I'm gonna talk about a few different things - but they all come together. The topic is power, and how it is a dangerous and volatile resource we must design carefully around. Unfortunately, Capitalism as it is positively reinforces power. This is because the bosses and investors, not the workers, have the legal and structural rights to (A) earn all of the profit (bounded by the low minimum wages as a floor) and (B) unilaterally (or 'co-laterally' amongst the owners) make all of the decisions at a company, leaving the vast majority of workers out of the decision. As a Capitalist earns more profit, they are able to buy and invest in more factories, outlets, industries, leading to more profit for themselves. It's a positive reinforcing loop. And as wealth is power in our world - the power to buy politicians, corrupt judges, support militias and tyrants, and more - the capitalists are able to bend the rules to their benefit, and wield increasing power. This is corrupt, centralized, non-democratic power, bending our government to its will. We can see it today - who got the majority of the COVID relief money? Who got bonuses while workers were cut? Who pushes anti-climate change propaganda as their own scientists discovered it more than forty years ago? In this post, I want to dive deeper into power.
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The Lord of the Rings is a great high-fantasy novel, and it's not just because the story is great. If it was just a good story, it would just be another cool book that book nerds occasionally tell you to read. No, it's a great expression of Tolkien's worldview, his art and facility with linguistics, as well as a great story. A super-parable, to put it crassly. Sidenote: imo it pulls off 'the horror of the great unknown' (ie the 'watcher in the water') far better than Lovecraft (Lovecraft is still fun, but Tolkien just absolutely cleans up). Back on track: This makes the Lord of the Rings a great testament about the nature of evil. One of the salient themes is power. Sauron's Ring embodies power - to put it vulgarly, it corrupts whoever bears it. Notably, Gandalf robustly rejects bearing the ring, because he is a person (technically a maiar :P) of great power, and therefore more likely to be corrupted by the ring and do great evil with it. It ends up with Frodo, because, among other things, hobbits are not the most powerful creature (although it can still corrupt them! As we see with Frodo throughout). Thus, they are able to better resist the corrupting power of the One Ring.
A lesson from LOTR (and his other works) is not just 'evil is bad, good is good', it's that power itself is a corrupting force - evil is a natural consequence of concentrated power, and unfortunately power concentration is fairly natural as well. Sauron is the villain, yes, a person with malicious intent. But the real tribulation is resisting the ring. See, the Ring could be used by Gandalf to probably defeat Sauron - but this would also come at an unknown cost, and potentially replacing Sauron as the new tyrant. The Ring corrupts, and to defeat the intensive, centralized military power of Sauron, they can't resort to the same intensive, centralized power of the ring. No, they must destroy the Ring, as the Ring contains a lot of spiritual potency of Sauron.
This isn't just a cool detail in the lore of LOTR (that the Ring has a lot of Sauron's spiritual vitality in it). It also suggests how Tolkien views evil - evil is sustained by the existence of absolute, centralized power. See, the folk of Middle Earth don't defeat Sauron in war and battle; war and battle are waged as a necessity to bide time and distract. Even in the War of the Last Alliance (when Sauron loses the ring), Sauron isn't totally defeated, because Isildur doesn't destroy the ring. By destroying its existence, you destroy central power - the spiritual vitality of Sauron becomes 'decentralized' when the ring is melted down in Mount Doom. Victory can only be had by treating the root cause, not the symptom. And anyone who believes they can wield the One Ring wisely only sustains the existence of evil. Tolkien suggests, through LOTR (and his other books) that to understand evil, we must understand power.
Tolkien, a World War I veteran, paints the horror of evil - it is not something alien to our world, it is something that naturally gurgles up at the nucleation of power accumulation, and sustains itself with said power like cancer. To grasp and reckon with the dangers and horrors of power, read LOTR.
There's a book (actually a four-volume series) I like, and haven't quite finished. It's by sociologist Michael Mann at the University of Cambridge/UCLA (lots of plane-rides?), and it's called The Sources of Social Power. Now I'm not a sociologist, so I'm not totally attuned to the criticisms to levy here, but I enjoyed it. The book takes the task of answering 'where does power come from? What is it? What are its forms?' I'm paraphrasing here, idk if it ever explicitly says it asks those questions, but it more or less does. What made it such a fun read, to me, is it walks through history, as if a great sociological experiment, showing how Mann's theory plays out.
It's been a hot second since I read Mann, but the gist is basically that there are four sources of social power - ideology, military, economics, and political. But Mann also defines two axes to describe the nature of power - there is (1) authoritarian to diffuse, and (2) intensive to extensive. By crossing them together, you get four kinds of power: intensive/authoritative [IA] (ie army command structure), extensive/authoritative [EA] (ie militaristic empire), intensive/diffused [ID] (a general strike), and extensive/diffused [ED] (market exchange). So, to put it briefly, power typically comes from the four sources (military, political, etc.), and is expressed in one of the four kinds (IA, EA, etc.). And, I'm gonna butcher this, but the 'final piece' is more or less that the form of power that emerges is often a natural consequence of the history, geography, etc. of that moment.
For Mann, to refer to society being built on dimensions (ie individual, family, village, etc.) is wrong - society is a holistic expression of power networks intertwined and reticulated. Not that this can't be understood, but to break it down into dimensions is asking the wrong question. Mann discusses how various economic considerations made the Swiss phalanx emerge as a new intense/diffuse military power in the middle-ages - but was quickly co-opted by centralized power.
For me then, the great lesson from Mann's book is how to design, constitute, and build political economies which are resistant to evolving towards centralized power. In the vocabulary of a physicist, you can control the boundary conditions of a box, but you don't directly control what goes on inside the box. For example, what if I force there to always be a higher temperature at one boundary and a lower temperature at another? How will this forced non-equilibrium effect the system? Or what if I have a chemical, such as ATP, always at a higher concentration somewhere in the box relative to the rest of the box - how would this effect the system dynamics? You can control the situation at the boundaries, and what happens from there is nature. The lesson is, you can't control everything - you can control the boundary conditions. If you have a good model of the system, you can well predict what happens with different boundary conditions, and if you have a bad model, you can't.
For example, even if you have a charitable view of the USSR (I do not), you might say that they tried their best, trying to control the economy through price control, state-mandated labor, and centralized planning. That does not mean the economy will turn out that everyone will have food, resources, etc. - that just sets the boundary conditions for which the system evolves. Or take climate change. We don't directly control the climate. But by pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we are dramatically changing one of the boundary conditions.
Michael Mann's model is a warning about boundary conditions. If we set out to design stable, peaceful systems, they must be systems which are designed to be robustly decentralized from the outset. When power becomes centralized, it obtains a consciousness of its own, through the individual that wields it - like Sauron's Ring (actually the One Ring does have something like a consciousness, but that's a whole other can of worms). This is why I advocate for decentralized systems, but ones that can still link together, ones that are capable of extensibility, and are not limited by their locality. Market socialism, in this sense, is a great step forward, harnessing the extensiveness of market economics expressed in Capitalism, while de-centralizing the power inherent to Capitalism. It should not be surprising that a democratic approach not only accomplishes this, but in the end yields a more just system.
This isn't to say there is no space for centralized systems - the government should be centralized, for example, and individual enterprises will remain centralized to some extent - likely there will still be elected executives, managers, etc. These positions shouldn't warrant accumulating massive amounts of power though (elected or not). The scope of centralized power should be attenuated, ie reduce it's power (for example - our systems should make spying on the people hard, for the government or private entities. Legislation should be a last-ditch effort, our primary goal is to design robust systems.). These ideas shouldn't be that scary either - what has made Capitalism so successful is that it utilizes inherent mechanisms, rather than centrally directed. It's not the wealth generation for the top 10 percent, it's how extensive and diffuse it is (in the jargon of Mann). Capitalism's systemic weakness is that it gives power to a few, rather than apportioning it among relevant participants, and as a result power is consolidated, made authoritarian rather than diffuse. Capitalism defeats its own success, it's fundamentally unstable (loosely speaking, this is also one of Marx's conclusions) - Capitalism is the existence of 'The One Ring'. The easiest stable alternative to transition to is a more-democratic market economy, Market Socialism.