For as long as there has been recorded history, in almost all societies a very small percentage of the
population (the “ruling classes” or “the elites”) controlled most of the wealth and the power (though those
percentages have varied).2 Naturally those who benefit from and control the system by and large like the system
and work with each other to maintain it. Because those with wealth can influence those with power and because
those with power can influence those with wealth, these ruling classes or elites have alliances between themselves
and want to maintain the existing order with everyone following its dictums and laws, even as the system increases
the gaps between those with power and wealth and those without them. As a result, all internal orders are run by
certain classes of people who have wealth and power and who operate in symbiotic relationships with each other to
maintain the order. Though aligned not to disrupt the order that benefits them, throughout time these elites have
struggled with each other over wealth and power and also have struggled with non-elites who want wealth and
power. When times are good and most people prosper, the struggles are smaller; when times are bad, the struggles
are worse. And when things are very bad for a large percentage of the people—e.g., there is an unresolvable debt
crisis, a very bad economy, a very bad act of nature —the resulting sufferings, stress, and struggles typically lead
to revolutions and/or civil wars.
As Aristotle said a long time ago: “The poor and the rich quarrel with one another, and whichever side gets the
better, instead of establishing a just or popular government, regards political supremacy as the prize of victory.”
3
Classically, the big cycle transpires with periods of peace and productivity that increase wealth in a
disproportionate way, which leads to a very small percentage of the population gaining and controlling
exceptionally large percentages of the wealth and power, then becoming overextended, then encountering bad
times that hurt those who are the least wealthy and powerful the hardest, which then leads to conflicts that
produce revolutions and/or civil wars, which after completed, then lead to the creation of a new order and the
cycle beginning again.
What drives these cycles is human nature. Because all people have that in common, people all over the world
who face similar circumstances tend to deal with them similarly, which is what gives us the timeless and
universal cause/effect relationships that we will explore in this and the next chapters.
Let’s start by exploring how they affect the changing internal orders.
Throughout time and in all countries the people who have the wealth are the people who own the means of
wealth production and, in order to maintain it, work with the people who have the power to set and enforce the
rules. This has happened similarly across countries and across time. While that has always been the case, the
exact form of it has evolved and will continue to evolve.
For example, for most of the 13th through 19th centuries, when agriculture was the main source of wealth and
most people believed that the power to govern was granted to monarchs through the mandate of heaven, the
prominent internal order all around the world, even in countries that never had any contact with each other,
consisted of the ruling classes or elites being 1) the monarchy, which ruled in conjunction with 2) the nobility,
which controlled the means of production (at the time that capital was agricultural land), and/or 3) the military.
Workers were viewed as parts of the means of production to make the land productive to produce the wealth for
the ruling-class elites; they had little or no say in how the order was run.
Societies that had little or no contact with each other developed in similar ways because they had similar situations
to deal with and because the nature of their decision making was similar. For example, for much of history Europe,
China, and most countries had monarchies and nobles as the ruling classes, yet they were a bit different because in
Europe the church was also part of the ruling mix. In Japan the monarchy (the emperor and his ministers), the
military, and the business community (the merchants and artisans) were the ruling elites. All around the world the
monarchs needed people to manage the day-to-day operations for them. The top people were ministers, who
oversaw the bureaucracies of people who did the various jobs that needed to be done for governance to work.
Across countries there were always, and still are, different levels of governance at the country level, the
state/province level, the municipality level, the city level, etc., and there were timeless and universal ways that
they operated and interacted with each other that were, and still are, pretty consistent across the world. Such
systems of governance (i.e., orders) have existed just about everywhere in the world with relatively modest
differences and they were all supported in similar ways by a hierarchy of professional bureaucrats, starting with the
ministers who served the rulers and down to the functionaries who did the tasks, and over time they evolved in