Ancient Rome is correctly noted for its production of highly skilled individuals. But despite no shortage of talent, they often struggled with transferring power to these leaders.
Their surprising solution was the practice of adult adoption
The succession problem has two components: skill succession and power succession.
A successor must be sufficiently skilled to pilot the institution they will lead. They must also have enough power to actually lead it.
Succession can fail on either or even both.
3/n
The Romans did not seem to have much trouble with skill succession: they never lacked for sufficiently talented individuals to lead their institutions and armies.
But perhaps precisely due to this surfeit, competition for power often became protracted and violent.
4/n
In other words, the Romans had solved skill succession, but they had not solved power succession.
Messy transitions of power are a good thing, if only because seemingly necessary, through a strictly Darwinian lens.
But they are not inevitable.
5/n
In later Roman society, adoption wasn’t only a means to help orphans.
Instead, it was used to adopt adult men as social and legal heirs, allowing them to inherit your position.
In other words, your dynasty didn’t need to end with your bloodline - or with bloodshed.
6/n
The cleverest thing about this practice was that it allowed an incredible social alchemy:
By adopting a rising younger rival, you could turn him from an enemy into your closest ally!
Now, his incentives would be in favor of maintaining and expanding your own power.
7/n
A similar practice called “mukoyoshi” can be found in modern Japan, where a son-in-law is chosen by a businessman primarily for his skill at running the family business.
Institutions are full of automated systems—bureaucratic procedures—which dominate outward institutional appearance. More often than not, these systems persist far longer than their designers do. Focusing on them obscures the true, underlying sources of institutional health.
2/n
Moreover, institutions often lean on outside institutions. That a bank branch is able to pay a utility to keep its lights on tells us nothing about the bank’s own functionality; we should generalize this observation to a broad range of core features that may be outsourced.
3/n
Competition for power unfolds over a strategic landscape.
As I explained in Empire Theory Part I, we can split this landscape into three power classes: high, mid, and low. In Part II, I illustrate how these classes vie for power:
Even those aligned on overall ends may choose to compete over power.
But with competition comes coordination; the dance between the two defines the landscape. Even unaligned actors may be induced to coordinate against others.
2/n
I go into detail about each interaction in the piece, but the tense interaction between mid and high is the most important part of the analysis.
The main variable is resources. High must incentivize mid not to raid the resources concentrated at the top.
3/n
The Forgotten Revolution: How science was born in 300 BC and Why it Had To Be Reborn by Lucio Russo
It has proven a good companion for my morning coffee.
1/n
Part of my thesis on Intellectual Dark Matter is that many of the momentus intellectual and ideological developments of the last three hundred years happened in previous civilizations as well.
2/n
"The naive idea that progress is a one-way flow automatically powered by scientific development could never have taken hold, as it did during the 1800s if the ancient defeat of science was not forgotten." p2
3/n
The flip-side of the Internet being a surveillance technology is that the Internet is also a communications technology.
In 2020, it is obvious how much personal, social, and political life has been thoroughly subsumed into the Internet. At scale, we have a new social world.
In this essay, I argue that the most impactful individuals in history all did so by founding functional institutions. Great Founder Theory proceeds from this:
Most institutions are non-functional. This does not necessarily mean that the buildings are on fire or that layoffs are expected. Rather, most non-functional institutions are merely inadequately imitating functional institutions.
2/n
In a non-functional institution, everyone works towards the same socially-rewarded goals, rather than doing specialized work that combines to achieve the institution’s nominal function, such as winning wars or generating profits.
3/n