The Origins and Evolution of Power

Even though I rarely write about such topics, right now it is November 2024. This year is an important year – there were many elections around the world, in countries that still care enough to go through the motions of that thing we call “democracy”. This month is an important month – this month, the United States might vote for possibly the last time. So I will use this opportunity to collect some of my thoughts about political power.

Now I personally do not care too much about the United States, but this election might be of strong symbolic importance by marking a global state transition (pun intended), regardless of the outcome. As an European, for better or for worse, I have been living all my life in the backwaters and shadow of this currently still dominating, but falling empire. The world at large seems to move away from the hegemony of the US, which for the last more than 50 years exported a specific combination of free-market capitalism and liberal democracy into the world, with mixed success. The loose collection of nation states which are called “The West” is currently in an existential crisis caused by multiple external and internal pressures. Many of these countries are increasingly turning away from and burying democracy, in order to reorganize themselves into structures with a higher concentration of power.

Just like in old times, power these days is almost fully soaked up and gathered in the hands of various individual “leaders” – be it autocrats, oligarchs or both at the same time. But what actually is “power”? How does it work? The words we use change, and often obfuscate the view, but the essence and mechanisms remain the same. So trying to make sense of the concept, finding some answers to such questions from a high-level perspective, strongly infused with personal opinion, shaped by reading a lot of news^[1] and slightly sprinkled with ideas from complexity science and dynamical systems, is what this long-winded and sometimes rambling article is all about. If you have not been properly discouraged by this description, I hope that you will enjoy the ride.

The Evolutionary Origins of Power Dynamics

Let us start with a few definitions. I promise that it will not continue that dry, but I think it is good to at least roughly clarify terms first. Political power is access to and control of any resource that allows an agent to effectively project change into the world, overcoming eventual resistance of other agents. The amount of such inner resistance we could call resilience. Unpacking this further, political simply means that this power affects the dynamics of social systems, which consist of different agents interacting in an organized way, and finally, an agent is a person or organization that we can consider to be a subject, i.e. an entity actively participating in social systems with self-awareness and intent.

In physics, power is essentially the amount of energy that you can mobilize at an instant of time to do useful work, so political power is not that different. This is of course not surprising at all, given that the foundations of our social world are very much material. Ultimately, most of our social world, just like the physical, is driven by evolution – the pervasive emergent force which echoes through all life and complex life-like systems.

Every competitive complex adaptive system is hard-wired for autopoeiesis and homeostasis. To ensure survival, or more abstractly – continuous persistence, it has to gain and keep access to various forms of energy, i.e. resources. . So everything becomes immediately clearer if we replace the word “powerful” with the word “resourceful”, and understanding a “resource” as “form of energy that you can make use of”.

Understanding the evolutionary dynamics underlying all our social constructs also makes one emergent “law” of power almost self-evident. Just as gravity, which clumps together mass-energy, power tends to accumulate^[2]. This, however, is not a hard Physical Law, but a glitch (or feature) of our evolutionary programming – all life-like systems want to not just persist, but are driven to expand in various ways, like growth and self-reproduction.

Just as biological evolution produced increasingly complex forms of life^[3], the social and economical evolution did the same to us – birthing nation states and corporations, the super-organisms competing on the stage of so-called “geo-politics”. As long as we let ourselves be governed by the automatic, “natural” but ruthless rules of evolution, power struggles and regular crises will remain inevitable. After all, evolution is an amoral, undirected, greedy local optimization process. And rules of the game are perpetually changing, so what works today can fail horribly tomorrow – this can be both a blessing and a curse, depending on the position you are currently in.

All life-like systems are always at a tension between self-reinforcement, i.e. resistance against change, and unavoidable adaptation.^[4] Such adaptation rarely happens voluntarily, if at all. Usually it is caused by increasing stress coming from an evolutionary pressure – a system becomes inadequate for its environment, but remains either unaware or unwilling to adjust parameters until the it simply collapses. Adaptation could, in principle be gradual and incremental, but is more often than not sudden and catastrophic – as regularly showcased by violent revolutions and coups.

On Edge Between Cooperation and Competition

Why do some systems manage to be more effective than others? More precisely – why do some societies fail and collapse, while others thrive?

One answer from an abstract system-theoretic point of view could be given by observing that life tends to adapt to the edge of chaos and produce self-organized criticality. Species can suddenly go extinct, empires can suddenly fall and give rise to new ones – one could consider it to be simply another statistical law of nature. If you need to be agile and adaptive, you necessarily will most likely have some literal weak spot, some intrinsic instability that keeps the door for change open, just wide enough.

Mathematically speaking, it seems to manifest in a built-in chaotic behavior that is usually triggered when parameters of the system are pushed sufficiently far off a stable equilibrium. Once this happens, the system undergoes an abrupt phase transition into a different stable state, or, in the worst case, enters a volatile and chaotic phase. This pattern can be considered to be one of the characteristics distinguishing between active, dynamic life-like systems – and basically everything else.

But when looking at social systems, another source of regular failures becomes more clear when considering a crucial difference between biological and social systems.

In a functional complex biological system, all parts have no choice but work together cooperatively. When they fail to do so, this is what we would consider a disease or defect. A biological being is a single unit – all its constituent parts stand or fall together. There is no space for uncontrolled competition, and thus a single individual is usually not a domain for internal evolution, a biological individual is in some sense atomic. This is as true for the organelles of eucaryotic cells as much as it true for organs making up a body.

Note that such biological systems also have a “power center”, only that we tend to call it differently. If we say that the power center is whatever orchestrates and controls the behavior, then in a single cell, the genome is hard law, and the cell core is the executive power center controlling all internal biochemistry of the cell. Similarly, the evolution of nervous systems, culminating in the development of a brain and the miracle of nature that are our eyes, showing the evolutionary success of centralized aggregation and highly specialized processing of information, combined with effective and far-reaching control mechanisms. Stop for a moment to appreciate the beauty of that bio-chemical miracle that our consciousness is. Our brain – the executive power center of our body – continuously creating an integrated sense of self that is pieced together from various unrelated senses that asynchronously collect information.

Now in contrast, social systems are quite different, for two main reasons:

• social systems are not atomic, they consist of agents with own interests
• the role and relative power of individuals in a society is not fixed

As humans over millennia competed over power they wanted to use to support their own self-realization and ensure their legacy, we evolved increasingly sophisticated social systems. But consequently, for the most time in human history, all those systems had power centers which were designed to let the whole serve them, instead of them being facilitators that effectively serve the whole – like the brain is actually supposed to do.

Power innately attracts a certain kind people – holding and wielding it is to them nothing but a prosthetic extension of their own self. Their body, their senses, their whole being is projected out and imprinted on the world. To them, other people are just means to an end.^[5] These people naturally end up in positions of power, because existing power structures perpetuate themselves by promoting (both actively and passively) like-minded people with relevant skills and traits^[6].

In biological systems, an agent acting in some environment will only stop to fight and compete if it increases the odds against other larger threats. The trade-off between individual freedom and stability exists on various scales. Loose cooperation can lead to higher levels of integration, until individuality is lost and some larger, more complex organism remains.

We are a very social species that built huge and diverse civilizations that nobody can maintain alone. Would then a gradual erasure and devaluation of individuals, reduction of people to mere little gears in a clockwork, be a way forward for us? Surely, that is a possible way, but certainly not a desirable one, even if it might turn out to be viable^[7]. But there is no threat of this happening anytime soon. On the contrary, human societies seem to follow a pattern of inter-species parasitism – growth, welfare and self-realization of some selected few is achieved at the cost of exploitation of many others.

Could there possibly be a middle ground between selfish exploitation and selfless denial and rejection of all individuality and freedom? Can we find a path toward a mutually beneficial balance, a fruitful voluntary symbiosis?

The Sad Tale Of A Human-Friendly System, And Its Fall

How could such a symbiotic system for humans look like? How could different, possibly opposing interests coexist, while people still flourish and maintain a high level of freedom and autonomy?

Such a system would need to check many boxes:

• minorities are protected from tyranny of the majority
• the majority is protected from tyranny of a minority
• on average, welfare is maximized and suffering is minimized
• the system itself is protected against malicious agents
• the system is capable to dynamically adjust the amount of individual freedom in times of crises to ensure fast and effective mitigation

Does that remind you of something? Oh right – that is what democracy is supposed to be – in theory! But if it truly was like that in practice, how can we explain the fact that most democracies are at the verge of collapse? There are many reasons for this, just mentioning a few:

• the globalized, highly interdependent world grew too complex to comprehend to any single individual, no matter how smart or qualified
• many countries now lack a well-educated, capable and responsible political class that is truly committed to serving the people
• the internet opened the gates to the current flood of disinformation, further fueled by underappreciation and under-funding of education
• out of arrogance, democratic values lost the competition for minds and hearts, because it was never even considered necessary to fight
• the void left by the eroded shared values was filled by neoliberalism, its shallow nihilistic consumerism and the lie of trickle-down-economics

There is also this one big humanist idea – a morally loaded sentiment that is at the same time important, well-intentioned, and dangerously naive:

If all humans have an equal right to be free, flourish and express themselves, how can our empathy and commitment be to anything or anyone else but the welfare of every individual or group, that is, inclusion of all humankind?

Those who defend rights and freedoms of everyone in an absolutist way, those who even suggest to tolerate people who actively try or support denying others all those nice humanistic things that we consider sacred, like basic human rights – they should do their homework and understand the paradox of tolerance. A system that does not protect and reinforce its own foundations will necessarily crumble. Those naive idealists are equally a big part of the problem we are facing right now as those who are attacking our way of life.

Democracy is an immaterial infrastructure built in the minds of a society, and just like other infrastructure, such as streets and bridges, it breaks down if not maintained with enough resources and genuine care. Also, some people do not seem to understand that being non-aggressive is not an excuse for being weak, and tolerating low-key abuse is not showing strength, its stupidity.

But before this turns even more into a rant about the self-destructive tendencies in our failing democracies, I would rather have a look on the various forms of power the enemies of the free society are using much more effectively.

The Many Faces of Power

There are many ways, multiple orthogonal dimensions along which one could align and compare facets of different forms of power, and probably doing this would be a futile exercise. Regardless the chosen form, if you have one kind of power, you often have various ways to convert it into other forms – so it can be difficult to draw hard lines. But I think there are some broad distinctions that can easily be made, and there is a certain natural progression between the different forms that power usually manifests in.

Physical Power

What pacifists fail to see, but the extremists of all colors understand really well is this: when push comes to shove, the most immediate and undeniable form of power is physical. Violence is primordial, hard power by force and intimidation is unescapable and just a fact of the finite, resource-constrained, material world we live in. Animals hunt, i.e. over-power each other. Effectively, they ignore the subject-hood of the victim, treat the victim as a mere object, a consumable or disposable resource. While we also developed other forms of power, our species is also exceptionally good at wielding this timeless classic and mother of all other forms of power.

Unlike all the humanist ideas that developed slowly over millennia in layers upon layers of cultural evolution, violence is truly a self-evident axiom – because diplomacy only ever works if both sides are truly willing to, that is, both sides agree to reject the axiom of violence and everything that logically follows from it. There is no escape from this harsh reality and therefore the critical life lesson can only be repeated: one can not afford to ever be weak, or one will be taken advantage of sooner or later, by somebody living life without the burden of noble self-restraints.

Informational Power

Another important form of power is knowledge – factual information with objective meaning. Scientific knowledge obviously belongs to this category, but also everyday practical knowledge of various kinds is not to be underestimated. We learned how to create fire, we learned how to create better weapons, we learned how to get more and better food, we learned how to live together without the danger of everyday violence or disease. Societies with more practically useful knowledge obviously are more likely to become powerful and successful, because they can simply can control and mobilize relevant physical resources better than the competitors.

Now there is not much to say about informational power, except for the fact that we rationalist, humanist kind of people collectively overestimated the innate attraction and gravity of objective truth, biased by our privileged and refined “high-brow” views, that are not at all representative of how an average person thinks about their life and makes decisions. Maybe education on rationality, critical thinking and ethics is not scalable to whole populations, but I think that actually nobody even really tried. We always have hundreds of billions for the military or stimulating the economy, but never for education. No surprise that many people lost or never gained the ability to use the sharpest tool we all have – our mind – to its full potential. One could attribute this to mere neglect, but I claim this flaw is structural – it is the direct product out of the unholy marriage of democracy with under-regulated capitalism.

We don’t need any AI-enhanced expensive tablets in schools, we just need authentic, charismatic and smart teachers and general role models in society. The education crisis, is in my opinion, not (only) a crisis of neglected infrastructure. It is primarily a crisis of value and meaning. If education is reduced to the purpose of teaching a person just the bare minimum to join the workforce in some useful function, instead of developing young minds into well-rounded personalities with a strong moral compass and all the needed tools to seek and find truth – then what you get is exactly what you deserve. If you do not invest into quality of people, in the long game you are shooting into your own foot. But this actually connects right to the next topic.

Psychological Power

Now I am not an anthropologist to say anything about the true chronology of these cultural developments with any authority, but I would guess that we learned to create fire and good fruit from bad some time before we learned to lie, cheat and manipulate others.

Informational power is tied to reality but its anchored to the objective, material world. In contrast, psychological power is based on belief and knowledge we have about belief and knowledge of others. Instead of being about the physical world, everything in this realm is deeply rooted in the human condition and the ambiguous and fluid social world of our own making. This is why I consider psychological power to be more abstract and subtle. If solid facts are critical for the long-term strategy, seeding and promoting narratives and sentiments are the bread and butter of political short and mid-term tactics.

Psychological power is transported by all the myths, stories, values, spiritual and moral beliefs, cultural priming, and everything else that makes up the invisible fabric that our human societies are woven from. Psychological power is what we call soft power – it is being respected and valued by your partners, but also being feared by your enemies – both outcomes are based only on your either manufactured or earned reputation. So psychological power is all about being able to effectively encourage or discourage behavior by other people indirectly.

This includes hidden forms of influence such as lobbyist “think-tanks” that only exist for the purpose of direct and indirect manipulation of political decision makers, but also all religions, ideologies and other cultural artifacts fall into this category. But aside from the return of both politically motivated religious extremism, and religiously motivated political extremism, currently the most concerning form of psychological power is the power of disinformation. It only fully opened up its potential since the beginning of the “digital age”, which started slowly in the 1970s with the development of information technologies, and then quickly spilled with full force into our everyday life since at least 2007 – the year when the first iPhone was released, beginning the “dumb age of smartphones”. The rise of social media, uncontrolled peer-to-peer communication and information flow can be considered the main catalyst, the cursed Pandora’s box that unleashed many of the developments that we all watch unfold today.

Whole books, many of them, are written about just this one new manifestation of psychological power and its abuse by various players on the political stage. But the truly novel quality of the psychological manipulation and warfare we see today is not just the sheer scale of it, or the fact that information now can flow freely in all directions^[8]. The recent breakthrough in psy-op technology is the recognition that you do not even have to convince anyone to genuinely believe you, or make them align with your goals.

Classical rub-it-in-your-face propaganda narratives do not work so well these days in non-religious liberal societies, at least for now. But instead of indoctrination with your truth, it is often easier and in fact sufficient to make people stop believing anyone, or even more, make people believe that they are free to believe whatever they want – because if you cannot possibly know or understand the full truth, you can as well just stay out of the big guy problems, and choose to believe whatever you want. Methods here are multifaceted – from spreading conspiracy theories and sowing doubt and distrust between groups of people, up to active disengagement of basic critical and rational thinking skills in favor of a personal felt truth, combined with devaluation of actual, factual, information and its supporters.

It is quite brilliant, actually – the chaotic noise of disinformation is engineered to reproduce and spread the kind of sentiments and views that you need, while looking authentic and coming “from the bottom”. Ultimately, this is nothing but political astroturfing and digital smoke grenades that simultaneously advance your goals, distract the enemies and keep them busy fighting among each other.

The sad bottom line concerning psychological power is: once you have an environment where emotions are trusted more than facts, psychological power can almost match the strength of physical power in how compelling it is. There is a wise saying: “You cannot reason somebody out of a position they did not reason themselves into in the first place.” And if laws of reason and logic are denied, the argument by gut feeling and intuition seems to weigh as strongly and is as compelling as a fist punching your face. You can disagree, but you cannot do anything to change their mind, unless they just “feel like it”.

People who fell prey to the virus of the “hateful hive-mind” simply do not have the same channels of communication a rational person. They are “informationally divergent”, their thinking patterns are vastly different. With them we do not share the minimal common agreement that is needed for any civil and rational discussion: the agreement that positions and beliefs should be based on views that are logically consistent, ideally are backed by verifiable facts, and must be either rejected or revised when inconsistencies or provably wrong assumptions are revealed.

If the person you talk to denies this framework, there is no point in talking to them. Because for them, communication is a fight for dominance. Discussion is not about finding truth or refining their position, instead it is a verbal fist-fight to make the opponent either finally accept their view, or at least, make them shut up. Doing neither means to them that you are “not listening” to them, and by committing the great sin of not listening to them – they will claim – you effectively deny them their right of free speech. Even worse, they will claim that you discriminate against their point of view, while spreading your own “propaganda”, thus you are oppressing them and they are the victims. It is a very different and peculiar understanding of both freedom and discussion culture, to say the least.

The problem with all this is the self-preserving circular logic and built-up subconscious psychological defenses. Once someone passed the event horizon of such a black garbage information hole, once they lost touch with our shared consensus reality, it becomes difficult, almost impossible to get them back. It would be much easier and cheaper to teach people not to fall into these black holes, instead of trying to get them back. But I fear that this ship might already have sailed by now, and it is not clear when, if at all, we get another shot to get it right.

Economical Power

Now we finally come to the form of power that has come to dominate the world in the recent times. We are talking about economical power. The origin of economical power is based in the material world. We abstracted the value of physical goods and gave that abstracted form a name and representation – money. But after this performative act of self-deception, we collectively agreed to attribute value to an abstract number in a digital system or a piece of paper. All of this of course only works as long as we keep up the collective social fiction that these numbers carry value and that we can exchange these numbers against actual material goods in the forseeable future.

If you understand this, you understand that economics is closer to humanities than to hard science. Economy is not made by robots moving numbers around in an optimal, it is made by people – who have incomplete or incorrect information and are biased by their beliefs, hopes, fears and other flaws.^[9] That makes modern economical monetary power much more similar to psychological power than to anything else, because when the currencies collapse, all your supposed resources vanish into thin air. To run a currency and a healthy market, you need participants that accept and trust the rules of the game.^[10] Because monetary power is a socially constructed illusion, most wealthy people diversify their assets by investing in reliable, physical things – houses, rare metals, you name it. But ultimately, most forms of capital (except for maybe, owning a loyal mercenary army) are only deriving their power from our acceptance of the capitalistic framework.

Big Guns vs. Big Money – Who Will Win?

One distinctive characteristic of our time that I noticed is the following. Power has always been highly concentrated, but physical, economic and psychological power were controlled by the same person or group of people – usually a king (or equivalent), often in alliance with some church (or equivalent). The church provides the fluff and pushes people in the desired direction, the state provides the weapons, king and pope share the income, everybody is happy. In the modern world and especially in democratic societies, different forms of power were mostly distributed among different institutions. The church is separate from the state, which is separate from the economy. That is how we all learned it in school, a pretty good idea – minimize risks of abuse by creating a balance of powers. Only that the balance has been lost in the last 20-30 years. The old formula never stopped working unchanged outside of The West, but right now the most powerful ally that an aspiring king^[11] can get is a patron oligarch^[12]. Only now the patron oligarchs grew so powerful that they soon will start to notice they do not really need the kings all that much.

The punchline of the current situation is that the current opposition is between two groups that have more in common than what divides them – classical autocrats that control oligarchs and do not shy away from brute physical power, and modern oligarchs that control autocrats, making use of their vast economical power. All of them learned how to use suitable and complementary forms of psychological power and are eagerly applying it to slowly create the right social substrate for their brave new world. Now this leaves one very important question – who of the players is on our side, of the people? Of course, they all say that they are, but I think we all know the depressing true answer. No matter who wins, it is almost certain that humanity will lose.

The Spiral Of History Keeps Turning and Twisting

Now this was a rather long read, and I still did not really say anything new at all. But maybe my personal mash-up and idiosyncratic presentation of these topics somehow resonates with you, maybe it can even enrich your own reflections on the world. Maybe you disagree with me – then you are welcome to correct me where you believe I am wrong.

In any case, if you actually read all of this, thanks for sharing this moment in space-time with me. Most articles I write in the hope of sharing something at least interesting and maybe even new or useful. This one, I feel, is mostly for me – its therapeutic screaming into the digital void, and it served me mainly as a narrative vehicle for processing the crazy times we are living in. When the world is just too much, it helps me to analyze and summarize it, break it apart, understand how it works. Even if you cannot change the tides, it is usually good to be aware of them. We all see that turbulences are coming our way, so fasten your seatbelts, hold on tight and stay hopeful.

Always remember – one part of the beauty in truth and the objective reality is that you usually cannot keep denying it forever. Last time I checked, even the most ingenious players of power games, all the abusers and exploiters of the common populace, despite the absurd amount of their power and their best efforts, still cannot change neither the laws of physics, nor the laws of logic.

1. I am a regularly relapsing, but self-aware news junkie. I would really like to shut the world out more, but some probably misplaced sense of duty – of being informed about what is going on – and also the sense of dread cause by the snowballing of recent the events makes me come back more often and get sucked into the cycle. Our brains were just not designed to continuously take in, process and properly assess all the bad things that happen in the world all the time. ↩

2. This phenomenon was studied and described brilliantly by Karl Marx for the special case of capital, but in fact the same dynamics clearly apply to any token of power, which in Marxist terms would also qualify as a form of “capital”. ↩

3. Yes, before anybody tries to point it out – I know that increased complexity is not necessarily the outcome of evolution. But that is also not the point – the first appearance of more complex life still can causally only happen after some simpler life that existed before it. ↩

4. In the social world, we see this tension manifested in the eternally opposing political spectra of conservative/reactionary (“right”) and liberal/progressive (“left”) forces. They can be summarized, respectively, as trying to concentrate power and resist changes to the current distribution of power, or trying to restructure power in order to induce change. ↩

5. Kant would strongly disapprove. ↩

6. The main qualifying traits being the dark triad, resulting in a lack of both responsibility and empathy, which tend to be a severe limitation and annoyance in the eternal evolutionary power struggle. ↩

7. Ultimately this is nothing but the vision of any totalitarian ideology (regardless whether “extreme left” or “extreme right”), when thought until the very end – a whole nation, acting as one single body and a single mind, sacrificing itself fully for some great purpose. Totalitarian visions seem to always off some grand drama and pathos. One can imagine people being “happy”, for some definition of happy, if only because of the lack of imagination or desire for any other form of existence. Nevertheless, to a free-spirited human being, this form of existence can only be considered a repulsive threat, and the culture and social feelings of inhabitants of such systems must appear incomprehensible, alien and almost in-human. It is probably not an accident that there are strong overlaps and sympathies between corporatism, trans-humanism and fascism. ↩

8. I think that this is a massive problem, as humanity mentally was not and still is not ready – is emotionally, socially, and rationally not mature enough – for it, and that explains many of the problems we face now. But this is probably a whole topic for a different essay that I might or might not write: “how cheap internet for everyone destroyed the world instead of saving it”. ↩

9. That is why the only truly scientific and realistic schools of economics are behavioral economics, and other variations that rooted firmly in both empirical science and human psychology. In contrast, neoliberalism is an old dogmatic ideology which has been proven wrong and unstable time and time again and that apparently only exists in order to justify inequality and further privatize and raid the public sector. We should finally throw it into the trash can of history, alongside other dangerous pseudo-science. ↩

10. There are many reasons why I believe that cryptocurrencies are at this point at best – a hot air bubble, and at worst – a scam for illiterates. But one reason why a cryptocurrency cannot work on the large scale is that there is no trustworthy entity that can give any guarantees about the value stability. This absence of a larger institution backing the system is supposed to be a feature, but in fact it is a flaw. I sympathize with the idea and can see where it is coming from, but came to the conclusion that trying to eliminate trust is impossible and the removal of trust-carrying institutions creates more problems than it solves. Maybe, just maybe, instead we should stop trying to solve social problems with technology and rather work on rebuilding trust. More and more I have come to believe that in various contexts trust is a crucial resource. ↩

11. Of course I mean autocrat… oh, wait, of course I mean “elected president”. See? Many words, same essence (modulo minor details). ↩

12. Of course I mean: CEO of at least one multinational company with larger turnover than the economy of your whole country. And of course we would never work with dirty oligarchs, there is not a single one in The West, our partners are all honorable and hard-working entrepreneurs. Oligarchs rise to power using corruption, but we do not have such problems in The West, only some minor issues with lobbyism and transparency. And the military groups we dislike are uncivilized terrorists, but the ones we support with money and weapons are poor liberation activists and have no other choice. Sometimes it is exhausting trying to keep track of all these distinct names given to the same thing. Probably I am just too stupid, so no oligarch will adopt me as their pet. ↩