The Art of Hiding Pebbles
Here's how hope dies: first as a promise and then as a compliance report. A reformer gets elected to fix a nation's broken system. Vox populi vox dei and all that. Change you can believe in! Once "in power," the reformer discovers the throne is mostly theatre. The new team's earnest efforts drown in bureaucracy - endless task groups and committees, piling plans and proposals, all eager to help, yet nothing moves. The old state machine grinds on, indifferent. An invisible windowpane somehow stops positive change from happening, as if a shadowy system existed beyond and beneath the visible levers of power. The result? Not reform, but more of the same - only heavier, slower, worse. We promised less of x and more of y; we delivered x+2=y. You know the story. Many such cases.
After a while, if you're of the noticer persuasion, you start noticing this fascinating paradox repeating itself, and you start wondering. Is there some system you're missing in all of this? Some complex machine hidden deep in the edifice of government. Suppose you assume this obscure, shadowy system is somewhere there, blocking reform. Where do you begin looking for it? The default route is to ask the experts. They will surely know. But, you say, the experts live in an echo chamber of faulty assumptions, longstanding biases, and manipulated data. Science denier, are you anon?
Alternatively, you could work from first principles. The deductive option is to disassemble the obscure system into its components and figure out their functionality and role in the larger whole. As much as you'd like deconstructing things, it would not do, as you don't have access to the obscure system apart from your observation and pattern recognition skills. Induction, then. You can infer the system's purpose and general functionality from observing its impacts. Watch the shadows it casts, the ripples in reality.
Sometimes, this would be enough. But, as we discussed in The Naked King Spell, the purpose of a system is what it does. Therefore, if a system seeks to hide, it must first hide its true actions - its purpose leaks through them. In other words, what if this system wears a mask? Determining what a system is actually doing can often be challenging, particularly if it obfuscates its operations to appear as something else entirely. The system might purposely generate synthetic shadows to convince you these are not the droids you seek. Again, many such cases.
You can overcome this problem by focusing on the other end of the equation and examining how the system feeds itself, that is, on its energy source. A system's energy source determines its internal structure and interactions with the external environment. Obscuring actions is relatively easy - muddy the waters and the trail vanishes. Hiding the energy source is more complicated because it must, by definition, exist outside the system, leaving a trace as it interfaces with the system's logistics.
For example, if you're observing a system that gets its energy from livestock - say, cattle - that system will likely have organized itself for optimal control over the pastoral lifecycle. It cannot be otherwise because cattle is that system's most precious resource. You can then safely deduce you're dealing with a pastoral nomad society with all the cultural, economic, and political implications that follow.
Similarly, a system that gets its energy from agriculture will organize and act differently from a system feeding itself on industrial production. An agricultural society's most precious resource is land, and it would, therefore, organize the entirety of its cultural, economic, and political protocols around control over the lifecycle of land. Not so for an industrial society, which has to organize itself around the capitalization, production, distribution and consumption of assembly line output at scale.
Alternatively, suppose the primary energy source of a system comes from government subsidies or government agency contracts. In that case, that system will structure itself to control and maximize energy input from the government acting as its energy source. Now consider a mafia network fed by racketeering and drugs. This system will optimize itself to control territorial monopolies and manipulate fear and loyalty among its operators and victims. Its routines will revolve around securing supply chains, silencing threats, and evading law enforcement - every action aligned with sustaining its energy source.
A system's source of energy reveals its structure and goals. Cattle? You've got nomadic Männerbünde. Land? Farmers and feudalism. Factories? Assembly line labor, capital accumulation, and consumerism. State subsidies? Extension of parasitic bureaucracy. Racketeering and drugs? Mafia.
You don't need to trace how the system spends all its energy; you only need to understand its energy source. A system's energy source reveals its objectives and operational methods, what it wants to control, and what it has to affect in its environment. Therefore, identifying a system's primary energy source allows you to determine the vector along which it aims to control its environment. This, in turn, will allow you to understand what the system actually does.
Energy defines purpose. Purpose defines control. Control defines action.
Power
In simple systems - a warband, for instance - power is acclamation. An Achilles, Agamemnon, or Odysseus rises as chief. His power is a function of the warband's will, performed continuously by its actions. Imagine the warband as a network of actors whose agency is necessary for generating and performing that power. Various technologies are also part of the network performing it. When the warband tames horses or invents the chariot - as an anon Sintashta warband once did - they dramatically extend the scale of its raids. The warband now extracts tribute from a vast area, and the chieftain's wealth grows; people now say that his power has grown to extend over the vast tribute area.
In systems, power is not force. Confusing the two is a common mistake. Force is the applied effect of power, not its cause. Take the warband chief: his power isn't in breaking skulls but in the band acting as though his word breaks skulls. Imagine the anon Sintashta band that invented chariots. Its chief's power wasn't in the chariots and their speed - these are just the vectors along which his power is applied as a force. His power is in the raiders, blacksmiths, horses, and chariots aligned as a network applying force against the farmers who must pay tribute. And yes, as long as the farmers pay their tribute, they also perform the network of power.
The chief's power has always been an afterglow of the warband's (the network's) dynamic performance of a specific set of routines across the scale of the network's surface. The more intricate, complex, and synchronized these routines, the more pervasive and stable the power seems. When the warband stops performing it, the chief loses his power. A new chief is elected and now sits in his place. What happened to the old chief's power? It seemed so vast and impressive when he wielded it. How did it disappear? These are the wrong questions to ask, as the power never resided with a specific chief in the first place.
Power is a network phenomenon - an effect of the warband's routines, maneuvers, and alignment. To understand the power, you must understand the dynamics of the network that generates it. From the network's perspective, what we perceive as power is a function of a series of maneuvers and mundane routines enacted by the network's actors. The phenomenon we call power is the effect of that consistent and ongoing performance, not its cause. Yet, we commonly attribute to it causal properties. When the warband network is aligned perfectly, we say its chief has power. One can even observe how that power is wielded, generating the impression of causality. The chief issues an order, and it is executed. Someone, somewhere, experiences the force of the chief's power and has to either resist or yield to it.
The warband may grow to tens of thousands of warriors, making us marvel at the power of its chieftain. Perhaps now he is dressed in royal garments, wields a scepter, and wears a crown. Surely, the crown and scepter are where the power resides. After all, when the chieftain dies, we put the crown on the new chief; long live the chief!
But then, drop this "powerful" chief into enemy territory with his crown and scepter. What is he now? A victim in funny clothes. Like Delaroche's painting of Napoleon at St. Helena, the ruler of Europe reduced to a sad man in an out-of-place uniform, forlorn on an ocean rock. How confusing when the mighty fall. Wasn't he powerful?
The confusion is in the causative flow of agency - the chief never had power; rather, power had him. It seems counterintuitive that the seemingly causative source of power is, in fact, the effect of a long chain of relations that have to be continuously aligned, upheld, and performed. Power is the effect of that long network chain performing it, not the cause.
As an aside, this is why oppressive states love atomized individuals and fear and suppress independent networks - the latter can exercise power, while the former cannot. Contrary to appearances, individualism is a totalitarian state's favorite ideology for the masses. Yes, anon, be all you can be, but don't think about organizing a sovereign männerbund, church, commune, labor union, religion, or militia. Those are all bad for you. Your extended family and clan are bad for you as well - they oppress you, you see. Be yourself, be free! So much freedom is to be had when you abandon all these tools of oppression! Anyways.
The network-generated power principle scales in complex systems. The modern state operates no differently with its labyrinth of systems and routines. Here, too, power flows from the network of bureaucrats, filing protocols, intranet switches, three-letter agencies, drab brutalist buildings, and countless alignment subroutines. These actors perform state power, weaving it from mundane interactions and alignments. Networks within networks, actors upon actors, an ephemeral field guiding the visible hand. Do you understand the reformer's confusion?
In a warband, the power-generating network is pretty clear - warriors, raids, tribute, feasts, long live the chief. Simple. But scale it up, and clarity dissolves. In large systems, scale adds efficiency and complexity up to a point, after which the system has to choose whether to retain adaptability or keep scaling up with efficiency. State bureaucracies rely on a government's budget - seemingly bottomless until it isn't - and always opt for the least efficient mode of complexity, which diffuses and abstracts the power-generating network. A warband's chain of actions is short - kill, take, divide, repeat. The modern state's chain is labyrinthine, stretched across countless systems, actors, and subroutines. Each piece performs a fragment of the whole, and no single actor sees the entire picture.
From the reformer's perspective, sitting at the "command center" of the system, its subroutine chains are so abstracted and obfuscated as to appear self-perpetuating. The reformer seems to rule, appoint people at all key departments, sign things, and issue executive orders but is, in fact, a function of the very machine they are supposed to reform. The reformer's power is a function of the network they aim to dismantle - a contradiction from the start. In turn, the network has no interest in its undoing and resists the reformer at every step. It absorbs, redirects, and stalls, ensuring that reform dies before it begins. Sounds familiar?
The Art of Hiding Pebbles
People imagine the deep state as an omniscient shadow bureaucracy - unelected, unsupervised, corrupt, all-seeing, and surgically competent. The esoteric alphabet agency from a Jason Bourne film. This shadowy, all-powerful enemy is a beloved trope of all serious conspiracy theories. We're resisting a 5000-year-old death cult anon, the final red pill! This is such a comforting story - it helps order the chaos and noise of reality into a neat victim narrative with heroic individualist overtones. There's nothing you can do, but now you're one of the few who know about these things.
However, there is nothing deep about a bureaucrat. Have you not seen one? Bureaucracies are neither deep nor competent; they are inertia-bound self-reproducing machines focused on their own expansion while growing less and less efficient over time. Like a tapeworm. Left unchecked, a bureaucracy invariably drags down the system it is supposed to serve into a Red Queen Trap.
When communism fell in Eastern Europe, the formal state structures of the entire oppressive apparatus remained. The following day, department names were changed, seals were swapped, and red stars were painted over. The bureaucrats were still there, yet their power was gone. Why? Again, because power doesn't live in people, titles, desks, or badges. It lives in network alignment - the chains of routines, actors, and energy flows that generate it. Once that alignment fractures, yesterday's power structure becomes a row of imposing brutalist buildings housing sex shops, with its top operatives peddling hair loss treatments in late-night infomercials.
There is no deep state; there is deep power.
Chesterton once noted that a wise man hides his pebbles on the beach, among countless others. Deep power follows the same principle. There is no deep state; there are networks performing their routines while concealing their actions and, to the extent that they can, their energy sources. Where would you hide a network of profound influence? In plain sight, among a thousand mundane ones. Within the complex edifice of the modern state, these networks are like a pebble hidden on a pebble beach.
Take the tax office - everyone's favorite bureaucracy. On the surface, it shuffles papers and collects revenue. Beneath that, its routines generate energy to feed a broader network - the state. Now imagine another vastly smaller network, hidden across tax offices, forestry departments, alphabet agencies, universities, corporations, and opposition parties while skimming off their revenue energy feed. Its survival depends on appearing as unremarkable as a beach pebble. It thrives because it blends in.
Obfuscation is not just a simple tactic; it is the network's primary survival mechanism. Networks that generate deep power obfuscate their actions and hide their energy sources in complexity, bureaucracy, or layers of plausible deniability. Depending on their environment, they can be expected to dedicate resources to generating the synthetic shadows I mentioned earlier. These shadows are designed not just to mislead but to exhaust your ability to discern reality.
How did Nabokov put it?
"A shadow of a waxwing slain / by the false azure in the windowpane."
Another benefit of synthetic shadow-casting is that when deep networks apply force, the source of that force is always obscure: an unknown perpetrator, a synthetic terror group, or a lone gunman. Sad! If you understand this, you see why the reformer's attacks against the visible structure of the state rarely achieve meaningful results. The visible structure is camouflage for the networks generating deep power. Deep power networks are the reformer's primary target. However, striking the networks is only possible after identifying their energy source and disrupting the flows that sustain it. Even then, the reformer must focus on disrupting the networks' routines and alignment.
And so, the reformer swings at shadows. If they're smart, they quickly realize it's easier - and safer - that way. The deep power network hides dispersed behind innocent office doors, audit reports, and coffee-stained memos, with closely aligned force just an arm away. Lean too close, and you'll feel the false azure's breath on your neck. So many such cases.
So, how do you fight a deep power network? Usually, you don't because you're not part of a network generating enough power. But, if you have the network to back you up, there are two primary ways of dealing with it. The Stalin way: clear almost every pebble from the beach and seed it with new pebbles. That way, no matter how well camouflaged and distributed the deep power network is, enough of its nodes get misaligned to disrupt it. Alternatively, the FDR way: build another, much larger pebble beach and route all energy flows to it. That way, the deep power network's energy sources, routines, and alignment are disrupted at once by the alignment of a much more extensive network.
Both options are very costly. The first leads to direct network confrontation, weakening the system or tearing it apart. The second buries the system under new burdens, leaving it no options but to seek new energy in expansion. Rome tried both. Sulla put in place the first, buying the system a generation of peace followed by two more civil wars. Octavian put in place the second, condemning the system to expand in search of new energy until it could not - and collapsed irreversibly. In the end, no matter the method, a new pebble joins the beach, and the game begins anew.
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I enjoyed the analysis, but was disappointed by the conclusion. Is the key point that attempting to reform or disassemble the deep state is a fool's errand?