So the other day Mark Zuckerberg, who is all but officially campaining for the Presidency in 2020, came out in favor of basic income:
Every generation expands its definition of equality. Now it’s time for our generation to define a new social contract. We should have a society that measures progress not by economic metrics like GDP but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful. We should explore ideas like universal basic income to make sure everyone has a cushion to try new ideas.
I do support basic income.
Though who cares what I support. Two to three decades down the line, basic income will become all but inevitable if the oligarchs want mass consumer capitalism to survive under mass automation.
The only problem is that Mark “I Don’t Know Why They Trust Me, Dumb Fucks” Zuckerberg is just about the last person you’d trust to implement a basic income.
Don’t like his sister’s ideas on “whitewashing ancient statues”? That’s a 10% cut in your soypack purchasing power.
Mainstream Republicans and Democrats are corrupt retards who care naught beyond more tax cuts for the oligarchs and gibsmedats for the ghettoes, respectively. So its likely that it will be some political outsider President who ends up instituting basic income. In practice, given their wealth and high IQ, this in turn probably means some Silicon Valley plutocrat.
Why, not only tax cuts. For example, Coca-Cola, Kraft, and similar multinational corporations lobby for, and benefit from the food stamps program. Big pharma benefits from the Medicare prescription drugs program.
Similarly, a basic income program, depending on how it’s implemented, could amount to a bonanza for many powerful corporations; way more lucrative than paltry tax cuts.
You suppose that the oligarchs understand anything at all. That’s quite a big assumption.
UBI is a good idea. However, it needs to be restricted. A % needs to be allocated to: EBT card, housing allowance, retirement, catastrophic and long term health care, preventive health care and disability insurance. Capable and industrious individuals could add to the basic level benefits in these categories, or not, for themselves and family. Very little cash from a UBI should be allowed into the hands of the individual. We would also need a biometric citizenship card, but we can’t trust the government or private business with the database.
High IQ is not a good way to become president, and great wealth only helps if it emboldens you to take popular positions most politicians don’t take. I can’t see Fuckerberg ever doing that.
The unbidden thought that Stanislaw Lem’s “The Futurological Congress” was only missing President Zuckerberg (in the “present” and the “future”, maybe as immortal vat brain) arises.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Futurological_Congress
Late-Soviet Communism felt fair for two reasons: no one was rich and everyone worked. The modern Western system of millions of people getting welfare payments for doing nothing does not feel fair.
In America the New Deal had broad support because it involved a lot of work programs. I’m sure some of it was make-work, but the psychological aspect is very important: people hate looking at idlers. They hate passing them on their way to work, they hate having to work hard while others in their earshot are laughing it up. People hate leaving for work while their roommates or significant others are sitting in front of a TV. Bosses hate passing by cubucles whose occupants are Twittering or writing blog comments.
And this is universal. I remember reading Menken, who was really, really anti-Socialist, and his stuff was full of complaints about people not doing their share. Super-productive and super-talented people can respect hard-working janitors. That’s what the phrase “deserving poor” is about. They’re not going to respect universal income recipients.
Personally, I’ve never understood this attitude much, maybe because although I work for a living, I very much enjoy my job. So when I see some hippy smoking fags and playing guitar outside the metro station, I’m happy to give him a hundred rubles for making life a little more colourful, and I’d be quite happy if he were given a basic income rather than being compelled to work at Pyaterochka.
That attitude may have made sense in an industrial society with more or less full employment, but if automation really turns out to be the great job-killer many expect it to be, a large part of the population will become economically superfluous (that is as workers, maybe not as consumers). If there’s simply no work to be had, how can you condemn people for not working?
I’m more worried what living on a universal basic income will do the recipients’ psyche.
Everyone is a recipient. That’s why it’s called ‘universal’.
That’s not UBI. What you’re describing is basically the welfare system we already have.
The principle behind UBI is that it’s universal and not means tested, and that there’s no government bureaucracy deciding how the funds are allocated and spent. The UBI is distributed to every citizen, regardless of economic status, and then markets, rather than government programs and bureaucracies, deliver goods and services.
We will always have lawyers, for example, and that hard working, competitive, highly paid lawyer will look at someone claiming that there are no jobs and assume that they were simply too lazy or dumb to follow the same path. If there are real jobs for only a tiny fraction of the population, that just means the tiny fraction will get even more elitist.
This is nothing new, of course. In a fully agrarian society some people are landowners and others till land owned by someone else. Land is limited so landowners will always be a small class: even if you were to distribute land equally with each man given the exact amount of land needed to support a family, they’d have several children and not all could inherit enough land to support a family. Landowners have a guaranteed status advantage and pointing out that not all people can be landowners will never negate that (which is, of course, why socialist movements tended to conclude that to achieve “equality” they need to get rid of landowners).
In any case, the point of universal income actually is that everyone receives it, even the rich and the people with jobs. So people cannot be looked down for receiving it. Of course that just means that we will see people intensely status signaling over what they do besides receiving the basic income so expect more obsession with the kind of social justice causes that make good Facebook material.
I suspect there is also another reason why Zuckerberg wants universal basic income. There will be very little motivation for people to innovate and think outside the box, and they will be utterly dependent on the elites for their income. After a while, people will have no idea how to make a living for themselves, and the elite will have a huge amount of power over the general population. No one would dare make a move against the elite.
But here’s the problem: with all the money we spend on the military, already existing welfare program, and the massive 20 trillion dollar debt, where will we get the money from?
Good news.
America should be ruled by businessmen, not politicians.
Yes, that’s probably true, and quite scary when you think about it, especially if robotics or other technological advances give the elites ever more efficient means of surveillance and repression. In the worst case even a mass culling of “superfluous” people might be imaginable.
It’s even easier to automate landlords than it is to automate farmers, workers, etc. It can already be done with a small piece of software or postal box that receives electronic rent payments or mailed checks.
That assumes that people who innovate or think outside the box today only do so for basic survival and subsistence. That’s obviously not true.
Eh, what? My tenants do the work of getting the money to me, I couldn’t care less how they do it. I don’t think you understand how this profession of living off the work of someone else works.
In any case, it’s irrelevant as we’re no longer agrarian societies so owning land is no longer as prestigious as it was as industrialization created many other paths to wealth and status. The point was that it’s not a new thing to have a society where the majority of people have low social status with very little chance of social advancement. It’s actually the historical norm.
Once they become our rulers, they also become politicians. Possibly better ones than the careerist politico-types however, but politicians never-the-less.
Why would that be bad? Should the population just keep increasing until the entire world is Nigeria?
Population is the number 1 reason I am so pessimistic about humanity over the long run. 8 billion people on this planet and we need to find a way to get rid of 7 billion of them.
We’re taking volunteers.
I understand how living as a rentier works. I’m not sure what your question is.
Land rent is actually still a major part of wealth today. It’s just not as immediately apparent as it was in the past in agrarian societies when there were formal, titled landlords. Industries that seem unrelated to land derive much of their wealth from it:
“Mcdonald’s Real Estate: How They Really Make Their Money”
http://blog.wallstreetsurvivor.com/2015/10/08/mcdonalds-beyond-the-burger/
If you believe in it so much, shouldn’t you be the first to volunteer?
Wasn’t a similar technique used to domesticate dogs?
I’m pessimistic about humanity because so very few people are human.
I am simply too important to humanity to do so.
So when he says “universal basic income” is it of a Trotsky or Stalin flavour, that is either for everyone in the world or only for the USA.
Is that you Hillary?
Plenty of volunteers in Europe, North America, and East Asia:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2e/Countriesbyfertilityrate.svg/800px-Countriesbyfertilityrate.svg.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility
Does that make you feel more optimistic?
OT:
Russian Software Industry punches below its weight.
“A Russian Tragedy” in IEEE Computer, May 2017, by David Alan Grier
https://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/co/2017/05/mco2017050132.html
Despite its success, there seems to be a gap between the Russian software industry and its Western counterparts. The most recent Russoft industry report reads like a Russian tragedy: the estate has been lost; the family is unable to cope with changes in society; the children cannot find roles for themselves in the world.
which leads to the RUSSOFT 2016 (“Export of Russian Software Development Industry”) report:
http://russoft.org/docs/?doc=3665
Not really. It is about quality, not just quantity. In particular, we need to drastically reduce the global black population.
I have no problem with blacks. They are good people. But the planet can’t support anymore than 100 million of them.
Reducing the white and asian populations will only make things worse because for every white or asian we lose, we will just get 3 blacks in their place.
As a very simple person I ask only two simple questions: how much will they pay and where will they get the money?
Well obviously you’d start small, maybe a thousand a year, but eventually you would want to build up to a living wage. In the US that would be around 30k a year. I don’t know how much that translates to in Russian money.
As for where you’d get the money, is that serious question? We’d borrow it just like we do to pay for everything else.
The whole thing smells like a scheme by oligarchs to move income from the people who tend to save to the people who tend to spend. The ownership class will find a away to skip taxes, people who work jobs won’t.
I doubt Zuckerberg will succeed in politics, by the way. He is a status hungry nerd with a lot of money. It will be like a really fat pig going for a swim in a shark tank.
Yes, very serious. Will they raise taxes or what?
From whom will they borrow the money? And how are they going to repay?
The same idiots who are loaning us money now.
We’re not. That’s the beauty of it.
The success of Trump has caused self absorbed billionaires like Zuck and Cuban to think that there is an opening for them. But Trump succeeded only because he had a unique message. Zuckerberg and Cuban think that they can win running on Hillary’s platform and that is just delusional.
The Dems really do have a great bench too. Much stronger than the 2016 Republican bench. The billionaire dbags are going nowhere.
I miss IEEE Computer. I just get IEE stuff now.
Yes, he wants a “universal income” alright… of 2 USD/hour to be exact, just to keep people barely able to click on “like” all day. If they are non-white, even better.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4548898/Facebook-young-Filipino-terror-related-material-Manchester.html
Currently, the government taxes economic activity (income, sales, capital gains, etc.) to subsidize poor welfare recipients and wealthy people who pay no taxes for property rights protection. The wealthy don’t just pay no taxes for property rights protection; they’re wealth is directly subsidized by government bonds which provide a basic “risk free rate” of return on their wealth.
The UBI can be funded by eliminating taxes on economic activity and by charging a use fee for property rights protection provided by the government.
Quite so, quite so. For example, what if someone manages to spend their UBI unwisely, or rather, unluckily, and their children become food insecure? Surely society cannot allow children to potentially starve.
what does this mean concretely? private legal system?
Surely society cannot allow children to potentially starve.
Of course not, we would still need social services. In the most extreme cases guardians would have to be appointed, just as they are now.
In the particular case you cite, all school personnel would be required to report neglect. Not having lunch money or a home prepared lunch would constitute neglect since the money is there. If it persisted after intervention by social services, child welfare could acquire a judicial order directing the required amount from the UBI to lunch money, just like they currently get child support directed from the income of the non-custodial parent to the custodial parent.
Universal Income sounds like the ultimate “Bread and Circuses” theatre troupe. The reality is that no society is going to put up with parasites indefinitely, and the more it tries, the more it pushes itself toward financial destabilization–ultimately leading to collapse, regime change and leaving ultimately nature to sort things out. Gnon rules.
No, it simply means that the government taxes for the chief service it provides – property rights protection.
For example, a farmer who owns one million acres of land only “owns” it because the government provides him with property rights to the land through the legal system – police, laws, courts, etc. that enforces his title and claims. The farmer himself does not patrol those one million acres and keep people off it. If there are squatters on his land, or if tenants on his land don’t pay the rent, or if a neighbor annexes some of his land, the farmer calls up the police who use force and court orders to remove the offenders and maintain the farmer’s property rights. The government then charges a fee for providing the farmer with property rights to this land.
The UBI would help rebuild local markets, economies, social support networks, and social capital that can provide jobs and support for people having trouble. That’s one of the advantages of UBI in terms of social welfare. It puts money into local communities who are more aware of and attentive to the needs of local problems than remote bureaucracies that have centralized power and money and have control over huge budgets.
UBI diverts money away from the poor and wealthy parasites who control a disproportionate amount of government largess and returns it to all the citizenry.
Yeah but if everyone gets it then the political parties won’t get to control a huge voting block with their handouts. Therefore, it will never happen.
Basically, anything that helps the common man will never happen. Every political move must serve the purpose of enabling the underclass or the elite moneyed interests.
In principle, you use the money that goes to the current hodgepodge of government payout programs. All of those get eliminated, along with all of their administrative costs. In principle, if the UBI is an automatic payment that goes to every adult citizen, no strings attached, administrative costs can be minimal. Does the math work? I don’t know. Have a flat tax on all earned income, and adjust the rate until you get it right. I’m inclined to think this would be better than the current system.
In any case, UBI+Flat Tax strikes me as a winning political program. That actually gives me a bit of pause. Is it too good to be true?
I think it would be good if UBI was just enough to cover expenses for someone prepared to live a very Spartan life. Living on your UBI could become a sign that you are a true badass, not a sponger. People that want stylish accoutrements would need to earn them by work.
(Different Anonymous here…)
That’s a great point… It is redirecting the money away from the current base of the Democratic Party. Most traditional “Republicans” are liable to have an initially negative attitude towards the UBI, but I think this is a proposal that merits some serious attention from anyone dissatisfied with the current state of affairs.
how long will it be till those… latifundistas, manipulate the system such that only they have any govt protection? sounds like feudalism by the backdoor.
you lose it if you don’t use it. no taxes in exchange for no rights is a bad, bad deal that noone should be allowed to make.
My experience with UBI-like programs in Finland was that they vastly failed to work. Its not simply about the Spartan lifestyle – it also seems to promote a certain kind of depression, creating an odd circumstance where the individual both is attached to his/her UBI but at the same time, is unhappy about the difficulties involved and feels that he or she can’t get anywhere. It promotes creative stagnation, surprisingly enough, given its supposed purpose in freeing people from work.
It does gradually seem to devolve into something of bread and circuses, ultimately. I think we underestimate the sense of purpose that having a job provides us.
I think it is also worth brining up is the only reason UBI is even being suggested is due to this hysteria that all jobs are about to be automated. Until that happens (spoiler alert: It won’t. Ever.), the whole thing is moot.
There are other arguments for it, including simplifying current welfare arrangements and the notion of a basic safety net for all human beings. As a neoreactionary, I don’t think that humans are entitled to anything, of course, but of course, the average bread and circus member is fond of it.
Just nationalize the banks and return to the old Zen adage:
“A day without work is a day without food” (一日不做一日不食 “One day not work, one day not eat”).
The idea of just paying the poor cash (Earned Income Tax Credit) instead of enabling some monstrous bureaucracy providing “social services” is fantastic. But the reality is, in America, we have EITC as well as millions of government employees here to “help” you. UBI is another of these political bait and switch. You just end up with more government, plus the same old government.
I could only go with UBI if they shut down the existing bureaucracy first–not just pass a law for some court to invalidate or the legislature to change in the next session, but shut it down, fired everyone, and demolished the buildings. Then we could talk about UBI.
I’m not sure what you mean. The wealthy would try to manipulate it by removing taxes off of wealth and taxing instead labor and enterprise – income, capital gains, sales, etc. Which is what we have now.
In the absence of government and some sort of regime of property rights, one has basic subsistence assets in the form of a homestead or hunting grounds whereby indeed a day without work is a day without food.
That’s not the case under a regime of property rights. You can hold and live off of assets without working to hold onto those assets – you can call the police if someone establishes a homestead or hunts on your land and get them off and maintain your property right to this asset. And the homesteader or hunter can’t simply work for his daily bread because the government will come after him.
The UBI returns these assets that are necessarily deprived by the introduction of this regime.
Neoreactionaries do believe in the state protecting them from violence and providing property rights, don’t they? Obviously then they do believe people are entitled to things.
Only somewhat, really.
Its a loose definition but a typical monarchist would probably support loyalty to the person rather than a state. The every single citizen being owed the notions of life or liberty would be alien, as that would basically require some overall assumption of equality.
“L’état, c’est moi.”
Monarchists are loyal to a state in practice.
If every citizen didn’t have certain rights, then they wouldn’t be citizens. They’d be slaves or some other order of subject.
At any rate, I don’t see how this response addresses my original point about neoreactionaries.
“In the absence of government and some sort of regime of property rights, one has basic subsistence assets in the form of a homestead or hunting grounds whereby indeed a day without work is a day without food.”
I believe that is only a privilege of the strong (and their beneficiaries). The only real political “choice” so far as I can tell is whether rule is primarily through coercion or manipulation (“force” or “fraud”). Obviously, usury (and “rule by the people”) is generally the domain of the second-type regime.
The only inalienable human right I have discovered in my philosophical journey is the right to starve, serve or fight to the death.
I don’t want to speak for NRx, but I think we have to start first with the primacy of the People, and the Leader of the People. The People would generally prefer that their Leader protect them from enemies, and keep corruption to a minimum. The Leader may have other ideas, but at some point, will have to face a Challenger. But who is the People?
And further, how to restore the human order back to the natural order? Where have the People gone?
Its all pretty artificial, even the “natural order.” But the historical order which I prefer would be greatly strengthened by increased scarcity and reduced social goods which I do think will be coming.
As far as corruption goes, one could hardly argue that aristocracy was anything but organized, legalized nepotism. But it worked pretty well, because familial-based systems resonate strongly with us.
Insofar as having a “leader”, etc, the reason why I’ve been so supportive is that through multiple personal experiences, I’ve found that groups work far better when there is a single leader – though of course, things can go far worse as well. But man, groupthink leads to really terrible decisions to the point that its main selling point is akin to shared culpability leading to participation legitimacy.
I can’t see how it’ll work once we’re out of the dreamtime of resources.
There might be an East/West difference here. To a Westerner: everyone has some rights, depending on his station; not all rights are equal. The king can’t kill a random commoner because he feels like it; this would be a misuse of the apparatus of justice which is his property, as a peasant’s shooting a neighbor would be a misuse of the gun which is his property.
The analogy is probably pretty flawed but I think it conveys the general outline.
It’s not a privilege in the absence of government. It’s a right. One can stake out a homestead or roam the land and challenge anyone. This right is deprived with the introduction of government.
Somewhat, possibly, but it should not be exaggerated – there were specific laws in France limiting the number of peasants that a nobleman could kill, and pamphlets promoting the Revolution implied that the aristocracy nonetheless exceeded that number. Royal disfavor might not immediately lead to death(but note that it could be argued that disloyalty to the king was equivalent to treason, a capital offense), but enough documentation shows that it could lead to banishment and punishment effectively equivalent to death.
The vast difference, I think, was the powerful force of religion in the West. Excessive abuse would have been seen as unchristian, and fear for one’s immortal soul was quite genuine, not to mention the vast social mechanisms including the priesthood that served to remind that even kings were to submit before the ultimate Lord, God Himself.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what people, anywhere, think. The king is just a man who can’t do anything except via a gang a goons i.e. the state. Putting some fancy hat on his head and pretending that he has magical powers doesn’t change anything. Any man who takes a bat to his head can cave his skull in.
Exactly why UBI is a lie. It would never replace the safety net, only add on top of it, despite what (((silicon valley))) says.
BTW Sam Altman is a right bastard. He is a courtier who never built anything of note. He got rich when Sequoia Capital had one of its successful companies (Green Dot) buy one of its losers (Altman’s startup). Then Paul Graham, king of startups, got sick of talking to SJW reporters and handed Y Combinator over to his court Jew, Altman. Now Altman has reinvented Jewish bolshevism from first principles and moronically tells the world about it (UBI). I believe Altman then took a Trump country road trip even before Zuckerberg did. He’s a child that has somehow been handed the world. Like a Kushner.
Pamphlets promoting the Revolution are slightly less reliable than Nazi pamphlets about the Slavs.
Nevertheless the point that in actual practice the king or some lord could do pretty much as he wished subject to the displeasure of his subjects is taken. Though you underestimate the power of resistance of the nobles, especially, who pretty often defied the royal authority with no consequences whatsoever; the towns also could and did go into revolt if they felt their privileges were violated. The sheer anarchy of the Middle Ages is hard to conceive in our modern day of all-powerful governments; it’s surprising how often things worked quite well, considering how absurdly easy it was by our standards for order to break down. Disloyalty to the king is indeed treason but is not equivalent to the disfavor of the king. It could sometimes be punished (dubiously) even against the will of the king as I think happened to at least one royal favorite (of Richard II?) in England.
I agree completely with your second paragraph.
Then why bother posting on a political blog?
I said that regardless of what people think, the basic fundamental political fact doesn’t change: The king is just a man who can’t do anything except via a gang a goons i.e. the state.
Yes, but he’s a man who ideally has a plan and consistency; i.e. when I was in organizations with a strong, good leadership, this meant that things actually got done and there was a systemic purpose to its activity. Sometimes the plans weren’t perfect, but the strength of impetus meant that a lot more got accomplished. This is something which I came to admire a lot – even a bad plan can be surprisingly useful simply by the fact that it has been vigorously pursued.
In comparison, in organizations which I’ve seen with a lot of groupthink, well, it works about as well as movie scripts written by committee.
The strength of having a single motive force shouldn’t be underestimated.
Tax cuts! They don’t pay tax, their profits are shielded in the tax dodge masquerading as a country that is known as Ireland
(*Cass Sunstein was in charge of the latter).
Progressive globalisation cannot secure democratic consent, the peoples recognise it as another entry from the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia. As with its introduction in ancient Athens, democracy means war. Well it’s better than the alternative.
Now I think you are reverting to semantics.
How about this–a privilege is a benefit exercised by a few, a right is a benefit exercised by all.
Territory is secured–whether by a nation-state or a tribal band–by force. Without a government, your access to resources is a function of the strength of your tribal band and your station within the band. Weak tribes and people of low station face the prospect of starvation or servitude. So I see it as a privilege of the strong. . . you can say right if you want, but the weak and dishonorable don’t have the same right.
However, citizens and bands of citizens have every bit as much right to revolt against the state as they ever have had. I think most of them are either happy or dissuaded by the odds.
I think there are observable historical cycles, and we can make some helpful generalizations from those cycles to say what values put a people on top, what values put them on the bottom, and what values lead to their total destruction.
As far as what moves the Chariot forward, and what mires it in the mud, it is a complex question. Certainly, autocracy didn’t work so badly in Japan, Germany, Mainland China, or Singapore, but left Russia, Spain, and the Ottoman’s behind the curve. It doesn’t seem to have a great track record in Africa either.
As far as democracy, I fear its fate rises and falls on the viability of conscript armies to revolutionize (and continue to compete) in warfare. So I am skeptical of democracy’s future on the planet given the changes in warfare.
Perhaps if our parasite class played guitar instead of the knockout game we would also appreciate the color they add to our lives.
It’s not semantics. The tribal band is simply a primitive state – a gang of goons that prevents people from staking homesteads, roaming hunting grounds, and challenging whomever they want. It’s not simply a matter of strength, since a gang of goons can overwhelm the strongest man.
Is a troop of chimpanzees that a state? Is a pride of lions?
In Russia and the Ottoman Empire autocracy (if you take a whole historical period) worked just fine. These two countries have achieved a lot, a lot more than allow their resources
The Ottoman empire totally failed at meeting the challenges of the modern age though…it fell hopelessly behind Western powers and in the end was dismembered. That’s not really a success story.
Modernization was much more successful in Russia before WW1, but at some point economic and technological modernization would also have necessitated some change in the political system and participation of wider segments of society (maybe not necessarily democratic or liberal though…imperial Germany after all indicated that there might have been other paths to modernity that could work).
I’m sick of how the front page will say that there a new comments and then when I click on the article page, I can’t see them. As a non paying customer I demand better service.
I had that problem for a long time as well (only with Karlin’s blog)…but strangely enough it seems to have stopped in recent weeks…no idea why.
You can easily demand better service with a small contribution to https://www.patreon.com/akarlin
The Ottoman Empire should be compared with other Muslim States. Against this background, the history of Turkey is a success story
For a correct evaluation should consider the entire period of “autocracy” (15-19 century). In this case, the autocracy in Russia worked perfectly. Russian monarchs led a very impoverished, deserted, extremely backward cultural and technical society (the cause was climatic, geographical and religious reasons) . However, due to the rigid centralized rule, Russia was able to defeat the enemy who had many times more resources and to assert his own existence.
It’s hard to say. In Russia in 1914 was the Parliament, but this Parliament, in conditions of war did nothing good but only evil
Oligarchs 200 yers ruled USA quite well
But there is no form of human life smaller than a face-to-face tribal band. Your “individual” wasn’t invented for thousands/millions of years later.
Group strength is more a function of morale and cohesion than the physical capacity to exert brute force (although that matters too). But that is strength, and strength is the foundation of any functional social order (necessary but not sufficient).