So we come to the first juncture, and pausing to catch our breaths, note that...

...if the form and purpose of power do remain consistent, despite the passage of time, and across a wide number of topographies, because power replicates itself, then it follows that the replication of power depends largely on how those who rule draw their replacements.

Obviously, in some societies, this remains largely hereditary, with the ruling class self-replicating rather literally, so that membership in the ruling authority precedes the instruction in the methods of power.

But, in those communities where the hierarchy does not pass strictly along familial lines, or only within some of the competing factions of the larger ruling class, the instruction in the methods of government and power must serve as a function of power itself.

The recruitment and replacement process must inhabit, at some or several loci, the physical territory which the ruling power controls. Since power replicates in order that those who hold it might enjoy the fruits of others' labor, to train for some portion of power a person must train to deprive others of their own work, as well as to persuade or force them to accept this fact as just, natural and right.

Any attempt to capture power, then, results in an effort to capture the authority to deprive others of the results of their own effort, to rule over them so that they cannot create lives for themselves, since, if they create their own conditions of labor and enjoyment, they cannot serve the preservation of power.

In a society where power does not replicate exclusively within hereditary lines, the ruling factions must recruit from their own exclusive subject populations, or from the larger population group.

Those subject populations might appear as religious, lingual, ethnic, national, gender or ideological groupings*, among others. They might hybridize one or more categories of identity, but what unites them all first and foremost - let us call this adherence.

In the simplest form, those who adhere to power accept that some must rule, and that they merit the better sorts of existences. Lacking any cultural, social, electrochemical, biological or evolutionary evidence for the necessity of adherence, we might consider it reasonable to conclude that those who rule raise those they rule, and their own replacements, in the belief in adherence.

Seen this way, those who train to rule others train also to instruct them in the belief that they must, should or ought to obey.

Adherence, then, provides the ruling power with the capacity to rule varying forms of populations, in divergent periods, across a diverse range of terrains. Since the form of power seems to remain stable, while the governed populations do not, adherence describes the methods by which the stable form of power governs the varying and unstable groups over which it rules, and does so with their participation. And also, how it consistently replicates the form of itself.

Those who rule must therefore train, educate and persuade those whom they rule to not only accept the arrangement, but believe in it, obey it and actively participate in it.

From this, we can understand that a person who argues that the capture of power will change the shape of society will very likely have already received an education in ruling others, or that a person who defends or defines the terms of adherence (in our own time, see Ezra Klein and Paul Krugman, as well as any number of analogs in conservative, ethnic, feminist or ideological circles) will predictably come from one of the recruitment centers of power.**



* - which, under any sort of scrutiny, seem rather obviously imaginary, in so much as the claims about them, like the claims about money, disappear the moment anyone checks up on them

** - a mere sample