What examples do you have in mind? — Moliere

Roman Empire, Spanish Empire, Portuguese Empire, Macedonian Empire...

I suspect that your notion of hierarchy, when descriptive, is not the same as what I'm targeting. The idea that a program or system has hierarchies, for example, isn't the same as social hierarchy. — Moliere

If you can’t present this beetle in a box private theory of yours here, then there is nothing to discuss.

Are you referring to "The End of History"? — Ludwig V

No. The Origins of Political Order, Political Order and Political Decay, and the postscript, Identity, are a really great trilogy.

Are you saying that power is equally distributed in a hierarchy? Had you thought to ask those at the bottom of the heap what they think? What happens if I'm at the top and don't want to distribute power in an evenly balanced fashion? — Ludwig V

No. I am pointing out that hierarchies are the hallmark of nature. Flows are fractally distributed. Even earthquakes fall into this inevitable statistical pattern. So hierarchies don’t need to be explained. It would be deviations from hierarchies that would seem immediately unnatural - in need of some further causal inquiry.

Then I made the point that this is also true of organisms - semiotically-organised systems. Systems which add encoded information to shaping of distributed flows. If a landscape offers society a river, society can start damming it, regulating it, turning it into a system of canals, ditches, sluice gates and water wheels.

But even this mechanical constraint of nature evolves towards the same natural logic of a hierarchical organisation. If water for irrigation or hydrogeneration is the social good to be dispensed, then the fair approach is to be able to do so over all scales. Every farmer ought to be able to turn on a tap and pay the same price. Every householder should have an electric socket and pay the same fee.

In a normal world, we just unthinkingly build infrastructure in this natural way. It is clearly logical once we have reached a level of civilisation where we think of ourselves as the larger collective that is a nation. We want to be part of a society that can act as if it is indeed a single giant organism with all the organ systems of such an organism. A nervous system, a circulation system, an energy system, an immune system, etc.

This doesn’t seem overtly political. But organising a crowd into a nation is hugely political. That is what Fukuyama is good at showing. That is what political science is properly about.

Once you have this civilised framework in place, then you can start to get into the usual bunfights over the actual health of your national plumbing. Does everyone have an electric socket and a tap that works. Can everyone afford the electricity and water or has wealth become siphoned off at the top in a way that it too needs to be redistributed to the lower levels.

If the state paid for the waterworks and power stations, the accounting is pretty easy. Taxes can be used to ensure a nation’s assets flow freely in some lower bounded way. A top and bottom get - somewhat artificially now - placed on the hierarchical flows.

But once a state’s assets are privatised, the assets hocked off to predatory capitalists, then that thermostatic regulation - that wealth constraining feedback loop - is removed. You get the predictable consequences of that.

Of course there are always the arguments. Trickle down theory. The philanthropic instincts of the super wealthy. The innate inefficiencies of any state bureaucracy. One can make a case for just about anything one likes. Folk are easily bamboozled.

But if you step back like a political scientist or systems thinker, the basics are clear enough. Nature is hierarchical in its organisation for good reason. And organisms exist by echoing that in constructing their own logically coherent state of being. An organism is a distributed flow where “life and mind” is the good being dispersed with a scalefree fairness to all parts of the one collective body. All 30 trillion cells or so, not including the further 100 trillion cells of our gut biome.

So politics is about the building of hierarchically organised sovereign nations. Civilisation is the good that is meant to flow freely through them over all scales. A well plumbed society will have an optimised distribution of civilised life and mind.

It is just weird how hierarchy is a term of abuse in the anglophone world. Everyone wants to be free. No one want to be constrained. There is somehow an expectation that civilisation appears as some kind of magical good rather than as a good being delivered by a long term social investment in really smart social plumbing.

In my Indonesian and Malaysian experience, it simply is. — Tarskian

I have, though, provided you multiple academic legal opinions to the contrary - at least oen from within Indonesia. Malaysia, I am less ofay with.

Again, what's on the books is irrelevant. — Tarskian

Then you are talking into the ether, from the ether. Which is fine, but it makes your responses fairly empty. You're defining-out some of the most important pieces of data to support a view point - not always horrid, but in this case, it is quite unfortunate as it amounts to moving the goalposts. If your entire view rests on "I don't think they would do that...." in response to bad policies, we ahve not much to discuss as that's just an opinion.

The above is simply unenforceable. — Tarskian

Plainly untrue. This is entirely enforceable, i'm unsure why you would suggest otherwise. If a report is filed, and the police process the report, it can be prosecuted. End of discussion. Whether someone is convicted is neither here nor there, but given the general biases against women in the penal system there, it is not at all out of the realm of reasonable assumption that at least one woman will be charged and convicted. THe possibilitiy is enough to uphold hte objection I'm making.

I am a foreigner in these countries. — Tarskian

This is not relevant to our discussion. If you're centering yourself, I don't know why you're talking to others about it.

You seem to be confused as to the role of the Islamic clergy — Tarskian

No. It appears that you pick and choose theory and practical results when it suits. Muslim Clergy are the ruling class by proxy in almost all Muslim-majority nations. Sharia is hte law of hte land? Ok, then Clergy are the judges. That's how that works. Pretending it's not because the titles don't reflect it is like saying the USA is not, in any way, oligarchical. It's a farce.

is substantially different from the army, the police, or the security forces in general. — Tarskian

They are all required in service of the faith and Islamic Law regulates how this is done (in all those cases). They are, all of them, theocratic outsources. If this were not the case, you could have a Catholic leader of the Iranian defense force (whatever it's named Properly).

Not specified, sure -- I'm reading into him. — Moliere

See:

Aristotle has not identified natural slavery with being a barbarian. He has identified it with having a certain condition of soul. National or geographical origin is a derivative characteristic (4(7).7.1327b20-36). — Aristotle's Defensible Defense of Slavery, by Peter L. P. Simpson

It's his mixture of biology with politics that is really close conceptually to the race-based reasonings for slavery: he doesn't explicitly put slavish souls into a biological category, — Moliere

What would it mean to "put slavish souls into a biological category"?

I have, though, provided you multiple academic legal opinions to the contrary - at least oen from within Indonesia. Malaysia, I am less ofay with. — AmadeusD

You really don't know Indonesia, do you?

https://uncoverasia.com/best-clubs-in-bali

7 Must-Visit Clubs in Bali for the Ultimate Party/Nightlife Experience

1. Club Jenja – A Sleek, Spacious & Sexy Club

What’s a trip to Bali if you don’t hit at least two or three nightclubs during your stay?

When the sun sets in Bali, the party animals come out to play (or shall we say, rave) and here’s where these creatures of the night flock to to wreak havoc.

A hotspot for the Balinese youth and elites, the club attracts some of the world’s finest DJs—Sander Van Doorn, Quintino, etc—and is definitely where you should be if you’re looking to party in style.

Plainly untrue. This is entirely enforceable, i'm unsure why you would suggest otherwise. If a report is filed, and the police process the report, it can be prosecuted. End of discussion. — AmadeusD

Concerning Indonesia, you don't know what you are talking about, do you? You simply have no clue whatsoever.

https://discoveryourindonesia.com/jakarta-nightlife/

11 Unforgettable Jakarta Nightclubs for a Crazy Weekend

Have you ever experienced Jakarta nightlife? What was your favourite Jakarta nightclub? Share your thoughts with other travellers in the comments below.

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

By the way, I do not recommend the use of nightclubs to pick up local one-night stands, be it in Indonesia or elsewhere. I personally consider casual sex to be rather lawless behavior. But then again, I don't give a flying fart if other people want to do that. To each his own.

You really don't know Indonesia, do you? — Tarskian

So when bar owners are paying off or intimidating the local police so as to be able to fleece the rich tourists, suddenly this becomes evidence for your narrative that some societies just have laws that they can’t be bother policing. And yet the facts seem better suited to your other narrative that all the world is run by corrupt oligarchs.

I’m confused. :razz:

, I happen to know a Malay homosexual who more or less fled Malaysia.
You wouldn't know they're homosexual without knowing them personally.
(Not that it matters, but I'm heterosexual and married.)
Good thing they're quite intelligent and rational, and managed to make a living in a safer country.
Neighboring Brunei isn't exactly better.
Such is the reality on the ground.

I happen to know a Malay homosexual who more or less fled Malaysia. — jorndoe

I have no clue about how things are in Malaysia for homosexual people.

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attractions-g298570-Activities-c20-t109-Kuala_Lumpur_Wilayah_Persekutuan.html

Dance Clubs & Discos in Kuala Lumpur

But then again, I am certainly aware of Malaysia's casual sex scene.

If I were homosexual myself, I would probably know much better what the gay scene is like. So, you are simply asking the wrong person.

I happen to know a Malay homosexual who more or less fled Malaysia. You wouldn't know they're homosexual without knowing them personally. — jorndoe

He is almost surely exaggerating about "gay persecution":

https://www.holidify.com/pages/gay-bars-in-kuala-lumpur-4392.html

10 Best Gay Bars in Kuala Lumpur for a Lively Night

If you are a proud part of LGBTQ pride and are looking for a stress-free and safe time of the night in Kuala Lampur, then these LGBTQ-friendly bars are perfect for you! Here are the top 11 gay bars in Kuala Lumpur.

He was most likely complaining about "persecution" by his own family who do not accept his sexual orientation. Traditional families expect you to marry a member from the opposite sex and to have children.

some societies just have laws that they can’t be bother policing — apokrisis

Quite a few laws are indeed just political statements with absolutely zero intention of setting up a specialized police department to hunt down cases to prosecute. The existing police are usually not even aware of the new law, and they simply don't care either.

Welcome to the real world!

You really don't know Indonesia, do you? — Tarskian

I do, actually. It strikes me as quite odd that you'd assume a lack of knowledge when I;'ve provided the sources... Your link has absolutely nothing to do with anything under discussion, and I note you have not bothered to look at the sources provided.

He is almost surely exaggerating about "gay persecution": — Tarskian

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/malaysia-questions-18-people-arrested-lgbt-halloween-party-2022-10-31/
https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/growing-persecution-lgbtq-malaysia
https://www.article19.org/resources/malaysia-stop-the-criminalisation-of-lgbtqi-individuals/
https://www.petertatchellfoundation.org/matty-healey-not-a-white-saviour-for-condemning-malaysian-homophobia/ (the article is somewhat irrelevant (as is Tatchell) but hte basis for it is what's interesting)
https://www.voanews.com/a/malaysian-authorities-raid-lgbt-halloween-party/6811548.html
https://www.humanrightspulse.com/mastercontentblog/the-persecution-of-transgender-people-in-malaysia
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/malaysia-cannot-accept-same-sex-marriage-says-mahathir-idUSKCN1M10UW/

Yeah, totally exaggerating.

Concerning Indonesia, you don't know what you are talking about, do you? You simply have no clue whatsoever. — Tarskian

I, in fact, do. I take your continuous denial of the facts on board.

I have no clue about how things are in Malaysia for homosexual people. — Tarskian

No, you don't.

I personally consider casual sex to be rather lawless behavior. — Tarskian

This sentence is incoherent.
So back to the start, I guess:

I have, though, provided you multiple academic legal opinions to the contrary - at least oen from within Indonesia. Malaysia, I am less ofay with.
— AmadeusD

You really don't know Indonesia, do you? — Tarskian

Please, feel free to critique several reports from legal experts in the region.

The idea that a program or system has hierarchies, for example, isn't the same as social hierarchy. — Moliere

You can see I did in fact reply to @Ludwig V on this. So I might as well expand on where I suspect you are going wrong.

You have this notion of "power" as the social good to be distribute. And you mean power in the restricted sense of the power to dominate (as opposed to the power to submit I guess). This everyday kind of ethological hierarchical organisation – the one discussed in its genetic and evolutionary sense of the dominance-submission hierarchies found in social animals – is then sort of hand-wavingly exported to the contests of nations, the contests between capital and labour, the contests between road-hogging cyclists and cycle-dominating road-ragers.

You praise "amiability" as that expresses your distaste for being dominated, and also as a way to bypass the issue of whether you thus have submitted. The good society on this view – which seems where you are tracking – would be the hierarchical order that could deliver this "amiability" across all scales of social being. Everywhere at every level in life, the question of who won and who lost could be considered moot. Politely unmentioned. Imagined never to have been a social dynamic in play.

Well you can see the issue if humans are social animals and have evolved some version of the dominance~submission behaviours that are the "how" of how non-linguistic social animals organise their adaptively hierarchical worlds. We can't help but tell a difference between a soft smile and a stern gaze. It is in our genes. And a natural conflict arises when we live all day pretending outwardly to be smiling while inwardly frowning because serving burgers at McDonalds is after all a pretty shit occupation.

The social game there becomes trading amiability with respect. You tack on the corporate welcome, they act with the respect suited to the financial occasion.

OK. But onwards to the political science of how modern society needs to be understood. What is the social good that is actually being plumbed to deliver? How can we define that in terms that are both personally meaningful and collectively measurable?

No one really talks of society as an amiability~respect distribution system. But that is not a bad kind of balancing act. And then those who think of it in wolf pack terms as a dominance~submission distribution system seem not to have noticed that we have collectively evolved way beyond that point. Sure those instinctive behaviours are still ever present as the fabric of our lives. But the point of the Enlightenment – of a civilising and rational social philosophy – was not to amplify this genetic trait but instead suppress it, or at least harness it to its best advantage, in a new scheme of civilised life.

So dominance (and submission) is not what is being hierarchically distributed, even if it might seem like it from a narrow genetic view of a social system as a hierarchy still organised by systems principles. I.e.: still organised as a system of top-down constraints in balance with their bottom-up degrees of freedom.

A better word than amiability could be agency. Western social democracy had this vision of self-actualisation as a cultural good to be distributed evenly to all. Creating a social safety net was what ensured that every person had the same opportunities, if not the same outcomes.

Obviously then along came neo-liberalism as a corruption of that approach. Agency became such a one-sided concept that the social safety net could just be abandoned. A cost to strike off the balance sheet and so leave "everyone richer".

Social democracy of course was a little short-sighted as it never quite expanded its hierarchical reach to include the wider environmental reality of a planet taking off towards 10 billion souls who all also hoped to enjoy their new civilised agency, with its social safety net.

And neo-liberalism very quickly decided that ecological and climate concerns were yet another kind of friction on their shiny entrepreneurial schemes. The quest to monetise, and even financialise, everything. Turn the social world into a pure capital world without any accounting line for "a work force" because fossil fuels were an infinite form of manpower and AI was coming to replace even the white collar back office.

If you had to still have some dark satanic mill of slave labour and stinking pollution, well as @Tarskian keeps reminding us, there are plenty of third world countries where you can just lose these things from sight. They can't even enforce their own laws on itinerant passport holders from developed nations. If they can't clean up their beach resort nightlife, there is no way they can say no to Foxconn or ExxonMobil.

But anyway, that is how to start thinking about hierarchies as the natural blueprint for any system of disspative flow. There will always seem to be some conflict going on – as between the top-down contraints and the bottom-up freedoms. But this is just the dynamical balancing act by which the two things of stability and creativity can live together in a fruitful complementary fashion. Complexity can be constructed because it can be afforded.

The issue is to properly frame the dynamical balance that you want to apply evenly over all the levels of your hierarchy. For actual natural systems such as rivers or plate tectonics, the good is simply "maximum entropy". But for organismic systems, the good becomes some notion of "flourishing". The ability to repair and reproduce and so continue the journey towards some personal future.

Human civilisation has raised the game still higher as we now can aspire to delivering "civilisation" as the scalefree good. But then we have to start digging into that to discover what it really means to us.

Amiability sort of touches on it. Agency does too. Social capital is another term. Living as nature intends might be another slogan. We sort of know what we mean in terms of "the good life".

At least until someone comes along with another dumb one-note "good" such as happiness, or virtuousness, or being ethical, or whatever else tends to crop up in utopian fantasies of how a society ought to be run if only they were its dictator.

Please, feel free to critique several reports from legal experts in the region. — AmadeusD

How is that compatible with the following?

https://www.holidify.com/pages/gay-bars-in-kuala-lumpur-4392.html

10 Best Gay Bars in Kuala Lumpur for a Lively Night

If you are a proud part of LGBTQ pride and are looking for a stress-free and safe time of the night in Kuala Lampur, then these LGBTQ-friendly bars are perfect for you! Here are the top 11 gay bars in Kuala Lumpur.

But then again, I am not gay. So, I am not familiar with the specific details of what exactly is tolerated and what is not in Malaysia.

For example, homosexual behavior is tolerated in Russia but homosexual propaganda is absolutely not. Furthermore, any homosexual propaganda targeting children is rigorously prosecuted in Russia.

Is it just about any perceived Malaysian distaste for LGBTQ propaganda?

Welcome to the real world! — Tarskian

But it is perfectly clear how little idea you have about what that is. You are just babbling in the fashion expected of the standard crypto bro digital nomad. Not an original thought in your head apparently. Just going with the latest meme lifestyle. Fitting in with your chosen crowd. :up:

But it is perfectly clear how little idea you have about what that is. You are just babbling in the fashion expected of the standard crypto bro digital nomad. Not an original thought in your head apparently. Just going with the latest meme lifestyle. Fitting in with your chosen crowd. :up: — apokrisis

Unlike you, I have lived for some while in these countries. I still regularly visit them. I am talking as an eyewitness from personal experience.

Furthermore, I am clearly not the only person writing this on the internet. Public sources point out that there is an entire nightlife scene for gay patrons in Malaysia.

Unlike what you are doing, I am not even supposed to dream up original fantasies and then present them as facts.

Reality does not seem to fit with the ideological propaganda that you subscribe to.

That is a you-problem.

A fact is more important than the Lord Mayor of London.

Unlike you, I have lived for some while in these countries. — Tarskian

Indulge your illusions if they give you comfort. :up:

Indulge your illusions if they give you comfort. — apokrisis

Having lived there is about a fact.

It is not an illusion.

Unlike you, I have a truckload of immigration entry and exit stamps to show for.

I have spent months in a row on Langkawi Island, as well as in Port Dickson and Malacca on the west coast, in Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya in the larger capital metropolis, Johor Bahru on the southern tip of the peninsula across Singapore, and Teranganu on the east coast.

I still want to visit Georgetown on Penang island as well as the Sabah and Sarawak territories in East Malaysia, i.e. North Borneo.

That is the famous Malay archipelago that runs from southern Indochina all the way to the Sulu Sea, south of the Philippine islands, bordering their Mindanao island.

I spend proportionally much more time in Indochina proper but I do like Malaya too.

Instead of endlessly complaining about these places, I simply enjoy their natural beauty and their friendly people. Seriously, get a life!

Having lived there is about a fact. — Tarskian

No, I meant that you are delusional in claiming to be well travelled, unlike me.

I had lived in four countries and visited another twenty or so by 12. We used to visit a nice crab restaurant in Johor Bahru.

_{(I'm using "they" to give out less personal information)}

He was most likely complaining about "persecution" by his own family who do not accept his sexual orientation. — Tarskian

Well, no, that's exactly not the case here.
Missing family + friends isn't a perk.
Much like neighboring Brunei, and Saudi Arabia by the way, Malaysia is officially Sunnist.
And so Malaysia lost another smart, kind person for (religion-bound state-sanctioned) humanitarian reasons.

Such is the reality on the ground. — above

This is very helpful.

This everyday kind of ethological hierarchical organisation – the one discussed in its genetic and evolutionary sense of the dominance-submission hierarchies found in social animals – is then sort of hand-wavingly exported — apokrisis

This is not helpful. In the first place "hierarchy" was invented to describe a human social structure. In the second place, it doesn't matter much where the term came from and what it meant in its original home, if the export proves helpful.

You have this notion of "power" as the social good to be distribute. And you mean power in the restricted sense of the power — apokrisis

Well, that description of power is yours, and I'm not at all sure that it is appropriate.

It is just weird how hierarchy is a term of abuse in the anglophone world. — apokrisis

Not all that weird. The term hierarchy most often encountered, as here, in the context of social hierarchies and, in that context, is very often associated with what one might call "one-way", "top-down" hierarchies. These posit one-way communication and control and that is, indeed, at least very often, tyrannical in a social hierarchy. When our leaders stop listening, they become ill-informed and make worse decisions. "Bottom up" communication and support is essential for such structures to work.

You are right that hierarchical structures can be found beyond the context of the social and indeed, the ethological. And its relevance should be evaluated in context. It is not difficult to see that a hierarchical structure might well be the most efficient and effective way of distributing or collecting goods, and so it would not be surprising to find structures like them outside the social context. But a structure that is an efficient and effective way of distributing or collecting things is not necessarily an appropriate way of organizing a society. In fact, the varieties of hierarchies once one starts looking round is positively dizzying; many of them are quite irrelevant to the issues of social hierarchies. I accept that they can work well and are even the best way for us to organize ourselves in certain situations. But in other situations, I very much doubt it.

Western social democracy had this vision of self-actualisation as a cultural good to be distributed evenly to all. Creating a social safety net was what ensured that every person had the same opportunities, if not the same outcomes.
Obviously then along came neo-liberalism as a corruption of that approach. Agency became such a one-sided concept that the social safety net could just be abandoned. A cost to strike off the balance sheet and so leave "everyone richer". — apokrisis

I agree with that analysis. There does seem to have been a crisis in the 1970's, and I think the arrival of neo-liberalism hi-jacked the post-war arrangements. That deserves an account to, though I haven't got one. Perhaps one day. Not that the world is waiting for it.

Human civilisation has raised the game still higher as we now can aspire to delivering "civilisation" as the scalefree good. But then we have to start digging into that to discover what it really means to us. — apokrisis

Yes. I describe that as liberal over-reach. It is a painful echo of the rhetoric of the imperialist age and it's no wonder there has been a push-back, leading to the crisis that we are now living through.

At least until someone comes along with another dumb one-note "good" such as happiness, or virtuousness, or being ethical, or whatever else tends to crop up in utopian fantasies of how a society ought to be run if only they were its dictator. — apokrisis

Yes. Prescriptions for the good life should only ever be offered as recommendations. Modesty, and a genuine interest in the other guy's point of view and respect for it. That builds community, which builds peace, which gives at least the opportunity for people to work out what is the good life for them.

You are right that hierarchical structures can be found beyond the context of the social and indeed, the ethological. — Ludwig V

But I am talking about hierarchy theory as a branch of science and not in that everyday sense.

Hierarchical models have been appearing in increasing numbers in scientific papers in recent years, but without any fully developed reference on these forms. In this paper I aim to remedy this lacuna. My focus is on biology, where both forms of hierarchy have been used, but I have included references from all fields where I have discovered attempts to use these forms.

But I am talking about hierarchy theory as a branch of science and not in that everyday sense. — apokrisis

Yes, you said that before. "pure form".

This paper compares the two known logical forms of hierarchy, both of which have been used in models of natural phenomena, including the biological. I contrast their general properties, internal formal relations, modes of growth (emergence) in applications to the natural world, criteria for applying them, the complexities that they embody, their dynamical relations in applied models, and their informational relations and semiotic aspects. — your link

Not being a mathematician, I'm not qualified to talk about that. But you seem to be talking about applying that pure form to social structures, though I notice that the article considers only applications to the "natural world". I think I'm qualified to talk about social structures, in a philosophical way. Is that not a basis for a conversation?

this polarity is reflected in the design of a rational political architecture — apokrisis

Well, a lot of people have had a go at this. The first person who tried it is probably Plato. It's called utopianism and it is very dangerous. Next thing you know, you will be telling us that it should be imposed on us for our own good. The fact (if it is a fact) that it is a structure that occurs in nature is not a good argument that it should be replicated in human societies. On the other hand, if it is inevitable, in some sense, then it is already here and we can all go home.

The character of the Irish is that they are lazy and so must have their land taken from them so that English capitalists of better character force them to be productive for their own good. — Moliere

Yes. They used the same argument to justify enclosures in England as well. It's a case of finding a weapon, not the truth.

I don't think that we make the same judgment of another person when we say they are incompetent because we're not judging whether their character is such that they are naturally incompetent: it leaves open the possibility of learning, as well as not making inferences about people who are of the same kind having such-and-such a character. — Moliere

"incompetence" is a legalistic term, but it includes permanent conditions like Down's syndrome as well.

I think I'm qualified to talk about social structures, in a philosophical way. Is that not a basis for a conversation? — Ludwig V

The systems view is now moving from thermodynamics and biology to social science and human history. It claims to add mathematical rigour to the conversation. And I endorse this move.

See for example - https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-47681-0

What would it mean to "put slavish souls into a biological category"? — Leontiskos

To say that slaves are essential different from masters due to the kind of creature they are. One could justify saying "this person has a slavish soul" by saying "this person has bad habits that could change", which would be a psychological rather than a biological category. But Aristotle justifies it by tying it to their essence as creatures: their whole teleology is to be bound to a master who directs them in physical labor.

Yes. They used the same argument to justify enclosures in England as well. It's a case of finding a weapon, not the truth. — Ludwig V

Yes! Been reading a book covering some of that time period which is why the example is on my mind.

"incompetence" is a legalistic term, but it includes permanent conditions like Down's syndrome as well — Ludwig V

Okiedoke.

Permanant conditions aren't the same thing as character, I'd say. "The Irish are lazy" is a judgment of a person's character on the basis of class-inclusion: All Irish are lazy. Shane is Irish. Shane is lazy.

"Shane has Down's Syndrome" is a medical classification which may entail various legal things depending on the legal system. Shane has to have various symptoms and a medical professional to prove such things for various legal entailments.

In the former you have policy-wizards dreaming up ways to change the bad character of a group of people. In the latter you have a person that needs to be recognized by a professional body in a different way.

(EDIT: At this point I've relied upon her so much I ought cite her -- https://www.amazon.com/Hijacked-Neoliberalism-against-Workers-Lectures/dp/1009275437)

whenever a civilizer comes along somehow the civilized end up worse off and helping the civilizer live an easier life — Moliere

One of the things about using whole empires as an example is it will be terribly vague whom counts as a civilizer and whom counts as the civilized over the course of an Empire's life. The examples I've used are much smaller than these historical entities to a point that I don't think they're exactly comparable examples.

The history of empires always reads like World History to me.

I'd say my examples are more in the vein of social history.

Just to put some names out there for marking differences of approach -- I don't think we're being so grandiose as to actually be doing history here rather than talking and thinking out loud.

The first question that came to mind was: Were the Greeks better off when the Romans conquered them?

The systems view is now moving from thermodynamics and biology to social science and human history. It claims to add mathematical rigour to the conversation. — apokrisis

You make it sound like the weather. But what you mean is that systems theories are now trying to apply it to social science and human history. Judging by some people, they are more likely to try to impose it. There is always a danger with these projects that you will fit the data to the theory, rather than the other way about. If you start off by saying that only systems theory knows what a hierarchy is, you're in trouble already, because you have defined your data out of existence.

You might like to think about the history of economics. For a long time, it clung to mathematical rigour. But now the limitations are being recognized and different, more humanistic approaches are being developed. Mind you, economics has an inherent limitation, that its predictions are known to the actors and affect their behaviour. The same will apply here.

Mathematical rigour is all very well. In its place.

Mind you, I'm not opposed to systems approaches in principle. So I'm quite happy to await results.

Were the Greeks better off when the Romans conquered them? — Moliere

In a way, yes. Their culture was maintained and cultivated. The once divided city-States unified completely and because of that managed to fight off Eastern invaders for centuries, when it barely managed to do so before that, in the Persian war. Basically, Greece was given a Mediterranean empire for free when, the only time it managed to do something like that, the whole thing collapsed before a single generation passed.

Were the people conquered by the Arabs, Mongols, Turks, Vandals and Huns better off? Absolutely not. It might be for the same reason that those were called barbarians so often in history.

You might like to think about the history of economics. For a long time, it clung to mathematical rigour. But now the limitations are being recognized and different, more humanistic approaches are being developed. — Ludwig V

But that was because economics lacked the larger constraint of a historical perspective on social order. It was concerned with the plumbing of markets in a pure sense and not with why trading and debt systems are characteristic of Homo sapiens since we got going with the hierarchical tribal structures that turned landscapes into customary narratives of foraging.

Economics too is being pulled into this new cross-disciplinary exercise of applying the lens of dissipative structure to an understanding of why our historical arc of development has been what it is.

I simply point out this is something that is happening in current academia. If you want examples, they are abundant.