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U.S.-based global corporations receive the majority of their profits from overseas operations; thus the commercial importance of maintaining a Neoliberal capitalist-centric world of open trade and finance--the U.S. Empire--should not be underestimated.

One mechanism of influence and control used by corporations worldwide is interlocking directorships, in which certain influential people serve on numerous corporate boards, in effect knitting various interests and strategies into a network.

The U.S. Empire can profitably be viewed in this same light. American interests need not own operations outright; the Empire's structure is not one of coercion (except when persuasion and subterfuge fail) but of interlocking interests.

Although it tends to raise ideological hackles, it would be remiss not to observe that the U.S. Intelligence Community is not entirely a passive network; on occasion it has engineered coups, uprisings, protests, etc. and retains the capability to do so--at the command of the civilian government of the U.S.

Why did I include oil and empire as one context? Both are global, and both are intertwined. What's the point of constructing an empire if it cannot secure global energy supplies for the home nation? If all wealth is in effect stored energy, as I contend, then the only real wealth other than food and water is energy.

To the degree a crisis anywhere on the planet affects oil, or any other critical interest of the U.S., then the U.S. Empire will act as a potentially decisive negative or positive feedback, regardless of the location.

Context Five: Ontological Forces Which Power Trends, Reversals and History

Within each context, various forces are at work to resist and accelerate trends. These forces include feedback loops (both positive and negative) and marginal returns. Models which apply equally to the natural world and human society are useful tools to map how ontological forces play out.

Negative feedback can be understood as forces which act as built-in stabilizers, while positive feedback can be understood as self-reinforcing trends which lead to runaway expansion and disequilibrium (the state of disharmony; out of equilibrium, unstable).

One theme which will re-occur throughout this analysis is that the over-reach of Elites and the State are manifestations of positive feedback: the more powerful they become, the more power they can appropriate. This self-reinforcing dynamic eventually consumes all the surplus of the society, an over-extension (extreme disequilibrium) that ends in collapse.

Forces may arise to counter the self-reinforcing trends--this is negative feedback which tends to stabilize systems around an equilibrium.

Distribution probabilities provide another useful model. In Chapter Six we will discuss the Pareto distribution power law--the Pareto Principle or the "80-20 rule" which predicts that 20% of any group has an outsized influence on the "trivial many" (the 80% majority). Though not a physical law like gravity, the Pareto distribution works remarkably well in mapping distributions of income, population, and other large-scale phenomena.

The Pareto Principle is one model within a larger family of mathematical models known as power laws, which model the relationship between the frequency of events and the size of those events. The frequencies decrease very slowly as the sizes of the event increase. The classic example is an earthquake twice as large is four times as rare. This model helps us understand why history and Nature do not maintain an "average" or "typical" balance but are ceaselessly moving above and below the equilibrium point.

This model also helps us understand why large disruptive events are infrequent and difficult to predict; the stable and linear suddenly gives way to volatile instability.

Another aspect of power laws is scale invariance. A map of a jagged coastline provides a good example: the rough irregularity looks about the same up close as it does from afar. (This is also called self-similarity.)