Samo Burja: a Primer

Samo is the founder of the political consultancy firm Bismarck Analysis. He is also one of the most original thinkers I have come across. Here’s a primer on his ideas, together with some challenges.

One question underpins Samo’s work: Why do all societies decline?

Photo by Vladimir De Vico on Unsplash

As our disorientated institutions stumble bleary eyed out of the wreckage of the COVID pandemic, this question has adopted an unsettling urgency.

Samo believes that the answer can be found via the modest task of analysing the history of human civilisation.

In pursuit of this task, he has developed a series of analytical lenses (Theories) through which he examines historical individuals, institutions, and events.

Much of Samo’s published material starts with the Theories and works from there.

However, to truly understand Samo’s worldview we must identify the assumptions that lie behind his Theories. Here’s my attempt to do just that.

For those who aren’t already loosely familiar with Samo’s main Theories: I have briefly summarised them in the Appendix and I would recommend casting your eye over this before reading the body of this post.

¹

---

1. Theories of History

The Assumption

History is not only instructive regarding the past. It is applicable to the present. Studying history enables us to develop lenses through which we can analyse and understand the present day and the near-term future.

Each set of lenses constitutes a theory of history.

Everyone, whether implicitly or explicitly, analyses the past via their own theory of history.

Our theory of history informs the actions that we take in the present. For example, someone who believes that history is driven by great individuals may be more motivated to pursue change themselves, or to vote for individuals who they think can do so.

Thoughts

Karl Popper

Samo makes an instrumentalist case for the importance of theories of history. In other words, he notes that they have real world impacts on our actions, regardless of their underlying truth.

But he also goes a step further, arguing that by finding the true theory of history we can calibrate our actions and make diagnostic assessments of the condition of our institutions. We can also make informed predictions about the near-term future.

Karl Popper was sceptical of theories of history. They are exceptionally difficult to falsify. History is big! Evidence can be found to support almost any viewpoint. In propounding our own theories of history, we are selecting for certain variables and discounting others. This suggests that almost any theory of history can be supported, but fewer can be comprehensively disproven.

In this spirit, I’d like to press Samo on what he thinks it would take for his Theories to be disproven. What types of evidence would be required for Samo to change his mind?

Philip Tetlock

Let’s see some predictions! If Samo has identified the true theory of history then this should enable him to make some precise, testable, time limited predictions in the manner advocated for by Philip Tetlock.

²

[2]

Given that Samo is a founder of a successful political consultancy firm (the function of which is to offer forward looking insights to clients), this may seem like a strange critique. He also has already made some specific forecasts, for example on Russia and Ukraine.

In general however, when reading Samo’s work I have been struck by the frequency of statements arguing that his Theories enable us to predict the future, and the relative infrequency of specific (i.e. not generalised) predictions. Making a series of time limited forecasts seems like the easiest way to demonstrate the truth of the Theories.

Dominic Sandbrook

While writing this post I re-listened to the Rest is History podcast episode ‘The Lessons of History’. I was struck by this quote from historian Dominic Sandbrook:

“Nobody ever draws a lesson from history that they didn’t want to draw in the first place. I think there’s a confused mass of stuff and people impose their own patterns on it and they seek justifications for stuff they wanted to do anyway.”

In general, Dominic Sandbrook and his co-host Tom Holland emphasise (and enjoy) the arbitrariness of history. They avoid sweeping thematic statements and where they draw parallels it is often to distinguish rather than diagnose.  

Samo’s approach to historical analysis appears fundamentally different. I wonder however whether a synthesis is possible. Perhaps seeing history as a “confused mass of stuff” is, in its own way, a theory of history. It is a lens which discounts patterns and highlights contextual factors. In this sense, the difference between the two historical worldviews is one of focus and method rather than of fundamental approach.  

2. Knowledge

The Assumption

Knowledge underpins society. To understand a society we need to identify the knowledge upon which it rests and understand how such knowledge is produced, retained and transferred.

Three of Samo’s Theories are explicitly based around knowledge:

1. Great Founder Theory is predicated on the idea that great founders have access to correct and special bodies of knowledge about the world. This knowledge is intentionally built into the systems and institutions designed by such founders.

2. Society is held together by Intellectual Dark Matter, being “knowledge we cannot see publicly, but whose existence we can infer because our institutions would fly apart if the knowledge we see were all there was”.

3. Functional institutions have access to living traditions of knowledge, i.e. bodies of knowledge which have been successfully worked on, transferred and understood. Access to such knowledge allows these institutions to be adaptable.

Samo argues that the recreation of knowledge is hard. When it is lost, it often remains lost. This, combined with the centrality of knowledge to a functioning society, means that when analysing the health of societies and institutions we must assess their mechanisms of knowledge transfer.

The importance of knowledge to society means that popular positive conceptions of economic disruption and competition are flawed. Each time a company dies or is disrupted rather than being cooperatively transformed, huge amounts of Intellectual Dark Matter will die with it. This is a waste. We should instead optimise for cooperation within, and succession of, institutions. This ties into the succession problem (i.e. the challenge of transferring skill and power from a leader of an institution to their successor).

Systems of recognising and producing knowledge are fundamental to a healthy society. Prestige, legitimacy and status must be carefully allocated so that the discovery of the right knowledge is incentivised. Knowledge production cannot be institutionalised to the extent that the frontiers of knowledge remain unexplored.

Thoughts

City-states

A socio-political-economic system which places knowledge cultivation, retention and transfer as its primary aim is a fun concept to explore. How different would this be to society today? Who would the elites be? I assume that rapacious competition would be reduced due to the lost knowledge caused by disruption, but likewise suspect that a huge amorphous state would not be conducive to knowledge production.

A city-state seems could be a good model. Both renaissance Florence and classical Athens appear to have been good examples of a culture of knowledge.  What would be the modern equivalent of the city state? Could it be Balaji’s network state?

Production vs Retention

I’m curious whether Samo identifies any tension between systems which incentivise production of knowledge and systems which incentivise retention of knowledge. I would argue that highly competitive systems are good for the former but bad for the latter.

Intellectual Dark Matter

The concept of Intellectual Dark Matter is one which immediately resonates with me. I can’t think of an organisation I’ve worked at which hasn’t relied on an unspoken web of internal and external personal connections, unwritten procedures, and tacitly acknowledged shortcuts.

It also suggests that one can establish leverage in an organisation by cultivating Intellectual Dark Matter. There may be an incentive for individuals to keep their knowledge secret thus allowing them implicit control of certain processes. This can be in tension with organisational incentives to make knowledge legible.

Karl Popper (again)

Despite my contention in the previous section that a Popperian analysis would be sceptical of Samo’s model of history, a synthesis is possible. Popper argues that the “course of human history is strongly influenced by the growth of knowledge, and we cannot predict, by rational or scientific methods, the future growth of our scientific knowledge”.  This statement assumes that our historical development is predicated on the development of knowledge. In this sense, Popper and Burja are aligned.

3. Agency

The Assumption

Most, if not all, historical developments are contingent on human agency. In other words, individual actions can shape the direction that history takes. This stands in opposition to materialist theories of history which see economic and material factors as primary to human development.

Great Founder Theory is predicated on the notion that the designs and actions of a small number of exceptional individuals dictate the development of society.

‘Live’ players have an ability to adapt and to reinvent, and therefore to take subversive actions which can upend existing scripts.   

Samo repeatedly argues that the world as we see it today isn’t a result of arbitrary developments. The world is here by design. He argues that corruption stems from political necessity, bureaucracies deliberately restrict innovation, and“nearly everyone underestimates how reasonable the actions of the powerful are.”

Thoughts

Optimism

In one sense this is an optimistic vision. If our world is designed this suggests that we have the ability to become designers.

From another perspective, it is deeply pessimistic. Great founders are historically unique. Live players are rare. What does this mean for the rest of us? One reading of Samo’s Theories is that we are doomed to a life of default, mere pawns entirely subject to the whims of a strategically superior set of individuals. I’d like to press Samo on whether the concept of live players can be a normative rather than a descriptive idea; in other words, whether by understanding live players we can become one.

Effective Altruism

I’m interested in the interplay between agency and effective altruism. In the introduction to his manuscript, Samo argues that “people who build institutions are far more impactful than people who don’t, and among those, people who build functional institutions are by far the most impactful”. Effective altruism’s central objective is to maximise its positive impact. Does Great Founder Theory imply that the movement should reprioritise away from solving problems like malaria and towards cultivating great founders?

³

Rationalisation

Samo’s ability to find the explicable in the inexplicable maps neatly onto a wider libertarian argument as to the extent to which bad government decisions can be rationalised.  Bryan Caplan would argue that there is often no explanation – inexplicable results can be ascribed to incompetence. Tyler Cowen is more likely to argue that there are complex explanations which we may not understand.

⁴

Samo appears to be more aligned with Tyler’s view.

Preventing Change

Great Founder Theory is hardwired to select for individuals who impose transformative societal change. In doing so, it risks underweighting the historical importance of individuals who prevent such change.

Churchill is a classic example of the ‘great man’ conception of history. Proponents will argue for his historical significance on the basis that his dogged resistance enabled the allied victory in the Second World War. Accepting for the sake of argument the historical validity of this account, Churchill still does not fit within Great Founder Theory as he did not impose transformative societal change.

However, if we assume that a fascist post 1940s Western Europe would constitute a fundamentally different social structure to that of liberal capitalism, then one can argue that Churchill’s actions prevented a fundamental societal change from taking place. In this sense, his impact on the development of our institutions is as pronounced as any great founder who enacted social change.

Supporting Players

I’m curious how Samo accounts for the agency of the individuals who surround great founders / live players.

Emperor Augustus is a good example. The set of reforms he instituted preserved the Roman imperium for centuries. But his success and influence were predicated on the intellectual, organisational, architectural and military genius of his right-hand man Agrippa.

Was Agrippa also a great founder? Given that Samo argues that there have only been between 100 and 200 great founders over the entire course of Western civilisation, the odds of this seem vanishingly small. Perhaps then Agrippa and Augustus together constitute a great founder. But if so, why draw the line there? How about the network of individuals who enabled Agrippa?

Alternatively, perhaps Samo would argue that Augustus’ ability to ‘talent spot’ and successfully utilise Agrippa is in of itself evidence of Augustus’ status as a great founder.

⁵

4. Coordination

The Assumption

We can understand society by understanding its coordination mechanisms.

Great Founder Theory is predicated on the ability of founders to identify and impose cultural traditions which materially change the way that people coordinate (for example Emperor Constantine’s transitioning of the Roman Empire to Christianity). It is via an analysis of these coordination mechanisms that Great Founder Theory differentiates from ‘great man’ theory.

Social technologies are coordination mechanisms. Politeness enables a base level of conversational norms which means we can approach conversation with others with an understanding of how the conversation will proceed. Western commercial law allows businesses to operate with each other with a basic level of confidence in the system and therefore the predictably of outcomes. Social technology therefore reduces coordination costs.

Methods of institutionalisation such as professionalisation, standardisation, credentialism and bureaucratisation are also coordination mechanics. They reduce variance via the creation of a set of procedures and norms which result in predictable outcomes.

Finally, Samo has developed a sophisticated framework for power competition. A summary of it is beyond the scope of this primer, but fundamental to its analysis is the way that different levels of power coordinate internally and externally.

Thoughts

Coordination, Knowledge and Agency

Coordination requires both knowledge and agency. You cannot accidentally coordinate, or at least you cannot do so sustainably.

However, whereas great founders and live players require knowledge and agency, generally they are not coordinated. Instead, great founders impose coordination on others via the institutions they develop. In other words, knowledge and agency are inputs, but coordination is an output.

A live player and a great founder could therefore be defined as someone who is able to stand outside of society’s coordination mechanisms.

Bureaucracies

Samo has a nuanced view of bureaucracies. He acknowledges that they serve a helpful purpose by extending power and results far beyond what a single individual can do. However, they simultaneously reduce variance, and by recycling rather than adapting they become inflexible and therefore decay.

I like this account of bureaucracy. It encourages us to consider what the ultimate aims of a given bureaucracy are, and to assess the ways in which such aims could be achieved without the bureaucracy in place. This is an enlightening way of thinking about society, and considerably more productive than the outright cynicism that dealing with cumbersome bureaucracies usually incurs.

It also reminds me of Pournelle’s iron law of bureaucracy: “In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.”

The Market

As already mentioned, Samo is generally cautious of the disruptive effect the market has on knowledge. I’d like to know whether in Samo’s worldview these concerns are counterbalanced by the benefits of the market as a coordination mechanism.

Cities

Samo’s Theories appear to assume that most forms of coordination are top down, stemming from the actions taken by great founders and live players.

It is possible however to point to certain forms of coordination as evidence of structuralist or materialist theories of history. In this sense coordination is perhaps the most fertile starting point if one were to develop a substantive counter thesis to Samo’s Theories.

Cities are a good example. Generally (with several notable exceptions), it is difficult to point to a single individual as the foundational driver of most cities’ development. Samo acknowledges as much on a recent podcast episode. Instead, when analysing the developments of cities one can point to an organic blend of cultural, political, social and material factors. If we view cities as institutions, then the fact that functional, self-sustaining, internally coordinated institutions can develop independently of great founders could suggest that Samo’s Theories are overlooking something fundamental about how civilisations develop and decline.

---

Just as theories of history are selective, so is my account of Samo’s worldview. One could write another piece based entirely around Samo’s account of power, bureaucracy, and elites.

In writing this primer I have sought to focus on the common threads which permeate the entirety of Samo’s work. My hope is that it, in doing so, the piece enables a richer and more substantive engagement with his Theories.

I also hope that in offering some thoughts and challenges I can contribute in some small way to the continuing evolution of Samo’s intellectual project.

---

Appendix: The Theories

Great Founder Theory

A small number of exceptional individuals (or tightly coordinated groups) designed the institutions and social practices which sit at the heart of today’s societies.  Great founders are the “primary force that shape society”.

Examples: Confucius, Charlemagne, Constantine, Ptolemy. There have been between 100 and 200 great founders over the course of recorded human civilisation.

Live / Dead Players

“A live player is a person or well-coordinated group of people that is able to do things they have not done before. A dead player is a person or group of people that is working off a script, incapable of doing new things.”

Examples: Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin and Kanye West are all examples of live players. There are somewhere between 500 and 1000 live players alive today.

Traditions of Knowledge

Bodies of knowledge that have been “consecutively and successfully worked on by multiple generations”. These can be living (successfully transferred), dead (unsuccessfully transferred), or lost (not transferred at all)

Examples: Production of a notable effect suggests that a tradition is alive. Rote recitation of a historic text without an understanding of what it is saying suggests that a tradition is dead.

Intellectual Dark Matter

Knowledge that exists but is inaccessible. This holds society together, significantly outweighing accessible and visible forms of knowledge.

Examples: Trade secrets, private networks, lost knowledge, persuasive skill, personal connections.

Social Technologies

Non-material social practices which govern our actions.  The set of scripts upon which our societies run. Can be likened to an operating protocol.

Examples: Education, politeness, marketing, ideology, strategy, ritual.

Empire

A group of coordinated actors operating around a central power.

Examples: A company, a church, the effective altruist movement, a government.

1. Samo has developed further models and frameworks which could be included here. In many cases these will be subsets of the 6 theories I have listed.  

2. See this Twitter thread for Samo’s views on the merits of using percentages when making predictions.

3. Samo discusses his views on the effective altruism movement during his appearance on the Lunar Society podcast.

4. See Bryan’s recent podcast with Richard Hanania (10.10 to 10.44).

5. I’m not sure whether Samo in fact deems Augustus a great founder. For the purpose of the point I’m making here it does not matter either way.