Galtland Index

Abstract Power Hierarchies

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Abstract Power Hierarchies

Abstract power hierarchies are Lowery’s term for institutions that allocate authority through belief, rank, rules, law, ideology, or software permissions. They can coordinate large societies, but Lowery argues that they create honeypot security problems because control authority becomes concentrated in people who administer the abstraction.

The Basic Claim

Lowery distinguishes physical power from abstract power. Physical power operates through real costs and constraints. Abstract power operates through shared belief and encoded rules: people recognize a king, president, legislature, administrator, court, software maintainer, or protocol operator as having authority because the relevant social or technical system says so.

The hierarchy is “abstract” because the authority is not itself physical force. It is a claim embedded in a symbolic system. It becomes effective only when people treat the claim as binding or when physical enforcers act on its behalf.

The Honeypot Problem

Lowery’s security criticism is that abstract power hierarchies centralize control authority while relying on trust. The people at the bottom must trust the people at the top not to manipulate the rules, abuse permissions, exploit loopholes, or use enforcement to protect their position. That makes the hierarchy a honeypot: it gathers valuable control into a place that attracts predation.

This framing overlaps with State Power and Intervention, but it is not the same argument. The libertarian article judges state monopoly against property, consent, and nonaggression. Lowery’s thesis asks a systems-security question: what happens when control over valuable resources depends on a trust-based abstraction whose administrators cannot be physically checked by users?

Arendt’s Total Domination

Arendt provides a non-libertarian convergence point in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Her account of total domination is not a security-engineering thesis, but it names a related danger: concentrated abstract authority can stop acting like ordinary coordination and become a system for remaking persons into material for an ideological process.

The divergence is important. Lowery frames abstract authority as a honeypot security problem and looks for physical-cost checks, especially in proof-of-work. Arendt frames totalitarian rule as a political-philosophical rupture rooted in mass society, ideology, terror, and loneliness. The shared point is narrower: abstract control can become pathological when it is centralized, insulated from ordinary human feedback, and able to redefine reality for those subject to it.

Convergence with Oppenheimer

The closest older parallel is Oppenheimer’s Political Means and Economic Means distinction. Oppenheimer calls the political means the forcible appropriation of others’ labor; Lowery calls abstract authority a rule-based hierarchy that can allocate control without physical-cost competition. These are not the same theory, but both name a mechanism by which institutional authority can extract value without producing it through voluntary exchange.

The convergence is striking because the traditions are so different. Lowery writes as a Department of Defense/MIT systems-engineering author. Oppenheimer writes as a German social-democratic sociologist of the state. The overlap belongs in Evolution of the State as a cross-tradition resonance, not as evidence that Lowery is making Oppenheimer’s political argument.

Software as Abstract Authority

The cyberspace part of the thesis extends the same claim from law to software. Software permissions, administrator roles, platform rules, payment rails, and protocol governance can create abstract control over digital resources. Lowery argues that this becomes strategically important because modern society increasingly stores, transfers, and validates valuable information through computer networks.

That point connects to Market Anarchism and Private Law and Resistance Axiom. Market-anarchist sources ask whether law and security require monopoly institutions. Hillebrand’s resistance axiom asks whether technical systems can be built to resist external control. Lowery adds a national-security version: proof-of-work may physically constrain software-defined authority in a domain where ordinary legal and logical constraints are fragile.

Relation to Hoppe and Argumentation

The connection to Hoppe is indirect. Hoppe’s argumentation-ethics line treats rational discourse, self-ownership, and property as constraints on legitimate authority. Lowery is not making Hoppe’s normative argument. The overlap is that both frameworks are suspicious of authority that claims binding force through abstract rules while suppressing the actor’s ability to contest control.

Limits

The confidence level is low because this is a single-source, contested framework with strong metaphors and policy claims. The concept is useful for mapping Lowery’s thesis and comparing it to libertarian state critiques, but it should not be treated as a settled diagnosis of every institution that uses rules, law, or software permissions.

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