The Five Basic Laws of Power
Introduction
The world is going crazy. This is nothing new of course. Ask any person in the last five thousand years, and they will likely agree that the world is going crazy. In 2025 we just came out of a pandemic, and the “collective West” is increasingly flirting with warfare: Sounds crazy, but tell this to people a hundred years ago and they will be thoroughly unimpressed. And yet, the bar of what is considered normal has moved higher. Two hundred years ago you might encounter a man accepting his role as a slave. He understands his role in society. Today, you might find this man’s great (great great…) granddaughter accepting half of her paycheck being channeled towards an abstract greater good. She understands her role in society. Both are “happy” with their current situation, yet both will also be severely punished if they challenge it.
Today we know that democracy is a superior form of government than any line of kings, queens and dictators, as those of us living in a democracy can change the course of the country with our vote. In other words, the power is now with the people, and if the people are unhappy with how their country is being managed, they can vote for someone else. With the shift to democracy monarchies distributed power to the people, and some cases even did so voluntarily, thus allowing the monarchs and their families to hold on to nice trinkets of material wealth as a reward.
Since the advent of democracy, however, powerful entities have been notoriously stingy in further distributing power. One reason for this is that the powerful entity of today is rarely a person or a specific group of people, but rather a blob that has a revolving door of individuals temporarily savoring an illusion of power, often taking little trinkets of wealth as souvenirs on their way through. The blob of today is not a secret club, it is not the deep state, it is not a group of powerful industrialists - it is a highly visible structure which nearly every person alive identifies with, roots for and is willing to defend with her wallet and her life. This blob manages to operate in such a way that all people living under its rule see themselves as members of much smaller structures that compete with one another, and every revolution, every regulation, every war and every pandemic amplifies the power of our current ultimate blob: The country-system. While this essay generalizes to all power structures, the country-system is the main example we use to elucidate the Five Basic Laws of Power.
Let me underline at this juncture that this essay is not targeting the country-system as the last center of power accumulation to be tackled, before we all live in a state of healthy, well-fed bliss. In fact, I firmly believe the country-system is painfully aware that it is fundamentally decaying, giving up most of its power within the next, very dangerous fifty years (unfortunately, most of the early readers of this essay will be part of its desperate last kicks, punches and screams). The following text is part of a constructive effort to detect, understand and thus possibly fight power accumulation, while encouraging power distribution when the next, post-country-system power-structures form and evolve.
The First Basic Law: Power accumulation and dispersion are intuitively easy to detect
The First Basic Law of Power asserts without ambiguity that
“Power accumulation and dispersion are intuitively easy to detect.”
At first, that statement sounds vague and inaccurate. Closer inspection will however reveal its veracity. No matter where one lives or what class one belongs to, one is repeatedly and recurrently startled by the fact that:
a) a system which one had once judged as participative and fair turns out to be power hungry.
b) day after day, with increasingly cheeky strategies, one is harassed by blobs of power that suddenly aim to limit new areas of our behavior, while charging us more for enjoying the status of a replaceable ant.
The First Basic Law applies to blobs of all sizes. Power accumulation is easy to detect: A teacher increasing the homework load, a state mandating a lockdown and a politician calling for the reinstatement of mandatory military service. Easy to see.
Now, on the surface, a TV presenter from a major network telling viewers to go vote might be logically seen as a dispersion of power, but this is where intuition comes into play: our gut feeling tells us, without further need of logical analysis, that this is a move of power accumulation. Power accumulation and dispersion are intuitively easy to detect.
Dispersion of power often happens in the arts: Opera visitors have to abide by a rigid set of rules regarding when to eat and go to the bathroom, when to clap and when to talk, but as soon as the showing ends, everyone can continue their evening as they like. The dispersion of power is palpable (after a short and well-justified accumulation).
Both power accumulation and power dispersion are intuitive to spot regardless of blob size. It turns out that correctly identifying a blob is much more challenging (by design). The following pages will dive into this topic.
The Second Basic Law: The blob is always bigger than expected
Cultural trends now fashionable in many parts of the world favor seeing misuse of power in very small entities: The corrupt politician, the greedy billionaire or even the aggressor country. Politicians, billionaires and countries often go to great lengths to prove, with an impressive apparatus of traditional and new media support, that other politicians, billionaires and countries are evil.
Any fighting between one’s favorite blobs should be the clue that one is thinking too small. It is my firm conviction, supported by years of observation, that the blob is always bigger than we are tempted to think, and that the biggest blob is one that never presents itself as a social construct, but rather as a backdrop akin to the rules of physics underlying our existence.
Although I am convinced that the country-system, the tacit agreement that we are all ruled based on the patch of land we are standing on, is the bigger blob that most people fail to see, I do not consider myself the enlightened one having detected the biggest blob. I firmly believe that any blob we as individuals are capable of seeing is only a subset of a bigger blob parading as an inevitable force of nature. This fact is scientifically explained by The Second Basic Law which states that
“The blob is always bigger than expected.”
In this regard, humanity seems indeed to have outdone itself. It is well known that humans manage to organize themselves in much bigger, more complex groups than any other animal. For instance, the internet connects people across the world, beyond borders, in a way that creates a collective wisdom so massive that we can now chat with it just like we would chat with a wise Druid. We do not know how the collective wisdom originates beyond the brute force recipes we use to mine it, but we know that in order to achieve such massive organization humanity must form bigger entities that act on their own will. The most remarkable fact about the forming of human groups is that once even a small group is formed, it is a new being capable of acting in ways that go against the personal preference of each and every member forming it. Thus when a group of groups forms, say multiple political parties forming a government, the new group of groups is capable of acting against the interests of each political party, and each political party is in turn capable of acting against the interests of each of its members. This ability of humans to organize into blobs that then form a bigger blob, ironically leaves the individual human element as an ant that should be thankful for its tiny vote, devoid of the freedom its human experience deserves.
The evidence that a group can act against the interest of its members is already provided by a group as small as a couple going on a date: A slight miscommunication can cause both to agree on the date format they think the other one wants, such as a candle-lit dinner, when in truth they would have both preferred a picnic in the park. For a small group like this it takes one confident member to speak up to align interests. As the group grows, meeting the interests of its members becomes less and less trivial. If we take a country with high inflation, for instance, there is not an obvious solution a confident individual with initiative can implement. If we now go bigger and take a war between two or more members of the country-system, the situation, which is largely negative for everyone involved (I would argue it’s net negative even to those profiting off it financially), becomes so entangled that it seems (see the Fifth Law) impossible for one individual or even one subgroup of the blob to end it.
The idea that there is always a bigger blob than the one directly causing a headache is hard to accept and digest but closer examination always reveals a bigger blob than the one that seems to be the source of the abuse of power at first sight. The Second Basic Law is an Iron Law and it does not admit exceptions. A couple’s counselor will support the Second Basic Law, as it shows that many conflicts one might face in marriage stem from the roles culturally expected by each partner in a relationship, rather than being solely the result of abuse of power by one of the partners. The anarchists among us will probably point to the Second Basic Law as proof that the authority they find arbitrary and misguided is just a puppet on the hand of a bigger and more arbitrary authority with even stronger grounds for fundamental rejection.
The implications of the Second Basic Law are frightening: the Law implies that whichever fight we pick, we are always choosing one size too small and only tackling a sub-blob whose annihilation would leave the bigger, thus far invisible blob intact. If we identify the bigger blob, seeing the power accumulation is intuitive (see the First Law), but even if we move up a blob size we inevitably end up fighting a sub-blob of a bigger blob we cannot yet see.
A technical interlude
At this point it is imperative to elucidate the concept of power blobs and to define the main way they hide, as hiding allows them to accumulate power undisturbed.
Individuals can be characterized by where in the hierarchy of power they currently reside. There are individuals who live in a modern day concentration camp without access to food. They are hunted by one army and used as human shields by the other. They literally have to witness friends and family starving or blowing up all around them and consider themselves lucky to see another day. At the other extreme of the spectrum there are individuals who are dictators. They absolutely cannot starve, they typically accumulate massive wealth, and they are unlikely to be killed given that they have a small army dedicated solely to their protection. They know the value of a violent crisis exhausting their “constituents”, so they can often stomach a few (hundred thousand) youngsters getting killed with ease.
Between these two extremes, there is a wide variety of conditions, although by far the greatest majority of people are closer to the dictator type than to the concentration camp type, not because they are significantly less likely to become human shields, but rather because they are prone to falling for illusions of power similar to that of the dictator. In the 2020s we are prone to speak of countries in a personified manner: “Japan said this, so China was forced to react”, “Russia invaded, so Ukraine defended”, “the US showed strength prompting the EU to back down”, “India showed resilience, angering Pakistan”. This leads to a large share of individuals in each country to feel like a valuable cog in their system defending against competing systems, which is not too far removed from the status the dictator feels he has. The validity of this statement is demonstrated by the fact that an attack on a share of people in a patch of land makes the other people within the delimiting line rally around the leader of that patch, regardless of its governmental form: Each person feels like when their country is under attack, they are under attack. When their country takes revenge, they are taking revenge. When their country defends itself, they are defending themselves. So many lives and resources are wasted in personifying the sub-blobs called countries, lending the dictator, the prime minister and the king fair amounts of power, but an even larger illusion of power.
In fact, whether one belongs to the foot soldiers or the president, one is duped by an illusion of power, albeit with a different scope and intensity. The president might feel an illusion of control over global matters, while the soldier might feel an illusion of fighting for his country’s freedom. The moral of the story is that both the dictator and the victim, both the president and the soldier perceive themselves to be part of the same vertical power blob with the main difference being that they are on a different level, either closer to the top or closer to the bottom of the hierarchy. The illusion both extremes of individuals suffer from is this perception of vertical blobs. In our main example, vertical blobs are countries. Figure 1 shows the structure of this illusion.
The x-axis lists the blobs people feel they belong to. The y-axis shows the level of the hierarchy each person is in within each blob.
To make all this clear, let us make a hypothetical example. Bambola is the president of country B and Pyotr is a construction worker in country P. Bambola is an X near the top of blob B, while Pyotr is an X near the bottom of blob P.
If countries B and P transform from dictatorships to democracies, Bambola (or her democratic successor if you will) would move down slightly in the hierarchy, and Pyotr would move up ever so slightly, but the change would be so minute that it would be impossible to show in this chart at any realistic linear scale. This is not to discount a shift into democracy as without impact: In a shift to democracy, millions of people in Pyotr’s position move up the hierarchy ever so slightly, so while the individual might not feel the extra grain of cereal in their breakfast bowl, everyone in sum is better fed. One point though must be made clear. When considering Pyotr’s perspective, he is still caught in the bottom of the hierarchy and his newfound vote will not move him noticeably higher in a hundred years. All too often it is forgotten that a vote today is not the same as a vote in five years: As new “democratic” structures form and accumulate power, the power of each vote naturally decays over time meaning that the minuscule increase in power Pyotr gets every time he exercises his vote is topped off with a diminishing rate of return. I will leave it to mathematicians to show the long term implications of a slow, tiny source of power that becomes even tinier with each iteration in absolute terms.
Let me resort to another banal example. Country B invades country P and country P reacts by counterattacking country B. In this case Bambole will go up a nice little step in her hierarchy while Pyotr will be bumped down as he becomes a major candidate to fight it out. However, Patricius, the leader of country P, might enjoy a similar or bigger bump up the hierarchy in country P compared to Bambole in country B, as surrounding countries rally around country P, delighted by the clean-cut attacker-victim narrative. Any Billies and Brenda’s in country B will suffer drops in the hierarchy in country B just like Pyotr in P, as seen in figure 2.
The Third (and Golden) Basic Law: Blobs grow horizontally, not vertically
The third law assumes, although it does not state it explicitly, that human hierarchies have a cut-off between the generally powerful and the generally powerless. It will be easily recognized by the perspicacious reader that Pyotr and Billie in figure 3 are below the power line, in the powerless area, while Patricius and Bambole are far above it, in the powerful domain.
As a rule, if Patricius and Bambole have a conflict they tend to both go up their respective hierarchies, not letting a good crisis go to waste, while if Billie and Pyotr clash (say they meet on the street and get into a fistfight, or they berate each other in a comment section), they will both get hurt and one if not both of them will take a step down in the hierarchy.
Now, the power line is nothing else than the lower line of a bigger blob we do not see when observing the structures that are presented to us. It is depicted in figure 4.
As the Third Basic Law explicitly clarifies:
“Blobs grow horizontally, not vertically.”
When confronted for the first time with the Third Law rational people instinctively react with feelings of skepticism and concern. The fact is that reasonable people will consider the concept of a horizontal blob as fertile ground for conspiracy theories. But let us take a step back from this modern concern and look at the happenings in a horizontal blob pragmatically. We all recollect occasions in which a country suffered a terrible attack and the leader of that very country saw a gain in popularity and influence, allowing him to launch deadly initiatives of power accumulation otherwise not possible: Theories of this leader conspiring with the opposing side are never far behind. We also recollect cases in which criminals with dirt on the powerful have been either let off easy or exposed to a sudden, potentially fake death: Theories of the dirt being procured for secret services and now serving as life insurance prevail. We can recollect cases in which a politician condemned the pollution stemming from industry and air travel as world-ending, while in the same breath encouraging missile shipments (i.e. unmanned private jets that explode at the end of their trip) to an ally in need: Theories of blind adherence to the most powerful lobby and a lack of regard for human life flourish. Some of these theories may indeed hold water. But upon thoughtful reflection you must side with your rational brethren and admit that all these conspiracies being simultaneously true is a near impossibility.
Our elites above the power line don’t need to be genius puppet masters, because the horizontal blob does not need conspiring between individual members or secret services collecting dirt and toppling elections to successfully accumulate power. While power hungry by nature, no human within the horizontal blob even needs to be willing to harm others or have bad intentions for the horizontal blob to grow at the expense of those under the power line. In fact, there is only one condition for the horizontal blob to sustainably accumulate power: That it remain hidden.
Hiding in plain sight
Attributing superior intelligence to those within the horizontal blob compared to those outside of it is a mistake: Carlo M. Cipolla will confirm that the proportion of stupid people within both groups is equal and bigger than we think. Under certain circumstances large structures forming the core of the horizontal blob can even attack each other stupidly, leading to utter mutual destruction while the horizontal blob does not only remain intact, but continues accumulating power at the same or a higher rate. The only important condition for the blob to grow so undisturbed is that it remains invisible to all players, be they above the power line and within the blob or below the power line and outside the blob.
From the fact that intelligence of individuals in the blob is not a prerequisite for blob growth, and that the horizontal blob needs to remain hidden to grow undisturbed it follows that there must be a simple way for the blob to hide that is exceptionally sturdy and attack resistant. Going back to our figure 4 with country B and country P, we have two different shapes: vertical and horizontal. The vertical hierarchy blobs represent known structures - countries in this example - and the horizontal blob cutting the vertical blobs above the power line represents an unknown bigger blob that is the true, hidden power accumulator - the country-system in this example.
One may shake one’s head when reading that the country-system is a hidden blob. Everyone is aware of the practice of partitioning the world into geographical chunks that govern every person’s life depending on which chunk they are standing on. This country-system seems as fixed and inevitable as a law of nature. Dogs, lions, cavemen - they all mark their territory one way or another and modern humans are doing the same just in a more sophisticated way allowing for scale, creating a diverse set of countries that naturally cooperate and compete with one another. It’s obvious, about as hidden as a congresswoman’s stock trades.
The fact that the horizontal blob is obvious allows it to operate unquestioned, while presenting the vertical elements it is overlapping as the holders of its power. But why are we treating it as a power accumulating entity rather than the inevitable force of nature it pretends to be?
The perfect horizontal blob is one that, while presenting sub-blobs as the ultimate power structures, accumulates most of the power to itself in the long run. To come back to our example, since we humans organize ourselves primarily in countries, we take the country-system for granted, rarely if ever questioning it. But as opposed to natural forces like photosynthesis and gravity, this system’s power over its individuals grows over time rather than remaining static. Income taxes have risen globally over the last 150 years, while technology has made everything we need to live more plentiful and automation has streamlined administrative processes. This growing money accumulation, a simple but imperfect proxy for power accumulation, is possible not due to the existence of one country, but due to the country-system hiding in plain sight: A human-built structure pretending to be a law of nature.
The power of horizontal blobs
It is not difficult to understand why a horizontal blob has power once we see it. But one still has to explain and understand what essentially it is that makes a horizontal blob grow while sucking power out of the inhabitants of all its vertical sub-components – in other words what the mechanics of power accumulation of a horizontal blob are.
Essentially horizontal blobs are great power accumulators because every possible power transfer within and between its vertical components benefits it. One country may attack another country. Both countries end up worse off as a result, but the country-system ends up stronger. The reason is as subtle as this: We started this example with “One country may attack another country…” – this reflects the fact that an act of war makes us personify countries. We blame one country, we try to quantify what another country is owed. We look back at the country’s young years looking for traumas that may explain the current erratic behavior. All this is giving a country the status of a gigantic person with its own ambitions, sufferings, quirks and rights. The country-system gains power the more its country sub-structures are accepted as mega-humans. Within these mega-human vertical structures the ambitions, sufferings, quirks and rights of an individual are a mere rounding error, about as relevant to the whole as the state of an individual cell in a human body (more often than not a skin cell that might be shed the next time the mega-human scratches an itch).
With a horizontal blob all the happenings within and between its vertical sub-structures are bumps that push, pull and deform the plasticine they are made of, making them spread and grow in all directions. All the power is sucked up from below the power line to above the power line, with individuals tending to lose or gain power based on their random location below or above the power line.
Because horizontal blobs are hidden by definition, they draw their power from the positioning of their subcomponents:
a) The definition of primary subcomponent forms is unquestioned.
b) Each subcomponent is anthropomorphized by the general population.
The fact that subcomponents of the horizontal blob are seen as inevitable and assigned human qualities by the population affected by the blob not only makes it very difficult for actual individual humans to accumulate power over their own lives, but it also makes it almost impossible to attack the horizontal blob in a way that it disperses power. To come back to our main example, try going a few years without paying taxes, while entering and exiting countries without passing border control. It’s a valid, yet small attack and you will feel the true power of the horizontal blob when one of its substructures (doesn’t matter which!) captures you, fines you and puts you behind bars.
The Fourth Basic Law: One cannot make a horizontal blob disperse power by aligning oneself with it or pretending to align oneself with it.
That people like Pyotr, working hard, voting and paying their taxes, do not recognize how poor the horizontal blob is making them is not at all surprising. Their failure to notice is just an expression of their indoctrination into the system that allows the blob to accumulate power: Pyotr might be frustrated with the politicians ransacking his country, or if he can he might decide to go to a different country to find better opportunities. In either case he is lending credence to the concept of countries.
The truly amazing fact, however, is that also the highest ranked politicians and business moguls generally fail to see the threat in the power accumulation of the country-system. It is extremely difficult to explain why this is, and one can only remark that when confronted with horizontal blobs often high-ranking individuals make the mistake of indulging in the comforts the system provides them, while ignoring the ease with which it can flick them aside.
One is tempted to believe that a horizontal blob will find a natural power balance shared between its sub-components and the individuals that form them, but this is confusing horizontal blobs with small structures like a family unit. All too often one is tempted to align oneself with the horizontal blob in order to be protected from its wrath by adhering to its rules. Such a maneuver is misguided because:
a) it is based on a complete misunderstanding of the nature of blobs, which cannot make decisions and have power accumulation as a static default state.
b) it gives the blob access to one’s mental and material resources for further power accumulation.
One may hope to outmaneuver the blob, adhere to its rules on the surface while dismissing them in private, digging a little hole with secret treasures and hidden relationships. But because of the incessant power accumulation of the blob it is only a matter of time before one of its tentacles approaches one’s little cave, lashes about sucking out and destroying all one’s hidden treasure, without even showing appreciation for the creativity of the hiding spot.
This is clearly summarized in the fourth basic law which states that:
“One cannot make a horizontal blob disperse power by aligning oneself with it or pretending to align oneself with it.”
The Fourth Basic Law has been ignored in times of peace and in times of war, in times of boom and in times of bust, leading to the entity of the country gaining more and more control over its citizens and the current largest horizontal blob, the country-system, gaining power seemingly on par with the laws of physics (although this example is flawed, as there must be an even bigger blob that I cannot see according to the Second Law).
The Fickleness of Power and the Fifth Basic Law: One can destroy a horizontal blob, making it disperse all of its power, without harming a single individual within it
The consideration on which the previous chapter ends is conducive to a reflection on the fickleness of power, which is the key reason we individual human beings are not actually forced to endure the prison of a horizontal blob. A full understanding of the Fifth Basic Law is essential to the analysis. The Fifth Basic Law states that
“One can destroy a horizontal blob, making it disperse all of its power, without harming a single individual within it.”
The essential point to keep in mind is this: While historically massive shifts in power have tended to be violent, and this is not likely to change, it is entirely possible to dissolve a blob without hurting any individual. It is even theoretically possible to do so in a way that every single individual within the (former) blob’s vertical sub-structures accumulates power.
Let’s take the opera example again: During the opera we sit tight, we clap when we should clap and we wait for intermission to use the facilities. As soon as the opera ends, this authority, the horizontal blob of the night’s show, doesn’t just dissolve, giving the audience back the power over their bladders, but it is also likely that everyone: The director, the performers and the audience members are better off and invigorated after the dissolution of the show.
If we take this to a global level, and take the country-system as the sample horizontal blob at hand, we must question why we should bother finding a way to make it disperse its power, given the reality that it is bound to collapse by itself: Fundamentally, geography is losing importance year to year and, technologically, we can be anywhere on the globe within 24 hours and speak to anyone in the world without a language barrier within seconds. We don’t need the world to be organized in vertical blobs that are geographically defined. The issue is that a horizontal blob’s self-driven collapse is not soft, but rather explosive. The country-system will not go quietly. It will go out swinging, and before it dissolves it is likely to leave us with a radioactive souvenir. Hence, it is worthwhile considering ways to drive its dissolution proactively and artfully: Making sure no individual gets hurt, including the elite individual that you may despise. He or she is just as much a replaceable tool of the horizontal blob as anyone else.
I can only propose one idea for a path to dissolution of the blob that makes every individual who is part of it win: A crypto-based food-and-space-for-everyone initiative, let’s call it Bitmesh. (A little aside for those readers who have grown a scarcity mindset: Yes, there is enough food and space for everyone on the planet today and in the future).
The Bitmesh should start without much resistance: Almost all governments tolerate it if their citizens get free calories. Simultaneously, the Bitmesh should fully ignore country borders, however, and allow anyone - rich or poor - to participate in it. There’s enough for everyone. There is not a management board or a president of the Bitmesh - its participants are its owners and anyone who participates as a giver in the Bitmesh gets Bitcoin or another token (the Bitmesh can define this, I have no idea what’s better). Participants that manage to extend the Mesh to harder to reach places with harder access to nutrients and more abusively restrictive governments will earn more tokens based on the difficulty of expansion. This difficulty must be determined in a decentralized manner.
Once this decentralized Bitmesh covers the whole globe, people will have food and a basic amount of space regardless of their government. Excessive taxation, industrial prison systems and army drafts should become exponentially harder to keep up, as the horizontal blob cannot take credit for you and your neighbor’s survival anymore. Countries won’t disappear, but they’ll simply be nice administrative bodies that take care of geography-based infrastructure like roads and utilities. Culture is also maintained without borders: Traditional beer festivals in Bavaria and horse races in Siena continue happening quite vigorously, despite the unrestricted access of Saxons and Sardinians to the Bavarian and Tuscan lands respectively. Therefore, countries as governmental entities will be less like an abstract God that promises social security while keeping you within random lines and bleeding you dry, and more like a librarian that makes sure you find what you need geographically speaking and stays out of your way otherwise.
Finally, let’s keep in mind that here we are discussing the country-system as an example of a horizontal blob that is relevant globally, but which nevertheless must be too small according to the Second Law, and superseded by a bigger blob that I cannot see. We have to start somewhere. Similarly, in other areas of your life, you might find certain people or entities abusing their power over you at a more micro scale, and you should look for the horizontal blob. It is likely hiding in plain sight. Once you see the horizontal blob, try to see if you can find an even bigger one. Then figure out how to dissolve the biggest blob you found: Should you manage, this will make it distribute all its power, and you automatically take care of the smaller, more visible issue at hand. If you are particularly clever, all individuals end up better off - even those originally abusing their (now inexistent) power over you.