Add A Little Color

 Do a little dance when you write. 

Telephone

I'll suggest that compound meaning drifts ever more quickly and dramatically the higher it is built. I tried reading Spengler a couple of years and walked away with some great tidbits, but ultimately put him down for a while, not understanding enough of it. After a couple years however, and after having absorbed a lot more history, I can understand a lot more now when I read him. That's because his philosophy is a set of abstractions and meditations based on his contemporaries' instantiations of all of the accumulated histories in Western knowledge. 

But then what's understanding? Part of it has to do with seizing upon something and taking it into your knowledge and integrating it within that system, which is a contemporary system derived not only from what is happening with you and your knowledge but also the state of knowledge of the surrounding world and what is happening there. 

To say you understand is also to say that you accept it, given all that you know and can weigh against, a body which passes through certain stable intervals but which can also be revolutionized with particularly salient data and experiences. And then the higher order data coming in - and also previous stores of knowledge which undergo recursive revisions - can appear in a new light, and different aspects of that data are seized on, depending on your current understanding and interests. 

Power Corrupts

The idea that power is corrupting is an abstract and vague notion that nevertheless finds wide agreement. For one thing, popular conceptions of power have tended on the negative for good reason: our market society likes to posit an exchange mythology in which everything good can be had by honest and consensual exchange, and the raw exercise of power is to be shamed and sanctioned. This is a directive for the broader populace of course; the powerful can go on exercising every last bit of power they can get their hands on and they have every right to. 

It is the uneven application of this myth in the first place that lends much of the force to market power: for exploitative exchange to work without triggering too much hostility, the exploited have to believe they are getting a fair shake in the deal.  

Though the proper and responsible exercise of power remains an important aspect of all political life, there remains an important lesson within the aphorism. To answer in kind an abstract and vague foreboding, we'll posit an abstract and vague explanation: the accumulation of power requires a certain mastery of the elements, of the social and political environment and the natural and technical levers that those environments make use of to traverse the natural world. The repeated exercise of that power draws on those stores built up by that mastery, taking the system away from the the original processes of mastery and towards the procedural exercise of the accumulated power itself in the form of permissions and inherited power and amassed resources and the like, ultimately winding down the mastery and driving the system towards the dispensation and dispersion of the accumulated power. 

The corruption is a change in the nature of that thing. 

Corruption

The language of corruption is a little fuzzy. We talk about "power corrupting," and we might have some archetypal storytelling that shows the seizure of absolute power by some individual, who becomes mad and then disperses that power through social abominations or some such, but what does it really mean? How does it really happen and why, especially with the regularity suggested by its formulation as an aphorism? And then one has to inquire about the very nature of power and what exactly is corrupting and how. 

And then there is the matter of talking about political corruption or a "personal corruption scandal" or some such. We have this idea that money circulating into the wrong places is bad, or that it is bad that individuals are using public powers and resources for personal gain, but then all of that starts to get tangled up with a more problematic reality. We see money power infiltrating every corner of society, and we see political power correspond pretty faithfully with personal power, and then the laws sanctioning the extremes of those thing begin to look more and more arbitrary and selective, with the customary powerful playing by a different set of rules and enjoying immunity for their crimes, and then the smaller fries getting taken out for similar infractions. 

On a larger scale, we see an entity like the US wagging its finger at "corrupt small third world dictatorships," while at the same time becoming so suffused with the interests of money power that it can no longer be understood as corruption, but simply how the system operates. So then again what really is corruption; how and why does it happen? How much is too much and does it even matter when corruption is ubiquitous? 

It does seem that "corruption" does matter. Historically, levels of corruption go up and down, especially correlating with the weakness and coherence of a given regime. Regimes that are not long for this world typically display all of the classic signs of corruption: bad finances, organizational chaos and apathy, communication and accounting breakdowns, and so on. You see the diversion of resources towards personal ends contradictory to a public purpose, resulting in a dissipation that not only fails to leverage resources towards a given purpose, but which also can be leveraged in turn by outside powers to the detriment of the ailing agent. 

A healthy regime may direct all sorts of atrocities outward, but at the very least there is a public coherence and order to the flow of collective resources towards common ends. The rule of law has some coherence; occasionally powerful people come into real danger and so power is tempered. There is a dynamism to social structures. Macroeconomically you see the same trends in young productive empires and maturing, financializing ones. 

Today with the ubiquity of mercenary concerns, the intense financialization of everything, and the suffusion of the market into every corner of daily life, it is tempting enough to project backwards. But there is a clear trend in which the market expanded over time to further and further corners of daily living over the past century. Even more interesting, the market itself seems to be not only corrosive to isolated cultures - it radically transforms them in line with its own logic - but also to itself. Within market society there is a constant struggle to roll it back out of the domains it colonizes, what with its intense transformative and exploitative tendencies, which rapidly emaciate them. The emergence of a self-destructive process out of the late stages of a more localized civilization has gone global and total. 

Lots to think about and chew on. But before I end I wanted get back to the basic questions posed of corruption at the beginning. If you start looking at basic definitions of the thing, you start to get a little closer to its meaning. Past the conventional definitions of improper and illegal behavior at the top of the social pyramid, you get something like a "departure from original form or what is pure and correct." Getting warmer. Another interesting avenue: obsessions on purity and correctness often accelerate dissolution as well, but beside the point. 

Going even further back, getting to the etymology of the thing, one gets even warmer: it is traced back to notions of decay, especially of dead bodies. So corruption is likened to the processes of something coming to an end, or indeed, something which has already come to an end breaking down ever further to free up the recirculation of energy, or simply something distinct changing into something else or into other things. 

And here is the dilemma: living things, living systems have to contend with a troubling contradiction: to expand and contract and change enough in response to a perpetually transforming universe, while at the same time halting change enough to exist as a distinct, bounded, and continuous entity. 

The end of what? For whom? The corrupting body may be bad for the bounded body, but we can be sure that the participating bacteria and fungi are having the finest of times. What again is corruption? Alas, we seemed to have succeeded at corrupting the question! 

Oh Well

There is a cosmic consciousness residing in any sort of relation of subjects or set of experiences: the way that things relate, whether you are getting a stable calm, an ecstatic expansion, or a terrible collapse, is an expression of everything that exists and all that that entails. No one wants to be the doomsayer at the dinner table, but that's often where I end up because these are some of the most salient issues of our time that are affecting so many far and wide; it is what happens to be happening. It is interesting stuff, and quite vital despite the gloomy connotations. Besides, relaxing feels pretty good after working hard and holding on tight. There are all sorts of experiences to be had and all sorts of things to focus on: life for the most part is good and interesting. And you only get the one. 

Monk Writer

Writing is a unique process of communication with its own space. When you write, you are sitting by yourself and delving deep into a subject, following its course as far as time and energy will take you. And then someone else can sit and follow those lines of thoughts for a long time and at great detail. This is very different from conversation, where you are interacting with someone else, picking up on various cues, with the subject and focus veering off in accordance with the persuasiveness, intensity, and interest of the given participants. And the oral histories might change with a little more variability and frequency than something that is written down, though you do have to figure in interpretations and criticism and institutional influences and so on. Doubtless, the written word has had a dramatic effect on the course of human civilization. 

Cascade

I've written some form of this a good couple of times now, and I'll probably be doing it again plenty of times in the future. But now I'll just repeat myself to cap off some of the discussion that has been going on here. 

What makes the world industrial system so powerful is its global reach, its ability to colonize almost every corner of the globe for exploitation. It then can sustain constant flows of enormous amounts of resources from these points of exploitation, constantly regenerating itself as it transforms and comes apart. With all of the problems of over-tooling for efficiency with "just in time" production and concentrated single supply chains and bare bones staffing structures which induce a brittleness to the system, there is at the same time an implied redundancy in the greater system, just due to the sheer amount of resources in circulation. 

But that same universality and ubiquity of power affects a constant and simultaneous degradation of the zones of exploitation, the general environment at greater scales, and a simultaneous weakening of the industrial system itself. You get failures, or even catastrophes, after this simultaneous weakening causes a critical point to fail, yes, and it is a terrible thing for those unlucky enough to be caught in those failures. The real danger however, is that these failures cause dislocations and displacements that put ever more pressure on other proximate points of weakness already under strain, causing additional failures, which accelerate and build up ever more momentum: the cascading failures we've been hearing more and more about. 

Yes it sounds bad, yes it probably will be bad. But it also takes a while. And historically we've seen this before, just at smaller scales and energy registers. We're really mucking it up over a global scale with incredible amounts of energy this time. 

Revving Up

I remember reading about a prison therapist who was making the claim that at the base of all acts of violence was a perception of disrespect, and that the violence was perceived as the only remaining avenue to get that respect back. This appears to be true in a lot of cases, at least in the modern world. 

You can see the violence steadily build. The inhibitions are starting to peel back as the resent builds up. People with less power typically keep their mouths shut when they are disrespected by their betters, instead absorbing the pain or else taking it out and someone or something weaker, but now you see more and more people letting loose regardless of the consequences because the resent is too much to continue to swallow and push down. 

Typically it is men who have the socialization and the means to actually carry out the physical violence, though you see the general hatred and willingness to "just say it" building up in everyone. Everything from shootings on the extreme end to reckless driving, workplace and commercial disputes, and social media flame wars on the other end. 

The trauma too takes a lot of time to subside. You see echoes of the violence last for centuries and disperse very slowly. 

The violence is produced as a result of culture and environment, and it takes time to erupt and to subside on its own, setting aside its intentional deployment in matters of military and police enforcement and their subsequent reactions. 

Church Ideology

In the late classical era and then on into the medieval period, there were huge transfers of wealth to the church. How did this happen? It wasn't as if the church suddenly revolutionized ancient warfare and took everything that it wanted by force.  

On the contrary, wealth could be seen to "collapse" into the church. Large donors - both living and dead - would give huge grants of land to the church, and resources in the form of donations and labor would steadily pour in. Cathedrals and chapels themselves would become protected sanctuaries for endangered political subjects and by and large the sanctuaries were respected, though people would often be physically dragged out of the churches so the bad deeds could be done outside and out of protection. 

The church would eventually become more integrated into the state, especially after Constantine adopted Christianity and successive rulers continued to formalized its official doctrines, and then the church itself became a fuller inversion of its genesis as it became the state and commanded military power. 

But in that early transition period, Christian ideology was a force in itself: through the pronouncements and behaviors of its prophets and then adherents and religious and political leaders, it described a proper way to think and perceive and to be in a fallen world. 

Through the material convulsions and the ensuing collapses of political and social legitimacies, the collapsing populations themselves had to become Christian after it became the dominant religious worldview in the ancient world, and the resources followed and flowed in. 

Terrible catastrophe was embedded in the very DNA of the movement: the guilt and hatred of the material world, the self hatred, the rejection of wealth and standing, the apocalyptic visions, and so on. A lot of the ancient world collapsed into the Christian one. 

Value as Vulnerability

We'll be continually elaborating on this issue in the future, but a couple of thoughts. First a quick primer: what comprises economic value is still a matter of intense debate, but there are some salient characteristics of value that matter to our discussion. Money approximates value, but price itself oscillates in accordance with not only supply and demand, but also social power and pricing power, though price does have a denser "bone" under the flesh which must not be violated. One can become emaciated but the bone must stay. 

In so many words, you have to have enough people fed, housed, and clothed who have the social power to topple you. You can immiserate and jail and kill whoever is atomized and dehumanized, we know that from bitter experience. However if "food" and "water" and "housing" and so on (in general) is too expensive and scarce, you will have a growing mass of people - eventually the "wrong" people - who can organize and direct some of the destructive processes of violence in your direction, to avoid being consumed by those processes themselves. I think then that we can make the provisional statement that value is this relation: the stable relationality of consumers and producers in a complex industrial society. 

Value is embodied in the commodity, and commodities are produced in isolation, to be alienated from their producers for money, for ultimately that battery of essential commodities needed to survive and reproduce. The producers are not self-sufficient: they are not producing the entire list of essentials. The existence of commodity production requires then the prior existence of a pool of the essential commodities needed to survive, a chicken or egg question that is solved with describing the histories of violence and expropriation. But we're going to move on. 

There is a gravity to the circulation of value then. You need to concentrate and direct commodities to yourself or else you are dying. To do that, you have to be both sovereign producer and consumer, who has the social power to both produce and receive commodities without being broken apart, atomized, and subjugated and/or destroyed. 

The higher up on the value chain you are, the more commodities you are able to direct to yourself. The reasons for this are very complex, but a lot of it has to do with having the military ability to defend yourself and the economic ability to sustain that military ability, which is taken by force if you are an empire, or allowed if you are a loyal subject, or attacked and denied if you are on the outs. And these abilities coincide with the ability to produce things that others want and have to have permission to take without using force. 

However the higher up the value chain you are, the stronger you are subjected to a gravity of its own. The reasons for this are just as complex: we've described before the transformers required for ascending the value chain. One needs to develop urban and industrial centers to concentrate and intensify economic activity, and to do this one has to also develop all of the surrounding land to both support the urban centers and support global trade to keep the entire party going. This means a relentless expropriation of the land and a wiping out of small producers and pockets of self-sufficient labor. 

Land and labor alike are converted into value at an accelerating rate and ever-growing scale. Within the commodity producers and consumers you see an ever-advancing specialization which boosts efficiency and economic productivity. This works great for commodity production, but it is not so great for self-sufficiency, as you have a gradual destruction of the traditional abilities and techniques of self-sufficient reproduction. For a vivid example of this, witness the migration of the city dweller back into the country and the initial ensuing helplessness. I've directly experienced this. It takes a lot of time and effort to get all of that back. What happens if the circulation of value is suddenly stopped, and all of that mass must locate the resources it needs to reproduce itself overnight? 

The result, as we've seen historically, is that all of the orphaned consumers and producers must band together and take from whatever surrounding stores of production and resource exist, which translates to organized violence of increasing intensity and scale, further and further destabilizing the entire system. Gravity takes over, and what sits high comes back down, sooner or later and as necessity prescribes, like that Surfside building. That's bad. And we're simultaneously degrading land and labor, at the base of that very heavy value chain, at increasing intensity and speed. That's the damage we're talking about. That's not good.

Damage

For something as gradual and largely invisible - at least for longer spans of time - as long term social damage, there are many differing views on what is actually considered "damaging" and for good reason. It is difficult to really come to terms with a given effect on that timeline and on that scale before it is too late, and then the really dramatic and visible stuff - which is largely unambiguous, though not entirely so - happens, such as revolutions and coups and civil wars and ethnic cleansing and the like. 

Because of this, much of the more gradual and greater scale changes - their effects not immediately observable or even fully comprehensible - need to be organized in relations of abstractions in service of speculative and comparative analyses, which requires a guiding ideology, which is built on very personal and subjective values, which is why you have such a variety of very strong opinions and approaches. This is also the simple structural nature of making judgments on a massive complex of judgments, but anyways. 

You can run the political gamut of what constitutes "damage," such as moral degradation and the loosening of cultural mores, cultural changes from technological growth, demographic change, and immigration, political and economic corruption, concentration of wealth, the ballooning of debt, and so on. Depending on the person you talk to, one or the other of these issues could be a dire threat, or progress and a social good, or unavoidable functions of large scale change, or whatever else, and there are wildly differing ideas about what to do about them. Just as many ideas as there are about the very nature of the issues in question of course.  

Taking into consideration too that a given society is based upon a set of collectively held values about what is good and right in the first place, and whether damaging that thing - or to use less loaded terminology, radically changing it or bringing it to an end altogether - would actually be a good thing, it is easy enough to veer off into the weeds pretty quickly and get bogged down in question begging. One is tempted to simply wave away such questions as "natural forces" that one can speculate about but not do a whole lot about to alter their directions on an individual level, and that such personal and subjective questions are largely relative anyway. 

But I do want to take these questions quite seriously. As gradual and even abstract as so-called "damage" could be, given the structure that that damage is a part of makes it all too real in the sense that the structure those "damages" are affecting will eventually radically change, which involves objective and consequential facts that affect everyone in an unambiguous way. A capitalist world system for example is only one of many possible iterations of human organization and one can imagine all sorts of alternatives, but embedded within a historical moment as a global phenomenon, that particular iteration is for all practical purposes there to stay, and it is important to understand how everything is interacting, and the directions those interactions will take, whether or not one has the power to change anything substantial. 

One analogy that comes to mind is the 2021 Surfside building collapse in Miami. That structure underwent a form of damage for years that was largely invisible and seemingly inconsequential to a naive observer, though plenty of people who knew better were warning about it the entire time: the fresh and salt water infiltration that ate away at major structural elements and eventually corroded the rebar within seems like a very slow and natural process on its own, but taken in relation with the immense amount of weight sitting above it, resting upon and depending on the full chemical and physical integrity of those elements, this was indeed a dire problem, which made its objective conditions known outside of any sort of technical knowledge or professional opinion when the structure collapsed, killing a lot of people inside. 

So the seemingly minor and gradual infiltration of sea water and associated corrosion has to be put in relation to the collapse itself. The location of that damage, in relation to the greater structure, where something small and gradual is taking place at a crucial location at the base of an immense amount of weight makes that damage quite dire and serious, and as a result, massive. And of course the people who understood the issue and who knew better were right all along about what would happen, but they weren't listened to, or else half-measures were taken and can-kicking was done. 

Not a lot of people would argue that a building full of living people going down - which could have been built any number of ways, or even evacuated and demolished and rebuilt at many different points of time - is a good thing for society, yet before the building actually went down, there was all sorts of hand wringing and feet dragging and waving away about that reality, with much of that behavior centralized within concentrated wealth, comprised of the owners and financial interests in the building, renter and unit ownership law structures which constrain collective decision making, and so on. 

And that disaster was able to take place because the much more gradual problem affecting the eventual collapse was a more technical issue, understood with specialized scientific and engineering knowledge and building experience. Further, this issue was connected to many other issues, all of which could be construed as gradual "damage": the weakening of the surrounding land and sea level rise, the weakening of the construction industry and associated corruption, the weakening of a particular building's finances and the reluctance of management to spend money on expensive maintenance, the weakening of political organization and efficacy, the weakening in public trust and communication, the corruption of technical professions and the public's growing distrust of them, and so on. All of this knowledge has to be integrated and synthesized for a more broad understanding.

This simpler, material example was bad enough. but the problems are even more difficult with the social damages we are concerned with at the scale and time frame that our analysis is interested in. 

Isolated issues like the concentrating wealth, or the wide ranging and cumulative damage wrought by Covid, or the ongoing abuses of the many forms of labor, or the environmental degradation, or whatever are all serious problems in their own right, but they have to be taken together as they all exist in relation to each other and advance together. Plenty interesting, as at greater and greater scales, these issues directly affect the lives of everyone living on the earth. 

What You Eat

Those wily Vipassana adepts who ran the meditation center in Northern California were onto something. The daily meal regime varied but largely adhered to "temple food," foods that were blander, lighter, and easier to metabolize such as fruits and veggies, rice, beans, oatmeal, and the like. 

Then they'd go and play a trick: for one of the meals they'd sneak in something heavy, like some delicious and greasy plate of macaroni and cheese to teach the meditators a lesson. Grateful for the indulgence, the meditators would chow down, and experience the heavy digestive load and its cognitive effects, blunting sensitivity to the sensations and throwing off one's focus with the racing heart and heavy breathing of intensive metabolism. 

It already takes a certain sensitivity to notice such changes; an inclination towards meditation or deep thought perhaps. Or perhaps an affliction makes the consequences of one's diet much more stark and noticeable when one strays. You see preferences for "temple food" or at least simple and mild food like rice back to at least the ancient Greeks; the perception has been around for some time. 

But this relationship changes when the flow of energy changes as well. Temple food works great for a largely contemplative life. However when it comes to hard labor, try concentrating when that voracious hunger takes hold emanating from a depleted body, and eating a light temple diet doesn't satiate. That heavier load becomes desirable when one is concentrating energy expending muscle power. 

The brain is quite energy intensive itself, but the energy and resources it takes in are of a different nature than that of the body; it is a different region, with different concerns, but which are also bound with those of the body's, so that a given balance of the regions, how those respective regions are fed and reproduced, whether those regions are getting the proper nourishment in proportion to their depletion, and how they relate to each other and give rise to a particular consciousness, make up an important part of what you are. 

Human Resources

A recurring observation in Marx's critique of capital is that capital seeks to ceaselessly expand, and upon coming up against obstructions to its expansion, it must surmount them or descend into crisis. One simple example of this occurred early on in the processes of industrialization, when the industrializing nations were still relying on biomass for energy, and so the open land required by wood fuels conflicted with pasture land and agricultural land. This obstacle was surmounted first with coal mining - going underground as opposed to outward - and then the transition to oil, which could also be extracted from the earth, saving the valuable horizontal real estate for agriculture and development. 

Of course now we're coming back to this problem full circle, with the enormous amounts of open land required for renewables and biofuels to replace fossil fuels at scale. 

Keeping this principle in mind, and moving from the economic realm to the military realm, one of the more interesting theoretical constraints facing the modern world now, as it moves deeper into an era of warfare, is the actual production of soldiers. We saw early glimpses of this with the United States running into problems during the broadly unpopular Vietnam War, when public trust and state legitimacy dropped to a new low and draft dodging was at its peak. The draft was retired after the war ended, partially because the state had determined that there was enough manpower for military supremacy without it (we'll get back to this). 

Civilization itself has had a long history of contention over drafts and conscription. This was one of the cardinal issues facing imperial Rome as its military expansion faltered, beset by declining populations chewed up by endless war, civil war and plague, and many of the traditional stock had been hollowed out by the creditor class - soldiers had to own land and be wealthy enough to bring their own equipment - so the military was professionalized and drew more heavily on mercenary forces and eventually the Germanic tribes for its stock. 

The various other historical reasons are quite complex and context sensitive, and at the moment I wanted to get at a more contemporaneous problem, so I'll briefly sketch that out now. More recently Russia experienced this problem with its "partial mobilization." Before the mobilization, there was a certain uneasiness in Russia regarding the war, but large swathes of the urban population in particular were able to go about their day as normal, ignoring the war as an abstraction in the distance, which was something we also experienced here in the States as the Iraq war grinded on: a reality for only a professional and mercenary minority and its distant foreign victims, with much of the population learning of the war as an abstraction represented by news reports, themselves carefully manufactured of course. 

When the prosecution of the invasion started to bog down, and Putin launched the partial mobilization, there was a panic especially throughout the professional classes, and lots of people jumped across the border to avoid the mobilization. The state was able to meet its mobilization quota, but it also revealed the underlying weakness of the body politic when it came to supposed matters of "national survival." 

This is a problem for advanced imperial states in particular: military supremacy in the modern age correlates with economic supremacy: one has to climb the value chain and command powerful military technologies and a formidable industrial apparatus to keep up with the top military powers. 

There was an inflection point in which this became more true: in the ancient world population booms and cultural military innovations like mounted cavalry and horse archers could tip the scales on the battlefield, but once technologies like firearms and artillery appeared on the world stage, in which a large amount of destructive power could be marshalled without high skill and training (though there is always some required), and the democratization of the warrior class and mass armies came into the field, the center of gravity shifted to the economic realm in which technological innovation and efficiency of mass production came to the forefront in battlefield supremacy, showcased dramatically in the shocking industrialized meat grinders of the theaters of WWI.  

So a given military power that wishes to be formidable must industrialize and intensely develop its urban environments as a result. Modern industry requires the density and efficiency of the modern city to sustain and grow its economic activity with forward momentum. Further, the modern value chain is a creature of incredible complexity and breadth, so a given power must source materials, knowledge, and technologies on a global scale, developing the cities into world cities in the process. 

What this ends up doing is cutting into the stock which is traditionally associated with warfare, and there are complex reasons for this. What modernization and urbanization typically do is create larger and broader classes of professionals with raising living standards, who are also better suited to utilize global transportation networks and global energy flows to physically move rapidly with ease. The prototypical middle class - at risk of striking a crude generalization - is a class literally raised above the soil and away from the soil's concerns, plugged into the rapid-moving global industrial energy flows and taken up into them. 

Conventional warfare is a more visceral activity with a more intense physicality, and it is also one of certain death, which is why the stocks are more intensely drawn from poorer and more rural regions, populations less able to move away from danger with ease and which are accustomed to more physically violent daily realities . There is a contradictory bottom limit to this as well: a population can't be grinded down into dust to produce soldiers either: for a decent physical constitution, good nutrition is required and some education to manipulate and navigate the increasingly complicated infrastructure, transportation, instruments, and tools of modern warfare. 

As a nation's wealth grows, and the broader that wealth is distributed, the more physically mobile and autonomous its population becomes, while at the same time becoming more integrated with and dependent on the global industrial system. The reality of the geographically bounded nation itself becomes more paradoxically abstract as a result, and the ever-shifting mirage of global industrial prosperity becomes ever more real. Global capital, with its absurd concentrations of power and disposal of incredible stores of energy, can flit to and fro to wherever is advantageous, extract what resources it can for as long as the host remains amenable, and then up and leave when it gets too hot or bothersome. 

The fear of the modern state is a host's fear of the irritated businessman. In the modern age it has become more difficult to simply strongarm one's population into submission: doing so risks the ire of the global industrial system and economic and political isolation and the ensuing capital flight. One must balance throwing one's weight and assets around while remaining open enough to allow the steady passing through of globally sourced resources and capital, like controlled wind through a musical instrument. So we see the constant nervous courting of capital, the hopeless reliance on debt and bondholders and desperate promises of austerity, the prostrated deregulation of markets and privatization, and so on. 

This of course was an ephemeral attribute of the golden age of globalized capital, which peaked alongside the peak of high ROI oil, and which becomes further and further threatened as constraint grows with dwindling available resources and heightened international tensions. At the same time, there is a countervailing shift to re-territorialize the functions and activities of the modern state and economy: a tightening of borders and the return of industrial policy, as the global system becomes increasingly strained under a multitude of pressures within and without, which still must be balanced with the need for global trade and access to a complex array of resources and labor from many different regions and specializations, a contradiction that is beginning to make itself shown in the bifurcating trade blocs. 

Back to the actual labor stock itself. Mirroring the more general labor question, in warfare too there is an inclination towards greater mechanization and automation to offset the problems created with a modernizing and urbanizing population. What the US military realized with Vietnam - though the war itself was a complete failure - was that with rapidly advancing aviation, targeting, munitions, and communications technologies - to just name a few - it was possible to use less and less human operators to achieve more and more destructive power, so that the increasingly politically troublesome draft was no longer necessary. 

We know especially with the history of modern warfare in the Middle East that this dream of automation was more pipedream than guiding ideal, but the belief itself does matter quite a bit for ordering larger scale behaviors. Its highly probable that with more and more sharply constrained resources and a growing instability of the world system, that that coveted human soldier stock will become more important again, but it is hard to tell how long that will take. 

Propagation

Just to set aside a minor movement in the massive and spectacular evolution of the early Arab caliphates, one can glimpse the psychosocial mechanisms behind the political and economic expansion of the Umayyad Caliphate under Abd al-Malik, whose reign made up a phase of that caliphate. 

Legitimacy was generally conferred by hereditary transfers of power, which of course had to be carefully managed even with legitimate heirs lined up. With premature deaths, conflicts could develop over the transfers of power which could lead to civil wars. 

Malik was considered to be a "fruitful" leader, fathering some 18 or so children with multiple wives, which would correlate with a period of vigorous expansion, in which the transfer of power was stable more or less, and each successive heir would be looking to continue on the works and gains of his predecessor, so that a steady expansion outward could be effected, denying enemies the breathing room and recovery time afforded by breakouts of civil war. 

There does seem to be a dispersal and disintegration with hereditary systems of power, with each successive heir declining in aptitude after the peak of a given "great" leader who fought their way to the top, though this was a common agreed upon method for transferring power legitimately, which is a highly contentious and dangerous process, especially in imperial societies. 

We did see variations such as the incredible catapulting of Alexander the Great onto the world stage after succeeding his father, Philip II, who was also considered a great figure and hard to top. Though of course this feat could not be repeated: the legend was that keeping in character, he wryly egged on his successors with some variation of "may the best man win" and so they proceeded to tear apart his newly conquered empire fighting over the power and spoils after he passed. 

We saw something similar in the unraveling of the Mongolian empire after the passing of Genghis Khan, which saw incredible territorial gains but which eventually saw succession crises and the splitting of the empire into four khanates that would go their own ways. 

Today we see the waxing and waning of hereditary concentrations of power that largely minimize themselves in the public sphere, favoring the formal symbolic participation in the political election and its economic counterpart, the conquest of the market, where regional powers work to capture what they can of the slippery-yet-greedy circulation of global capital. 

Succession and expansion is a globally interconnected process of constant and accelerating movement of material transformation.