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4. These concentrations are power are ontologically vulnerable to disruption in two ways: any structural concentration heightens vulnerability (think of a single train station through which all traffic must be routed or a single power station serving an entire state), and any systemic concentration of power leads inevitably to over-reach as every obstacle to their increase of the national income is overcome.

Another way of understanding the momentum of concentrations of power is that the more powerful they become, the more adept they become at sweeping aside institutional negative feedbacks which act to counter their over-reach.

In an structural irony akin to a supernova star, the larger they become the more vulnerable they become to implosion/degradation.

The Pareto Principle, which we invoked to describe the potential leverage of the Remnant, also applies to concentrations of power. Once an Elite controls 20% of the resources of any particular structure, then they wield outsized influence on the remaining 80%. Since State employees (all levels of government and quasi-governmental agencies) exceed 20% of the workforce, they exert outsized influence on the 80% non-State private-sector employees.

Thus at certain thresholds of power--what might be termed phase or quantum shifts--then Elites' power accretion and influence leap to new ever-more dominant heights.

These mechanisms explain how the Power Elites of cartel/crony/monopoly capital (who own or control 2/3 of the productive assets of the nation) and State fiefdoms (which absorb 40% of the GDP) influence the entire economy to enlarge their shares of the national income.

With these two hands firmly squeezing their throats, the declining class of productive non-Elites have no choice but to submit to debt-serfdom, devolve into insolvency/penury or opt out. In this way, their very concentration of power drives the Plutocracy/State to over-reach which then crushes the productive class they depend on for debt servicing and taxes.

Can reducing complex systems and interactions to this level capture the essential structure of large-scale change? Or is such simplicity misleading?

Consider the Plutocracy: calling a complex mix of people, institutions and enterprises a single class is of course simplistic: what are the precise thresholds for membership, and so on. But as I explained earlier, the Plutocracy is not neatly monolithic or neatly conspiratorial, with secret membership lists and the like. It is a self-organizing group drawn together by shared interests: preservation of capital, reduction of risk, expansion of income/return on capital, extending influence within the State, etc.

The same argument can be used on the State: hasn't the social safety net of entitlements eased the suffering of the citizenry? What about all the conflicting political forces within the sprawling vastness of the State?

One way to reach an answer is to turn the question around: is complexity itself a trap of sorts, a black hole into which explanations fall and disintegrate in endless explorations of interactions? In other words, is complexity itself a distraction, or even more troubling, an excuse for passivity?

Complexity creates information asymmetry--unequal access to information--and opens up vast opportunities for gaming the system. Thus complexity itself is a tool of domination by Elites and the State. Like its conceptual twin transparency, simplicity is the mortal enemy of Elites key weapons of control: secrecy, obfuscation, disinformation, information asymmetry and complexity itself.

If we cannot divine first principles and fundamental structures beneath the noise and confusion of endless complexities, then there truly is no way forward; we are fated to bob on the choppy sea of complexity without a compass, a navigational system or even a sense of the drifting currents.

Just as identifying the deep underlying forces--resource depletion, over-reach, concentration of power--is the key to an integrated analysis, cutting through complexity to identify key