Reflections on Centralized Power

The Structural Foundation of Human Security, Trust Systems, and Economic Civilization

Reflections on Centralized Power:
The Structural Foundation of Human Security, Trust Systems, and Economic Civilization

This paper begins from the foundational constraints of human cognitive biology and uses abductive reasoning to reconstruct the complete causal chain from primitive tribal groups to contemporary globalization. The core thesis: centralized power is not an ideological choice but a functional necessity for establishing large-scale trust systems once humans exceeded the Dunbar number cognitive ceiling. It is equal exchange among the weak—not the strong’s control over the weak—that serves as the true engine driving the leap of human economic civilization. When the foundation of this equal exchange is destroyed by structural forces, cycles of violence will inevitably restart. This paper makes no moral narratives; it only reconstructs mechanisms.

Dunbar’s Number and the Trust Ceiling

The neocortical capacity of the human brain determines that each individual can maintain a maximum of approximately 150 stable social relationships (Dunbar’s number has a confidence interval of 100–230; this paper uses the conventional value of 150). Within small groups of 150 or fewer, trust can be built naturally through face-to-face interaction—you know who everyone is and what relationships they have with one another. But when group size exceeds this threshold, individuals can no longer track “who is trustworthy and who is not,” trust costs skyrocket, and cooperation and trade become impossible.

This is the first structural bottleneck facing human social organization: not insufficient resources, not inadequate technology, but insufficient cognitive bandwidth of the brain. Trust requires time to build through repeated social interactions, and cognitive capacity limits the total number of trust relationships that can be maintained.

02

The Jungle Era: A World Without Trust

Before the emergence of centralized power, the default relationship between human groups was hostility. Archaeological and anthropological records show: in stateless societies, most males slept without leaving their weapons, never went out without them. They chose community sites in defensively advantageous locations, and vast territories remained unusable because they were too dangerous. Every male you encountered who did not belong to your kin or local group was a potential threat. Life was filled with fear, war, anxiety, and hunger.

Warfare in stateless societies, measured by the probability of individual death from violence, may have been more lethal than in organized societies. This is what a world without trust systems looks like: every stranger is an enemy, every encounter could be a battle. The core of a trust system is not moral exhortation but a system of judgment and punishment—predictable sanctions for rule violations.

There is an important cognitive bias here: humanity’s recorded “history of warfare” is a product of centralized civilization, because the capacity to record itself comes from writing, writing from trade, and trade from centralized power. The killings of the Jungle Era had no third-party recorders—those who killed did not write, and those who were killed could not write. Our cognitive starting point for the history of violence is not the starting point of violence itself, but the starting point of the capacity to record.

03

Centralized Power: The Birth of Trust Infrastructure

The essential function of centralized power is not “rule” but serving as a trust intermediary for ultra-large-scale groups. A centralized authority provides three core services: security guarantees (military protection), dispute arbitration (judicial systems), and trade standardization (weights and measures, currency). The combination of these three services makes transactions between strangers possible—you do not need to know the other party; both sides need only submit to the same authority.

Archaeological records show that China had already established a central banking system and currency-commodity exchange bureaus during the Shang and Zhou dynasties. Tax records from the Mesopotamian city-state of Lagash indicate that tax rates were generally low but were clearly earmarked for city-state defense and trade. Taxation was not the starting point of plunder—it was the operating cost of trust infrastructure. The centralized authority provides security, arbitration, and standardization; users pay for these services.

04

Strong-Weak Trade and Weak-Weak Trade

Chronological order is crucial: first came small-scale exchanges among acquaintances, then centralized regimes established the prerequisite trust relationships for secure trade, and only then did trade and markets emerge at scale. After centralized power established security zones, trade unfolded in two stages:

Stage One: Strong-Weak Trade. Exchange between the centralized power and surrounding weaker groups was inherently exploitative—tribute, taxation, unequal exchange. The strong set prices; the weak accepted. This type of trade required no calculation, because pricing power resided entirely with the strong.

Stage Two: Weak-Weak Trade. When security zones became sufficiently stable, different weaker groups spontaneously began equal exchange within the trust framework provided by the strong. This was the true paradigm shift—the engine of human economic civilization ignited from this point.

The key distinction between these two types of trade: Strong-Weak trade is a zero-sum game where one side gains and the other loses, and its scale is naturally limited. Weak-Weak trade is a positive-sum game where both sides benefit; only this model can self-expand, self-replicate, and eventually evolve into market networks. Centralized power built the stage; spontaneous trade among the weak is the performance upon it. The stability of human society comes not from the exploitative relationship between the strong and the weak, but from equal exchange among the weak—it makes specialization possible and enables rapid growth in the number of groups and total individuals. Local surpluses have no value if not exchanged; exchange activates surpluses, and surpluses drive specialization.

05

Surplus, Calculation, and the Birth of Writing

Weak-Weak trade gave rise to three entirely new needs: measurement (how much you have, how much I have), calculation (equivalence relationships between different goods), and recording (durable, verifiable transaction records). Strong-Weak trade did not require these—the strong had the final say. But among the weak, where neither party could overpower the other, it was necessary to calculate whether exchange values were equal and reasonable.

The world’s earliest writing—cuneiform script—originated from an ancient accounting system. Clay tokens were used purely for bookkeeping for 5,000 years, after which impressed and inscribed clay tablets served the same purpose for another 500 years. The first 5,500 years of human “recording behavior” were devoted entirely to one task: recording transactions. The development of proto-cuneiform was accompanied by the emergence of standardized weights, measures, and pricing practices, forming social control technologies for coordinating resource use.

Writing was not invented to compose poetry. It was not invented to record history. Writing was invented for bookkeeping—because the scale of exchange among the weak had grown too large to remember. Humanity’s capacity for abstract thought was not the product of philosophical meditation; it was figured out by two weak individuals squatting on the ground doing arithmetic.

06

Currency: The Intermediary Layer Issued by Strong Power

When value asymmetries appeared in Weak-Weak trade—when one party’s surplus could not be absorbed through immediate exchange—a third-party medium was needed to carry residual value. One tribe trades ten cattle for another tribe’s pottery, but the other side only has pottery worth six cattle—what happens to the value of the remaining four cattle? In barter, the higher-value party must either accept an unequal exchange at a loss, or the trade simply falls through. Among the weak, where neither side can overpower the other, there is no option of saying “the remainder counts as tribute.”

Currency emerged in response. But the key question is: who has the ability to make everyone accept the same thing as a medium of value? Only a centralized power. Behind every successfully circulated currency stands a powerful entity. The king’s image on a coin is not decoration—it is the symbolization of violent credit. The essence of currency is not the piece of metal or paper but the consensus that “everyone believes it can be exchanged for something.” Creating this consensus requires coercive force of sufficient scope and continuity. The demand comes from below (the problem of storing surplus value in Weak-Weak trade); the supply comes from above (the credit guarantee of centralized power). Currency is the intermediary layer inserted by the strong into the weak’s trade network.

07

Trade Networks: From Tribal Organisms to Collective Intelligence

When Weak-Weak trade networks operated stably, humanity underwent a fundamental leap. In the isolated tribal state, each small group had to solve all survival problems on its own—gathering, hunting, tool-making, defense. Everyone had to know a little of everything and mastered nothing deeply. Groups had almost no contact with one another; knowledge was sealed within circles of 150 or fewer, and when a group perished, all the experience it had accumulated vanished entirely.

Trade networks changed all of this. Specialization meant a group could focus solely on what it did best. This directly unleashed the cognitive depth that comes with specialization—not everyone needed to know ironworking; it was enough for one group to specialize in it and refine the technology across generations. Archaeological evidence shows that prehistoric trade networks not only moved goods but also spread ideas, technologies, and cultural practices—toolmaking techniques, artistic styles, and even spiritual beliefs all traveled along the same trade routes. Every trade was an information exchange; every trade route was a neural pathway.

At this point, the entire trade network itself became a superorganism—each group a specialized functional node, currency the blood, trade routes the blood vessels, and the trust system provided by centralized power the skeleton. Individual brains did not change; Dunbar’s number remained 150. But trade networks allowed humanity’s collective cognitive capacity to break through the biological ceiling. Humans leaped from disconnected population organisms to trade-social collective intelligence.

08

Security Before Freedom: Humanity’s Biological Source Code

In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, safety needs occupy the second level—just above physiological needs and far below freedom (the fourth and fifth levels of esteem and self-actualization). This means that in the human psychological architecture, security comes before freedom. The implicit condition of freedom is “you must judge risks yourself and bear the consequences yourself.” For the masses, this is not liberation—it is a burden, because alongside the acquisition of freedom comes enormous risk, and they do not know where their safety net lies.

Empirical research shows that most people tend to choose security over freedom. What drives this preference is not actual victimization experience but the perception of potentially becoming a victim. Fear is more powerful than reality. After every “liberation” in history, the same pattern emerges: after the French Revolution, the populace quickly accepted Napoleon’s dictatorship; after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia embraced strongman politics; the chaos of the Weimar Republic gave rise to the Nazis.

The evolutionary psychology “Regality Theory” further argues that authoritarianism is not a psychological anomaly but an evolutionary adaptation to perceived collective danger. During human prehistory, the tendency to support strong leaders in the face of shared survival threats contributed to Darwinian fitness. The correlation of authoritarianism between identical twins is more than five times that between fraternal twins—this tendency is written in our genes. Consequently, hardline politicians have a natural electoral advantage, while advocates of freedom struggle to generate voting responses from the weak at the bottom.

09

Moral Narratives: Applications Running in Peacetime

Moral narratives can control the scope of human cognition—making people believe that freedom matters more than security, equality more than order, democracy more than efficiency. In peacetime, these narratives operate smoothly because the safety need has already been met and people cannot feel its presence—just as fish cannot feel water.

But the moment a crisis hits, all moral narratives instantly collapse. After 9/11, Americans immediately accepted mass surveillance; during COVID, citizens of democracies worldwide voluntarily accepted lockdowns and movement restrictions. Nobody discusses privacy rights while running for their life. The masses can be blinded by moral narratives, but when safety is at stake, everyone rushes for the emergency exit.

Moral narratives are not the operating system of human behavior—they are applications that run after the safety need has been satisfied. The operating system is Maslow’s second level. Applications can be installed, switched, and crashed—the operating system always runs in the background. The true function of moral narratives is not to guide behavior but to fill cognitive space during periods of safety, giving people a reason more dignified than “I’m afraid of dying” for their obedience and tax payments. They are decorative labels humans attach to their safety-driven choices.

10

Reverse Verification Through the Collapse of Strong Power

The Crisis of the Third Century of the Roman Empire provides the most perfect reverse verification. Since Augustus inaugurated the Pax Romana, the empire’s economy depended on trade through Mediterranean ports and a vast road system; merchants could safely travel from one end of the empire to the other within weeks. When the Third Century Crisis erupted, widespread civil unrest made it impossible for merchants to travel safely; financial crisis and currency debasement made exchange extremely difficult. By the end of the third century, most surviving trade was local barter that used no meaningful medium of exchange.

The disappearance of strong power → collapse of the trust system → currency became worthless → Weak-Weak trade vanished → specialization regressed → humanity reverted from collective intelligence to isolated tribal survival. Provinces turned to self-sufficiency, large landowners ceased recognizing central authority, and the commercial middle class shrank as trade income disappeared. Trade volume directly corresponded to the territorial integrity of the empire—in the eastern regions where the empire lasted longer, trade persisted longer as well. Civilization rewound.

Archaeological data further confirms: with the establishment of centralized states, violence declined significantly during the Early and Middle Bronze Age (3300–1500 BCE). But after centralization collapsed, violence rates rose again in the Late Bronze and Iron Ages. The emergence of the state was not a one-time elimination of violence but an institution requiring continuous maintenance—when the institution collapses, violence immediately returns.

11

The Cold War: Humanity’s Safest Survival Structure

The Cold War is described by mainstream narrative as humanity’s most dangerous period. But from a structural perspective, it was precisely the opposite: two superpowers divided the entire planet into two security zones, and the weak within each zone received unprecedented security guarantees. Nuclear terror balance eliminated the possibility of direct war between great powers. Proxy wars did exist—Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan—but these occurred at the margins and seams of the two security zones. For the majority of humans living inside the security zones, the Cold War era was the longest period of large-scale peace in history.

Population data is the most honest indicator of security—people do not reproduce en masse amid fear. Between 1950 and 1975, the annual population growth rate reached 1.9%, the highest peak in human history. The growth rate peaked at over 2% in 1963. The growth plateau that appeared in the 1980s was a demographic momentum effect of the baby boomer generation entering reproductive age, not a resurgence of security—the number of births per woman was already declining, but the enormous reproductive-age population base masked this trend.

After the Cold War ended, the growth rate continued to decline, falling below 1% by 2020. During the Cold War, annual average conflict deaths were approximately 210,000, but this included superpower proxy conflicts like the Korean and Vietnam Wars. In the post–Cold War period, the annual average dropped to about 69,000, yet the number of armed conflicts never fell below 100 and in recent years has risen to the highest level since the end of the Cold War, with global violence at a 30-year peak. More conflicts with dispersed lethality—a hallmark of a fragmented security system.

12

Globalization: The Structural Shock of Asymmetric Exchange on the Weak’s Living Space

The underlying assumption of globalization is that cost structures of all participants will naturally converge. In reality, labor costs, environmental costs, social security costs, and exchange rate policies differ enormously across countries. When the cost structure of an industrialized system of 1.4 billion people is injected into local trade systems worldwide through exports and immigration, local weak actors no longer face another local weak actor but a dimensional projection of an ultra-large-scale system.

The precondition for equal Weak-Weak exchange is parity between the cost structures of both sides. When this precondition is destroyed, exchange shifts from a positive-sum game to zero-sum or even negative-sum—the harvested party not only fails to improve but loses its existing productive capacity and economic autonomy. Weak-Weak exchange was originally a mutual survival mechanism, but when one side is backed by external supply chains vastly exceeding local scale, this is no longer Weak-Weak trade but a disguised form of Strong-Weak trade.

A critical distinction: this process does not damage the interests of local centralized powers but rather the living space of the weak at the bottom. Local elites (political and capital) are often direct beneficiaries of globalization—Wall Street profits from low inflation, multinational corporations earn higher margins from Chinese manufacturing. Those truly crushed are at the bottom: American manufacturing workers lose their jobs, African small vendors are squeezed out of markets, Latin American factories close and lay off workers. Centralized powers and external economic systems are co-conspirators; the weak at the bottom of both countries are the system’s sacrificial victims—they are just harvested in different ways.

Global research confirms the same structure recurring on every continent: Africa (Tanzania, Ghana, South Africa, Nigeria), Latin America (Nicaragua, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia), Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar), Europe (the EU as a whole), North America (the American Rust Belt)—the voices of the local weak at the bottom all say the same thing: “My living space is gone.” The essence of a trade war is not China vs. the United States—it is each security system being forced to re-contract its boundaries under the pressure of safety needs at the bottom. Tariffs are walls at the national level.

13

Middleman Minorities: A Repeatable Equation of Violence

A quantitative study from Oxford University’s Review of Economic Studies reveals a structural pattern that transcends time and space: ethnic minorities dominating middleman occupations frequently become targets of persecution and ethnic violence. Global cases include: Chinese in the Philippines and Indonesia, Igbo in Nigeria, Lebanese in Sierra Leone, Muslims in India, Greeks and Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, and Jews in medieval Western Europe and modern Eastern Europe.

The trigger formula has been precisely quantified: Economic shock + Political instability + Minority dominance of middleman roles = Violence eruption. All three conditions are necessary. During politically stable periods, economic shocks do not break down relationships—both sides still value the future relationship and debts can be extended. But when political instability coincides with economic crisis, debtors can no longer promise future repayment, economic relationships rupture, and violence is triggered.

The characteristic of weak-actor violence is that it is unorganized, lacks targeting precision, and has no upper bound. Strong-actor violence is instrumental—purposeful, bounded, and subject to cost-benefit calculation; violence ceases when the objective is achieved. Weak-actor violence is driven by fear—without precise targets, without cost-benefit calculation, without a stopping mechanism. The 1998 massacres and rapes in Indonesia, the looting of Chinese-owned shops in South Africa—the perpetrators were not “fighting for their rights” but engaging in destructive release amid panic. Strong-actor violence can be ended through negotiation; weak-actor violence has no negotiating counterpart. This is why weak-actor violence is more dangerous than strong-actor violence.

14

The 80/20 Rule: Its Foundational Basis in Human Architecture

Based on an analogical derivation from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the Pareto distribution (this paper presents this as a structural hypothesis rather than an empirical conclusion): the majority of the population lives at the first and second levels of the needs hierarchy—physiological and safety needs. Their core demands are stability, predictability, and security. They do not actively seek power, nor do they actively seek change, because change itself is risk.

The minority divides into authoritarians and libertarians. Authoritarians say to the masses: “I protect you, you obey me”—exchanging security for power. Libertarians say to the masses: “I liberate you, you support me”—exchanging ideals for influence. The underlying logic of both is identical: identify the core need of the masses, then leverage that need to establish one’s own dominant position.

The majority expend their energy maintaining safety; the minority expend their energy on the operating system itself. The former run within the system; the latter run the system. The asymmetric distribution of wealth and power is not an accidental market outcome—it is a necessary distribution determined by the hierarchical structure of human needs. Moreover, this structure is self-reinforcing: the more the masses depend on safety guarantees, the more they depend on the minority that provides safety; the more irreplaceable the safety guarantee, the greater the wealth and power accumulated by its providers. From ancient tribal chiefs collecting tribute to modern capitalists collecting profits, the underlying logic has never changed.

15

Counterarguments and Boundary Conditions

This paper’s framework faces three powerful counterarguments that must be addressed head-on:

Counterargument 1: Large-Scale Cooperation Without Centralized Power

The Turkana pastoralists of East Africa constitute a politically decentralized, egalitarian society with no formal centralized institutions or coercive authority, yet they sustain high-cost cooperation in battles involving hundreds of people, sanctioning free riders through community-imposed informal punishment. This suggests that punishment mechanisms do not necessarily require centralization. However, Turkana cooperation is primarily limited to the domain of warfare; 56% of spoils distributions fail; and their trade activities remain at the level of simple pastoral product exchange. This proves: decentralized punishment can support small-scale, single-domain cooperation, but it cannot support large-scale, multi-domain trust systems and complex trade networks. This paper’s argument holds within the domain of “large-scale trust systems.”

Counterargument 2: The Hanseatic League’s Decentralized Trade

The medieval Hanseatic League was a commercial federation with no formal territory, no head of state, and no standing army, yet its laws governed trade centers spanning thousands of miles from London to western Russia, encompassing nearly 200 cities at its peak. This would seem to prove that large-scale trade can be maintained without unified centralization. However, the Hanseatic League’s decline precisely validates this paper’s framework: when centralized nation-states (England, Sweden, the Netherlands) rose and developed their own navies and trade policies, the decentralized federation could not compete. The Hanseatic League ultimately dissolved in 1669. Decentralization can function within specific historical windows, but it is ultimately replaced by centralized structures—not because centralization is “better,” but because centralization provides stronger security guarantees and lower trust costs in competitive environments.

Counterargument 3: Blockchain and Algorithmic Trust

Blockchain technology attempts to replace the trust function of centralization with algorithms—cryptographic authentication, distributed ledger accounting, and consensus mechanism enforcement. But the operation of cryptocurrency is parasitic on the existing strong-power system (electricity, networks, and personal safety are all guaranteed by the state), and its value is ultimately realized through exchange with fiat currency—which is itself backed by state power. Bitcoin had no physical exchange value before alignment with fiat currency; after alignment, it essentially borrows the credit of strong power. Cryptocurrencies with wild price swings are not currencies but technology commodities wrapped in a currency shell—no fundamentally different from speculating on sneakers or in-game items. Stablecoins (such as USDC and USDT) have real dollar collateral and are closer to fiat, but their value anchoring still derives from the American power system. Algorithms can simulate trust functions, but they cannot exist independently of the strong-power system.

16

History Does Not Repeat Events; It Repeats Equations

The variables driving the structural events at the base of human society have never changed: Dunbar’s number has not changed, the priority of safety needs has not changed, the function of centralized power as trust infrastructure has not changed, the status of Weak-Weak equal exchange as the economic engine has not changed, and the pattern of weak-actor violence targeting the most visible perceived threat during economic crises has not changed.

What changes are only surface features: weapons evolve from stones to guns, currency from shells to digits, trade from marketplaces to e-commerce platforms, empires from Rome to America, middleman minorities from Jews to Chinese. The underlying driving equation remains the same.

Conclusion

The engine of human civilization is equal exchange among the weak. Centralized power is the trust infrastructure that makes this engine run. When centralization collapses, trade collapses, and civilization regresses. When asymmetric forces destroy the foundation of equal exchange, conflict restarts. This causal chain was established the moment humans stepped beyond the 150-person small group, and it has not changed since. Strip away the moral narratives, and this is the source code of how human society operates.

Note This is an independent thought paper that has not undergone peer review. The content aims to use abductive reasoning to reconstruct the foundational structural logic of human social organization and does not represent a value judgment on or policy advocacy for any political system. All historical analyses are based on archaeological records, demographic data, academic research, and publicly available sources. Chapter 14 (The 80/20 Rule) is a structural hypothesis based on the hierarchy of needs theory, not an empirical conclusion.

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