Theory of Indivisibility: The Evolution of Power-Over Systems

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Theory of Indivisibility Publications

12 min readJan 15, 2022

This publication corresponds with Episode 3 of my podcast Theory of Indivisibility where I talk about the evolution of power. Be sure to check it out on Google Podcast, Apple Podcast, Spotify, or Stitcher!

In my previous articles, Evolution: How Did We Get Here? (Part 1) and (Part 2), we discussed the evolution of all things including human life starting from the origins of our universe. I provided several evolutionary highlights from the first 13.8 billion years of the observable universes existence.

In line with our exploration of the evolution of all things, this article is about power structures and how they came to be. A thorough understanding of evolution is really important for understanding our world because it puts everything into its proper context. The work I am doing in my Theory of Indivisibility project is an evolutionary process as well, so I highly recommend starting from the first piece I posted, as well as listening to my podcast starting from Episode 1, if you haven’t already done so.

Like everything else in the observable universe, our social systems have evolved since the first homo sapiens appeared on earth 300k years ago. Power, in a social context, can be defined as the ability of an individual to influence the behavior of others. Power in society is dynamic and complex. It has different meanings depending on context and it has been the driving force behind the evolution of our social systems.

Here are three terms for different types of power that you’ll need to know moving forward:

Power-to: individual agency, personal choices, individual abilities, strengths, weaknesses etc.
Power-with: how individuals use their power to collaborate with others.
Power-over: how individuals use power to control others.

Evolutionary origins of Power

According to archeologists, prior to the agricultural revolution, humans did not live in societies stratified along the lines of wealth, social status, gender, and power. For the previous approximately 290,000 years of homo-sapiens existence as a species, our ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers in egalitarian societies. Egalitarian societies are characterized by having social and economic equality amongst all the people. In pre-agricultural societies, hunter-gatherers lived nomadic lives and depended heavily on one another for survival. Everyone had a role and they shared all the responsibilities and resources in a collaborative way (i.e. power-with).

Much of what archeologists infer about hunter-gatherers is based on research about modern hunter-gatherer tribes. Those who’ve never been touched by “civilization”. Here is an excerpt from an article written in Psychology Today by evolutionary biologist and research professor at Boston College Dr. Peter Grey,

“During the twentieth century, anthropologists discovered and studied dozens of different hunter-gatherer societies, in various remote parts of the world, who had been nearly untouched by modern influences. Wherever they were found — in Africa, Asia, South America, or elsewhere; in deserts or in jungles — these societies had many characteristics in common. The people lived in small bands, of about 20 to 50 persons (including children) per band, who moved from camp to camp within a relatively circumscribed area to follow the available game and edible vegetation. The people had friends and relatives in neighboring bands and maintained peaceful relationships with neighboring bands. Warfare was unknown to most of these societies, and where it was known it was the result of interactions with warlike groups of people who were not hunter-gatherers. In each of these societies, the dominant cultural ethos was one that emphasized individual autonomy, non-directive childrearing methods, nonviolence, sharing, cooperation, and consensual decision-making. Their core value, which underlay all of the rest, was that of the equality of individuals.

We citizens of a modern democracy claim to believe in equality, but our sense of equality is not even close that of hunter-gatherers. The hunter-gatherer version of equality meant that each person was equally entitled to food, regardless of his or her ability to find or capture it; so food was shared. It meant that nobody had more wealth than anyone else; so all material goods were shared. It meant that nobody had the right to tell others what to do; so each person made his or her own decisions. It meant that even parents didn’t have the right to order their children around; It meant that group decisions had to be made by consensus; hence no boss, “big man,” or chief.

If just one anthropologist had reported all this, we might assume that he or she was a starry-eyed romantic who was seeing things that weren’t really there, or was a liar. But many anthropologists, of all political stripes, regarding many different hunter-gatherer cultures, have told the same general story.
When you read about “warlike primitive tribes,” or about indigenous people who held slaves, or about tribal cultures with gross inequalities between men and women, you are not reading about band hunter-gatherers. The hunter-gatherer way of life, unlike the agricultural way of life that followed it, apparently depended on intense cooperation and sharing, backed up by a strong egalitarian ethos.” (Gray, 2011).

So why and how did humans change?

Why did people go from power-with to power-over social systems?

In short…population growth.

During the agricultural revolution 10,000–12,000 years ago, power-over social systems took root when humans developed the ability to form settlements because of farming practices that allowed them to grow and store larger quantities of food. A more sedentary lifestyle followed, which created a need for new social systems to emerge around organizing the growing populations and protecting food and resources.

Over the course of tens of thousands of years, as societies grew from bands (dozens of people) to tribes (hundreds of people), from tribes to chiefdoms (thousands of people), and from chiefdoms to states (50,000 or more people), power became consolidated. Control over land, food, and protection from competing tribes became a means by which rulers and an elite class of people began to wield power over commoners in a variety of ways.

To provide deeper insights into how systems of power-over and control evolved, I’m going to share an excerpt from a book entitled, The Parable of Tribes by Andrew Schmookler. In this book, Schmookler analyzes the problem of power in social evolution by synthesizing history, evolutionary biology, political theory, and psychology.

“In nature, all pursue survival for themselves and their kind. But they can do so only within biologically evolved limits. The living order of nature, though it has no ruler, is not in the least anarchic. Each pursues a kind of self- interest, each is a law unto itself, but the separate interests and laws have been formed over eons of natural selection to form part of a tightly ordered harmonious system. Although the state of nature involves struggle, the struggle is part of an order. Each component of the living system has a defined place out of which no ambition can extricate it. Hunting- gathering societies were to a very great extent likewise contained by natural limits.”
“With the rise of civilizations, the limits began to fall away for humans. The natural self-interest and pursuit of survival remain, but they are no longer governed by any order. The new civilized forms of society, with more complex social and political structures, created the new possibility of indefinite social expansion: more and more people organized over more and more territory. In a finite world, societies all seeking to escape death- dealing scarcity through expansion will inevitably come to confront each other. Civilized societies, therefore, though lacking inherent limitations to their growth, do encounter new external limits — in the form of one another.”
The parable…
“Imagine a group of tribes living within reach of one another. If all choose the way of peace, then all may live in peace. But what if all but one choose peace, and that one is ambitious for expansion and conquest? What can happen to the others when confronted by an ambitious and potent neighbor? Perhaps one tribe is attacked and defeated, its people destroyed and its lands seized for the use of the victors. Another is defeated, but this one is not exterminated; rather, it is subjugated and transformed to serve the conqueror. A third seeking to avoid such disaster flees from the area into some inaccessible (and undesirable) place, and its former homeland becomes part of the growing empire of the power-seeking tribe. Let us suppose that others observing these developments decide to defend themselves in order to preserve themselves and their autonomy. But the irony is that successful defense against a power-maximizing aggressor requires a society to become more like the society that threatens it. Power can be stopped only by power, and if the threatening society has discovered ways to magnify its power through innovations in organization or technology (or whatever), the defensive society will have to transform itself into something more like its foe in order to resist the external force.”
“This parable is a theory of social evolution which shows that power is like a contaminant, a disease, which once introduced will gradually, yet inexorably, become universal in the systems of competing societies. More important than the inevitability of the struggle for power are the profound social consequences of that struggle once it begins.
Humans inadvertently stumbled into a struggle for power beyond their ability to avoid or stop. This struggle generated a selective process, also beyond human control, which molded change in a direction that was inevitable — toward power maximization in human societies.” (Schmookler, 1994)

Hence, power-over systems are born…let’s look again at that last sentence:

“This struggle generated a selective process, also beyond human control, which molded change in a direction that was inevitable — toward power maximization in human societies.”

What does the author mean by “selective process”?

Selective process refers to the scientific concept known as natural selection, initially theorized by Charles Darwin in his theory of evolution. In short, natural selection means that individuals best adapted to their environments are more likely to survive and reproduce.

Basically, the author is stating that this initial struggle for power required some tribes to protect themselves against more aggressive tribes, which set in motion the creation of systems of power maximization (i.e. power-over & control). Over time, these systems of power evolved to play a role in the development of cultural norms (i.e. social systems) as populations grew from bands and tribes to the larger civilizations of chiefdoms, and then states.

Why does the author state that this was “beyond human control”?

Why did he say that it was inevitable?

His statements are rooted in Systems Thinking.

Systems Thinking teaches us that structure influences behavior. This means that the design of a system causes its dysfunction, not individual human choices or mistakes. The design of a system has more power over an individual’s behavior than an individual’s personal choices alone. A lot of people push back against this…but think about it…why do so many people go to jobs they hate everyday? Because, for those who desire to meet their basic needs and live relatively comfortably, the design of our economic system requires it.

Systemic structures produce behavior, and changing underlying structures can produce different patterns of behavior.

Here is an example for you to visualize…

In the book Thinking In Systems, Donella Meadows explains how she uses a slinky when teaching the concept of systems thinking…

She asks students to imagine that she holds a slinky in the palm of her hand. Then she asks them to imagine she grabs the top of the slinky with her other hand and pulls her bottom hand away. She asks, “What will happen next?”…

The lower end of the slinky drops and then yo-yos up and down. “What made the slinky bounce up and down like that?” she asks students.

“Your hand. You took away your hand,” her students would say.

Then she’d pick up the box the slinky came in, hold it the same way, and repeat the same actions. When she removes her bottom hand from the box, nothing happens. The box just stays there suspended between the fingers of her top hand. Let’s think about the question again…what made the slinky bounce up and down?

Ponder that question.

The answer lies within the slinky. The hands that manipulate it either suppress or release behavior that is latent within the structure of the slinky.

Once we begin to see the relationship between structure (how a system is designed) and behavior (the results a system consistently produces based on its design) we can begin to understand how our social systems work, what makes them continually produce dysfunctional results, and how to shift them into healthier behavior patterns.

As the slinky example illustrates, a system may be manipulated or triggered by outside forces, but the system’s response to these forces is characteristic of the system itself. The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior. An outside force or event may unleash a behavior, but the same outside event applied to a different system (i.e. the slinky box) is likely to produce a different result.

When systems of power-over and control evolve, so do systems of oppression.

I grew up being taught that human conditions have always improved over time and that even though society can be harsh with things like crime, police brutality, racism, sexism, poverty, hunger etc., in the present…things are at least better and more humane than they used to be.

The book Parable of The Tribes provides a broader perspective…

“The idea of history as progress is itself of relatively recent origin. And those who endorse that idea are usually looking only at relatively recent history for support. In earlier eras of history, the cutting edge of civilization’s progress led from freedom into bondage for the common person. The great monuments of the ancient world were built with the sweat of slaves whose civilized ancestors had not known the oppressor’s whip.” (Schmookler, 1994)

According to sociologist Ashley Crossman,

“Social oppression includes the systematic mistreatment, exploitation, and abuse of a group (or groups) of people by another group (or groups). It occurs whenever one group holds power over another in society through the control of social institutions, along with society’s laws, customs, and norms.
The outcome of social oppression is that groups in society are sorted into different positions within the social hierarchies of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, etc. Those in the controlling, or dominant group, benefit from the oppression of other groups through heightened privileges relative to others, greater access to rights and resources, a better quality of life, and overall greater life chances. Those who experience the brunt of oppression have fewer rights, less access to resources, less political power, lower economic potential, worse health, higher mortality rates, and lower overall life chances.”

Why did humans accept power-over and control systems in the first place? Were there any benefits?

There is a chapter in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, entitled “From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy” that explores the introduction of power-over and control dynamics into societies. This chapter goes into great detail. I’ll summarize below…

A Kleptocracy is a government with leaders who use power to exploit the people and natural resources of a territory in order to extend their personal wealth and political power.

The author provides four ways that the elites gained support while also maintaining a more comfortable lifestyle than the commoners.

1. Disarm the populace, and arm the elite. That’s much easier in modern times with high-tech weaponry, produced only in industrial plants and easily monopolized by the elite, in comparison with ancient times of spears and clubs, which were easily made at home.

2. Make the masses happy by redistributing much of the tribute (food, labor, & eventually taxes) received, in popular ways. Like building infrastructure, places of worship, etc. In modern times, this means using taxes to build parks and playgrounds, repair roads, public schools, etc.

3. Use the monopoly of force to promote happiness by maintaining public order and curbing violence. In the past, rulers and guards maintained order. Today, police forces do that.

4. Kleptocrats gain public support by constructing an ideology or religion that justifies kleptocracy. Bands and tribes already had supernatural beliefs, just as do modern established religions. The supernatural beliefs of bands and tribes did not serve to justify centralized authority, the transfer of wealth, or the maintenance of peace between unrelated individuals. When supernatural beliefs gained those functions and became institutionalized, they were transformed into what we term a “religion”.

How does this apply to present-day issues with power?

In what ways do our social systems still mirror the power-over and control systems from approximately 10,000–12,000 years ago?

We’ll explore the answer to these questions and more in my next piece on the modern-day complexities of power structures…so stay tuned!

If you haven’t already, check out my podcast Theory of Indivisibility.

I love y’all.

Peace!

Dr. Sundiata Soon-Jahta

2022. Podcast brought into written form by Ray Lightheart

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References & Resources:

The Parable Of The Tribes by Andrew Schmookler

Guns, Germs, & Steel by Jared Diamond