Power Systems

Large scale power systems aren't so much a single thing as three different, overlapping ideas: Power as the ability to control people, systems that give and allocate power, and the responsibilities or requirements imposed externally on the system itself.

• Power as control: You make people do stuff, you have power. Works both for both actual declarations (eg. You Must Give Me That) and more implicit controls (eg. "You'd better get on the good side of such-and-such"), which will be important when studying corruption later. Also, eventually all control is eventually underwritten with violence: if you break the rules of a workplace you may lose your job, if you break the law they'll send police with batons and handcuffs, if you try to overthrow the government they'll send combined arms military. This is the fundamental reason we will spend so much time talking about how many people - and who - support different power structures.
• Power as a system: Whether you are a King or a Junior Customs Officer, you are part of a system, and your power stems from knowing what the other people in your system are going to do. For example, a King or Queen might declare "Off With Your Head!" because of the effect that declaration will have on other people - they don't expect to have to chase you with a sword and possible get hurt. Similarly, a Customs Officer who rejects your items expects you to either put the offending items in the bin, or, for larger things such as entire container ships, cart them off somewhere else. If you break the rules, they aren't going to chase you or load your cargo back on your ship or something, they'll just inform the police. This is the reason we will spend so much time talking about the relationships inside power systems, and the allocation of power inside them.
• Power as responsibilities: For all the hierarchies, in-fighting and ambition that is layered on human history, the truth is that power systems fail and collapse incredibly often, across all different sizes and structures of organization, and the vast majority of the time it is because people were unhappy with how leadership was impacting their lives. This is such a fact of life that it is most common to compare the longevity and stability of different systems first, before any ideas of morality, justice or anything else considered important on a more personal level. If the rules say that you are a super-dictator emperor who must be obeyed in every word, that doesn't mean you can just declare "we will be happy and prosperous" and it will happen. If the rules say you are a Customs Officer and that you will ensure fruit-disease will be kept out, and you fail to understand what you need to do to make that happen, your government will soon be fielding angry calls from farmers whose crops are blighted. That vast gulf between what you want to happen and what will actually happen is the fundamental reason we will spend so much time talking about what powers and responsibilities positions should have in the first place, as well as the many difficulties people have in engaging with and executing on their responsibilities

Finally, sometimes we will also need to separate the part where a system tries to understand the world and orient itself inside it, (eg. deciding whether unemployment is a result of too few job opportunities versus too little incentive to work) and the part where they people actually go out and create changes (eg. construction of public works, taxes on cigarettes).