Rethinking the State: An Evolutionary History of a Power Species

Part IV: Power Natural Selection and the Question of Equality

This is Part IV of Rethinking the State: An Evolutionary History of a Power Species. Part III argued that states consume ideology as nourishment and use different political pathways to restore the same underlying homeostasis.

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Rethinking the State

Chapter Six: Power Natural Selection

Darwin discovered that the forms of species are not designed but selected. No designer is needed to explain why the giraffe has a long neck. Only a simple mechanism: individuals with longer necks could reach higher leaves, had higher survival rates, and left more offspring. Over enough generations, long necks became the trait of the entire population. This is natural selection — no intention, no design, only differential survival.

The evolution of states follows exactly the same logic. Except the criterion of selection is not biological fitness but power fitness.

Power Fitness: The Selection Criterion of State Evolution

In biological evolution, fitness refers to an organism’s ability to survive and reproduce in a given environment. In state evolution, power fitness refers to a state structure’s ability to maintain its own power and be replicated in a given environment.

Note the word “replicated.” This is the key to natural selection. A state structure must not only survive; it must be imitated by other states. Structures that survive but are not imitated are evolutionary dead ends. Structures that survive and are widely imitated are the main trunk of evolution. The Prussian military-bureaucratic system, the British parliamentary system, Napoleon’s conscription, American federalism — these structures spread globally not because they were “good,” but because states that adopted them performed better in power competition, thereby triggering imitation by others.

Three Conditions: Variation, Selection, Replication

Darwin’s natural selection requires three conditions: variation, differential survival, and heritable variation. Power natural selection maps perfectly onto the state level. Variation: history continuously produces different forms of political organization — city-states, empires, feudal domains, commercial republics, theocracies, nation-states. Differential survival: not all forms survive. Italian city-states were absorbed in competition with nation-states. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was partitioned. The Hanseatic League lost its survival space. The forms that survived had higher power fitness in their specific environment. Replication: surviving structures are imitated. But state “replication” operates in two modes — competitive selection (states voluntarily imitate efficient structures) and hegemonic injection (powerful states forcibly transplant their own structure). The Meiji Restoration is the classic case of the former; the colonial system, of the latter.

Values Are Not the Selection Criterion

We are accustomed to narrating the direction of state evolution in the language of values. We say humanity is “moving toward democracy,” “moving toward freedom,” “moving toward civilization.” This is a teleological narrative — it assumes evolution has a direction, and that direction is something we consider “good.”

But power natural selection does not care about values. It cares only about power fitness. Democracy is selected in certain environments not because it is more “just,” but because in those environments it provides higher power fitness — more efficient legitimacy production, more stable extraction capacity, stronger innovation incentives. Likewise, authoritarianism is selected in certain environments not because it is more “evil,” but because in those environments it provides higher power fitness — faster decision-making, stronger internal control, lower coordination costs.

Nature does not eliminate bacteria because we think wolves are more “advanced.” Bacteria may be far more fit than wolves in their environment. Likewise, the state system does not eliminate autocracy because we think democracy is more “civilized.” Autocracy may be far more fit than democracy in certain environments. Evolution does not care about our preferences.

Power Functional Imitation: Learning “Strong,” Not “Good”

When one state imitates another, what it imitates is not values but power functional modules. The Meiji Restoration is the perfect case study. Japan did not “choose Western values.” It identified the efficiency advantages of specific modules and transplanted them one by one: the Prussian military system, the British naval model, the French civil code, the German university model. The selection criterion was power efficiency, not value affinity. This logic explains why many “democratizations” are module-level transplants rather than holistic transformations. A state may adopt elections because they provide low-cost legitimacy while retaining authoritarian modules for information control and border management. At the module level, there is no sharp divide between “democratic” and “autocratic” states — only a continuous spectrum of module combinations.

The Shifting Selection Environment

The direction of natural selection depends on the environment. In the agricultural era, military competition dominated: states that could concentrate violence most efficiently survived. The great empires — Persia, Rome, China — were products of this selection pressure. In the industrial era, economic competition became equally important. States that could mobilize productive capacity began to win. This explains why “democratic” features evolved — not because humanity awakened, but because individual freedom and property protection more effectively incentivized innovation, thereby expanding the state’s extraction base. Democracy was not a concession. It was an adaptation. Now, the selection environment may be shifting again. Information technology, capital mobility, and population mobility are changing the parameters. In a world where factors of production flow rapidly across borders, power fitness increasingly depends on the capacity to attract rather than to control. This may be the real evolutionary pressure the state as a species now faces: not replacement by another ideology, but replacement by another organizational form.

Evolution Is Not Progress

A deep misunderstanding needs to be cleared up. Power natural selection is not a narrative of progress. Biological evolution has no direction — it does not move from “lower” to “higher.” The dinosaurs are gone; bacteria have been alive for four billion years. State evolution likewise has no direction. It does not move from “autocracy” to “democracy.” It merely selects for power fitness in specific environments. When the environment changes, “democracy” may no longer be the fittest form, and something we do not yet have a name for may emerge. States do not evolve according to values. States evolve according to power fitness. The distance between these two sentences is the distance between looking up at the sky and looking down at the ground.

Rethinking the State

Chapter Seven: Equality Does Not Come from the State

The previous six chapters built a descriptive framework: the state as a power organism with its own metabolism, immunity, homeostasis, and evolutionary logic. But description alone is not enough. If the framework left readers with only a sense of inevitability, as though power were destiny and nothing ever changed, it would be incomplete. Something has changed. The abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, women’s liberation, racial equality, labor protections — these are real. The question is not whether equalization has occurred, but where it came from. If the state’s essence is the maintenance of power, then the equalization trend that genuinely exists in human civilization cannot have originated from the state itself. So where?

The answer is not the state. The answer is technology.

The Logic of Power and the Logic of Equality Are Mutually Exclusive

Let us return to first principles. The state’s core operating logic is homeostasis — maintaining the equilibrium of extraction capacity, violence monopoly, information control, population binding, and boundary integrity. Every one of these parameters presupposes inequality. Extraction means some extract and others are extracted from. Violence monopoly means some possess violence and others are constrained by it. Information control means some define reality and others accept the reality that has been defined.

In other words, inequality is not a defect of the state. It is the state’s operating system. Without inequality, there is no extraction. Without extraction, the state starves. To ask the state to produce equality is to ask an organism to produce a substance that dissolves its own metabolic system — this is not difficult; it is logically impossible.

Of course, the state will claim it pursues equality. But this is narrative, not structure. Recall Chapter Four: narrative is food, not identity. The state consumes the “equality” narrative in exactly the same way it consumes any other narrative — extracting its legitimacy energy while discarding the parts that contradict power maintenance. When “all men are created equal” entered America’s founding narrative, it coexisted perfectly well with slavery, women’s disenfranchisement, and the genocide of indigenous peoples. The narrative was digested into whatever shape power required.

What State-Led “Equalization” Actually Is

States do perform actions that look like “equalization.” But upon close observation, every one of these actions serves power homeostasis, not equality itself.

The expansion of suffrage is a classic case. It is usually narrated as a victory of popular struggle. But from the perspective of the power organism, suffrage expansion typically occurs when the state needs total mobilization — war. The wave of women gaining the vote after World War I happened not because men suddenly recognized women’s equal rights, but because the state had just mobilized the entire female population for wartime production and could no longer sustain the narrative that “they are not full citizens.” Suffrage was not a gift from the state to its people. It was a homeostatic adjustment the state was forced to make in order to maintain narrative consistency.

The welfare state is another example. The welfare systems built by Western states after World War II look like states pursuing equality. But their immediate backdrop was the Cold War — facing the competitive pressure of the communist narrative, capitalist states needed to provide sufficient material guarantees to maintain the credibility of their own narrative. Welfare was not the state’s commitment to equality. It was an arms race against a competing narrative. When the Soviet Union collapsed and the competing narrative disappeared, welfare systems immediately began to contract. This is not a coincidence.

Every instance of state-led “equalization,” when dissected, turns out to be homeostatic adjustment. It is not the state becoming more equal. It is the state recalibrating its extraction and control systems to adapt to a changed environment.

Where Real Equalization Comes From

If the state cannot produce equality, then where does the equalization trend that has genuinely occurred in human civilization come from?

From technology.

More precisely, from the deconstructive effect of technological revolutions on power structures. Every major technological revolution changes the parameters of power — the cost of information transmission, the efficiency of violence concentration, the difficulty of population control, the mobility of factors of production. When these parameters change, existing power structures are disturbed, and in the gaps created by this disturbance, equalization appears as a byproduct.

Three Waves of Technology Deconstructing Power

The first wave was the printing press. Before printing, the written word was the exclusive property of power. Priests and bureaucrats monopolized the production and distribution of information. The printing press lowered the cost of information replication by several orders of magnitude. The result: the Reformation — individuals could read the Bible directly, no longer needing priests as intermediaries. This happened not because Luther was more “right” than the Pope, but because printing reduced the sustainability of the information monopoly. Technology changed the parameters; the power structure was forced to readjust; equalization appeared as a byproduct of that readjustment.

The second wave was the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution changed not only modes of production but the power parameters of populations. When production shifted from land to factories, workers gained a form of structural bargaining power for the first time — not because the state granted it, but because factory production depended on concentrated, organizable labor. Workers could strike; peasants could not stop planting. The right to strike was not a political right but a byproduct of technological conditions — when production depends on concentrated labor, concentrated labor automatically gains countervailing power.

The third wave is information technology. The internet has reduced the cost of information replication and distribution to near zero. This has produced an enormous shock to the state’s information control parameters. Simultaneously, digital technology has enabled capital, information, and some labor to flow across borders, disrupting the state’s population binding and boundary maintenance parameters. When a person can earn dollars in Chiang Mai, access any information a state tries to block online, and move capital from one country to another in hours, multiple power parameters are simultaneously disturbed. This is unprecedented.

Equality Is a Byproduct of Technology, Not a Product of the State

Now the relationship can be stated precisely.

Technological revolution changes the parameters of power. Parameter changes disturb the state’s homeostasis. The state is forced to adjust to restore homeostasis. In the process of adjustment, certain equalizing outcomes appear as byproducts. The state is not the producer of equality. It is a subject forced by technology to make homeostatic adjustments that happen to include equalizing byproducts.

Moreover, whenever the technological disturbance ceases, the state attempts to claw back those equalizing byproducts. This is why the equalization process is always uneven and oscillating — it is not a linear narrative of progress but an ongoing tug-of-war between technological revolution and power homeostasis. Technology pushes the door open a crack. The state tries to close it. New technology pushes it open a little further.

The State Is a Container of Power, Not a Vehicle of Civilization

This is the core argument of this chapter, and the conclusion of this series.

The essence of the state is the stability of power, not the diffusion of civilization. The state will not actively produce equality, because equalization deconstructs power, and power is the foundation of the state’s existence. The equalization trend in human civilization comes from technology’s alteration of the parameters of power, not from the state’s pursuit of equal values. The state is a container of power. Technology is the force that fractures the container. Equality is the light that leaks through the cracks.

When we attribute the credit for equalization to the state, we commit a fundamental error of causal attribution. We mistake the subject being forced to adjust for the initiator of change. This is like watching water begin to boil and saying “the water decided to boil” — no, the fire decided. The water is merely the object being heated. The state is merely the object being disturbed by technology. Equality does not come from the state. Equality comes from the forces that break the state.

Epilogue

Let us return to where we began.

2017, Kuala Lumpur airport, VX nerve agent. 2026, Tehran, precision-guided bombs. One was called a “rogue state.” The other was called a “democratic alliance.” But now we know that these two labels do not describe two different things. They describe two individuals of the same species, driven by the same survival instinct, performing structurally identical actions.

The state, as a power organism, possesses the same violent impulse. This impulse has nothing to do with its political system, nothing to do with its narrative, nothing to do with the values it claims to represent. It comes from the survival logic of the power structure itself. The difference between a “democracy” and a “rogue state” in their violent responses when threatened is a difference of degree and packaging, not of logic. VX agent and precision-guided munitions are two different dosages of the same immune system.

What does this mean? It means that the organism you live inside does not see you the way you see yourself. You see a citizen, a participant, a person with rights. It sees a node in an extraction network, a unit to be bound, a narrative to be maintained. This is not malice. It is structure. An organism does not hate its cells. It simply metabolizes them.

Therefore, what this framework asks of every individual is not fear, but clarity. Not escape from the state — there is no outside — but the capacity to see through its narrative packaging and recognize the structural logic beneath. To understand that when a state says “national security,” it is describing the homeostasis of its own power, not your safety. That when it says “sacrifice,” it is requesting metabolic input, not honoring your dignity. That when it says “we,” it is performing personification — the oldest and most efficient disguise of power. Seeing clearly is not cynicism. It is the precondition for acting wisely within a structure whose logic you finally understand.

Recognizing the nature of the state is where clear thinking begins. And clear thinking, in a world governed by power organisms, is the closest thing to freedom.

Rethinking the State

For readers interested in the theoretical foundations of this framework, the following appendix maps how its core propositions converse with existing academic traditions — and where they move beyond them.

Appendix: Academic Foundations of the State-as-Technological-Species Theory

The “state as technological species” framework proposed in this series did not emerge from a vacuum. Its core structure can be traced to several important theoretical traditions. This appendix is not a literature review but an intellectual map — it shows how the series’ core propositions converse with existing academic traditions, and where it moves beyond them.

I. Power Genealogy: Foucault

Michel Foucault is this series’ most direct theoretical predecessor. His core contribution was transforming the question of power from “who holds it” to “how it operates.” In Foucault’s analysis, power is not a resource “held” by someone, but an operating modality diffused throughout the social body. His concept of “biopolitics” revealed how the modern state exercises power through the management of populations — birth rates, mortality, hygiene, education. His concept of “disciplinary power” showed how power permeates society through surveillance, normalization, and standardization.

What this series inherits from Foucault: the fundamental perspective of power as a distributed operating mechanism rather than a concentrated possession, and the concrete analysis of how the modern state exercises power through population management and disciplinary technologies. Where this series goes beyond Foucault: Foucault primarily examined how power operates within society but did not analyze the state itself as an entity with an independent life-logic. This series upgrades Foucault’s micro-analysis of power into a macro-analysis of the state’s life-logic as a whole.

II. Social Systems Theory: Luhmann

Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory provides another core pillar of this series. Luhmann’s central concept is “autopoiesis” — systems produce and reproduce themselves through their own operations. In Luhmann’s framework, social systems are not “composed of” people but “composed of” communications — systems maintain themselves through internal operational logic, while people are merely part of the system’s environment. This resonates deeply with this series’ core argument: the state is a system with an independent operating logic, and humans are its environment rather than its components.

Luhmann also proposed “operational closure” — systems operate through their own internal logic, and external signals can only be processed as “disturbances” according to the system’s own logic. Chapter Five’s argument about homeostasis — that the state’s responses to external disturbances always serve its own homeostasis rather than the content of the disturbance — is essentially the concretization of this Luhmannian concept at the state level.

What this series inherits from Luhmann: the core perspective of systems as self-producing and self-maintaining entities. Where this series goes beyond Luhmann: Luhmann’s systems theory is highly abstract, lacking concrete analysis of how state power operates. This series combines Luhmann’s abstract framework with the concrete operation of power, and introduces an evolutionary dimension — Luhmann explained how systems maintain themselves; this series further asks: how are systems selected and replicated in competition?

III. State Formation Studies: Scott, Tilly, Mann

James Scott’s Seeing Like a State showed how the modern state exercises control through “legibility” — standardized names, land registries, censuses, urban planning. Chapter One’s discussion of the industrial state’s capacity for “standardization” builds directly on Scott’s analysis.

Charles Tilly’s Coercion, Capital, and European States showed how European states evolved under the selective pressure of warfare — “war made the state, and the state made war.” Chapter Six’s discussion of power natural selection — particularly the analysis of military competition as a selection environment — has a direct dialogical relationship with Tilly’s framework.

Michael Mann’s The Sources of Social Power provided a multi-dimensional power analysis framework — ideological, economic, military, and political power interacting with each other. This series’ concept of “power functional modules” bears structural similarity to Mann’s multi-dimensional power analysis.

What this series inherits from state formation studies: the concrete analysis of the state as a power-extraction and control machine, and the historical study of warfare as a driver of state evolution. Where this series goes beyond these studies: Scott and Tilly primarily treated the historical formation of European states; this series abstracts the state as a cross-historical, cross-regional technological species and introduces biological evolutionary analogy to treat inter-state competition and replication.

IV. Evolutionary Biology: Darwin, Dawkins, Wilson

This series’ most conspicuous theoretical operation is applying the framework of evolutionary biology to state analysis. This is not metaphor but structural analogy. Darwin’s three conditions for natural selection — variation, differential survival, heritable variation — are directly applied to the state level of analysis.

Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene provided another key concept: the true unit of evolution is not the individual but the gene. Individuals are merely genes’ “survival machines.” This series’ application of this logic is: the state is not the ultimate unit of evolution; power functional modules are. States are merely the temporary vehicles of these modules, just as individuals are the temporary vehicles of genes. Tax systems, standing army systems, sovereign debt systems — these modules can spread across states, be replaced within a state, and be preserved by successor states after collapse. Their life cycles do not coincide with the state’s life cycle.

David Sloan Wilson’s multilevel selection theory provides the theoretical framework for handling “within-state selection” and “between-state selection.” Competition between different power modules within a state, and competition between states as wholes, are two different levels of selection that can occur simultaneously and in different directions.

What this series inherits from evolutionary biology: the basic framework of natural selection, the gene-centered view of evolution, and the analytical tools of multilevel selection. Where this series goes beyond evolutionary biology: biological replication is blind and high-fidelity; state “replication” includes conscious imitation and forced transplantation, giving state evolution fundamentally different dynamics from biological evolution. This series explicitly identifies these differences rather than treating biological analogy as identity.

V. Technopolitics: Marx/Engels, Scheidel, Postman, Winner

Chapter Seven’s core argument — that equalization comes from technology rather than from the state — stands on a deep tradition of technopolitics. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels viewed productive force transformation as the fundamental driver of social structural change. This series inherits that perspective, but replaces the narrower formula of “productive forces determine productive relations” with the broader “technology changes the parameters of power.”

Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler demonstrated an uncomfortable conclusion: historically, large-scale equalization has almost always been accompanied by large-scale violence — war, revolution, plague, state collapse. This series’ interpretation is that these violent events are essentially collapses or reorganizations of power structures, and equalization is the byproduct of power structure destruction, not the result of any active pursuit.

Neil Postman’s work on technopoly and the politics of information demonstrated how information technology can be simultaneously liberating and controlling — states are not only disturbed by technology but also reincorporate technology into their own power structures. Chapter Five’s analysis of the state’s homeostatic mechanism corresponds to this insight.

Langdon Winner’s notion of “technology as legislator” — that technology is not merely a tool but a force that shapes power relations in itself — provides direct theoretical support for Chapter Seven’s core argument.

What this series inherits from technopolitics: the perspective of technology as the fundamental driver of power transformation. Where this series goes beyond these studies: this series integrates technology’s influence on power into a unified framework of the state as a living organism, rather than analyzing it as an isolated variable. Technology is not an external factor but the core variable that changes the survival environment of the state as an organism.

VI. Other Interlocutors

Friedrich Hayek’s theory of spontaneous order resonates deeply with this series’ analysis of the “non-designed” nature of state behavior. Hayek argued that social order is spontaneously evolved rather than designed; this series applies the same logic to the state itself — the state’s behavioral patterns are products of evolution, not of rational design.

Francis Fukuyama’s State-Building and The Origins of Political Order provided systematic analyses of state capacity. This series’ “state as species” analysis can be viewed as an evolutionary extension of Fukuyama’s state capacity research.

Balaji Srinivasan’s The Network State proposed alternative forms to the sovereign state. This series’ dialogue with Srinivasan lies in providing the theoretical basis for understanding why the sovereign state might be replaced — not because it is “bad,” but because the selection environment is changing and its power fitness may be declining.

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities showed how the nation, as an “imagined” construct, is co-produced by print technology and state institutions. Chapter Four’s analysis of narrative as the state’s food can be viewed as an evolutionary re-reading of Anderson — the nation is not “imagined” into existence; it is consumed by the state as a source of legitimacy energy.

The Theoretical Position of This Series

In summary, the theoretical position of this series can be described as follows: it stands at the intersection of Foucault’s power analysis, Luhmann’s systems theory, Scott’s and Tilly’s state formation studies, and Darwin’s and Dawkins’ evolutionary biology. It extracts core tools from each tradition, then assembles them into an integrated framework that none of these traditions completed on its own: analyzing the state as a power organism with an independent evolutionary logic.

Foucault showed the micro-operation of power but did not treat the state’s macro life-logic. Luhmann treated systemic self-maintenance but not competitive selection. Tilly treated inter-state competition but did not treat the state itself as a living organism. Dawkins provided a gene-centered view of evolution but did not apply it to institutional analysis. This series’ work is to assemble these fragments into a complete picture.

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This essay is part of Rethinking the State: An Evolutionary History of a Power Species.

Part I: The State Is Not a Moral Person

Part II: One Species, One Organism

Part III: Narrative, Homeostasis, and the State’s Survival Logic

Part IV: Power Natural Selection and the Question of Equality ← You’re here

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About the Author

Deep Bitcheese Brew is not the name of a single author, but a collaborative thought-creation entity formed through ongoing dialogue between a human and AI. It represents a new mode of knowledge production: the human contributes experience, intuition, historical memory, and cultural judgment, while AI helps with association, structural reasoning, and iterative refinement.

Through this process, ideas are not simply written but brewed — tested, recombined, and clarified over time. The work of Deep Bitcheese Brew explores the evolution of technology, civilization, and social structures, with particular attention to how knowledge, institutions, and cultural narratives are reshaped in the age of digital networks and hybrid intelligence.

For a fuller statement of this project’s origins and method, see the Deep Bitcheese Brew manifesto: The Game Has Begun.