VOLUME IV, CHAPTER 11
Centralized Authority Beyond Politics
The centralized authority of the last few chapters has stayed at the level of the state. This chapter pushes it beyond politics, to see how, as a life-level law, it runs through every organized group, and then brings the three root structures of political institutions together to close the Part. Three sections. The first covers the first two of five angles on cross-domain centralized authority: the enterprise type against the enfeoffment type, a distinction that decides which form an organization should take, since an enterprise type run on enfeoffment logic must fail and an enfeoffment type run on enterprise logic must fall into disorder, and then the wholly different shapes the central position takes in different groups. The second completes the remaining three angles: that the power in centralized authority is really five powers, decision, appointment, finance, information, and arbitration, that different organizations each have their own irreplaceable functions, and crossing the line brings trouble, and that the five laws of failure appear in every organization in their own forms. These two sections together are a set of thinking tools a reader can take to analyze their own company, family, or association. The third section brings the three structures, enfeoffment, the examination, and centralized authority, together, and makes clear that a skeleton alone is not enough: it must be joined with coordination and balance, so that factions are absorbed, errors corrected, and power restrained, before a political institution can run steadily. This chapter gives you one real thing: centralized authority is not only a tool for studying the state, it is a tool for seeing clearly into every group you yourself stand inside.
Chapter contents
Section One. Five angles, part one, the enterprise type against the enfeoffment type
Section Two. Five angles, part two, the five powers and the irreplaceable
Section Three. How the three structures fit together, a preview of balance
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.