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Great Founder Theory
What drives social change throughout history and the present? What are the origins of institutional health or sclerosis? My answer is that a small number of functional institutions founded by exceptional individuals form the core of society. These institutions are imperfectly imitated by the rest of society, multiplying their effect. The original versions outperform their imitators, and are responsible for the creation and renewal of society and all the good things that come with it—whether we think of technology, wealth, or the preservation of a society’s values. Over time, functional institutions decay. As the landscape of founders and institutions changes, so does the landscape of society.
This answer forms the basis of the lens through which I analyze current and historical events, affairs, and figures. But though it may be intuitively compelling, fully substantiating such a framework is no small task. This manuscript, titled Great Founder Theory, is my substantiation. It explains all of the models that are key to understanding how great founders shape society through the generations, covering such topics as strategy, power, knowledge, social technology, and more.
The first edition of this manuscript was published in 2018 and has now been updated for a new 2020 edition. This manuscript is not a book—but a book is coming soon! The upcoming book will be a full treatment of the aforementioned topics, fleshed out with historical examples and several new chapters on the topic of civilization as a whole, and written for a broad, educated audience. Subscribe to my newsletter here to get updates on the upcoming book.
In the meantime, I invite you to read and consider the more theoretical treatment of these topics that I have published here.
This answer forms the basis of the lens through which I analyze current and historical events, affairs, and figures. But though it may be intuitively compelling, fully substantiating such a framework is no small task. This manuscript, titled Great Founder Theory, is my substantiation. It explains all of the models that are key to understanding how great founders shape society through the generations, covering such topics as strategy, power, knowledge, social technology, and more.
The first edition of this manuscript was published in 2018 and has now been updated for a new 2020 edition. This manuscript is not a book—but a book is coming soon! The upcoming book will be a full treatment of the aforementioned topics, fleshed out with historical examples and several new chapters on the topic of civilization as a whole, and written for a broad, educated audience. Subscribe to my newsletter here to get updates on the upcoming book.
In the meantime, I invite you to read and consider the more theoretical treatment of these topics that I have published here.
Unknown Binding
Published August 1, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
December 21, 2020
Written in a lucid, aphoristic style, this treatise argues that a civilization's flourishing depends on a small number of knowledge-creating institutions run by remarkable people. The implications are both scary and exhilarating: When such institutions are left to decline, the rest of civilization is likely to follow; by the same token, however, a handful of ambitious people can radically improve their society at any time by building great instutitions.
The treatise covers a lot of ground in just 175 pages, including the differences between 'owned' and 'borrowed' power, the complex dynamics between different echelons of power, the problem of preserving institutional knowledge over time, and the diffuse and hard-to-preserve nature of social technology. My favorite sections were on Botswana's remarkable institutional stability and on the tendency for institutional failure to come as a surprise.
I think some readers will be skeptical of such theory-rich material that doesn't engage much with competing theories, but I realize this text is meant to be a general overview; I assume Burja will address such matters in his book. All in all, a fascinating read. Highly recommended.
The treatise covers a lot of ground in just 175 pages, including the differences between 'owned' and 'borrowed' power, the complex dynamics between different echelons of power, the problem of preserving institutional knowledge over time, and the diffuse and hard-to-preserve nature of social technology. My favorite sections were on Botswana's remarkable institutional stability and on the tendency for institutional failure to come as a surprise.
I think some readers will be skeptical of such theory-rich material that doesn't engage much with competing theories, but I realize this text is meant to be a general overview; I assume Burja will address such matters in his book. All in all, a fascinating read. Highly recommended.
December 6, 2020
Written in a lucid, aphoristic style, this treatise argues that a civilization's flourishing depends on a small number of knowledge-creating institutions run by remarkable people. The implications are both scary and exhilarating: When such institutions are left to decline, the rest of civilization is likely to follow; by the same token, however, a handful of ambitious people can radically improve their society at any time by building great instutitions.
The treatise covers a lot of ground in just 175 pages, including the differences between 'owned' and 'borrowed' power, the complex dynamics between different echelons of power, the problem of preserving institutional knowledge over time, and the diffuse and hard-to-preserve nature of social technology. My favorite sections were on Botswana's remarkable institutional stability and on the tendency for institutional failure to come as a surprise.
I think some readers will be skeptical of such theory-rich material that doesn't engage much with competing theories, but I realize this text is meant to be a general overview; I assume Burja will address such matters in his book. All in all, a fascinating read. Highly recommended.
[This review is for the 2020 version.]
The treatise covers a lot of ground in just 175 pages, including the differences between 'owned' and 'borrowed' power, the complex dynamics between different echelons of power, the problem of preserving institutional knowledge over time, and the diffuse and hard-to-preserve nature of social technology. My favorite sections were on Botswana's remarkable institutional stability and on the tendency for institutional failure to come as a surprise.
I think some readers will be skeptical of such theory-rich material that doesn't engage much with competing theories, but I realize this text is meant to be a general overview; I assume Burja will address such matters in his book. All in all, a fascinating read. Highly recommended.
[This review is for the 2020 version.]
May 13, 2023
The titular theory may not be convincing, but the book will do as a guide to certain corporate and political behaviours. You'll learn some useful vocabulary with which you might want to think further.
May 25, 2021
Notes:
- Great founders design and set up machines of automation (bureaucracies) around them. After these great founders leave, knowledge about how these machines were designed often disappears. The principles that lead to their generation are replaced by the brittle instruction manuals.
- There are low, middle, and high stratas. Middle often use low against high, and middle fight amongst themselves to become high. When the whole empire is expanding, the mid's best bet is to coordinate with high to get more power. When the pie isn't growing, it's their best bet to turn against high.
- Great vocabulary - he never did justify what great founder theory was and why he believes this to be superior to other theories of history. He simply chided people for having many accounts. I think this is a limited critique. He maintains that 1. A M-theory of history would be complex 2. Most people don't know their theories of history or have contradicting theories 3. His is great founder theory, not social determinism or technological progress. All of these seem right-ish. Part of a large, non-linear, weighted sum of interactions. I'm not one to be defeatist -- but this seems like an important but limited part of the whole story. One that is useful though -- a defeatist account of history leads to a lame life, much lamers than a great founder theory driven. I think there are several advancement stragies that pay out in the state space of progress reward. Great founder is one, tech progress is another. They can happen together, too.
- Great founders design and set up machines of automation (bureaucracies) around them. After these great founders leave, knowledge about how these machines were designed often disappears. The principles that lead to their generation are replaced by the brittle instruction manuals.
- There are low, middle, and high stratas. Middle often use low against high, and middle fight amongst themselves to become high. When the whole empire is expanding, the mid's best bet is to coordinate with high to get more power. When the pie isn't growing, it's their best bet to turn against high.
- Great vocabulary - he never did justify what great founder theory was and why he believes this to be superior to other theories of history. He simply chided people for having many accounts. I think this is a limited critique. He maintains that 1. A M-theory of history would be complex 2. Most people don't know their theories of history or have contradicting theories 3. His is great founder theory, not social determinism or technological progress. All of these seem right-ish. Part of a large, non-linear, weighted sum of interactions. I'm not one to be defeatist -- but this seems like an important but limited part of the whole story. One that is useful though -- a defeatist account of history leads to a lame life, much lamers than a great founder theory driven. I think there are several advancement stragies that pay out in the state space of progress reward. Great founder is one, tech progress is another. They can happen together, too.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 22, 2023
Will be interesting to see the additions when this manuscript becomes a book. Samo is chasing a very interesting and exciting area of research.
May 30, 2023
A very interesting, if slightly excessively masculine, perspective on history and its importance in understanding how to salvage civilizations from collapse - provided it’s possible to do so. The main question Burja tries to answer in the book is: What are the origins of institutional health or sclerosis? And the answer: a small number of functional institutions are founded by exceptional individuals, and it’s these that form the core of society. Radiating outward from the core are ever-decreasing levels of competence, as other people try to imitate their functionality to much lesser degrees of success. He makes use of the power-law distribution stating that a tiny minority of individuals and institutions have a prodigiously productive effect on society, while the rest lag behind, usually by orders of magnitude. Because the best way to view society is as a landscape of institutions, the health of society can be viewed as analogous to the health of these various institutions. As the institutions change, so does society; as the institutions decay, so does society.
INTRODUCTION: an institution is a zone of close cooperation maintained by automated systems. (Am I dreaming if I equate Burja’s institutions, roughly, with Wilber’s holons?) The most automated of institutions can be understood as bureaucracies, and we can understand the whole of human society as a landscape of functional and non-functional institutions, this latter being the exception rather than the rule. When a functional institution dies, the living tradition of knowledge disappears to the detriment of the whole of society. To examine a society, we need to look to the functioning institutions; look for those businesses, religions, governments that radically outperform the competition, and then seek out the founders of these movements. By looking at the plans and intentions of these great founders, we can make predictions about what the future is likely to look like. Many great founders will push the world forward; the less there are, the worse society will be.
(I think the author goes slightly wrong when he states that social technologies cannot be explained by evolutionary analogy, whether Darwinian or Lamarckian because they appear in clear, discontinuous jumps, with several interlocking complexes, in a short space of time. As Gould stated, punctuated equilibrium is a much closer model of reality than simplistic gradualism, and it applies in this case too. But I think the main issue seems to reflect a misunderstanding with evolution; since humans are seen to intervene in the process of selection, this isn’t ‘natural’ selection in action. The author states that “[social technologies] did not evolve, but were designed,” as though evolution and human design are separable or mutually exclusive. Rather, in actuality, evolution encompasses human R&D, the latter is a subset of the former. To be sure, it’s a tiny point that doesn’t actually affect the entirety of the argument, but I just wanted to point it out.)
A theory of history is an explanation of how things generally happen in the world; while we’ll never manage to get ahold of the “true” theory of reality because reality is much too fluid, complex, multifaceted, and implicit to pin down explicitly, we will manage to describe those small number of factors that have disproportionately affected the course of things. “We are aiming for a theory that generally explains how things happen in the world.” Proper theory make reality comprehensible and usable, by leaving out that which doesn’t matter ‘for our specific purposes of understanding and using!’
LOSS of KNOWLEDGE: a tradition of knowledge is a body of knowledge that has been consecutively and successfully worked on by multiple generations of practitioners. It’s alive if successfully transferred and understood; dead if successfully transferred but not understood; and lost if not transferred. Just like physicists posit the existence of dark matter that must be there even if it cannot be detected, there is intellectual dark matter, which is knowledge that we cannot see publicly but whose existence we can infer. Knowledge can be, firstly, lost to the sands of time. Secondly, it can be proprietary knowledge, meaning it’s guarded by the institution that developed it to maintain its monopoly (frequently associated with the profit motive, so we need to remove this obstacle). Thirdly, it can simply be implicit knowledge; you don’t learn to ride a bike by reading a book but by actually riding a bike. Since some knowledge cannot easily be transmitted by text, it is frequently imparted by virtue of master/apprentice relationships. “If we can find this information and assemble it into a coherent understanding, we stand a chance of dramatically changing the world’s course for the better.” Great quote; might steal.
LIVE and DEAD PLAYERS: live players are able to do things they haven’t done before; dead players are working off a script and are incapable of doing new things. Societies with few live players will stagnate; with many, they’ll thrive. A live player isn’t necessarily exceptional in skill; if I’m exceptional in doing X but I’ve done X before, then I’m not necessarily alive because I can do X, even if X is extremely technically impressive. (It’s literally the RH and LH all over again! Unbelievable how McGilchrist just pops up everywhere; I swear we won’t know what we’ve lost when McGilchrist goes.) There are two attributes necessary to consider a player live: tight coordination and a living tradition of knowledge. Once they lose the latter, they run out of ideas; the former is lost because it gets replaced by formal structures which constrain action.
BORROWED and OWNED POWER: borrowed power is that which is given to you but can easily be taken away, whereas owned power is harder to remove because it comes in the form of resources, skills, personal relationships, and knowledge. Borrowing and lending power is inherently adversarial; the lender wants to keep as much as possible. (This assumes there isn’t a basis of love underpinning the relationship between lender and borrower which is admittedly rare.) It’s interesting to note (Burja doesn’t mention this last point) that high offices ought to lend power to their incumbents, rather than allow them to be taken by those who possess owned power; at first glance, while it’s certainly good to acquire owned power (increased knowledge, skills, etc) this cannot be taken too far because someone is bound to abuse their monopoly position for their own selfish benefits.
THE SUCCESION PROBLEM: Functional institutions always trace their beginnings to a competent founder. In order to ensure the continuation of the group, it’s important to appoint a successor to skillfully pilot the institution to even greater success. There are two components: power succession (handing off the reins of the institution) and skill succession (transferring the skill needed to pilot the institution well.) This is a notoriously difficult problem to solve for institutions, and one which must be solved time and time and time again. The difficulty of this problem ensures that functional institutions remain the exception across the landscape. Because of the decay across time and the near-impossibility of rescuing a floundering group, if you see a functional institution, it most likely was that way from the start. Only once assembled and functional can the automated machinery of the institution perpetuate itself. “Those who find secrets - that is, correct and special knowledge about the world - and have the ability to plan, possess the building blocks of the next great social machine.” Also another great quote; might steal.
BUREAUCRACIES: despite their bad rep (which is entirely justified) there are some useful aspects to bureaucracies. “The purpose of a bureaucracy is to save the time of a competent person.” The RH tells the LH, the master tells his emissary, this latter limited in vision and skill, what he needs to do. Bureaucracies are best thought of as extensions of their creator and as sources of power for him. Ideally, the master would like his emissary to carry out his duties algorithmically, like a computer, but humans are cunning little creatures and always try to transform their borrowed power into owned power, usually with disastrous consequences.
EMPIRES and POWER: there are two types of actions in competition: limited (which plays by the rules of the game) and unlimited (which does not). Competition for owned power frequently features unlimited action and is likely to be brutal. ‘Empire’ means a group of coordinated actors that operate around some central power; they’re composed of players, resources, and other empires. Players are the individuals with enough power to be relevant to the overall functioning of the empire and resources are assets that can be drawn upon for the empire to function. A strategic landscape is a domain of competition among players and a domain of competition is a region within which players compete for scarce resources. Actors exhibit common patterns of behaviour depending upon their relative position in a strategic landscape; and the positions are divided into high, mid, and low.
High is generally concerned with maintaining its power in the empire; high will seek both to increase the direct power imbalance between high and mid, as well as to acquire more resources in order to buy off certain mid players and play them against each other.
Mid is the group of players that can challenge high. The tense interaction between mid and high is the most important thing to focus on when trying to understand an empire.
Low players can challenge mid players.
Outside is composed of those empires not within high’s empire. These can be further divided into near and far, the former being the direct competitors to the empire, the latter not being direct competitors to high.
Burja then goes through the various interaction between the different sections of society, such as that between high-mid, but they’re too numerous to list here. The dynamics between the power classes can determine whether empires are healthy or not. (He states that health and growth are synonymous, but I’m wondering whether this is a LH-approach to health? Growth isn’t necessarily healthy, although there certainly is healthy growth; but then again think of cancer. Perhaps a differentiation between growth and health is necessary here.) He creates a matrix of empire classification with centralization on the x-axis and expansion on the y-axis.
Centralized expanding empires are ones where high is broadly allied with the middle powers, often by buying them off with resources acquired from outside the empire
Centralized declining empires are ones where high is keeping mid coordinated by denying them resources and preventing them from acquiring them elsewhere.
Decentralized expanding empires are ones where high isn’t strong enough to prevent mid from acquiring resources from outside.
Decentralized declining empires are ones where high isn’t strong enough to keep mid coordinated and prevent their growth. (In all honesty, I didn’t see much of a difference between these last two examples he gave; perhaps because he was equating the health of the whole with the health of high.)
In this analysis, growth seems indispensable for the harmonization of divergent interests of high and mid. Empires coordinated through cooperation rather than coercion last longer; the best way to win at adversarial encounters is to focus energy on building cooperative ones. “Acquiring power and empowering others is mutually reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive.” Key quote too!
WHY CIVILIZATIONS COLLAPSE: Society isn’t a single institution but an ecosystem of interdependent ones; non-functional ones are the rule, functional ones the exception. Civilizational collapse is the low-grade but constant loss of capabilities and knowledge throughout the most critical parts of our institutions, that eventually degrades our ability to perpetuate society. Collapse is that process wherein most large-scale recognizable institutions of a society vanish and the material wealth, the complexity of material artifacts/social forms, physical safety, and knowledge all massively drop. The key dynamic is the loss of the subtle social technologies that allow us to solve the succession problem, the transfer of power and skills necessary to keep the machine up and running. The solution to this dripping degradation lies with a small number of people who can independently judge the generative minds behind the facts, rather than merely minding the integrity of the established theories.
INTRODUCTION: an institution is a zone of close cooperation maintained by automated systems. (Am I dreaming if I equate Burja’s institutions, roughly, with Wilber’s holons?) The most automated of institutions can be understood as bureaucracies, and we can understand the whole of human society as a landscape of functional and non-functional institutions, this latter being the exception rather than the rule. When a functional institution dies, the living tradition of knowledge disappears to the detriment of the whole of society. To examine a society, we need to look to the functioning institutions; look for those businesses, religions, governments that radically outperform the competition, and then seek out the founders of these movements. By looking at the plans and intentions of these great founders, we can make predictions about what the future is likely to look like. Many great founders will push the world forward; the less there are, the worse society will be.
(I think the author goes slightly wrong when he states that social technologies cannot be explained by evolutionary analogy, whether Darwinian or Lamarckian because they appear in clear, discontinuous jumps, with several interlocking complexes, in a short space of time. As Gould stated, punctuated equilibrium is a much closer model of reality than simplistic gradualism, and it applies in this case too. But I think the main issue seems to reflect a misunderstanding with evolution; since humans are seen to intervene in the process of selection, this isn’t ‘natural’ selection in action. The author states that “[social technologies] did not evolve, but were designed,” as though evolution and human design are separable or mutually exclusive. Rather, in actuality, evolution encompasses human R&D, the latter is a subset of the former. To be sure, it’s a tiny point that doesn’t actually affect the entirety of the argument, but I just wanted to point it out.)
A theory of history is an explanation of how things generally happen in the world; while we’ll never manage to get ahold of the “true” theory of reality because reality is much too fluid, complex, multifaceted, and implicit to pin down explicitly, we will manage to describe those small number of factors that have disproportionately affected the course of things. “We are aiming for a theory that generally explains how things happen in the world.” Proper theory make reality comprehensible and usable, by leaving out that which doesn’t matter ‘for our specific purposes of understanding and using!’
LOSS of KNOWLEDGE: a tradition of knowledge is a body of knowledge that has been consecutively and successfully worked on by multiple generations of practitioners. It’s alive if successfully transferred and understood; dead if successfully transferred but not understood; and lost if not transferred. Just like physicists posit the existence of dark matter that must be there even if it cannot be detected, there is intellectual dark matter, which is knowledge that we cannot see publicly but whose existence we can infer. Knowledge can be, firstly, lost to the sands of time. Secondly, it can be proprietary knowledge, meaning it’s guarded by the institution that developed it to maintain its monopoly (frequently associated with the profit motive, so we need to remove this obstacle). Thirdly, it can simply be implicit knowledge; you don’t learn to ride a bike by reading a book but by actually riding a bike. Since some knowledge cannot easily be transmitted by text, it is frequently imparted by virtue of master/apprentice relationships. “If we can find this information and assemble it into a coherent understanding, we stand a chance of dramatically changing the world’s course for the better.” Great quote; might steal.
LIVE and DEAD PLAYERS: live players are able to do things they haven’t done before; dead players are working off a script and are incapable of doing new things. Societies with few live players will stagnate; with many, they’ll thrive. A live player isn’t necessarily exceptional in skill; if I’m exceptional in doing X but I’ve done X before, then I’m not necessarily alive because I can do X, even if X is extremely technically impressive. (It’s literally the RH and LH all over again! Unbelievable how McGilchrist just pops up everywhere; I swear we won’t know what we’ve lost when McGilchrist goes.) There are two attributes necessary to consider a player live: tight coordination and a living tradition of knowledge. Once they lose the latter, they run out of ideas; the former is lost because it gets replaced by formal structures which constrain action.
BORROWED and OWNED POWER: borrowed power is that which is given to you but can easily be taken away, whereas owned power is harder to remove because it comes in the form of resources, skills, personal relationships, and knowledge. Borrowing and lending power is inherently adversarial; the lender wants to keep as much as possible. (This assumes there isn’t a basis of love underpinning the relationship between lender and borrower which is admittedly rare.) It’s interesting to note (Burja doesn’t mention this last point) that high offices ought to lend power to their incumbents, rather than allow them to be taken by those who possess owned power; at first glance, while it’s certainly good to acquire owned power (increased knowledge, skills, etc) this cannot be taken too far because someone is bound to abuse their monopoly position for their own selfish benefits.
THE SUCCESION PROBLEM: Functional institutions always trace their beginnings to a competent founder. In order to ensure the continuation of the group, it’s important to appoint a successor to skillfully pilot the institution to even greater success. There are two components: power succession (handing off the reins of the institution) and skill succession (transferring the skill needed to pilot the institution well.) This is a notoriously difficult problem to solve for institutions, and one which must be solved time and time and time again. The difficulty of this problem ensures that functional institutions remain the exception across the landscape. Because of the decay across time and the near-impossibility of rescuing a floundering group, if you see a functional institution, it most likely was that way from the start. Only once assembled and functional can the automated machinery of the institution perpetuate itself. “Those who find secrets - that is, correct and special knowledge about the world - and have the ability to plan, possess the building blocks of the next great social machine.” Also another great quote; might steal.
BUREAUCRACIES: despite their bad rep (which is entirely justified) there are some useful aspects to bureaucracies. “The purpose of a bureaucracy is to save the time of a competent person.” The RH tells the LH, the master tells his emissary, this latter limited in vision and skill, what he needs to do. Bureaucracies are best thought of as extensions of their creator and as sources of power for him. Ideally, the master would like his emissary to carry out his duties algorithmically, like a computer, but humans are cunning little creatures and always try to transform their borrowed power into owned power, usually with disastrous consequences.
EMPIRES and POWER: there are two types of actions in competition: limited (which plays by the rules of the game) and unlimited (which does not). Competition for owned power frequently features unlimited action and is likely to be brutal. ‘Empire’ means a group of coordinated actors that operate around some central power; they’re composed of players, resources, and other empires. Players are the individuals with enough power to be relevant to the overall functioning of the empire and resources are assets that can be drawn upon for the empire to function. A strategic landscape is a domain of competition among players and a domain of competition is a region within which players compete for scarce resources. Actors exhibit common patterns of behaviour depending upon their relative position in a strategic landscape; and the positions are divided into high, mid, and low.
High is generally concerned with maintaining its power in the empire; high will seek both to increase the direct power imbalance between high and mid, as well as to acquire more resources in order to buy off certain mid players and play them against each other.
Mid is the group of players that can challenge high. The tense interaction between mid and high is the most important thing to focus on when trying to understand an empire.
Low players can challenge mid players.
Outside is composed of those empires not within high’s empire. These can be further divided into near and far, the former being the direct competitors to the empire, the latter not being direct competitors to high.
Burja then goes through the various interaction between the different sections of society, such as that between high-mid, but they’re too numerous to list here. The dynamics between the power classes can determine whether empires are healthy or not. (He states that health and growth are synonymous, but I’m wondering whether this is a LH-approach to health? Growth isn’t necessarily healthy, although there certainly is healthy growth; but then again think of cancer. Perhaps a differentiation between growth and health is necessary here.) He creates a matrix of empire classification with centralization on the x-axis and expansion on the y-axis.
Centralized expanding empires are ones where high is broadly allied with the middle powers, often by buying them off with resources acquired from outside the empire
Centralized declining empires are ones where high is keeping mid coordinated by denying them resources and preventing them from acquiring them elsewhere.
Decentralized expanding empires are ones where high isn’t strong enough to prevent mid from acquiring resources from outside.
Decentralized declining empires are ones where high isn’t strong enough to keep mid coordinated and prevent their growth. (In all honesty, I didn’t see much of a difference between these last two examples he gave; perhaps because he was equating the health of the whole with the health of high.)
In this analysis, growth seems indispensable for the harmonization of divergent interests of high and mid. Empires coordinated through cooperation rather than coercion last longer; the best way to win at adversarial encounters is to focus energy on building cooperative ones. “Acquiring power and empowering others is mutually reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive.” Key quote too!
WHY CIVILIZATIONS COLLAPSE: Society isn’t a single institution but an ecosystem of interdependent ones; non-functional ones are the rule, functional ones the exception. Civilizational collapse is the low-grade but constant loss of capabilities and knowledge throughout the most critical parts of our institutions, that eventually degrades our ability to perpetuate society. Collapse is that process wherein most large-scale recognizable institutions of a society vanish and the material wealth, the complexity of material artifacts/social forms, physical safety, and knowledge all massively drop. The key dynamic is the loss of the subtle social technologies that allow us to solve the succession problem, the transfer of power and skills necessary to keep the machine up and running. The solution to this dripping degradation lies with a small number of people who can independently judge the generative minds behind the facts, rather than merely minding the integrity of the established theories.
January 27, 2026
This book sets a good theoretical foundation for thinking about empires, players, and strategies. Occasionally, it delves into practical applications, as if nudging the reader to join the arena, but it never delves deep enough to consider it a manual. The few historical case studies are too few, too abridged, and finally, they may be unorthodox to the mainstream historical science. Overall, it is still a comprehensive and thorough book but some aspects make it exposed to cheap criticism and place it just shy of a truly great work. Worth noting that the current edition is the first one, and said to be a mere draft, so overlooks like that are completely understandable.
August 4, 2022
Very interesting framework for strategic analysis and decision making, particularly useful for academic purposes or organizational planning.
In regards to its personal value, I think the book invites us to reflect on our place in the organizations and general landscape in which we operate and develop ourselves, using the concepts and frameworks explained could enrich our understanding of the dynamics behind how and why the people and the systems around us operate and how we could effect changes in them, based on our given positions in those domains.
In regards to its personal value, I think the book invites us to reflect on our place in the organizations and general landscape in which we operate and develop ourselves, using the concepts and frameworks explained could enrich our understanding of the dynamics behind how and why the people and the systems around us operate and how we could effect changes in them, based on our given positions in those domains.
April 4, 2024
I think that anyone who is going into engineering, science, leadership, ethics, or philosophy should read this book. The vocabulary it provides on its own is very helpful to further academic discussions. Personally, I don't agree with every principle, but that doesn't matter when reading to better know your own perspective.
January 2, 2024
It’s just a compilation of blog posts that he put on Medium.
Really great blog posts but it’s not a book.
He knows this and this is slightly dishonourable of him to do.
A good non-fiction book takes one idea and explains it thoroughly - this did not do that. Just jumped from topic to topic
Really great blog posts but it’s not a book.
He knows this and this is slightly dishonourable of him to do.
A good non-fiction book takes one idea and explains it thoroughly - this did not do that. Just jumped from topic to topic
January 6, 2025
Collection of essays on similar topics that together explain Burja's philosophy of history. His theory is very uncool in leftist circles and current academia. Compatible with Silicon valley startup mentality. I find it quite productive.
January 4, 2025
I have a number of questions about Samo. Where did he come from? Why is he now prominent? Was he an NRx before whatever he is now? How did he get to the US?
Whatever his origin story, Samo is an interesting thinker, academically inclined in the best possible sense of the term while managing to avoid the groupthink of academia. Unfortunately most of his writing is behind the prohibitive paywall of Bismarck Brief; fortunately for those of us with little credit but lots of interest in niche thinkers, Samo has provided a free copy of the unfinished manuscript for his very unforthcoming book, Great Founder Theory.
Samo has a wide frame of reference and the ability to synthesise common elements from different epochs; but is Great Founders Theory really any different from Great Man Theory? He has never claimed as much, but then the theory surely lends itself to such a claim.
One of the core focuses of his book is on institutions: how they function, why most don’t, who’s behind them, and how they make society possible. This I found interesting, though occasionally vague. We are a society of institutions and most of them are sclerotic; how is this fixed? Samo says the answer is Live Players, the people who move society forward. Live players attract other live players and together they coordinate to form competent centres of power.
If I sound hesitant about giving the manuscript full-throated praise this is only because it needs finishing. The writing is full of great insights and (at least in my case) new mental models with which to make sense of the world.
For example, Samo points out that while it’s very difficult to start a functioning institution, it’s virtually impossible to join a dysfunctional institution and fix it from the inside. When those are your only options, it’s much better to start your own institution. This is what Elon Musk has done with DOGE.
Similarly, with eery prescience, Samo writes that institutions are almost never self-abolishing. When they no longer serve their purpose they keep going anyway, wasting time and resources until a live player shuts them down or reforms them or the institution simply runs out of money. Will DOGE really fulfil its promise of being a self-abolishing institution? Time will tell.
Since reading the book I've often thought about how societies collapse. Samo tells us that the Romans didn’t notice their empire falling. They would complain to each other about the roads no longer being safe, but on paper the Roman economy was doing fine. It lost about 1% of GDP a year for two hundred years straight. Collapse can happen slowly. What does that mean for us? If we were collapsing how would we know?
I hope he publishes a finished version of the book with a few more answers!
Whatever his origin story, Samo is an interesting thinker, academically inclined in the best possible sense of the term while managing to avoid the groupthink of academia. Unfortunately most of his writing is behind the prohibitive paywall of Bismarck Brief; fortunately for those of us with little credit but lots of interest in niche thinkers, Samo has provided a free copy of the unfinished manuscript for his very unforthcoming book, Great Founder Theory.
Samo has a wide frame of reference and the ability to synthesise common elements from different epochs; but is Great Founders Theory really any different from Great Man Theory? He has never claimed as much, but then the theory surely lends itself to such a claim.
One of the core focuses of his book is on institutions: how they function, why most don’t, who’s behind them, and how they make society possible. This I found interesting, though occasionally vague. We are a society of institutions and most of them are sclerotic; how is this fixed? Samo says the answer is Live Players, the people who move society forward. Live players attract other live players and together they coordinate to form competent centres of power.
If I sound hesitant about giving the manuscript full-throated praise this is only because it needs finishing. The writing is full of great insights and (at least in my case) new mental models with which to make sense of the world.
For example, Samo points out that while it’s very difficult to start a functioning institution, it’s virtually impossible to join a dysfunctional institution and fix it from the inside. When those are your only options, it’s much better to start your own institution. This is what Elon Musk has done with DOGE.
Similarly, with eery prescience, Samo writes that institutions are almost never self-abolishing. When they no longer serve their purpose they keep going anyway, wasting time and resources until a live player shuts them down or reforms them or the institution simply runs out of money. Will DOGE really fulfil its promise of being a self-abolishing institution? Time will tell.
Since reading the book I've often thought about how societies collapse. Samo tells us that the Romans didn’t notice their empire falling. They would complain to each other about the roads no longer being safe, but on paper the Roman economy was doing fine. It lost about 1% of GDP a year for two hundred years straight. Collapse can happen slowly. What does that mean for us? If we were collapsing how would we know?
I hope he publishes a finished version of the book with a few more answers!
November 11, 2021
I'm a little confused, because this more seems like it's laying the groundwork/ context for the titular concept, and explaining everything around it, rather than actually the thing itself?.. It kinda reads with a 48 Laws/ Prince vibe (which is also not what I expected, haha).
July 17, 2025
This manuscript did a good job introducing various concepts and framing its points in a concise way - I’d recommend it as a useful toolbox for ambitious individuals, independent of their intrinsic goal.
Equally so to people trying to understand the status quo our societies find themselves in.
There’s some excellent dynamics analysis and useful lenses through which to look.
There is a certain lean towards examples (individuals/institutions) with a positive outcome, which is understandable given the incentive - no one puts in the effort without actually caring about societies. I certainly do care, thus my interest in the first place.
The framing makes it exceptionally tempting to embrace and apply too, I am the last to deny that. Noticing rather strong excitement within myself whilst playing through various applications I can tell it's a powerful framework. My inner canary started fainting eventually and I think it’s important to share a particular concern of mine here.
As a European, a German on top, with keen interest in historical matters I’m rather well acquaintanced with the history of the Third Reich and couldn't help but noticing that Hitler would have served as an example par excellence for the applicability of the theory presented. I'd furthermore claim the outcomes weren't particularly desirable, to put it _mildly. Today I witnessed footage of an enthusiastic Musk showing something *remarkably* close to Hitlergruss. One has to visit a concentration camp to grasp the full extent, on a profound human level, on what we are actually talking about here.
The crucial question emerging here, is the following: How to enable desirable things like progress, rejuvenation, adaption, self preservation - and yes, a strong and healthy identity - that seem to often be connected to the influence of such individuals - whilst keeping a society from collapsing? Not from all the causes mentioned in the manuscript but the consequences of "Grössenwahn", the frenzy of power leading to disaster.
A disaster nowadays, with nukes, seasoned with AI and CRISPR on top, the interconnectedness of our world both through trade and the internet, seems likely to be unprecedented in its severity.
I’d love to see some applicable ideas embedding this theory into the realities - including dangers - of our current time in some follow-up, even if this is probably way beyond the scope of this manuscript.
Equally so to people trying to understand the status quo our societies find themselves in.
There’s some excellent dynamics analysis and useful lenses through which to look.
There is a certain lean towards examples (individuals/institutions) with a positive outcome, which is understandable given the incentive - no one puts in the effort without actually caring about societies. I certainly do care, thus my interest in the first place.
The framing makes it exceptionally tempting to embrace and apply too, I am the last to deny that. Noticing rather strong excitement within myself whilst playing through various applications I can tell it's a powerful framework. My inner canary started fainting eventually and I think it’s important to share a particular concern of mine here.
As a European, a German on top, with keen interest in historical matters I’m rather well acquaintanced with the history of the Third Reich and couldn't help but noticing that Hitler would have served as an example par excellence for the applicability of the theory presented. I'd furthermore claim the outcomes weren't particularly desirable, to put it _mildly. Today I witnessed footage of an enthusiastic Musk showing something *remarkably* close to Hitlergruss. One has to visit a concentration camp to grasp the full extent, on a profound human level, on what we are actually talking about here.
The crucial question emerging here, is the following: How to enable desirable things like progress, rejuvenation, adaption, self preservation - and yes, a strong and healthy identity - that seem to often be connected to the influence of such individuals - whilst keeping a society from collapsing? Not from all the causes mentioned in the manuscript but the consequences of "Grössenwahn", the frenzy of power leading to disaster.
A disaster nowadays, with nukes, seasoned with AI and CRISPR on top, the interconnectedness of our world both through trade and the internet, seems likely to be unprecedented in its severity.
I’d love to see some applicable ideas embedding this theory into the realities - including dangers - of our current time in some follow-up, even if this is probably way beyond the scope of this manuscript.
April 19, 2023
Samo gives a useful framework of how to think about power and organizations through the first section "I. Key Concepts". However, within the second section "II. Core Theory", the book feels only useful up to Empire Theory, after which it devolves into musings about how society is shaped by great people.
Summary here https://www.notion.so/Great-Founder-T...
Summary here https://www.notion.so/Great-Founder-T...
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