Reminds me of the joke Henry Farrell told recently in his newsletter: economics is about how people make decisions, sociology is about how there aren't any choices to make at all
I'm somewhat surprised given your example of railroads, that you don't mention how much sheer political corruption was involved in the building of railroads (preeminently in the US). It seems a classic example of how the business of railroads was intimately mixed with the political landscape, with each system having perverse effects on the other.
I would also emphasize the institutional-legal landscape. Railroads and the second IR are intimately bound up with the general availability of the corporate form (crucially with limited liability) that comes about with the various companies acts of the mid-19th century. The very form of the corporation means that politics and organizational forms with their in-built problems of governance and information (the so-called agency problem) were political from the outset. This is perhaps obscured by the fact that the formation of a corporation no longer needed a specific act of Parliament and therefore a clear public interest-political rationale. Also, that corporations were no longer associated with legal monopolies which had been justified by mercantilist strategic-economic considerations in the age of commerce -- the East India Company being the most notorious example.
But there is no second industrial revolution without the general availability of the corporate form allowed by the Companies Acts. Economies of scale demand large organizations despite the loses in managerial efficiency.
Unrelated point: I'm always amused by the French term for a limited liability company: "Societe Anonyme." I believe it just refers to the fact that the shareholders were anonymous. But it sounds like they already had in mind the idea that companies would be "accountability sinks."
I think this is why agency so often manifests as revolution in some form rather than evolution. The slate (heap) needs to be wiped clean and to start again. If we find ourselves in something of an evolutionary dead-end, constrained entirely by past choices, then we have to re-evaluate all those past choices all at once.
Truss and Trump's actions are attempts are large agentic action (in my view stupid ones) but without addressing the big pile that is the bond markets/financial systems, ultimately work just as blasting while pretending they're not there...
I think your general point is spot on. In biology and economics I think we see this take the form of death/firm dissolution. Eventually the problems build up so far that things just have to collapse and be replaced by less dysfunctional systems, which will themselves be replaced someday.
People take this view ("decisions are constrained by factors which are hard to even recognise as constraints") a lot, but the governing ideas we're living through (not just with Trump, but since the shift in the 70s) are much more constraining on representation than any technical problems or past decisions around information/organisation. Or, to put it another way, what comes on top of information is sense-making - and that's the set of tools where the constraints currently limiting our information processing options lie.
"as systems get more complicated, and more of their energy and resources are taken up in matters of organisation and information, rather than physics, then agency is likely to become less important, as more and more decisions are constrained by factors which are hard to even recognise as constraints, because the capacity doesn’t exist to represent altenatives."
We can't reliably predict the weather 10 days out, nor can we predict what US tariffs will be 10 days out.
At some point will have to sadly admit that we can't model everything, or understand everything. Then we will have to deal with things as they come up, even if they are off the map, and fix them with duct tape.
At least we know where the moon is, and we know how much power chemicals have, so we can calculate what a rocket needs to do to get a human to the moon. But that's easy, that's just rocket science. It's only the engineering details that cause the trouble, like rubber 0-rings getting stiff in the cold. Or how the word "no" does not flow upwards in organizations.
What we do have is GIGO models, SWAG guesses, and fingers in the wind. Maybe we should consult an astrologer, or a goddess:
Hitler consulted with an astrologer, but it didn't end well for him, or the astrologer. He got that swastika backwards, too.
Could it be humans are not supposed to know some things? We can't even tell if the cat is dead or alive, or what color that white dress was. Or if the toilet paper should come off the bottom of the roll, or the top.
«pretty much every structuralist theory since Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism has sooner or later run into a wall when someone asks “but seriously, is there absolutely no place for agency in this?”.»
It would seem strange to me to regard a famous point made by that very same person in 1852:
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”
as a case of ”run into a wall” because “absolutely no place for agency in this” (even allowing for rhetorical exaggeration and for there being excessively deterministic structuralists too).
«The slate heap effect will be present»
That very same person continued consonantly as to that: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”.
Note: Conversely in mechanistic theories of the economy like neoclassicism (inspired by physics and laplacianism, the economy as an orrery) there is zero agency by construction: individual maximizers with rational expectations can only make exactly one set of most optimizing choices.
Best to compare 'agency' with narcissism wherein the interplay between the world and the self collapse into a singularity, such that 'history' becomes a list one damned narcissist after another. Remember inter-group competition offers individuals the choice of who to live with, structural and systemic narratives that simplify increasing complexity (of relations of economy) actually riff off those choices, even as they inform the thinking style of the agent. More anthropology is always good.
It's not that bad. The problem isn't that agency (motivations and consequent behaviours) - can't be modelled, just that some 'political' bits of it haven't been thus far. That's the second book, isn't it (you can't be expected to do everything all at once)? Incorporating the supersystem of 'what the ruling class does when it rules'...
Is the perceived problem that politics (or agency) is intractably unpredictable? I think that may appear more of a problem than it really is at the present juncture. Trump's really unpredictable (capricious, blundering) aspects are mostly noise, in the scheme of things. He's not the Mule from the Foundation novels, just an especially colourful shithead. We have pretty good theories of shitheads...
Trump's 'agency' is only worth modelling insofar as its effusions stick - I.e. don't get reversed or frustrated either by impersonal constraints or by the various other shitheads whose motivations we have a pretty good handle on. Just as accountability sinks exist only because (when, insofar as) no-one in a position to do so has stepped in to eliminate them, too. Making things happen and letting them happen are not functionally different & there's a lot more people doing the former than the latter. Maybe Trumpian anomalies can be modelled as sources of random mutation. The action then is all in the selective reproducton..
Things like how psychopaths get to be overrepresented in positions of power can certainly be modelled and seem pretty straigtforward. If we're just drawing descriptive diagrams, then that's part of them. Psychopaths themselves are eminently modellable (e.g. the firm, homo oeconomicus).
POSIWID is a behaviourist theory - ideal for eliminating misleading philosophical 'puzzles' about agency from this scientific endeavour...
Isn't this why there is a perennial cycle of concentration (of power) and spinoffs (devolving power to the periphery)? The more the system is made of autonomous parts (e.g. a business with relatively independent divisions), the greater the agency overall. In extremis, this is the free market where decisions are made at the level of the individual. To prevent power concentrating in the one, or the few, we invented democracy, which mostly works better than monarchies/dictators.
We evolved as plains apes prefer hierarchies, but like almost all vertebrates, we find that cooperation has advantages. But cooperation means constraints. It is a tradeoff that cooperation has proven superior. But cooperation has limits, and we fluctuate around some chaotic edge of constraints vs freedom (system vs agency).
The more complex a civilization, the greater the need for constraints to keep it workable. Beer's nested viable system model is a reasonable way to do this - up to a point. At some point, civilization complexity becomes too difficult and civilization has to break up again into independent peripheral power structures.
What would be interesting is to model Beer's approach and see where the problems lie. Does it help increase system size before breakup, or not? When does the system become unbearable for the agency of the individual?
The theory here is that for most of the past the ecological niche of "humans" was "cursorial group hunters" that is humans figured out that hunting in groups would get them much better/bigger results with less risk than hunting alone (e.g. buffalo hunts) and this has shaped our society/culture to this day.
(side note: curiously the "group hunter" theory proponents seems unable to notice that their theory applies only to males not "humans" and this too has had a strong influence on our society/culture to this day).
«But cooperation means constraints.»
Like any project-oriented groups, where individuals mostly cooperate but also compete, especially as to the share of the results or the blame. My guess is that the office politics of a cursorial hunting team 100,000 years ago were pretty much the same as those of a an engineering or sales project team today.
«When does the system become unbearable for the agency of the individual?»
Which individual? The lord of the manor or the serf?
I wonder how systems work when the visionary / leader at level 5 is a psychopath / sociopath who's mostly interested in the power, versus someone who's saying a founder who's creating it for the need.
I say that given the prevalence of sociopaths as CEOs and US Presidents.
E.g In the book Taming Toxic People by David Gillespie it was explained that both Trump and Hillary are high in psychopath traits. Trump is even considered higher rated than Hitler.
Then in this great interview with Ezra Klein there's a section where they explain the current Trump tariffs as Trump likes to talk with leaders and give concessions. He likes the power over others.
«great interview with Ezra Klein there's a section where they explain the current Trump tariffs as Trump likes to talk with leaders and give concessions. He likes the power over others.»
Ezra Klein? Good one! Pure TDS inevitable. The logic of TDS sufferers is simple and unassailable: Since Trump is 100% evil then 100% of his motivations are necessarily evil and therefore 100% of his acts are evil, which proves that he is indeed 100% evil. Q.E.D.! :-)
Trump instead is following classic "negotiator" principles by "anchoring" his asks to a very high level and then compromising down (hist mistake is to do so publicly and with vulgar manners). I may be ill-thinking that both Ezra Klein and you understand that very well intellectually but TDS sufferers never miss an opportunity to propagandize Trump (or Corbyn or Truss or Putin or Xi etc. for other types of DS victims) as having 100% evil motives. Note: a classic example is the claim that (since Trump is 100% evil therefore) Trump is racist.
BTW USA presidents are backed by thousands of nuclear missiles and a dozen aircraft carrier and (indirect) control of the Fed etc. so they *have* tremendous power over others, and they all enjoy it tremendously I guess, Trump is not the only one who is not like His Holiness Clinton, Bush the Preacher, Saint Obama, The Blessed Biden; for example all of them like Trump boasted publicly of reviewing monthly kill-lists of "enemies of the state" and ordering a large number of CIA+DOD death squads to carry them out.
Sounds like the "black box" of the corporation is becoming the monolith of "2001," impenetrable and all powerful?
We still need to know how unpredictable external actors, like say the President of the US, interact with it. The Pres. has the money, and the army, and can fire the guy with the computer geeks, unless they secretly install a backdoor to the whole government while they are in there, and put in a kill switch. Which they might already have done. Who is guarding these guardians? Nobody.
Don't think the Founding Fathers of the US foresaw this. How could they?
At this point, it could be Black Arts all the way down. Maybe the Voodoo artists are in control? They escaped from Area 51, or was it Jurassic Park? Is that a Black Hole in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?
These black boxes are subsets of reality as a whole. So reality as a whole, or its other subsets, may have agency vis a vis them.
This sounds awfully silly and theoretical, doesn't it! Verging on Ken Wilber territory, or medieval scholasticism. Personally, I think those are demons dancing away right now, but who can say?
Is it King Entropy coming to visit? The world ending in a whimper?
It makes your head hurt.
Re Henry: according to Thatcher, there is no need for sociology anyway, so OK.
«unless they secretly install a backdoor to the whole government while they are in there, and put in a kill switch. Which they might already have done.»
Something like that might have happened decades ago. Probably nearly all systems in every organization have both human and software backdoors (consider the UK Telecoms Act etc.). After all the main job of all "security services" is to plant as many moles (human or software) as possible everywhere and there is ample if scattered evidence that they are very successful (the STASI was was not an outlier).
«according to Thatcher, there is no need for sociology anyway»
She claimed that rather than "society" there a network of families and the organization of the state. So sociology might be replaced by anthropology and political studies. I personally think that anthropology is vastly underrated as to its application to non-primitive societies.
Maybe the game of Monopoly is a better model than the Thatcher model? At least for real estate, or other markets? But what did Thatcher know; she was a chemist who really wanted to be a politician.
If there was nothing between the family and the state, how did she explain the existence of her own political party? Or that artificial person, the corporation? That East India Corporation was as big as a whale. And whom did it serve?
And look at how different Thatcher was from Angela Merkel! Not even all great sci-politico minds think alike.
As a perplexed resident of the US, does anthropology apply even here, a primitive society?
«Maybe the game of Monopoly is a better model than the Thatcher model? At least for real estate, or other markets?»
But the Monopoly model is part of the Thatcher model: thatcherism/reaganism/neoliberalism are not like 19th century liberalism (Mellon/Bagehot style): even hardcore thatcherites/reaganists used massive state intervention to bail out property and stock investors in 2001, 2008, 2020, and have been using whatever it takes to pump up property prices for over 4 decades, and 19th century liberals would have rejected that.
The "neo" in "neoliberalism" signifies that Thatcher and Reagan and their successors preached market discipline but not for favored categories like residential land owners; "neoliberalism" means *both* market competition mostly for workers and state intervention mostly for property and stocks rentiers.
Thatcher in particular was at the same time "whig" and "tory", here is an interesting quote:
“Peregrine Worsthorne [Telegraph journalist] once said that, ‘Margaret Thatcher came into Downing Street determined to recreate the world of her father and ended up creating the world of her son.’ It’s a pretty damning assessment but it’s actually quite true.”
I can Trump that: our guy tried to recreate the world of his ancestors, the predators. Not sure yet what his legacy will be. But one way or another, there is a swamp in the picture.
Reminds me of my long-ago first trip to Florida, to a small town a little ways inland from Mar-a Lago. I was warned not to go into the tall grass: might be rattlesnakes or alligators in there.
And if I were to hear any noises at night from that grass strip airport nearby, stay away: it might be drug smugglers.
Reminds me of the joke Henry Farrell told recently in his newsletter: economics is about how people make decisions, sociology is about how there aren't any choices to make at all
I'm somewhat surprised given your example of railroads, that you don't mention how much sheer political corruption was involved in the building of railroads (preeminently in the US). It seems a classic example of how the business of railroads was intimately mixed with the political landscape, with each system having perverse effects on the other.
I would also emphasize the institutional-legal landscape. Railroads and the second IR are intimately bound up with the general availability of the corporate form (crucially with limited liability) that comes about with the various companies acts of the mid-19th century. The very form of the corporation means that politics and organizational forms with their in-built problems of governance and information (the so-called agency problem) were political from the outset. This is perhaps obscured by the fact that the formation of a corporation no longer needed a specific act of Parliament and therefore a clear public interest-political rationale. Also, that corporations were no longer associated with legal monopolies which had been justified by mercantilist strategic-economic considerations in the age of commerce -- the East India Company being the most notorious example.
But there is no second industrial revolution without the general availability of the corporate form allowed by the Companies Acts. Economies of scale demand large organizations despite the loses in managerial efficiency.
Unrelated point: I'm always amused by the French term for a limited liability company: "Societe Anonyme." I believe it just refers to the fact that the shareholders were anonymous. But it sounds like they already had in mind the idea that companies would be "accountability sinks."
I think this is why agency so often manifests as revolution in some form rather than evolution. The slate (heap) needs to be wiped clean and to start again. If we find ourselves in something of an evolutionary dead-end, constrained entirely by past choices, then we have to re-evaluate all those past choices all at once.
Truss and Trump's actions are attempts are large agentic action (in my view stupid ones) but without addressing the big pile that is the bond markets/financial systems, ultimately work just as blasting while pretending they're not there...
I think your general point is spot on. In biology and economics I think we see this take the form of death/firm dissolution. Eventually the problems build up so far that things just have to collapse and be replaced by less dysfunctional systems, which will themselves be replaced someday.
I think this post could serve as a pretty good introduction to a book, "Why Organizations (e.g. Firms, Nations, High School Cliques) Fail".
Sounds like the job of the software product manager - like me.
It generally comes down to what your goals are, and often what you and the company's values are - at the intersection of software and politics.
Trump just paused the tariffs, so evidently pulling the fire alarm still works.
People take this view ("decisions are constrained by factors which are hard to even recognise as constraints") a lot, but the governing ideas we're living through (not just with Trump, but since the shift in the 70s) are much more constraining on representation than any technical problems or past decisions around information/organisation. Or, to put it another way, what comes on top of information is sense-making - and that's the set of tools where the constraints currently limiting our information processing options lie.
"as systems get more complicated, and more of their energy and resources are taken up in matters of organisation and information, rather than physics, then agency is likely to become less important, as more and more decisions are constrained by factors which are hard to even recognise as constraints, because the capacity doesn’t exist to represent altenatives."
Until the agents revolt against complexity and destroy the system, see Tainter. An intro: https://www.elidourado.com/p/collapse
https://substack.com/@mfrobbins/note/c-112679926?r=4rn71
One for your beehive
We can't reliably predict the weather 10 days out, nor can we predict what US tariffs will be 10 days out.
At some point will have to sadly admit that we can't model everything, or understand everything. Then we will have to deal with things as they come up, even if they are off the map, and fix them with duct tape.
At least we know where the moon is, and we know how much power chemicals have, so we can calculate what a rocket needs to do to get a human to the moon. But that's easy, that's just rocket science. It's only the engineering details that cause the trouble, like rubber 0-rings getting stiff in the cold. Or how the word "no" does not flow upwards in organizations.
What we do have is GIGO models, SWAG guesses, and fingers in the wind. Maybe we should consult an astrologer, or a goddess:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan
Hitler consulted with an astrologer, but it didn't end well for him, or the astrologer. He got that swastika backwards, too.
Could it be humans are not supposed to know some things? We can't even tell if the cat is dead or alive, or what color that white dress was. Or if the toilet paper should come off the bottom of the roll, or the top.
What good are we?
«pretty much every structuralist theory since Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism has sooner or later run into a wall when someone asks “but seriously, is there absolutely no place for agency in this?”.»
It would seem strange to me to regard a famous point made by that very same person in 1852:
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”
as a case of ”run into a wall” because “absolutely no place for agency in this” (even allowing for rhetorical exaggeration and for there being excessively deterministic structuralists too).
«The slate heap effect will be present»
That very same person continued consonantly as to that: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”.
Note: Conversely in mechanistic theories of the economy like neoclassicism (inspired by physics and laplacianism, the economy as an orrery) there is zero agency by construction: individual maximizers with rational expectations can only make exactly one set of most optimizing choices.
Best to compare 'agency' with narcissism wherein the interplay between the world and the self collapse into a singularity, such that 'history' becomes a list one damned narcissist after another. Remember inter-group competition offers individuals the choice of who to live with, structural and systemic narratives that simplify increasing complexity (of relations of economy) actually riff off those choices, even as they inform the thinking style of the agent. More anthropology is always good.
It's not that bad. The problem isn't that agency (motivations and consequent behaviours) - can't be modelled, just that some 'political' bits of it haven't been thus far. That's the second book, isn't it (you can't be expected to do everything all at once)? Incorporating the supersystem of 'what the ruling class does when it rules'...
Is the perceived problem that politics (or agency) is intractably unpredictable? I think that may appear more of a problem than it really is at the present juncture. Trump's really unpredictable (capricious, blundering) aspects are mostly noise, in the scheme of things. He's not the Mule from the Foundation novels, just an especially colourful shithead. We have pretty good theories of shitheads...
Trump's 'agency' is only worth modelling insofar as its effusions stick - I.e. don't get reversed or frustrated either by impersonal constraints or by the various other shitheads whose motivations we have a pretty good handle on. Just as accountability sinks exist only because (when, insofar as) no-one in a position to do so has stepped in to eliminate them, too. Making things happen and letting them happen are not functionally different & there's a lot more people doing the former than the latter. Maybe Trumpian anomalies can be modelled as sources of random mutation. The action then is all in the selective reproducton..
Things like how psychopaths get to be overrepresented in positions of power can certainly be modelled and seem pretty straigtforward. If we're just drawing descriptive diagrams, then that's part of them. Psychopaths themselves are eminently modellable (e.g. the firm, homo oeconomicus).
POSIWID is a behaviourist theory - ideal for eliminating misleading philosophical 'puzzles' about agency from this scientific endeavour...
Isn't this why there is a perennial cycle of concentration (of power) and spinoffs (devolving power to the periphery)? The more the system is made of autonomous parts (e.g. a business with relatively independent divisions), the greater the agency overall. In extremis, this is the free market where decisions are made at the level of the individual. To prevent power concentrating in the one, or the few, we invented democracy, which mostly works better than monarchies/dictators.
We evolved as plains apes prefer hierarchies, but like almost all vertebrates, we find that cooperation has advantages. But cooperation means constraints. It is a tradeoff that cooperation has proven superior. But cooperation has limits, and we fluctuate around some chaotic edge of constraints vs freedom (system vs agency).
The more complex a civilization, the greater the need for constraints to keep it workable. Beer's nested viable system model is a reasonable way to do this - up to a point. At some point, civilization complexity becomes too difficult and civilization has to break up again into independent peripheral power structures.
What would be interesting is to model Beer's approach and see where the problems lie. Does it help increase system size before breakup, or not? When does the system become unbearable for the agency of the individual?
«we find that cooperation has advantages.»
The theory here is that for most of the past the ecological niche of "humans" was "cursorial group hunters" that is humans figured out that hunting in groups would get them much better/bigger results with less risk than hunting alone (e.g. buffalo hunts) and this has shaped our society/culture to this day.
(side note: curiously the "group hunter" theory proponents seems unable to notice that their theory applies only to males not "humans" and this too has had a strong influence on our society/culture to this day).
«But cooperation means constraints.»
Like any project-oriented groups, where individuals mostly cooperate but also compete, especially as to the share of the results or the blame. My guess is that the office politics of a cursorial hunting team 100,000 years ago were pretty much the same as those of a an engineering or sales project team today.
«When does the system become unbearable for the agency of the individual?»
Which individual? The lord of the manor or the serf?
I wonder how systems work when the visionary / leader at level 5 is a psychopath / sociopath who's mostly interested in the power, versus someone who's saying a founder who's creating it for the need.
I say that given the prevalence of sociopaths as CEOs and US Presidents.
E.g In the book Taming Toxic People by David Gillespie it was explained that both Trump and Hillary are high in psychopath traits. Trump is even considered higher rated than Hitler.
Then in this great interview with Ezra Klein there's a section where they explain the current Trump tariffs as Trump likes to talk with leaders and give concessions. He likes the power over others.
https://youtu.be/DTPSeeKokdo?si=Gj4tVhGHCskN6od2
Psychopathic/sociopathic traits are installed in law school, business school, and other places, if they didn't already exist.
They can be observed in schoolyards. Tiny tyrants!
«great interview with Ezra Klein there's a section where they explain the current Trump tariffs as Trump likes to talk with leaders and give concessions. He likes the power over others.»
Ezra Klein? Good one! Pure TDS inevitable. The logic of TDS sufferers is simple and unassailable: Since Trump is 100% evil then 100% of his motivations are necessarily evil and therefore 100% of his acts are evil, which proves that he is indeed 100% evil. Q.E.D.! :-)
Trump instead is following classic "negotiator" principles by "anchoring" his asks to a very high level and then compromising down (hist mistake is to do so publicly and with vulgar manners). I may be ill-thinking that both Ezra Klein and you understand that very well intellectually but TDS sufferers never miss an opportunity to propagandize Trump (or Corbyn or Truss or Putin or Xi etc. for other types of DS victims) as having 100% evil motives. Note: a classic example is the claim that (since Trump is 100% evil therefore) Trump is racist.
BTW USA presidents are backed by thousands of nuclear missiles and a dozen aircraft carrier and (indirect) control of the Fed etc. so they *have* tremendous power over others, and they all enjoy it tremendously I guess, Trump is not the only one who is not like His Holiness Clinton, Bush the Preacher, Saint Obama, The Blessed Biden; for example all of them like Trump boasted publicly of reviewing monthly kill-lists of "enemies of the state" and ordering a large number of CIA+DOD death squads to carry them out.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/35492496-taming-toxic-people
The book is worth reading.
I think it'll be an interesting challenge to combine the Rules for Rulers, steps for identifying and dealing with psychopaths and Cybernetics.
https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs?si=PP2-yABHciyD5-yR
The Rules for Rulers is based on The Dictators Handbook.
Didn't you leave out Machiavelli?
Or, In a very different spirit, Harvey Penick's "Little Red Book?"
Or, Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYiMJ2bC65A
Will check out your links, thanks.
Sounds like the "black box" of the corporation is becoming the monolith of "2001," impenetrable and all powerful?
We still need to know how unpredictable external actors, like say the President of the US, interact with it. The Pres. has the money, and the army, and can fire the guy with the computer geeks, unless they secretly install a backdoor to the whole government while they are in there, and put in a kill switch. Which they might already have done. Who is guarding these guardians? Nobody.
Don't think the Founding Fathers of the US foresaw this. How could they?
At this point, it could be Black Arts all the way down. Maybe the Voodoo artists are in control? They escaped from Area 51, or was it Jurassic Park? Is that a Black Hole in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?
These black boxes are subsets of reality as a whole. So reality as a whole, or its other subsets, may have agency vis a vis them.
This sounds awfully silly and theoretical, doesn't it! Verging on Ken Wilber territory, or medieval scholasticism. Personally, I think those are demons dancing away right now, but who can say?
Is it King Entropy coming to visit? The world ending in a whimper?
It makes your head hurt.
Re Henry: according to Thatcher, there is no need for sociology anyway, so OK.
«unless they secretly install a backdoor to the whole government while they are in there, and put in a kill switch. Which they might already have done.»
Something like that might have happened decades ago. Probably nearly all systems in every organization have both human and software backdoors (consider the UK Telecoms Act etc.). After all the main job of all "security services" is to plant as many moles (human or software) as possible everywhere and there is ample if scattered evidence that they are very successful (the STASI was was not an outlier).
«according to Thatcher, there is no need for sociology anyway»
She claimed that rather than "society" there a network of families and the organization of the state. So sociology might be replaced by anthropology and political studies. I personally think that anthropology is vastly underrated as to its application to non-primitive societies.
Maybe the game of Monopoly is a better model than the Thatcher model? At least for real estate, or other markets? But what did Thatcher know; she was a chemist who really wanted to be a politician.
https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-04/margaret-thatcher-politician-and-chemist-has-died/
If there was nothing between the family and the state, how did she explain the existence of her own political party? Or that artificial person, the corporation? That East India Corporation was as big as a whale. And whom did it serve?
And look at how different Thatcher was from Angela Merkel! Not even all great sci-politico minds think alike.
As a perplexed resident of the US, does anthropology apply even here, a primitive society?
«Maybe the game of Monopoly is a better model than the Thatcher model? At least for real estate, or other markets?»
But the Monopoly model is part of the Thatcher model: thatcherism/reaganism/neoliberalism are not like 19th century liberalism (Mellon/Bagehot style): even hardcore thatcherites/reaganists used massive state intervention to bail out property and stock investors in 2001, 2008, 2020, and have been using whatever it takes to pump up property prices for over 4 decades, and 19th century liberals would have rejected that.
The "neo" in "neoliberalism" signifies that Thatcher and Reagan and their successors preached market discipline but not for favored categories like residential land owners; "neoliberalism" means *both* market competition mostly for workers and state intervention mostly for property and stocks rentiers.
Thatcher in particular was at the same time "whig" and "tory", here is an interesting quote:
http://exepose.com/2016/03/02/thatcher-and-god-an-interview-with-eliza-filby/
“Peregrine Worsthorne [Telegraph journalist] once said that, ‘Margaret Thatcher came into Downing Street determined to recreate the world of her father and ended up creating the world of her son.’ It’s a pretty damning assessment but it’s actually quite true.”
I can Trump that: our guy tried to recreate the world of his ancestors, the predators. Not sure yet what his legacy will be. But one way or another, there is a swamp in the picture.
Reminds me of my long-ago first trip to Florida, to a small town a little ways inland from Mar-a Lago. I was warned not to go into the tall grass: might be rattlesnakes or alligators in there.
And if I were to hear any noises at night from that grass strip airport nearby, stay away: it might be drug smugglers.
Some things never change.