The Dialectics of Power

Master and Servant in the 21st Century

Main Concepts:

• Monocracy : Government by the One
• Republic : Government by the Few
• Postmodernism : The Destruction of The Nation State

---

Master and Servant

The Advent of Monocracy: Sovereign and Subject

---

---

In my understanding of history, power has always followed a kind of dialectic, between a "master" and a "servant". I'm not sure why that is, but wherever civilization has emerged, the need for labour and justice, ironic as it may be, always lead to the establishment of a form of "enlightened despotism". Usually manifested by the King, or the King of Kings: the Emperor.

In relatively not-so-ancient times, it seems that the vast majority of systems had Sovereign and Subject. The Sovereign was able to rule and govern any piece of land he was able to prevent another Sovereign from ruling and governing. Any person who resided within a land governed by a Sovereign was thus deemed to be his Subject, unless the Subject could overthrow the Sovereign, and become the Sovereign himself.

This is the purely Hobbesian view of the "State". His view was that people are all animals waiting to rip each other apart, and they need a "Leviathan", someone stronger and more powerful than any individual faction or singular coalition of individuals in the land, who could get everybody to chill the fuck out and be cool, by force if necessary.

But then modernity came along, and people thought "to heck with having one guy sit at the top while everybody struggles beneath"... A sovereign in the form of a monarch really was the opposite of a trickle-down, egalitarian, or even just society. All it would take was for the sovereign to be a dick and the whole system became cruelly unjust.

So what happened during the French revolution was the establishment of a new model of the State. (All made possible by the Treaty of Westphalia and the advent of a system of "Nation-States" as opposed to just Kings and Dukes and Emperors and Lords and pure feudalism like this.)

---

Master and Servant

The Advent of the Republic: State and Citizen

---

---

And thus was born this concept that people tend to call "democracy" ( though we are talking about "representative democracy"; which is the nice-sounding word for republic and republicanism)

Now this system did exist in some forms in the ancient ancient past. (I'm of course talking about a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.)

---

Republic, from the Latin Res Publica : "the common wealth, a commonwealth, state, republic," literally res publica "public interest, the state," from res "affair, matter, thing" + publica, fem. of publicus "public".

---

---

This notion of a common wealth, of a public interest; the idea that a citizen has a stake, has an interest in the state, certainly differs from the purely "I am loyal to the sovereign because he protects me from the mean bad world of barbarians, brigands, raiders, and the like" ethos of the Subject.

The combination of the concept of the Citizen, meaning the city-dweller, and the Patriot, meaning the one from the fatherland (Patria); gave rise to our modern "national" senses of identity.

The idea of "Citizenship" is derived from the Greek "Politeia"; i.e. the "Polity", denoting the concept of being a member of the "polis" or "city-state", and thus sharing in certain privileges or rights, and certain responsibilities or duties.

In this system, instead of being a Subject of the monocratic Sovereign, the State becomes Sovereign, and the Individual becomes a member of the Polity. In our parlance, he is a Citizen of the Republic.

Every State on the planet in the modern era has either been some form of Republic (from the USA to North Korea, from China to South Africa, to you name it), or a Monocratic system (from the United Kingdom to Saudi Arabia).

---

---

The irony is that the British are still subjects of their monarch while the North Koreans are all "citizens of a republic". Yet in their day-to-day lives their experience of the sovereign-subject or state-citizen relationship is inverted from what we usually expect it to be. This is what happens when a modernized people fail to reform their feudal system of government, or a pre-modern feudal people adopt a modern form of government. It's funny :)

---

Postmodernism

The Destruction of the Nation State

---

---

Once one understands, or at least conceptualizes the dialectic nature of societal organization, between the superstructures that govern, and the individual units which form the foundation of society, we can not only continue studying the master-servant dialectic, but also more closely examine the way that societies and civilizations tend to evolve (or devolve) into more tightly centralized, or decentralized, forms of socio-political and economic organization.

Ceterus paribus, it seems to me like the modern master-servant relationship of the Republic and the Citizen, best understood through the "Nation-State System" (one could include the labels multinational-state or even civilization-state into this grouping for the purpose of delineating across political and not ethnic lines ), is coming to an end. And it is a very interesting and convoluted phenomena which is responsible for it.

What one can candidly observe in today's world, is that the form of societal organization that seems to be following and indeed replacing the widespread sprawl of the "nation-state system" across the entire surface of the globe is the emergence of an incredibly centralized and globalized world order.

And this incredibly centralized and globalized New World Order seems to be systematically subverting, dismantling, and assimilating (like a big monster swallowing up its prey) every single nation-state of the world, incrementally subsuming them into larger and larger geographical superstructures.

This phenomena is being carried out by a form of social-organization that we are all incredibly familiar with and have for the most part become incredibly dependent on for almost every facet of our daily-lives. I'm speaking of none other than:

The Multinational Corporation.

The Multinational Corporation is a fascinating entity in our world because it seems to have been the only entity in the entire modern era to have successfully supplanted the nation-state's supremacy, becoming the true sovereign power in the world, and turning the nation-state into its loyal subject.

Today, it is the multinational corporation that all monocracies and republics depend on alike for their continued survival and perpetuation. Were a sufficient number of multinational corporations to stop their operations simultaneously in a coordinated and calculated manner, the resulting destabilization and panic would not only halt all life as we have come to know it, but most of the world would be sent into a crisis it may never recover from.

And what is most fascinating about this phenomena of the age of the multinational corporation's rise (which includes but is not limited to the convergence of interests of international finance, the military-industrial complex, and every international organization that enables, supports and strengthens the master's domination) is that all human productive and creative enterprises are being increasingly and systematically consolidated into a rapidly shrinking number of corporations.

It is my belief therefore that when we speak about "World Government" in "conspiracy circles", what we are actually talking about is a "One World Corporation", divided into an infinitesimal amount of micro-brand identities.

This is both the New Feudalism and the New Imperialism.

This incessant competition between the world's largest billion-dollar corporations... It is the reason for why economies are increasingly integrating, the reason why there has never been a Higher Mergers and Acquisitions Rate in History... It is the reason why Cash-rich companies are set to pour $2.5 trillion dollars into buybacks as the very concept of a publicly-listed company becomes a thing of the past...

It is the privatization of the stock-market and the end of capitalism and free-enterprise...

In order to cloak the destruction of the Nation-State, and help it quickly fade into our collective memory, the elites introduced the concept of a "Multi-polar World" (following the end of the Bi-polar "Cold-War" world)

In this view, a "sovereign West" (this time, the bad guys!) vs. a "sovereign BRICS" (ah, yes, people of color finally getting their day and age and becoming the heroes of our world!) will find themselves increasingly at odds as "tensions" increase (the result of coordinated corporate-instigated "market" forces acting in a certain way) and finally escalate to the point of a not-too-hot-not-too-cold "war".

A World War Three

If you will... And all of this "Evil American Imperialism" and "Evil Russian Imperialism" and "Evil Chinese Imperialism" seems to me like it is an attempt by the world's secret masters to finally consolidate all the power in the world into

One World Corporation

I believe this was Rockefeller's dream, going back to Cecil Rhode's and the "Anglo-American Establishment", who were of course influenced by the world's "money-changers" (Read: The Templars), and if one really wants to go back far enough, since the days of Rome, Alexander the Great, Babylon, Akkad... and all of these powers that wished to unify all mankind under one central rule.

---

Find out in my next pieces

---

The Dialectics of the Future : The New World Order [Part 3 : The Robotics Age, Universal Basic Income, Technocracy, and Global Scientific Dictatorship]

And more to come...

---

Also feel free to check out my previous piece

---

The Dialectics of Progress : Where Are We Heading? [Part 1 : On Capitalism, Marx and Utopia]

---

Peace

Hae-Joo

---

Sources

Pixabay: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 7 / 9 / 10