The Continuum of Privilege within Fractal Cult

Every day the cult becomes more obvious as it’s abuses mount, as it centralizes around a singular sovereign. But we can’t let ourselves be distracted from the fact that the cult predates it’s current version. Indeed, we should understand the current changes not as “a cult taking over” but as “a cult changing shape.”

Let’s look at the transition from the Divine Right of Kings to Liberalism using the Graeber Wengrow domination framework. Prior to Liberalism, a monarch was the seat of sovereignty. That is, the monarch had (sometimes limited) ability to exercise violence. The bureaucracy supported the infrastructure of violence. Competitive politics was not, as far as I’m aware, a major factor in these systems.

The feudal structure was understood as a recursive hierarchy. The king submitted to God, the nobles submitted to the king, lords submitted to their nobles, families of serfs submitted to their lords via the male head of household. Man over woman, noble blood over common blood, god over king, a family of families in submission to the one above it.

You may notice that this model of privilege and power creates a continuum of power. God, being the ultimate power in the universe, delegates all earthly power to the king. The king, the sovereign, is (classically) unbound by any law but rather is the ultimate earthly master of it. The privilege of vassals below decreased with their proximity and service to the sovereign.

The power of the sovereign seems to have come from rituals. It is common to find rituals around the world where individuals may take on temporary absolute or near absolute powers, only to lose them after the ritual is over. It may be, some posit, that this power escaped the temporal restrictions of the ritual to become sovereign cults. The sovereigns of these early cults, those without bureaucracy, were restricted in their ability to express their absolute power to that which could be done with their own bodies.

Pharaohs would work around this by connecting others to themselves. Those who executed their will became part of their families (by name or decree, when not actually being by blood). Early pharaohs, as well as early Chinese emperors, sacrificed members of their court to be buried with them at death. Perhaps the logic to this is connected: the king is the head of this great body, and, if the agents of the king are the limbs, then the whole body must be entombed together.

Through time this mutated. The caste continuums of today are much more complex systems that offers proximity to privilege in exchange for maintaining the order. Participation in the ritual power of the sovereign, perpetuation of the illusion, allows an individual to become an extension of the sovereign. An individual may, based on their proximity, carry out violence against others so long as that violence serves the power of the sovereign. A straight cis white man can enact all sorts of violence against others, can ignore all types of social norms, and can expect police to support him if violence flows in the other direction. Police are essentially above the law in almost all cases.

But this system has been under attack. It has been significantly weakened since the partial success of the Civil Rights Movement. Trump ran on restoring it, perhaps even enhancing it. This is what he meant by “Make America Great Again.” It’s what his supporters still mean. His supporters identify with him, because they gain power through him. They were angry that they had become so limited they couldn’t even tell racist jokes without consequences. Now they can murder protesters and perhaps even be paid well to participate in ethnic cleansing.

But Trump didn’t ever care about his base. He’s using them. He wants a different structure.

Capitalism destabilized the monarchy, which had already been reorganizing for a while. Hierarchy is actually far more complex than the perfect model the monarchy wanted to represent. In reality, it’s a complicated game of balancing power. Dictators and monarchs are not immune.

Liberalism ultimately brought competitive politics into the foreground and transferred sovereignty to the territory rather than the individual. People, under Feudalism, belonged to the sovereign. Liberalism asserted that people belonged to a territory, and the justification for sovereign violence came though those people. In order to control that violence, a ruling class (defined in the US as white male property owners over 21 years of age) would choose from their own. Over time additional restrictions, such as the electoral college, the Senate, and the 3/5 compromise, decreased the democratic potential of the system. Political parties allowed elites to restrict the pool of acceptable candidates, thereby allowing the oligarchy to retain control even while increasing suffrage.

But capitalism eventually evolved it’s own form of competitive politics.

Capitalism, as pointed out in Divine Right of Capital (Marjorie Kelly), took the structure of the monarchy pretty directly into the corporation. Historically, the monarch was the physical manifestation of the state. The corporation itself has legal person-hood, emulating the same structure. Those within the realm of the monarch were functionally property, and so, Marjorie Kelly points out, this leaks through the veil when a corporation is bought or sold. Physical property is listed, but so too is a thing called “good will,” which, she argues (and I think demonstrates quite well in the book), is actually people (employees).

Corporations compete with each other for serfs and vassals, who they use to dominate more of the market and thus to be able to control more people. While we may be more familiar with territorial power, there are several examples of cultures where people were free to choose a ruler from a set of competing nobles within a single territory. Some Pacific Northwest Coastal tribes operated in exactly this way (as discussed at length in Dawn of Everything).

Some Trump supporters have asserted his right to rule comes directly from god. That he is an (imperfect, they admit) instrument of god and therefore has the right to assert his authority as a divine sovereign (following the tradition of such cults). In some ways, Trump does represent an attempt to return to the structure of a feudal hierarchy. He is above the law and the ultimate arbiter of it. He demands loyalty from his subjects. But his form of government emulates the dictatorships that the US has inflicted on Central America.

His rule is predicated on his ability to maintain the total freedom of corporations (and the oligarchs who control them) to do whatever they want. In this hierarchy, Trump is the ultimate authority. His vassals compete with each other for their control over the population, leveraging the wealth they extract to gain his favors. Men are owned by their corporate overlords, and those men, in turn, own their women and children as property. Now, if you think this is somehow an unimaginably radical departure from anything in US history “American values” I’d like to like you to go learn what Johnny Cash’s “Sixteen Tons” is about.