The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (Francis Fukuyama)

Human beings can be violent

This book is a 500 page tome absolutely chock full of facts, data, analysis, and ideas regarding the origins of our political institutions, from as far back in time as chimps up to the French Revolution.  I have never found such a dry book so interesting, which is strange to say; it is both compelling and sleep-inducing at the same time.  Before going through my notes, I did not think I would put them all together in this format, as I had taken a ton of notes on nearly 250 pages, but upon reviewing it, I found the content so compelling that I went through it all in about five hours.  Fukuyama is a nuanced, careful, and humble seeming theorist without a real axe to grind (it seems to me), who weaves a long road through history to ultimately extol the virtues of constitutional democracy with checks and balances.  I found especially interesting his summary of the origins of English individualism and its intertwined relationship with the medieval Catholic church’s desires for self-enrichment.

“Melanesia’s tribal social system limits economic development because it prevents the emergence of modern property rights.”  Property has, “spirits [which] continue to inhabit that place.”  Thus, a foreign company has to negotiate with hundreds or thousands who lay claim to the land.  “From the standpoint of many foreigners, the behavior of Melanesian politicians looks like political corruption. But… the Big Men are simply doing what Big Men have always done, which is to redistribute resources to their kinsmen.”  Property rights “[incentivize] people to innovate.”  People are, “born to conform to the social norms they see around them, and they entrench those rules with often transcendent meaning and value.”  Thus, when change is necessary, there can be a disjunction between new needs and existing institutions; “[T]hey cannot be changed due to people’s heavy emotional investments in them.”  “Ideas are extremely important to political order; it is the perceived legitimacy of the government that binds populations together and makes them willing to accept its authority.”  “Real-world Communist regimes of course did exactly the opposite of what Marx predicted, building large and tyrannical state structures to force people to act collectively when they failed to do so spontaneously.”  “By breaking the link between individual effort and reward, collectivization undermined incentives to work, leading to mass famines in Russia and China, and severely reducing agricultural productivity.”  Fukuyama is decidedly centrist (not libeterarian), dismissing no-government fantasies as actually existing today on Earth in the developing World.  “[N]o one… ever stops to think about the complex, invisible social system that makes [potholes getting filled] possible… or why potholes never get filled in many developing countries.”  Fukuyama goes all the way back to our primate ancestors, “[H]uman beings are by nature both social and competitive animals.”  “Human beings cooperate to compete, and they compete to cooperate.”  Desire for status was not created by evil capitalist baddies; “[N]epotism is not only a socially but a biologically grounded reality.”  Addresses Rousseau as the source of many left-strain political ideas, as he discusses man’s potential perfectibility.  Goes back to our chimp ancestors, who run to Mama, even adult males, to settle conflicts.  The human ability to, “attribute causality to invisible abstractions is in turn the basis for the emergence of religion.”  Humans often react emotionally without time for rational analysis; “These emotional responses make human beings conformist, norm-following animals.”  People want to see justice done, and display “moralistic aggression” (Robert Trivers) “when proper metanorms are not carried out.”  Echoing Ernest Becker’s competitive immortality projects, “When norms are invested with intrinsic meaning, they become objects of what… Hegel called the ‘struggle for recognition”, social status being a subjective good that cannot be consumed.  “[S]tatus can only be relative… there are no win-win situations as in trade… Status-seeking behavior has become genetically coded for a wide variety of animals, including humans… A great deal of contemporary politics revolved around demands for recognition, particularly on the part of groups that have historical reasons for believing their worth has not been adequately acknowledged… economic resources are often seen more as markers of dignity rather than ends in themselves.”  Fukuyama points out the basic fact that, “Coerced recognition isn’t meaningful”.  In pre-modern times, status-anxiety was not an issue for band-level people because status was predetermined by the “tyranny of cousins”; “[Y]our social world was limited to the circles of relatives surrounding you, who determined what you did, whom you married, how you worshiped, and just about everything else in life.”  “Tribal societies are egalitarian… States, by contrast, are coercive, domineering, and hierarchical... the ‘coldest of all cold monsters.’” -Nietzsche.  “Tribal societies are egalitarian, consensus based, and fractious; they have great difficulty holding territory over prolonged periods and are subject to internal disagreement and rupture.”  Regarding current Africa disfunction, Fukuyama partially places blames on Europeans, who, “deliberately empowered a class of rapacious African Big Men, who could tyrannize… as a consequence of the Europeans’ desire to create a system of modern property rights.”  Going back again to our chimpness, “[V]iolence is a social activity engaged in by groups of males and sometimes females… driv[ing] the need for greater social cooperation… to work with their fellows to defend themselves [from fellow species members.]”  He continues, “The idea that violence is rooted in human nature is difficult for many people to accept… the archaeological record shows a continuous use of violence by pre-historic human societies.”  Fukuyama points to the most basic unit of political organization as a leader with his armed enforcers, with the power to coerce.  Economic virtues replaced warrior virtues in the 17th-18th century.  “Militias… are… young men without families, land, or assets, but with raging hormones that incline them toward lives of risk and adventure.”  “[T]he social expectations for sharing surpluses [amongst hunter gatherers] quickly quash private incentives to move to higher levels of productivity.”  The post-Malthusian world is no longer zero-sum.  Fukuyama points out that different groups of people place different values on leisure vs. work.  “The Greek word charisma means “touched by God”; a charismatic leader asserts authority not because he is elected by his fellow tribesmen for leadership ability but because he is believed to be a designee of God.”  “There is no clearer illustration of the importance of ideas to politics than the emergence of an Arab state under the Prophet Muhammad… Muhammad’s charismatic authority… allowed them to unify and project their power.”  Fukuyama points out religious rituals and political power were inseparable in early states, legitimating the rule of the rulers.  Fukuyama then compares and contrasts the histories of both India and China, making it clear why something like remotely like democracy does not exist at all in China.  India’s ancient caste system, “has proved much stronger than any state in defining the nature of Indian society.”  Of China, “war made the state, and the state made war” (Charles Tilly).  Illustrating why life in 2021 is not so bad, Shang dynasty China 1600 BC had slavery, human sacrifice, and, “Oracle bone inscriptions mention five types of punishment: branding the forehead, cutting off the nose, cutting off the feet, castration, and death.”  Some 2,000 years later in the 600s, upon becoming Empress, Wu Zhao, “had the former empress Wang and rival concubine chopped into pieces and stuffed in a wine vat.”  She also framed, exiled, and forced to commit suicide her own son.  The Chinese pioneered bureaucracy, a “remorseless dictatorship” under the Qin.  The Chinese family is a very strong institution; “Confucianism gave [Chinese tribal societies] a particular ethical cast… one owed much stronger obligations to one’s parents, and particularly to one’s father, than to one’s wife or children.  Failure to act respectfully toward one’s parents, or to fail to care for them economically, was severely punished, as was a son who showed greater concern for his immediate family than for his parents.”  Han Fei, Legalist philosopher, called, “to rule autocratically with deliberation, and to implement the policy of surveillance and castigation by inflicting heavy punishments without exception.”  Rule of Law in the West, in India, and in Islamic societies was based on a body of preexisting de-facto laws, sanctified by religion; China never had this.  Thus, Kings and rulers were bound by law in the West, but never in China, “law was simply the codification of whatever the king or ruler dictated.”  No checks and balances, no elections, no individual rights; “The only accountability in the Chinese system was moral.”  Thus, there is today, “enormous scope for tyranny.”  “Early Chinese kings exercised tyrannical power of a sort that few monarchs in either feudal or early modern Europe [pre-French Revolution] attempted [minus Russia]. They engaged in wholesale land reform, arbitrarily executed the administrators serving them, deported entire populations, and engaged in mad purges of aristocratic rivals.”  China was a society of war, without modern property right and no prestige for being a businessperson; status went to aristocracy (landowners) and warriors.  “What China did not have was the spirit of maximization that economists assume is a universal human trait. An enormous complacency pervaded Ming China in all walks of life.”  Fukuyama continually contests that all humans always want to economically maximize; many Chinese regimes did not tax to the full extent made possible by their authoritarian regimes.  Regarding the power of ideas, “[A]ll successful efforts by civilian authorities to control their militaries are ultimately based on normative ideas about legitimate authority. The U.S. military could seize power from the president tomorrow if it wanted; that it has not done so reflects the fact that the vast majority of officers wouldn’t dream of overturning the U.S. Constitution, and that the vast majority of soldiers they command would not obey their authority if they tried to do so.”  Max Weber saw, “religion and religious ideas as primary, both as motivators of human action and as sources of social identity.”  Fukuyama denies the Marxist interpretation of religion as a fairytale to subdue the masses; “Religion and politics must therefore be seen as drivers of behavior and change in their own right, not as by-products of grand economic forces.”  The Brahmanic religion in India “sacralized the existing social order, making the fulfillment of one’s existing jati or occupation a religious duty”; the Brahmins even limited access to education and thus literacy.  Many of India’s current political systems came from their Colonial experience, integrating them into their own tradition.  China can get stuff done (i.e. rapid modernization) due to their ability to force their people around, who, “have little recourse to protect their rights or make their wishes known,” an impossibility in India which is a democracy.  India is, “highly fragmented religiously, ethnically, linguistically, and in class terms; it was born in an orgy of communal violence that reappears periodically as its different subgroups rub up against each other.”  Despite its inegalitarian culture, India had no history of despotic authority as in China. “For the strong Chinese state has never been constrained by a rule of law that limited the whims of its rulers. Its visible accomplishments, from the Great Wall to the Three Gorges Dam, have come at the expense of the lives of ordinary Chinese who were (and are) largely powerless to resist the state and its plans to draft them into its service.”  Fukuyama then switches to the history of the Ottoman empire, which employed foreign slaves (originally not allowed to have children) to run their administrative positions; disallowed to pass on their ruling privileges to offspring.  “[A]n institution that took children involuntarily from their parents, turned them into slaves [Mamluks], and forcibly converted them to Islam is a very cruel one that is incompatible with modern democratic values, regardless of the privileged lives these slaves may have led. No comparable institution ever developed outside of the Muslim world.”  Fukuyama points out Socrates’ “noble lie” to tell the guardians of the city that they were the children of God; “tie to the family compete with loyalty to the city that the guardians protect.”  Even the Ottoman Mamluks managed to promote their families and display their wealthy status, reflecting, “a deep-seated human urge to promote and protect the interests of descendants, friends, and clients against the requirements of an impersonal social system.” Similar to modern times in America, Mamluks employed, “charitable foundations to be run by their children” in order to accumulate property and pass it on.  Fukuyama pivots to Western history, outlining the patterns and origins of individualism, a, “striking contrast between marriage patterns in Western Europe and virtually every other part of the world.  With lower birth rates, later in life marriage, and number of people never marrying, a pattern dating back to 1400-1650 per John Hajnal; individuals could make their own decisions about marriage, property, and personal issues.  Thus, “states were formed on top of societies in which individuals already enjoyed substantial freedom.”  “[T}he origins of English individualism shows that the right of individuals to freely alienate their property while still alive and disinherit their children in testamentary wills was already well established in the English Common Law by the early sixteenth century.”  This in contrast to, “’peasant societies’ that were characteristic of Eastern Europe and much of the rest of the world, kinship obligations imposed severe entails on the ability of property owners to sell their land.”  Thus, individualism has its roots in breaking away from the tyranny of crushing familial social obligation.  “Englishwomen had the right to hold and dispose of property freely and to sell it to individuals outside the family” as early as post-Norman Conquest in 1066; this would have destroyed the social order in a patrilineal society such as China.  Fukuyama outlines the stark difference between family-centric Chinese society and English culture, where, “parents signed maintenance contracts with their children obliging the latter to care for them once they had inherited their parents’ property [before their death].” “Putting one’s parents out to pasture in a nursing home has very deep historical roots in Western Europe. This suggests that, contrary to Marx, capitalism was the consequence rather than the cause of a change in social relationships and custom.”  Fukuyama outlines the enormous role played by the Catholic church in the evolution of modern ideas and customs, in its own efforts to funnel property to itself and thus increase its own riches.  The church, “took a strong stand against four practices: marriages between close kin, marriages to the widows of dead relatives (the so-called levirate), the adoption of children, and divorce… Later church edicts forbade concubinage, and promoted an indissoluble, monogamous lifetime marriage bond between men and women.”  “The probability of a couple’s producing a male heir who survived into adulthood and who could carry on the ancestral line was quite low. As a result, societies legitimated a wide range of practices that allowed individuals to produce heirs.”  The church worked against all of these.  “Cross-cousin marriage ensured that property would remain in the hands of close family members.”  “[T]he church systematically cut off all available avenues that families had for passing down property to descendants. At the same time, it strongly promoted voluntary donations of land and property to itself. The church thus stood to benefit materially from an increasing pool of property-owning Christians who died without heirs.”  As a fundamental underpinning of modern feminism, “The relatively high status of women in Western Europe was an accidental by-product of the church’s self-interest. The church made it difficult for a widow to remarry within the family group and thereby reconvey her property back to the tribe, so she had to own the property herself. A woman’s right to own property and dispose of it as she wished stood to benefit the church, since it provided a large source of donations from childless widows and spinsters.”  The Church around 1100 (Pope Gregory VII) no longer allowed the priesthood to have families or sexual relations, to end corruption, wanting to become independent of political authority.  Fukuyama puts forth, “[A] far more individualistic European society was already in place during the Middle Ages, before the process of state building began, and centuries before the Reformation, Enlightenment, and Industrial Revolution… change in the family was more likely a facilitative condition for modernization to happen in the first place… [capitalist economies] did not have to overcome the resistance of large corporately organized kinship groups with substantial property to protect, as in India and China.”  “European societies made an early exit from tribal-level organization, and did so without the benefit of top-down political power.”  It was also based less on military power and more on “their ability to dispense justice.”  “[W]e have come to understand the law as something created by human beings, but only under a strict set of procedural rules that guarantee that they conform to a broad social consensus over basic values”; are there too many differing values in the United States in 2021?  England had a “far more individualistic form of community… of unrelated neighbors”, folksy strangers who do not know each other.  “[T]he whole of English society had been organized down to a village level into highly participatory political units.  This was not a grassroots phenomenon of local social organization taking on a political role; rather, it was national government inviting local participation in a way that structured local life and became deeply rooted as a source of community.”  Thus, both bottom up and top down.  “The absence of a strong rule of law is indeed one of the principal reasons why poor countries can’t achieve higher rates of growth.”  “No one will make long-term investments unless he knows that his property rights are secure”, if a government arbitrarily makes tax changes, or does not property enforce contracts and adjudicate disputes, investment will go elsewhere.  Of China, “[I]t is perfectly possible to have “good enough” property rights and contract enforcement that permit economic development without the existence of a true rule of law… There is no true rule of law in China today: the Chinese Communist Party does not accept the authority of any other institution in China as superior to it or able to overturn its decisions.”  Hayek decried rationalist/constructivist understandings of law, “the will of a legislator who rationally studied the problems of society and devised a law to establish what he thought was a better social order… [those] who thought the human mind was sufficient to understand the workings of human society.”  There is too much information for any one person to master.  Fukuyama takes issue with Hayek’s dismissal of “a strong centralized state” to allow to bring into being and enforce the law.  The law substituted a system of justice administered “by a higher third party” for the previous system of violence between kin groups.  People, “are much less inclined to obey the law if they believe that it is unjust.”  Like Yuval Noah Harari, Fukuyama sees religion positively; “Religion was essential to the establishment of a normative legal order that was accepted by kings as well as by ordinary people.”  Unlike in China, there was something abstract to limit the power of the rulers.  Much of modern legal precedent has its origins in the Justinian Code, rediscovered in northern Italy in the late 11th century, written under emperor Justinian in Constantinople in the 500s; civil vs. criminal law, and public vs. private law.  There arose a group of university interlocutors whose job it was to make, “rational inquiry into the meaning of those texts.”  “[W]e are used to thinking of England and its offshoot the United States as the home of Anglo-Saxon laissez-faire economic liberalism, and France as the birthplace of dirigiste centralized government. Up through the fourteenth century, however, exactly the opposite was true… the English state was by far the most centralized and powerful”  “Thus two of the basic institutions that became crucial to economic modernization—individual [1] freedom of choice with regard to social and property relationships, and political rule limited by [2] transparent and predictable law—were created by a premodern institution, the medieval church.”  Fukuyama continually points out that separation of church and state is not some sort of European precedent; law comes from God in both Christian and Islamic societies.  Islamic churches never took on the institutional form of “The Church” in Western Europe, however.  During the fall of the Ottoman Empire, “Ordinary tax rates were raised arbitrarily and fortunes seized, leading wealthy individuals to look for ever more creative ways to hide their wealth rather than investing it.”  In India and the Middle East, the lack of a strong separate religious institution (as with the Catholic Church post-Pope Gregory) meant, “the state itself could not evolve as a separate secular institution.”  “The traditional rule of law did not survive modernization either in India or in the Muslim world, and that failure is particularly tragic in the latter case.”  With colonization doing a number on each respective region’s customary laws.  Fukuyama puts forth a theory that return to sharia law was dissatisfaction with “lawless authoritarianism” and a nostalgia for “executive power… limited by a genuine respect for law… to live within predictable rules.”  As with other intellectuals that have a brain, Fukuyama posits the role culture plays in people’s (and a people’s) life outcomes, “[T]he cultural legacy of an emphasis on education and personal achievement lives on in a manner that has been highly beneficial to Chinese economic growth. It endures in the countless Chinese mothers around the world who save money to send their children to the best possible schools and push them to excel in standardized examinations. The self-satisfaction that led Emperor Chengu’s successors to cancel long-distance voyages [of Worldwide exploration] has been replaced by an extraordinary willingness of Chinese leaders to learn from foreign experiences and adopt them when they seem practically useful.”  Fukuyama explains why democracy has exported poorly to developing nations, “the material balance of power in each society did not force the different actors to accept constitutional compromise.”  The different French classes did not believe “they constituted  parts of a single nation,” leading to the Revolution; “Wealthy individuals, instead of investing their money in productive assets in the private economy, spent their fortunes on heritable offices that could not create but only redistribute wealth.”  “[T]he French monarchy found it could not create investor confidence or repeal basic laws of economics by political fiat.” Napoleon brought, “A new political system in which recruitment into public office was to be based on merit and impersonality.”  “[I}nequality and weak rule of law—are related. Rule of law protections often apply to only a small minority of people in Latin America… as much as 60 to 70 percent of the population lives in what is known as the informal sector. These people often do not have legal title to the homes they occupy; they operate unlicensed businesses; if they are employed, they are not members of trade unions and do not receive formal labor protections.”  “In Latin America, by contrast, the fiscal system does very little redistribution, and in some cases succeeds in redistributing income toward relatively privileged groups like unionized public sector workers or university students… the burden of taxation comes from excise, customs, or value-added taxes that fall disproportionately on the poor.”  There was not a work ethic that was exported from Spain to Latin America, as it was from England to New England.  “[T]he 1540s led to the creation of a huge extractive empire in which the European rulers lived off of mining rents, while the work was done by enslaved indigenous laborers... the Spaniards who sailed to the New World went there not to work but to be masters: they ‘are sustained by the labour of the Indians and the work of their hands and are maintained thanks to their sweat.’”  Today, Latin American countries that cannot effectively tax their elites wind up doing so effectively when they have to write-down enormous amounts of debt when they do bankrupt (as with Argentina.  “Rather than risk confrontation over higher levels of direct taxes, [Spain] debased the currency and accepted a higher rate of inflation. Inflation via loose monetary policy is in effect a tax, but one that does not have to be legislated and that tends to hurt ordinary people more than elites with real rather than monetary assets.” “[T]he fiscal bad habits of old regime Spain like persistent budget deficits, excessive borrowing, debt renegotiation, and taxation via inflation lived on in Argentina, Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia.  Formal democracy and constitutionalism was not based on confrontation and negotiated consensus between social classes, but was granted from above by elites who could take it back when it no longer suited their interests.” In contrast, “English Kings were willing to support the property rights of nonelites against those of the nobility, something that depended in turn on the existence of a powerful centralized state.” “It is the responsibility of the central government to enforce its own laws against the oligarchy; freedom is not lost when the state is too strong but when it is too weak.  In the United States, the ending of Jim Crow laws and racial segregation in the two decades following World War II was brought about only when the federal government used its power to enforce the Constitution against the states in the South.”  Regarding Russia, it had a long history with absolutism; serfdom had meant people were bound to their owners and could not move; “[An] alliance that emerged between the monarch and both the upper and lower nobility… to binding rules at the expense of the peasantry.” (No wonder there was a revolution?)  Cities and trade began to chip away at serfdom, but there was not a rich development of bourgeoisie due to the constraints on owning property for non-nobles (one had to own serfs).  Russia did not so much participate in European ideals like the Enlightenment.  Ivan IV (1500s), foreshadowing Stalin, confiscated property, and enacted tyranny on those deemed evildoers and traitors.  Peter I tried to modernize Russia top-down and reform government, but his bureaucratic systems ran into a “’lack of capacity.’ That is, there was an insufficient number of trained administrators at a local level, and those who existed lacked initiative.”  Rule of law with regard to elites basically did not exist in Russia; this mirrors comments about Russia’s lack of economic development per Thomas Sowell, when it is an enormous nation abound with natural resources.  And echoing Sowell critiques and praises, Fukuyama says, “The Wealth of Nations provided a more nuanced and ultimately convincing account of the provenance of the bourgeoisie, one that sees politics as cause as much as consequence of its rise.”  Men who had, “escape from the control of their lords and found refuge in the city.  Over time they were granted privileges by kings to give away their own daughters in marriage, to raise their own militias, and eventually to live under their own laws… This was the origin of the bourgeois class.”  Quoting Smith, paralleling modern discourse, “The lords despised the burghers… The wealth of the burghers never failed to provoke their envy and indignation.”  Thus, “unless [cities] are granted political protection, they will be subordinated to the powerful territorial lords”; they are not magic results of economic growth as Marx posited.  “The struggle against corrupt government is never decisively won or lost… patrimonialism always seeks to reinsert itself over time.”  There must be, “an external environment that puts fiscal pressure on the government to improve its performance… pressure from below on the part of those who are paying taxes to the government and don’t want to see their money wasted.”  Many corrupt foreign nations today do not need their people for revenue; “government income comes from natural resources or aid from international donors, who do not demand accountability for how their money is spent.”  Thus, without taxation, there is lower incentive for political participation.  The three components of a modern political order are 1. A strong and capable state 2. The state’s subordination to a rule of law and 3. Government accountability to all citizens.  Neither France nor Spain taxed their elites, and they thus did not have accountability, nor enough money.  “Matin Luther’s ideas proved tremendously destabilizing, catalyzing long-standing popular grievances against the Catholic church.”  Lutheran set up education everywhere in Denmark, and literacy helped them organize politically.  “Given the enormous conservatism of human societies with regards to institutions, societies do not get to sweep the decks clear in every generation.  New institutions are more typically layered on top of existing ones, which survive for extraordinarily long periods of time… the possibilities for change in the present [must] appreciat[e] this legacy, and the way that it often limits choices available to political actors in the present.”  Also, understanding the history of how institutions developed makes it easier to understand why they cannot be copied and pasted from one society to another.  “Human beings are not completely free to socially construct their own behavior.  They have a shared biological nature.  That nature is remarkably uniform throughout the world… [this] frames and limits the nature of institutions that are possible.  It also means that human politics is subject to certain recurring patterns of behavior across time and across cultures.”  “The principle of kin selection or inclusive fitness states that human beings will act altruistically toward genetic relatives (or individuals believed to be genetic relatives) in rough proportion to their shared genes… When impersonal institutions decay, these are the forms of cooperation that always reemerge because they are natural to human beings.”  “Human beings have an innate propensity for creating and following norms or rules… human beings have a natural inclination to create institutions.” “The human instinct to follow rules is often based in the emotions rather than in reason, however.  Emotions like guilt, shame, pride, anger, embarrassment, and admiration are not learned behaviors… they come naturally to small children, who then organize their behavior around genetically grounded yet culturally transmitted rules.”  “The propensity of human beings to endow rules with intrinsic value helps to explain the enormous conservatism of societies… societies cling to them long after those conditions have changed and the rues have become irrelevant or even dysfunctional.”  “Human beings have a natural propensity for violence… social institutions have always existed to control and channel violence.”  “Human beings by nature desire not just material resources but also recognition… one can have high status only if everyone else has lower status.”  “A great deal of human politics revolved around struggles for recognition… It is important to resist the temptation to reduce human motivation to an economic desire for resources.  Violence in human history has often been perpetrated by people seeking not material wealth but recognition.  Conflicts are carried on long beyond the point when they make economic sense.”  Human beings and their causal models have grown, and are now “using fertilizer and irrigation, for example, rather than the blood of sacrificial victims to increase crop yields.”  However, “[L]arge scale… Collective action based merely on rational self-interest is wholly inadequate in explaining the degree of social cooperation and altruism that actually exists in the world.  Religious belief helps to motivate people to do things they would not do if they were interested only in resources or material well-being.”  “Religions are more than theories; they are prescriptive moral codes that seek to enforce rules on their followers… invested with considerable emotional meaning and therefore are believed for intrinsic reasons… the faculty for creating religious doctrine is innate”  With a dig at Hayek, “While large-scale design may work less frequently than smaller-scale projects, it still does periodically work.” (though I would suggest perhaps not all the chickens have come home to roost yet i.e. Biden administration printing money like crazy.  Fukuyama mentions the pervasive propensity of humans to blame others, “[I]t is easy to blame social failures on the machinations of various outsiders, whether Jews or American imperialism, rather than looking to indigenous institutions for the explanation.”  Citing Mancur Olson, “entrenched interest groups tend to accumulate in any society over time… a large disparity in the organization capacity of elites and nonelites that prevents the latter from acting decisively.”  Many band-level societies did not make the shift to agriculture for generations, suggests research, due to the pressures to engage in food-sharing, something “impossible once agriculture and private property are adopted.”  “The shift from one form of production to another would make the society as a whole richer due to the higher productivity of agriculture over hunting and gathering, but it would also require the exclusion of certain member of the band from the free enjoyment of the surpluses.”  “In many respects, the norms and institutions of the contemporary world have closed off violence as a means of resolving political deadlocks… This means either that the burden of institutional innovation and reform will fall on other, nonviolent mechanisms like the ones described above, or that societies will continue to experience political decay.”  Says that economic modernization can come first and democratization later, as with Turkey, South Korea, Taiwan, and Indonesia.  “In 1954, following the Korean War, South Korea’s per capita GDP was lower than that of Nigeria, which was to win its independence from Britain in 1960… the performance is almost entirely attributable to the far superior government that presided over South Korea compared to Nigeria.”  “The fluidity and open access demanded by modern market economies undermine many traditional forms of social authority and force their replacement with more flexible, voluntary forms of association.”  “Group based on ethnic or racial chauvinism spread intolerance; interest groups can invest effort in zero-sum rent seeking; excessive politicization of economic and social conflicts can paralyze societies and undermine the legitimacy of democratic institutions.”  Points to how different the 20th century would have been had not Marx lived, and how no one believed in the ideas any more after 1989; also how the Great Depression delegitimized many capitalist institutions and led to the greater state control of the economy.  Globalization has “made it much harder for states to enforce laws on their own territory, collect taxes, regulate behavior…” etc.  Regarding political orders, “The very contingency of their origins, and the prolonged historical struggles the were required to put them in place, should imbue us with a certain degree of humility in approaching the task of institution building in the contemporary world.”  “Oftentimes formal institutions need to be supplemented by cultural shifts…” such as having an independent press and self-organizing civil society to keep governments honest.