Originally published in “La Opinión de Zamora”, March 26th, 2023
The Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater often reminded his audience that in a democracy, we are all politicians, although only some are representatives. In my opinion, the book I am about to comment on is the best popular science piece on Politics. In a democracy, since (regardless of their profession) the reader is also a politician, the logic of power is always practical knowledge.
The book is "The Dictator's Handbook" by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, two Political Science professors in New York University. The work falls within the realist tradition that the reader might associate with Machiavelli, that often-misunderstood idealist who witnessed the fall of the Republic of Florence into tyranny and dedicated his entire intellectual work to create tools for the liberation of Italy.
Like Machiavelli, the authors understand that emancipation begins in truth, by removing the veils of idealism and superstition and replacing them not just with realism, but with pessimism about human behavior. Institutions not only have to be built for ordinary men: they must be rogue-proof. Similarly, the citizens should not be protected from reality, or soon they will become subjects.
Darwin narrated in horror the life cycle of endo-parasitic wasps that lay their eggs in a live prey. Reading the first chapters of this book generates a similar feeling of despair, as it describes the brutal logic of the struggle for power and rent extraction with conviction and without concessions. The authors describe the canonical model of social extraction, where actors who have accumulated the most power and on whom the sovereign's power is based are permanently rewarded for their loyalty by being granted the right to extract from the masses most of the income that exceeds mere subsistence. Power and corruption appear as two sides of the same coin, and the relationship seems so deep that it is difficult to understand how, in the last two centuries, much of Humanity has managed to escape this powerful dynamic.
The power-extraction feedback loop is not only documented in the worst dictatorships but also in international organizations (FIFA and the International Olympic Committee are sources of examples) and in democracies, where the authors find an equally brutal competition and a political elite adapted to that competition.
The work is based on an academic treatise, where the authors used a database of political events (since antiquity), but the popular version is not only more readable but even more interesting, because the specific cases are well explained, and the overuse of statistics from the academic version has disappeared. Still, the most important results on the duration in office of politicians under different regimes, on transitions between regimes, and on the economic consequences of various political systems are explained in detail in a series of chapters in the central part of the work.
Finally, after facing the abyss of the nature of power and those who wield it, the authors describe the social checks and balances that make the sustainability of pluralistic political regimes possible. That long tradition of "individual vices that become public virtues," which the reader might associate with Adam Smith and the field of economics, appears in the world of democratic politics. Democratic competition turns the natural brutality and cynicism of political actors into a virtuous competition to provide the public with maximum material prosperity.
Of particular importance, especially at this moment when the world is teetering on the edge of the abyss, are the chapters on the Pax Democratica. Both authors are experts in international relations, and the book describes how the political costs of wars are different for autocrats and democracies, and how consolidated democracies tend to form alliances that have a credibility impossible for autocrats, trapped in the same logic of distrust towards their subordinates, their public, and other autocrats.
In short, endo-parasitic wasps and the love of parents for their children are fruits of the same elegant and cruel Nature, and Politics, equally red in tooth and claw, also gives rise to the worst and sometimes to the not-so-bad (if we know how to keep it, as Benjamin Franklin said, with the skepticism of the wise).
Since EA is an organization that promotes prosocial activity outside of politics, it is worth asking whether it would not be more valuable to consider the non-political factors that enable social change. Note that there is a flaw in the Darwinian (and Machiavellian) interpretation of human relations because it presupposes that power relations are not affected by internalized cultural changes over time. How can Marx or Machiavelli explain that the oppressing classes that crushed Spartacus gave in to British workers unions in the Victorian era?
In fact, Darwin might have been able to explain it with his vision of "group selection."
Let's look beyond politics.
This is a marvelous question, that is partially adressed in the book: "Finally, after facing the abyss of the nature of power and those who wield it, the authors describe the social checks and balances that make the sustainability of pluralistic political regimes possible"[...]"Democratic competition turns the natural brutality and cynicism of political actors into a virtuous competition to provide the public with maximum material prosperity."
Regarding cultural change and evolution I wrote a long essay whose cover note you can read here (and if interested, the link to the essay is there):
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aCEuvHrqzmBroNQPT/the-evolution-towards-the-blank-slate
There you can see how I see the relation between Gintian "strong reciprocity" and cultural evolution. "But it turns out that existing hominids are more like water molecules (attracted by the powerful van der Waals forces of strong reciprocity) than the quasi-ideal gas helium atoms of abstract philosophy. The moralization of human existence has occurred through the creation of incentive schemes generating social surplus and distributing it in such a way that the social organization itself was reinforced in the process."