I was tempted to just now purchase Mann’s book, but it turns out to be a multi-volume set, so for now I’ll be content with AI summaries and the impressions of others (especially yours). Anyway, in a recent parallel thread in this community, I challenged the discussion with these questions:
“The question that draws me is what is the source of power? Who has it? Why do they have it? How might others obtain it?”
Sounds similar to Michael Mann’s research agenda! I’d love to engage with his specific model. My guess is it would lead to some specific refinements in my thinking, but not likely a root and branch paradigm shift. My original college major was history (studied first in the 1970s and 80s), so I’ve done my fair share of reading in political science and the social sciences. Alternative models of power have been on my radar for awhile. As I noted in some other reply about your model and its sources, my master architecture for what I read and think about is complex adaptive systems theory. My current read on “power” is a function of that thinking.
What follows now is ad lib, and I’m making it up as I go along … I just now asked my unconscious to serve up a mediation on “power”. Those cooks are now busy in the back of the house, so lets’ see what they serve up!
As a first cut on “power”, let’s begin with energy. That is, “energy” as defined by standard Western physics. We human consume calories and output behavior. No calories, no behavior. So armies march on their stomachs and so forth … Nate Hagens has posted 10 years of podcasts about the “carbon pulse” and the captured sunlight slave power we currently use to replace the human and animal slave power more typical of pre-industrial societies. In a strange way, Donald Trump, who weeps bitter tears at the loss of precious Russian oil refineries, but cares little about human casualties in Kiev, has arrived at a parallel conclusion. Of course, Trump got his insight the hard way by wrecking global oil markets with dubious military action in the Persian Gulf. I just read books and listened to podcasts. So Trump and I differ on that dimension, and a few others … Peter Pogany is the author who has told me the most about how energy feeds what he calls GLOPPE - global population plus economy. (This is similar to what Hagens calls the “superorganism”. ) Where there is energy, there is entropy. So perpetual GDP growth on a finite planet, with negative feedback loops to using the atmosphere as a carbon sink, makes conventional economic development models out of sync with more comprehensive, holistic world models. Energy supply - and the physical feedback loops for consuming that energy supply - is a non-negotiable boundary for power in its other dimensions.
Then comes the question, in a bounded world, who gets the energy sources that remain available? The Trump model is to use military superiority so seize oil from other places, burn more coal, and achieve both military and energy “dominance”. Suddenly needing to purchase Russian diesel to keep prices down (a commodity Russia is no position to actually ship), shows the superficiality of this approach. MAGA is consuming and undermining its own sources of power at an alarming rate, so all of my strategizing is for the upcoming post-Trump world, the first light of which is beginning to break even as we discuss here … China, by contrast, is moving to become the greatest global electro-state. Given that imported oil is a strategic liability for China, and solar, hydro, and so on can be locally sourced, it just makes sense. Moreover, China is investing heavily in science (while Trump defunds science), so advantage China in that dimension. Carney’s “middle power” strategy likewise involves poaching research talent from US. US expat scholars everywhere else? To some extent! In any case brain power is power too, because it is useful for both generating and directing other forms of power. The one oil monopoly the US truly enjoys is technical drilling expertise. Trump could have more economically left the aircraft carriers in their ports. The world will come calling for US engineers to revive oil fields in any case.
So why is a dubious figure like Trump making decisions for the US in the first place? Let’s call it - the power of persuasion. There are fancier terms - Habermas for example talks about “performative” speech - but essentially, talking other people into doing things allows one to have an impact on the world. It’s tempting from the Trump case, then, to imagine that the most shameless con artist will always win. However, on deeper levels, (I get a lot of this by reading Habermas and parallel sources) humans have learned from pragmatic experience, so culture has a way of calling BS on the pretensions of self-proclaimed god-kings and others of that ilk. So yes … propaganda, ideology, advertising, AI in your social media feed … it’s all a power play. Habermas’s “colonization”. But let’s look at it this way - Hitler did not lose his war because Goebbels failed in his propagandistic mission.
If anything, Goebbels did his job too well, inspiring his boss to fatal overreach. The USSR did not collapse due to shortage of propaganda. It collapsed due to a shortage of believable propaganda. There comes a point in which actual human experience - Habermas’s lifewor;d - provides immunity against colonizing messaging from the powers that be. Putin can fill all Russian airwaves about how great the “special military operation” is going, while Russians shiver in the winter. Russian winters have a persuasive power of their own.
My use of Karatani’s Captial-Nation-State model is my way of saying what Micheal Mann said at much greater length - that “power” is distributed across multiple interlocking systems, each with their own reinforcing feedback loops. Trump lurches from one mono-power model to the other, squandering all forms of it in a highly inefficient process. Carney in Canada has a better grasp of what it takes. In sheer geopolitical mass, the US should win that fight. My best guess is, it won’t. Those who wish to construct an updated rules-based global order (Pogany’s GS3) will need better models and better powers of persuasion. Those skills are what I’m practicing right here, right now. Consider this post a training montage.