns), charisma, and dogma.

Pragma

A pragmatic justification for sovereign authority is when a sovereign promises to directly provide certain valuables to their constituents. Though justifications affect (and are answered by) all members of a society, their primary beneficiaries are always the constituents. Pragma-based governments are most concerned about coups because fellow constituents are the most obvious rivals for the sovereign’s role. While the sovereign does have the responsibilities of operating the government, it is also allowed increased rewards for that reason, it is given special precedence, and it has the authority of acting in the name of the entire state. If one’s current sovereign is not providing the desired level of reward, replacing the sovereign might be the way to get there.

In terms of resilience against uprising, this root of justification is weak for two reasons. First, it makes no promises to subjects, meaning that there is no uniformity between domains and no reason for subordinates and principals to exert any effort opposing the wishes of their own coup-plotting controller-constituent. Second, it relies on the reliable actual provision of goods, something which can be stopped by unusual climate, raid targets being well-defended, natural disaster, etc. Any interruption in benefits, for whatever reason, could be the impetus for a constituent to grab at sovereignty.

Charisma

A charismatic justification is one in which the sovereign convinces the constituents (and likely some subjects) of their capability to rule by invoking a quality that is intangible and (scientifically) untestable. There are two scopes to this justification. The broader scope is based on the actual charismatic claim being made (ranging from specific prophecy to divine commission to luck or even having a certain talent) which states that the society will flourish due to the sovereign’s charism. This is the claim that is to be understood by subjects. It promises something to subjects but that something is always insubstantial. If the promise is not being met, proving this is not a forensic task but one of preponderance of evidence. What is important for a charismatic sovereign in terms of their subjects is to establish a sense of constancy which does not disturb subjects’ efforts at flourishing.

The narrower scope is the way that charismatic justification is understood by the constituents: as the terms of an agreement. Whereas the network of sovereign and constituents under a pragmatic system is maintained by the exchange of goods, the same under a charismatic system is achieved by a shared respect for the sovereign’s charism. This does not require in the belief in the charism’s claimed effect or even existence. In fact, in the first place, it is an agreement by constituents to promulgate the fact of the charism regardless of the truth. In return, the sovereign agrees to manage the state for the primary benefit of the constituents. Usually this is evidenced by the extreme favor that constituents are given by governments. Even when the government restricts a constituent, however, this is for the purpose of convincing subjects not to get agitated and to remain receptive to exploitation by the state as a whole.

Dogma

A dogmatic justification is one in which the true sovereign entity is not a person but a set of commonly understood beliefs about how conflicts and complaints should be resolved. This type of justification provides the most innate stability against uprisings (provided that the uprisings do not have significant non-state investment) because the dogma speaks to both constituents and subjects in the same specific way. That dogma may use (and even deepen) social divisions but every person’s place is rationalized with referenced to the dogma in a public manner. The dogma has to be practical, which is to say that it must be reliable and focused on how to operate the government to fulfill its duties. This is the measure used by people to decide whether or not a dogma is worthwhile, so a state with a wholly non-practical dogma cannot be considered to be justified by it.

In the first two justifications, the sovereign was fairly clearly one person (in most cases). In the case of dogma, we can see the sovereign ruler as the union of two roles: the sovereign body and the sovereign person. The sovereign body is the theoretical seat of sovereign authority over the state, while the sovereign person is the specific person given charge over the sovereign body at any particular time. The sovereign body is the aspect which is always treated as a constituent while the sovereign person may be a constituent or they may be a subject of any grade. The other constituents’ place in a dogmatic system is heavily obscured as they are less and less held accountable directly for important decisions. Because the system is taught to the majority of people, including subjects, failures in the system (often caused by the occult greed of the constituents) tend to be understood as group obstacles for society to overcome rather than as potential malice against the subject class.

The Effect of Justification

I listed the roots of justification in order of increasing stability, not as an evolutionary path or as a comparison of sophistication. Stability also does not necessarily imply longevity. Instead, it is a rough measure of how long a society can continue before breakdown, without replacing the sovereign, should the sovereign stop effectively operating the government. In a dogmatic system, the sovereign person can be replaced at will, which implies a system which is not reliant upon the sovereign person. It will take an extended period of government failure for constituents to lose faith in the sovereign body because that sovereign body is intangible, it’s a set of opinions and ideas. At the other end, faith in a pragmatic sovereign is easily lost, but the sovereign can still remain in this insecure predicament indefinitely as long as they continue to buy off their constituents.

Justification of authority works to outline the freedoms which are being offered to constituents as well as the terms under which the sovereign and constituents should collaborate to meet the general crisis.

• Pragmatic justification leaves constituents functionally independent as it is based on various forms of bribery, a relatively weak method of social cohesion. This gives constituents great freedom but also promises limited sovereign support, leaving the constituents to handle subordinate uprisings and the like by their own devices.
• Charismatic justification compels the sovereign to make certain guarantees to their society as a whole so, in the order to meet these, the government is likely to be larger in size and function than a pragmatic government. This allows constituents to devote fewer resources to managing their subordinates but the increased government presence naturally means a decreased space for each domain administration to flex.
• Dogmatic justification tends to allow the government the authority and capability to confront the large majority of the general crisis. This leaves constituents with few burdens but requires them to submit to public law and the threat of accusation. Constituents are protected because, as full members of the state, constituents always have a voice in government and can construct specific laws and policies to lessen or remove any charges. Should these fail, however, being a constituent under dogmatic justification implies accepting legal punishments in the interest of keeping the system going for the rest of the constituent class; constituents flaunting public dogma is a frequent cause of (or reason given for) uprisings against the government.

Conclusions

I’ve now finished laying out the theory, but there are some conclusions that I wish to note. It would be easy to look at what I’ve written from the perspective of a liberal democrat and conclude that the best justification is dogmatic and any other is unacceptable. To the extent that I was able I chose expressive terms, and the use of “subject” as the society’s lower class is not incidental. The ever-present subject crisis should illustrate that constituents are always in opposition to subjects, viewing them primarily as an aspect of life which must be managed. When I described dogmatic systems, I still said there was a subject class. If the goal is to create the fairest and most just system, the method is not to confer more privileges upon subjects, it is to radically expand the constituent class.

The most just society would have the highest possible number of its people as constituents. 99 out of every 100 people, even 999 out of every 1000, should be constituents. To achieve this, a huge part of the government would need to engage a constant, thorough enterprise of wealth redistribution. Wealth inequality of any significance must be abolished. Social position can no longer be related to the personal ownership and control of resources. The only way to ensure this happens is through government oversight. If this is not done, those who amass resources will eventually come together due to their shared crisis: the fear (reasonable or not) of expropriation. If these people are allowed to flourish, they will seize political ascendancy and effectively supersede the state with themselves as a new & exclusive constituent class and the rest of society as a suddenly-disenfranchised subject class.

Again, it would seem that a dogmatic justification would be a best fit for this concept of a just society, so I want to stress that the particular justification has little bearing on the justice of the society. Though it may be easy for us to find obstacles in the way of a pragma-based government maintaining a large ratio of constituents, theoretically this arrangement presents no issues. A just society can emerge alongside any category of government. What matters is that all people possible are the direct beneficiaries of the state system.

While it would be wonderful for every member of society to be a constituent, I never said every person could be for a specific reason. Among every society there are people who truly cannot be trusted to make their own decisions: this includes young children, the senile elderly and similarly affected, the comatose, and so on. These people must be considered “subjects of necessity”, which is to say that they would be constituents except for their limitations. Considering these people constituents would be inconsistent with the self-serving nature of constituency and would allow others to claim agency on behalf of the child etc. when no agency can exist in a legal sense. At the same time, a just society will help its necessary subjects overcome their limitation and become constituents. Children should be educated, formally and informally, so that they learn at least rudimentary rational thinking. Medical science seeks and should continue to seek remedies to mind-affecting conditions related to senility. But for as long as humanity survives, children will be born and others will lose their senses close to death, so this category cannot be forgotten. By remembering that these people are subjects only by necessity, we can remind ourselves that subjecthood cannot be associated with true liberty and fulfillment.

All I wanted to do in this essay is to show the true bones of the state so that it can be properly autopsied. I hope that this contribution is valuable.