Chapters 1–3 argued that life, mind, and culture scale whenever internal information loops beat external shocks. Here we test that rule at the level of whole societies, asking how clusters of communication renormalise into families, tribes, states, and—when shadow-tax bases arise—mafias.

4.1 On the Centralisation of disputation

This is the first day in the history of political science. As yesteryear’s policy is nothing more than an amalgamation of terms — that is, if anyone has ever had the displeasure of having taken a politics 101 course. One is immediately confronted with the terms liberalism and realism, which are presented as a dichotomy to be contrasted. This presents a problem, as liberalism and realism have nothing to do with each other. Realism is a theory regarding state formation. Defensive realists define a country as an area that can defend itself, whereas offensive realists define a country to be an area over which it can project force. Meanwhile, liberalism is a theory which dictates inter-state relations. Now, when it comes to intra-state relations, the terms “conservative” and “liberal” literally convey no information from a political-science perspective. Conservatism and liberalism are positions with respect to time. As an example, a conservative in 1991’s Russia would be in favor of communism, while at the same time in America, it would be pro-markets.

Thus political labels mis-inform unless we tag them to scale—inside a polity or between polities—a distinction carried forward in the renormalisation model below.

The notion of scale, as such, is completely devoid from any political science course (inter-state vs intra-state). The closest corollary comes from multi-fractal localism. Multi-fractal localism simply means that social patterns repeat at every scale—family, neighborhood, city, nation—like the same jagged coastline reappearing no matter how closely you zoom in. The notion of multi-fractal localism can be given a methodological foundation when combined with the notion of a renormalization group.

A renormalization occurs when there is greater internal than external communication. One can then define a country as the scaling of these various renormalization groups:

Family → Tribe → Neighbourhood → City → State → Country → Empire

The study of the relationship between these renormalization groups is the study of political science. The best attempt to incorporate this idea of scale comes from the United States of America. The states are united in the sense that each state is composed of individual governing bodies that delegate authority to the federal state through the interstate-commerce clause (the 10th Amendment).

Chapter 6 will show how railways and telegraph lines alter these renormalisation thresholds, inflating “country” into “nation-state” almost overnight.

4.2 Power Laws in political science

Hegel’s notions of cultural and temporal relativism can be reinterpreted in an information-theoretic/complex-system:

Volksgeist, essence of the time, can be reinterpreted as shared information communication over space.

Zeitgeist, essence of the space, can be reinterpreted as information communication over time at a point in time.

A Volksgeist is formed when there is greater internal than external information communication (renormalisation). This invokes the concept of a power law—local bonds are overridden in favour of a single, global bond. The α-exponent of the power law is its size. It is inversely proportional to the disparateness of nodes over an area; disparateness is measured by shared information communication (shared attention). Roughly speaking, the smoother the social landscape, the larger the power-law cluster.

In lay terms, societies with less disparateness are more homogenised. This model of state formation can be extended with the language of calculus.

The Zeitgeist can be modeled as the first derivative of the Volksgeist — how much is the information over an area changing at a specific point in time. A higher Zeitgeist implies greater generational change. The second derivative of the Volksgeist is also equal to the first derivative of the Zeitgeist. How much does the Zeitgeist change over time? It is equal to the intergenerational information differential.

4.3 Culture Wars — Why there are no hippies in the wild

Furthermore, Hegelian terms can be given a methodological foundation when incorporated with Computationalism, where one considers human intelligence to be a specific instance of intelligence as such. These nodes (information agents) can either cooperate (trade) or destroy (war).

When one node suggests a proposal to another node (a thesis), if the other node proposes one back then it will be an antithesis. However, if they agree, it will become a synthesis.

If the nodes do not agree, the cycle continues as long as there is a society to decide over. Each node can either engage in this process with their neighbor or centralize this process in a political body. Nodes can either go to war physically or culturally. The technical definition of a cultural war is when two separate Volksgeists amalgamate into one.

Hippies do not fight when they disagree with each other. They voluntarily dissociate: one group of “dorks” goes one way, the other group goes another way. This can only happen within a state, as disputation is centralized. Because in the wild, you cannot choose peace and love. Evil finds you. 

It is important to understand that the process of civilization is the process of increasing a Volksgeist. The greater the civilization, the greater the areas where external communication is greater than internal communication.

4.4 The Nation-State is a recent invention

The Nation State is a recent invention of modern history. The birth occurred during the French Revolution — one of the great tragedies in human history, but that is for another chapter of the Image Symbol Code.

However, it is entirely worth understanding that the ‘French’ did not share a common language until the advent of the Napoleonic nation-state (≤ 10 % French-speakers in pre-1789 France; Napoléon’s 1802 lycée decree). Germany provides us with the most recent example of smaller states forming a larger one, resulting in what you would call World War 1 but I call it the First War of the Stupids, or Europe’s civil war (discussed in another chapter of this book).

These linguistic mergers foreshadow Chapter 7’s rail-and-telegraph section, where cheap ton-miles flip local identity into national consciousness.

The Mafia

The Mafia acts as a state over the market for illicit goods—gambling, drugs, and prostitution. If one wants to get rid of organised crime, the best option remains to legalise the markets the Mafia controls. According to UNODC estimates, the global illicit-drug trade alone generated US $426 – 652 billion in 2019 (World Drug Report 2021), underscoring how large a “shadow tax-base” an extralegal state can tap.

Like a micro-nation, the Mafia supplies contract enforcement where the formal Volksgeist refuses to tread, illustrating renormalisation at black-market scale.

4.5 Ancient Greece

Religion and topography

Religion provides a robust proxy for information dispersion. There are more Muslims in Iraq than in Japan because Iraq lies far closer to Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam. Ancient Greece offers a vivid example of how information topography shapes society: a mountainous, island-studded landscape so insular from land that three hundred Spartans could hold off the vast Persian army. Greek religion was markedly decentralised; anyone could witness a sacrifice, not just a centrally appointed priesthood.

City-state values

Each Greek πόλις—each local information cluster—emphasised different facets of the shared mythology. Athens, named after Athena, prized wisdom and democracy. Sparta, devoted to the huntress Artemis, exalted power and autocracy. Every city had its own government and priorities, yet all called themselves Hellenes. In information-theoretic terms, internal communication among Greek cities exceeded their communication with the wider world.

4.6 Judah

At the time, however, most cities weren’t part of a network of city-states. Each city was a city on its own, with each city-state boasting its own religion. In the language of information theory, there was greater information communication within a city than between cities.

4.7 Cyrus (the Great)

The reason why they call him Cyrus the Great is because Cyrus did not kill them (for once). He instead chose to patronize their God, to assimilate them rather than disseminate them. Unlike the other great men of history, when people call Cyrus the great they actually mean it. He truly deserves that title for introducing the power of markets to the world.

The fundamental difference between Persian and pre-Persian rule is straightforward. Before Cyrus, war was zero-sum: the winner grew richer by seizing the loser’s goods, while the loser was impoverished. After Cyrus, the objective shifted: he patronised local gods instead of destroying them and, crucially, valued honest trade over pillage.

Although warfare suppresses short-term growth, Cyrus’s security apparatus stabilised trade routes. Stable routes fostered economic interconnectivity, which, in turn, seeded the great empires of the ancient world.

Cyrus, by contrast, just wanted people to stop “lying”, as, for the Persian, lying is the ultimate crime. He was not interested in stealing your God in glorious combat. In fact, he paid homage to the gods of the conquered people. Although war is the opposite of economic growth, it, however, established security. Security established along trade routes allowed for the establishment of economic interconnectivity. Which, in turn, established Empires that populated the world.

When we examine Roman roads and Chinese canals, we will see Cyrus’s market-over-pillaging logic scaled to continental supply chains.

The same renormalisation logic later underpinned the Chinese ‘All-Under-Heaven’ realm, whose vast bureaucracy kept internal communication denser than any contact with steppe, Hindu, or Islamic peripheries—an empire, not a nation-state, by sheer information flow.