To Be the Best, a Government Must Be First of All Possible

Two ideas that can help predict the future of a society

DALL·E / Falltide illustration

Why do societies fall? One answer may lie in the fact that survival is not the only aim driving individuals and societies. If these other aims take precedence, individuals and societies may begin acting in ways contrary to their survival. If they stay long enough on this path, they’ll achieve their own ruin.

In my last post I wrote on James Burnham’s Machiavellians, in particular about how division of power is the only guarantee of individual freedom. In the course of his narrative, Burnham touches on two important ideas related to survival, one at the level of individuals, the other at the level of societies. The first is Gaetano Mosca’s idea of the difference between the struggle for existence versus the struggle for pre-eminence. The second is Vilfredo Pareto’s idea of the utility of a community versus the utility for a community.

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Mosca writes that “the struggle for existence has been confused with the struggle for pre-eminence.” His point is that besides survival, people compete with each other to rise to the top of the social hierarchy—i.e. to become the ruling class—and that this second struggle is not directly related to the first. To be sure, in situations with scarce resources, the rulers have the benefit of getting the first pick, but, short of a mass famine, this advantage doesn’t directly translate into survival. Indeed, Mosca points out that the opposite might even be true, for, generally speaking, “in civilized societies, far from being gradually eliminated by a process of natural selection so-called, the lower classes are more prolific than the higher, and even in the lower classes every individual in the long run gets a loaf of bread and a mate, though the bread be more or less dark and hard-earned and the mate more or less unattractive or undesirable.”

The winners in the struggle for pre-eminence, i.e. the ruling class, possess certain qualities and characteristics. Besides their capacity for hard work, ambition and ruthless pursuit of power, they have another attribute that makes them “highly esteemed and very influential in the society in which they live.”¹ This attribute is their mastery of what Mosca calls a “social force”—which is any human activity that has, in the words of Burnham, “significant social and political influence.” Social forces include things like “war, religion, land, labor, money, education, science,” and technology. The importance of any one social force rises and falls in time, and so those who are masters of it are either elevated or demoted in the hierarchy, depending on what society currently values. One present-day example of this would be tech entrepreneurs, who have joined the elite through the meteoric rise of the power of technology.

Once they gain power, the elites tend to want to stay in power. “Special principles of selection,” writes Burnham, “different in different societies, affect the composition of the elite so that it no longer includes all those persons best fitted for social rule.” In other words, outside factors are not the only things that affect the selection of the elites—once in power, the elites themselves become the gatekeepers of who they allow to join their ranks. And competence is not necessarily at the top of their list of criteria. The obvious example of this is the aristocratic principle: the selection of the ruling class based on heredity. But there can also be ideological gatekeeping—to become the elite in the Soviet Union you had to be a member of the Party.² Too much hereditary or ideological gatekeeping, and the elite will ossify and become incompetent, leading to decline, mismanagement, tension and even revolution (e.g. the regime of Louis XVI, or Nicholas II).

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Utilitarians want to build a state that maximizes the happiness of its citizens, but, as Burnham writes, “to be the best, a government must be first of all possible.” In this regard Pareto makes a shrewd distinction between the utility of a community and the utility for a community. “By the utility of a community Pareto refers to what might be called the community’s survival value, its strength and power of resistance as against other communities. By the utility for a community Pareto means its internal welfare, the happiness and satisfaction of its members.” Pareto talks of competition with other communities when talking about the utility of a community, but I think the idea can be broadened to include factors that help a community survive in general. After all, countries don’t need an external enemy to collapse. The Soviet Union, for example, fell suddenly (and to many unexpectedly) under the accumulated weight of its failed economic system.

Burnham writes that “these two utilities … seldom coincide.” Take, for example, preparations for war. Money spent on the military is money not spent on infrastructure and welfare. Such spending does nothing to improve people’s daily lives. In the rare event of an outbreak of war, however, such preparations assume existential significance. Families having large numbers of children is another example. Partners who decide to forgo the costs and challenges of raising a large family get more time for themselves. But if everyone decides to have few or no children, we get an ageing population in which the ever growing welfare burden is pushed onto an ever shrinking number of young people. What we have in either case is a tradeoff between individual short-term interests and long-term societal goals.

Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore is a great example of making short-term sacrifices to achieve long-term prosperity. Besides investing in infrastructure, cleaning up the city and being strict on law and order, Lee Kuan Yew had to put a stop to endless union strikes. Singapore sits on a tiny island with no natural resources, so the only way that it was going to thrive was if multinational corporations chose to open factories there. And that was never going to happen if unions kept going on strike. At the start of the 1960s, shortly after Lee came into office, there were 153 strikes in the span of about a year. Nine years later, in 1969, owing to Lee’s forceful action, there were no strikes. Investments began pouring in. In time, so many companies came to Singapore that they began to compete with each other for staff, lifting salaries as a result. Today, Singapore has a higher per capita GDP than the US.

But a long-term strategy alone isn’t enough. The Soviet Union had a long-term strategy which, besides its many other problems, was economically unsustainable. Its forced collectivization of agriculture ruined the economy, killed millions by the famines it caused, and never proved sustainable.³ Not only do you need to think ahead, you also need to be right.

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We thus have two factors that influence the health of a society:

1. Selection of the elites. Those who seek power compete with others for pre-eminence, and the mechanism that decides who rises to the top shapes not only the character of the ruling class, but, as a consequence, society as well. A mechanism that allows incompetence to rise or remain at the top, coupled with a mechanism that prevents competent people from rising, leads to mismanagement and growing tension.

2. Short-term individual interests versus long-term societal goals. The direction set by the ruling class decides the future of its society, or even whether it will have a future. Long-term societal goals may reduce the immediate happiness of a community, but they are necessary for the survival of the state, which is a prerequisite for everything else. “If a nation cannot survive,” writes Pareto, “it is rather pointless to argue in the abstract whether or not it is a ‘good society.’”

Plato famously observed that democracy is a stepping-stone to tyranny. His reasoning is not that it allows a wily populist to deceive the masses, but that it has a natural tendency to break down into anarchy, at which point the people begin clamoring for a strong leader to come and save them.⁴ Nobody wants a tyrant in a prosperous, well-run society. It is only when things break down that the question of leadership becomes paramount. The danger of societal decline isn’t just that a society declines, but that freedom is lost in the process.

1. “Deep wisdom, altruism, readiness at self-sacrifice, are not among these qualities, but, on the contrary, are usually hindrances,” adds Burnham.

2. The competence of Napoleon’s generals and officials, for example, was due to the fact that he didn’t discriminate based on background, hiring both revolutionaries and monarchists, plebeians and aristocrats. What mattered was their skill. On the other hand, right after the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks refused to employ the former gentry officers on ideological grounds. They filled those roles with inexperienced peasants, yielding unsurprising results.

3. Though one could argue that the “benefit” of forced collectivization was to make agriculture and industry completely dependent on the Party. As I mentioned in my previous post, once the state swallows up all independent social forces, it gains total control over everyone and everything.

4. Though it must be noted that, as I wrote in my last post, ancient democracies were very different to modern democracies. The point here isn’t so much that democracy turns into tyranny, but that if a society breaks down, it creates a power vacuum for a tyrant to fill.