10 thoughts on “EXCELLENT: Neofeudalism: Hierarchical Mimetic Networks in An Unfair Society | by Andrew D. Knapp | Medium”
Neofeudalism is a combination of thinking on the human tendency towards hierarchical social arrangements with the tensions that rent-seeking activity creates. This general organizational tendency is carried forwards in time by mimetic systems — which are re-used and evolve over time, but are path dependent and progressively codify the legitimacy of ownership and authority (both deeply in question in the present).
Despite many egalitarian movements over time, especially as regards religion, hierarchy would appear to be the primary organizational factor that allows ideas and institutions to scale and persist. Hierarchy is also tied to what is broadly called “rent seeking” — using established positions of power to draw benefits without necessarily providing new value. In a state of pure competition profits tend to evaporate, and it is organization and the establishment of barriers that prevent the diffusion of value, with differentiation and protection required to maintain a profitable arrangement over the long-term. Differentiation can include things like scale, quality, and branding, where protection includes having the legal or tactical capacity to hinder a competitor, or the mimetic loyalty of a brand. Examples of the later include patents, a dominant position in a market, or ownership of technical infrastructure that walls out new competitors and ossifies the technical backbone for an economy.
The kernel of Olson’s theory is that stakeholders are incentivized towards collective action to protect their benefits and way of life. These incentives give way to what Olson calls “distribution limiting coalitions” — a union that prevents production in a market or institution in order to maximally preserve the benefits for existing stakeholders. Barber’s licenses are costly because hairstylists would struggle to make ends meet if anyone could go into business with a $30 dollar pair of clippers and a folding chair. Academia is not immune. Tenured professors draw professional salaries while an army of adjuncts and grad students do the work of teaching, grading, and research without meaningful pay and without hope of moving into tenured roles. Similar analogies could be drawn with U.S. housing markets in many states, where new housing construction is deliberately hindered to increase the asset price and rents of existing properties, and where economic opportunity is ossified by a clerical class who legitimizes the arrangement.
This is the same core logic powers what Clayton Christiansen termed the “Innovator’s Dilemma” — where incumbent businesses ossify and refuse to adopt new technologies and methods, not necessarily because they believe their own methods represent the end of history in their category, but because their existing profit model is already established and reworking their offerings would threaten their established modus operandi.
Among the most grounded takes on this topic comes from Roko Mijic, who makes the argument that the current woke model is a lateral mimetic system, rather than a vertical one. In a vertical mimetic system, like religion, values are passed down from one generation to another, and are subject to evolutionary pressure. In a lateral system, values are imposed against the grain of reproduction, meaning they can and often do have effects that run counter to evolutionary survival. Antinatalism (dislike of children and devaluation of reproduction and the family unit) is one such clear cut example.
These institutions are both naturally hierarchical and, to continue an argument, biologically rooted. Dumezil’s core insight was that human beings naturally need a combination of security, provision, and meaning and succeed, and rely on both symbolic and material systems that have been inherited from the past. Further, these systems have natural innate limits to their effectiveness and what domains they can address — they cannot govern by their own power alone, and cannot govern over each other. For example, theocracies naturally stifle commerce and do not govern well (witness the Islamic State). Fascist states stifle commerce and religion (witness mid-20th century Germany), and commercialist states such as 15th century Venice not only failed as empires, they ended up stifling commercial progress to protect the rents of existing stakeholders and industries.
Trinitarian civilizations are a blend of the monotheistic hermeneutic, with one creator god over reality, and an Indo-European heuristic for statecraft and commerce, or method of making prudential decisions within a broader world governed by sovereign god.
Trinitarian societies are an evolution of the trifunctional model, but rather than having each deity express his or her independent will in dynamic tension and at some times in opposition, the trinitarian system focuses on a compatible synergy between the different pillars. It is this particularly Greek mindset, which blended rationality and philosophy with theology and “revelation” — inherited religious text and tradition — that gives us natural law philosophy. This tradition is embodied in Catholic natural law scholarship and the scholastic tradition, with writers such as Thomas Aquinas using an Aristotelian ontological framework to unify faith with other traditions such as statecraft and commerce. The tension of adding a wholy sovereign God to the competing sectors of society was arguably extremely fruitful, as it resulted in norms, education, orthodoxy, and intellectual tensions giving rise to creativity and scientific inquiry. Where many great minds existed in Islamic, Chinese, and other civilizations, it was orthodoxy and challenges to it that arguably empowered the staying power of the scientific method.
The Western system of government evolved in this intellectual milieu, and there are several arguments to this effect. Russel Kirk argues in The Roots of American Order that the American system of government is a blend of these different traditions; the Judeo-Christian model as inherited from Jerusalem, the Greek philosophical ontology, and the Roman model for law and governance. In Kirk’s argument, these traditions were gradually integrated until they became a cohesive mimetic system, which we today refer to as Western Civilization.
The current neoliberal order has relied on deracination and reduction of people to their economic production, rather than their identity as a part of creation or as part of a polity with civic objectives and values. There are riots in the streets because the classical means of governing a hierarchical mimetic system have broken down, with humans reduced to their economic value. Today we have political cults in lieu of a shared civic religion. People want to be safe, prosperous, and have meaningful lives, but deracinated neoliberalism has — advertently or inadvertently — undermined that balance. We cannot oppose marxian revolution by being good neoliberals: neoliberalism and marxism are the problem because they fail to satisfy human needs for security and meaning.
Shawn Eng's Inbox 
Neofeudalism is a combination of thinking on the human tendency towards hierarchical social arrangements with the tensions that rent-seeking activity creates. This general organizational tendency is carried forwards in time by mimetic systems — which are re-used and evolve over time, but are path dependent and progressively codify the legitimacy of ownership and authority (both deeply in question in the present).
LikeLike
Despite many egalitarian movements over time, especially as regards religion, hierarchy would appear to be the primary organizational factor that allows ideas and institutions to scale and persist. Hierarchy is also tied to what is broadly called “rent seeking” — using established positions of power to draw benefits without necessarily providing new value. In a state of pure competition profits tend to evaporate, and it is organization and the establishment of barriers that prevent the diffusion of value, with differentiation and protection required to maintain a profitable arrangement over the long-term. Differentiation can include things like scale, quality, and branding, where protection includes having the legal or tactical capacity to hinder a competitor, or the mimetic loyalty of a brand. Examples of the later include patents, a dominant position in a market, or ownership of technical infrastructure that walls out new competitors and ossifies the technical backbone for an economy.
LikeLike
The kernel of Olson’s theory is that stakeholders are incentivized towards collective action to protect their benefits and way of life. These incentives give way to what Olson calls “distribution limiting coalitions” — a union that prevents production in a market or institution in order to maximally preserve the benefits for existing stakeholders. Barber’s licenses are costly because hairstylists would struggle to make ends meet if anyone could go into business with a $30 dollar pair of clippers and a folding chair. Academia is not immune. Tenured professors draw professional salaries while an army of adjuncts and grad students do the work of teaching, grading, and research without meaningful pay and without hope of moving into tenured roles. Similar analogies could be drawn with U.S. housing markets in many states, where new housing construction is deliberately hindered to increase the asset price and rents of existing properties, and where economic opportunity is ossified by a clerical class who legitimizes the arrangement.
LikeLike
This is the same core logic powers what Clayton Christiansen termed the “Innovator’s Dilemma” — where incumbent businesses ossify and refuse to adopt new technologies and methods, not necessarily because they believe their own methods represent the end of history in their category, but because their existing profit model is already established and reworking their offerings would threaten their established modus operandi.
LikeLike
Among the most grounded takes on this topic comes from Roko Mijic, who makes the argument that the current woke model is a lateral mimetic system, rather than a vertical one. In a vertical mimetic system, like religion, values are passed down from one generation to another, and are subject to evolutionary pressure. In a lateral system, values are imposed against the grain of reproduction, meaning they can and often do have effects that run counter to evolutionary survival. Antinatalism (dislike of children and devaluation of reproduction and the family unit) is one such clear cut example.
LikeLike
These institutions are both naturally hierarchical and, to continue an argument, biologically rooted. Dumezil’s core insight was that human beings naturally need a combination of security, provision, and meaning and succeed, and rely on both symbolic and material systems that have been inherited from the past. Further, these systems have natural innate limits to their effectiveness and what domains they can address — they cannot govern by their own power alone, and cannot govern over each other. For example, theocracies naturally stifle commerce and do not govern well (witness the Islamic State). Fascist states stifle commerce and religion (witness mid-20th century Germany), and commercialist states such as 15th century Venice not only failed as empires, they ended up stifling commercial progress to protect the rents of existing stakeholders and industries.
LikeLike
Trinitarian civilizations are a blend of the monotheistic hermeneutic, with one creator god over reality, and an Indo-European heuristic for statecraft and commerce, or method of making prudential decisions within a broader world governed by sovereign god.
LikeLike
Trinitarian societies are an evolution of the trifunctional model, but rather than having each deity express his or her independent will in dynamic tension and at some times in opposition, the trinitarian system focuses on a compatible synergy between the different pillars. It is this particularly Greek mindset, which blended rationality and philosophy with theology and “revelation” — inherited religious text and tradition — that gives us natural law philosophy. This tradition is embodied in Catholic natural law scholarship and the scholastic tradition, with writers such as Thomas Aquinas using an Aristotelian ontological framework to unify faith with other traditions such as statecraft and commerce. The tension of adding a wholy sovereign God to the competing sectors of society was arguably extremely fruitful, as it resulted in norms, education, orthodoxy, and intellectual tensions giving rise to creativity and scientific inquiry. Where many great minds existed in Islamic, Chinese, and other civilizations, it was orthodoxy and challenges to it that arguably empowered the staying power of the scientific method.
LikeLike
The Western system of government evolved in this intellectual milieu, and there are several arguments to this effect. Russel Kirk argues in The Roots of American Order that the American system of government is a blend of these different traditions; the Judeo-Christian model as inherited from Jerusalem, the Greek philosophical ontology, and the Roman model for law and governance. In Kirk’s argument, these traditions were gradually integrated until they became a cohesive mimetic system, which we today refer to as Western Civilization.
LikeLike
The current neoliberal order has relied on deracination and reduction of people to their economic production, rather than their identity as a part of creation or as part of a polity with civic objectives and values. There are riots in the streets because the classical means of governing a hierarchical mimetic system have broken down, with humans reduced to their economic value. Today we have political cults in lieu of a shared civic religion. People want to be safe, prosperous, and have meaningful lives, but deracinated neoliberalism has — advertently or inadvertently — undermined that balance. We cannot oppose marxian revolution by being good neoliberals: neoliberalism and marxism are the problem because they fail to satisfy human needs for security and meaning.
LikeLike