An English Meiji: sketch of a royal coup

"Under the rule of mere habitual obedience, revolution is just a coordination problem."

The English constitution, as described by Walter Bagehot 150 years ago, is not a constitution as we Americans know it. It is not an old piece of paper. It is a set of unwritten traditions or conventions—mere habits of obedience.

The King of England delegates his royal prerogative to the Prime Minister of the UK, because he does. This is how it works. Today, this habit is what it means to be King—the very model of a modern king, in a modern constitutional monarchy.

In the modern world, we have learned, the real job of a king is to—always be on time for your photo shoots. As Carlyle observed almost 200 years ago, a modern king is an actor. The royal family is the ultimate reality show, and acting in it is not an easy job. Small wonder that those who do that job well, as Elizabeth II did, feel a real pride.

Imagine how Elizabeth I would have felt about this interpretation. Imagine what she would have done—transposed into the body of Elizabeth II. She would have seen this “constitutional monarchy” as a mere reinvention of the Merovingian rois faineants, the “do-nothing kings”—and stepped right over the magic yellow lines on the floor, out of the show, and—into the world. What would have happened next—is anyone’s guess.

Traditions change. Habits of obedience change. (Even we Americans have our “living constitution.”) One common pattern of change is for operational organs of a regime to become ceremonial—in Bagehot’s jargon, “effective” institutions become “dignified.” Elizabeth I was “effective”; Elizabeth II was “dignified.”

The late Merovingian kings were “dignified,” too—with their long, flowing hair. Once a year, they were rolled out in an oxcart to ritually delegate their powers to the Mayors of the Palace. Eventually the Mayors got tired of this, decided they wanted to be kings in name as well as reality, and had the last Merovingian shot or something. And, like, no one cared.

The reverse can also happen: ceremonial organs can become operational. Parliament under the Tudors is dignified; under the Stuarts, it becomes effective; under the Hanoverians, it rises to be absolute. (Under the Windsors, it is once more dignified.)

Even a ceremonial monarchy can return to operation—as in Japan’s 19th-century Meiji Restoration. Could this happen in England? In the 21st century, can we dare to dream of—true monarchy, absolute monarchy, in the UK? The Sex Pistols might not approve.

Let’s go deeper into this idea of a very English regime change—of a return of the king, a second restoration, a renewal of the powers of the Tudors—a royal coup, if you will.

Regime change in the UK

Somewhere between the Elizabeths, without any formal change, actual operating power in England fully changed hands. Elizabeth I was more or less all-powerful; Elizabeth II was more or less powerless. Regime change happened.

This is fine. It was fine. It probably had to happen. And next time it happens—it will also have to happen. And it will be fine. In fact—it will be much better than fine.

Nothing could be more English than regime change. Across the last half-millennium, we see the strong unlimited monarchy of the Tudors, founded frankly on the sword, under which the theory of divine right need not be stated because it was assumed, become the weak unlimited monarchy of the early Stuarts, under which that right was challenged and the royal prerogative grew bounded; then came revolution; then the limited monarchy of the Restoration; then a Dutch invasion; then the parliamentary oligarchy from Queen Anne to the Great War, with a monarchy essentially symbolic from beginning to end, and a parliament increasingly captive to a cabinet; then the Fabian apolitical regime of the modern era, in which not only king and parliament, but cabinet and electorate, have entered Bagehot’s “dignified” category. What next?

Will England see another regime change? Certainly. When? I have no idea. Because I think it is a good idea, I would say: as soon as possible. What? Other than a foreign conquest—rather rare in the sceptered isle—there is only one conceivable way to complete the pattern above: as a sawtooth wave between monarchy and oligarchy.

The pattern of the last half-millennium is a trend of decay from “effective” monarchy to “effective” oligarchy, with transient waves of “effective” pressure from democracy. (England never had a full democratic revolution and never will—the “effective” power of the London street has been declining for at least the last 200 years. For Wellington and his ilk genuinely feared a French Revolution at home in the 1820s.)

This gradual decay cannot be reversed. A sawtooth oscillation is asymmetric in time because it alternates between gradual decline and instantaneous rise, mirroring the time-asymmetric nature of entropy. Timelines do not reflect in time. Monarchy lost power gradually, but cannot gain it gradually. Trends cannot continue infinitely. The tension between these realities creates the discontinuity.

The next step in the sawtooth curve is a step function straight to the top of the chart—an instantaneous transition to absolute monarchy—a Patriot King with the powers of Cromwell. Or Elizabeth I; or Henry VII; or even William I. A true English Meiji.

The partnership of Charles III and Prince William is the ideal team for a restoration. Together, the two could credibly promise to rule for half a century—and found a new regime that rules for half a millennium.

They won’t, of course. So far as I know. I hasten to insist that neither of their royal majesties have, so far as I know, any such intent. If they do, they surely keep it to themselves—and are wise to do so! It would amaze me. But history can be weird.

They could. But they won’t. They just won’t. Sorry. It won’t happen. But still, it could—and to a political theorist, this is the interesting question.

Could it happen? Really? If so—how would they do it? What would be the result?

The purpose of this essay is to prove that all that prevents England from changing utterly—and utterly changing the world, no new thing for the English—is the will of two living men. Though these two men are unlikely to change their minds, they could. And any regime whose survival rests on such a weak reed is a weak regime indeed.

The Japanese analogy

Can a symbolic monarchy be converted into a governing monarchy? History offers one intriguing example: Japan’s 19th-century Meiji Restoration.

In the Meiji Restoration, the imperial throne—a figurehead for roughly a millennium—returned to power as the center of a new regime, replacing the Tokugawa regime—which had ruled for longer than the USA has existed.

The irony of the Restoration is that the Meiji Emperor was actually still a figurehead (who assumed the throne at age 15). Moreover, the Tokugawa shogun was a monarch! But the Meiji oligarchy was a tight cabal (created by the previous Komei emperor, who died young of smallpox) and the Tokugawa regime was a feudal bureaucracy.

The centralized, authoritative, dynamic character of the Meiji regime, compared to the decentralized, procedural, inertial character of the Tokugawa regime, makes one of the best natural experiments in political history. We may disagree about where that Meiji state ended up three-quarters of a century later; by any modern standard of state capacity, Meiji governance worked better than Tokugawa governance.

It is no exaggeration to say that the Meiji regime reconstructed Japan—bringing it, in half a century, from premodern feudalism to industrial capitalism. Historically, only monarchies, especially newborn monarchies which retain their founding energy and have not yet decayed into de facto oligarchies, have the organizational power for any kind of full national reconstruction.

If you do not think your nation and government need to be rebuilt, you are probably not a monarchist. When we imagine a second restoration in Great Britain, we imagine a nation and government completely rebuilt—not in some kind of 20th-century bloody chaos, but in the utmost peace and order.

The Meiji analogy is just an analogy. Everything else about the royal transition will be different. What the Meiji Restoration teaches us is just that a second restoration is not just possible, but plausible—and in politics, only the plausible is possible.

The ceremonial, substantively defunct office of an old monarchy served as a Schelling point—a seed around which a new regime could crystallize. The change of regimes was not gradual or incremental; it was total and discontinuous. What has happened in the past can happen again.

The meaning of regime change

True regime change is not a symbolic process. When power truly changes hands—think of the four unconditional regime changes that Germany in the 20th century experienced—everyone’s life changes.

Ten years after an unconditional regime change, unless something has gone really wrong, everything even looks different. After twenty years, a documentary about the past feels like a documentary about a foreign country. We have all seen documentary footage from the foreign England of 1950; what was once done, can be done again.

We can barely imagine the England—and the world—that an English Meiji would create. In both speed and measure of change, it would have to compete with the original Meiji Restoration, which turned Japan from a medieval to a modern nation.

Yet that process created only a strange Japanese copy of the existing West. The meaning of a 21st-century royal revolution in England—or anywhere that can plausibly claim to be the next capital of the world—is something new and different.

The meaning of this revolution is to define the final reconciliation of humanity and technology—to decide how technical man, in the post-industrial world which is now stably defined, should live and work and play and fight and be born and die. The new kings will design not just a new pattern of government, but of economics and society.

Nothing will stick around just because it seemed like a good idea in the 20th century—not architecture, not culture, not religion, not politics, not painting, not even science. The new kings will renew every way of seeing, doing, and making everything.

Simple political theory

To guide ourselves around this new and bewildering political landscape, a map.

As Aristotle observed, there are three forms of regime: monarchy (the rule of one), oligarchy (the rule of some) and democracy (the rule of most).

Like Aristotle, we can bind these neutral descriptions to pejorative equivalents. Instead of monarchy, oligarchy, democracy, we can say tyranny, bureaucracy, populism. The structural meaning is the same; and the pejorative often dispels some Orwellian spell. (Yes, there are other forms of oligarchy than bureaucracy—bureaucracy is just the form of the current Western oligarchy.)

More generally, there are three forces of governance: monarchy (the force of rank), oligarchy (the force of prestige), and democracy (the force of mass). Every government must control all three forces—either by harnessing them, or by suppressing them.

In general, rank (ye olde pyramid-shaped orgchart, with mission orders) is a more effective organizing force than prestige (networks of respected individuals and/or institutions, with procedures that aggregate this prestige to make decisions), which is a more effective organizing force than mass (counting heads, likes, or clicks).

Notice that almost all large productive organizations in our own society are built around the principle of rank—even nonprofits have pyramid-shaped orgcharts. The same is true for effective military organizations, and even creative organizations—from a restaurant to a film set, all the best work is done by a monarchical auteur.

From this perspective, the purpose of symbolic monarchy is clear. An oligarchy must suppress the force of monarchy, which is the force of rank. One strategy is to install a ceremonial monarch whose rank confers no power. This figurehead displaces any possible alternative monarchy whose rank might confer real power.

Decaying monarchical organizations become bureaucratic. Instead of completing missions, their employees—even their leaders—follow procedures. They become less like SpaceX and more like NASA—or less like early NASA, and more like late NASA.

Historically, stable monarchy is the norm; stable oligarchy is rarer; populism is a transient, not a static force, almost never stable; and stable mob rule, as John Adams said, is a “Hurricane, Inundation, Earthquake, Pestilence”—a natural disaster. Yet it would be absurd to claim that populism, as a transient force, has never been a force for good; one of the reasons it is unstable is that populism in power corrupts itself, a good reason to use it only transiently, as a path to transition between stable regimes.

By “populism,” of course, we mean “democracy” in its literal, not figurative, sense. “Democracy” is a tricky word because everyone wants to use it. The formal name of North Korea, the DPRK, is one place name and three synonyms for “democracy.” Actually, of course, the place is an absolute monarchy (and not my favorite). Words are tricky things.

One way to use the word “democracy” is to describe any regime that can command public popularity as “democratic.” Globalists, looking darkly to the east, refer to this as “managed democracy.” Aside from producing odd results in which Comrade Xi is more popular than the US Congress, managed popularity is not democratic, whether the management is a tyranny or an oligarchy. Democracy, aka populism, is only a meaningful concept when free and unmanaged public opinion is in the saddle—when the ideas of the people control the institutions of power, not vice versa.

Many critics of many a regime stop once they have proved it not a democracy. Since “democratic” in present political language simply means “legitimate,” they reason, any regime proved undemocratic is proved illegitimate. Actually, since all stable regimes are undemocratic—since stable populism is impossible—all regimes are illegitimate in these terms. But these brave critics have only found a tautology.

Bagehot’s doctrine of camouflage

If monarchy works better than oligarchy—one struggles to imagine the Department of Transportation building a car—why has oligarchy, under the brand of democracy, taken over the world? Simple: monarchy works better, but monarchy is more fragile.

The function of Bagehot’s doctrine, in which which one “effective” organ rules while another “dignified” organ reigns—be it the reign of a king or the reign of the people—was to camouflage the operational regime from the disastrous power of populism—the power of crowds. As an Orwellian doctrine of lies, Bagehotism is Machiavellian and frankly anti-democratic. But if the alternative was a nonstop French Revolution…

Camouflage is a lie and lies are bad. But sometimes lies are needed. But once they are not needed, they should be done away with. The camouflage—which moves the real power of government to an invisible, unaccountable, irresponsible organ—is hiding from a predator which has gone extinct.

That predator is crowd power—the physical power of street democracy, of massed human muscle, organized or disorganized—even of armed infantry. Crowd power no longer exists because effective mass violence no longer exists. Today’s crowd does not want real power; wanting real power, it would not know how to get it; knowing how to get it, it would not choose to do that. Most adult men in First World countries have never even been in a fistfight. On the street or the battlefield, populist power is zero.

In the 21st century, headcount is not what counts. Political scientists need to get used to this. For instance, no one in Europe cares that the European Commission is about as democratic as the Thirty Tyrants. No yelling crowd will ever sack the Berlaymont, much less set up some new people’s republic, fascist junta, etc, in its ruins.

In the 21st century, security is a matter of machines, not men. Riot control is a solved problem. We cannot imagine a mob overthrowing the government of China, nor an anarchist assassinating Xi Jinping. Even infantry looks obsolete on a drone battlefield. Raw masses with muskets win no wars, ending Taine’s observation that democracy “thrusts a ballot into every adult’s hands, and puts a soldier’s knapsack on his back.”

In an era of crowd power, when regimes had to pretend to be democratic, or be torn down in riots, or order troops (who might not obey) to fire on the mob, the doctrine of camouflage had to function. Kings too were prey—hunted by mob and anarchist alike.

Natural power in such an ecosystem belongs to Burnham’s “managers,” specialists and bureaucrats, oligarchs whose power is defined not by personal or organizational rank, but by personal or institutional prestige. Bureaucrats are anonymous and disposable—which means the regime cannot be attacked by attacking them.

While an oligarchical organization is less efficient than a monarchical organization, it is better at diffusing responsibility. The best oligarchies can pretend that no one is in charge at all. And in fact, no one is—a procedure is in charge. If there was such a thing as an infallible procedure, oligarchical bureaucracy would be the perfect regime.

This evolved camouflage is downstream from mob or street power. When monarchy finds it hard to resist or control surges of democratic energy, whereas oligarchy can much more easily resist populism, oligarchy is the most stable form of government—and therefore the best.

But in an era when the physical power of democratic force is weak, the kabuki show of “dignified” and “effective” can be dispensed with. The regime can be exactly what it pretends to be—and it can be as efficient as it needs to be. This is why monarchy returned to Rome after five centuries of conflict between oligarchy and populism.

For Rome, it was not a choice between republic and empire, but collapse and empire. Empire was possible because the Roman military was stronger than the Roman mob. Caesar did not need the camouflage of pretending to be an elected politician.

Power in our 21st-century environment needs no camouflage. Power is as physically invincible today as when one knight could quell any number of peasants. It has no use for “noble lies.” The union of force, truth, and rank is the most powerful and stable form of government; given a chance, it will prevail; once it prevails, it will endure.

The return of the king

Therefore, power in future can shed its camouflage and assume its most effective form—monarchical organization by rank and command, the usual form both of the virtual kingdoms we call “companies,” and the past kingdoms we call “countries.”

The pyramid-shaped orgchart, reporting to a single CEO or a pair of founders, is the optimal way to run any organization large or small. Everything that works is pyramid-shaped: a regiment or a restaurant, a startup or a film set, Apple or the ACLU.

The top of the pyramid should be reinforced by some passive accountability structure, like a board of directors. A board is not an operating mechanism. It is a safety mechanism. The board is a spare tire: only there for exceptions and emergencies.

The board’s one job is to select the next sane CEO when the CEO quits or goes crazy. Ideally, the board will only have to act every twenty or thirty years. Being a director is very much a part-time job.

If the board does not take a regular part in governance, it will not be corrupted by power. If the board is invulnerable to power, it cannot be coerced by power. If it is not corrupted nor coerced, it will remain a safe and effective independent sanity check.

The nerd design is anonymous trustees on a public blockchain—but an ancient royal family should work just fine. The king is tied by natural bonds to his family; his family is tied by natural bonds to their country. Perhaps this is better than cryptography.

Betraying such natural trust would take a level of mental pathology that is literally neurological—that could not be concealed. And with modern artificial-reproduction technology, the dynasty can produce a steady stream of candidate kings for poking, prodding and education. Biology does not need to let the modern royal family down.

Sometimes, as in most Silicon Valley startups, the top of the pyramid is “two in a box.” An English restoration would need the active cooperation not just of Charles III, but of Prince William. King Charles, by himself, is not young enough to promise any kind of truly long-term continuity; with William as his cofounder, he can reliably promise decades of a new regime. This is long enough to outlive any conceivable resistance.

What regime more natural to England and Britain than a King who rules and reigns—who returns the monarchy to the full power of the Tudors? Taking power will be easy; holding power will be easy. Neither democracy nor oligarchy will stand in the King’s path. Victory will be a change of stationery, not a bloody civil war.

The weakness of the old regime

Can regime change happen now? Why is the liberal administrative state we inherited from the 20th century ready to sing its song and fly away? How is this even possible?

We have seen how a restored absolute monarchy is viable in the 21st century, though it would have had a tough time in the 19th and 20th. But it is not enough to be strong enough to be born and live. The old regime must be ready to dry up and blow away.

While the 20th-century democratic energy which destroyed so many weak states has long since dissipated, so has the strength of the state itself. When we look back at the titanic political and military conflicts of the 20th century, we see irresistible forces against immovable objects. When we look at what our 20th-century ancestors would make of our conflicts, we see negligible forces against insubstantial objects.

Mobs are not going to overthrow Whitehall by force. On the other hand, in 1989, mobs did not overthrow the Kremlin by force. There were demonstrations, sort of. They did not include a lot of people. The USSR collapsed not because the forces against it were strong, but because its own forces were weak.

What sustains an incumbent regime? The combination of habit and faith. Habit alone is the essence of government—but habit alone is weak. Regime change happens when the old regime is habitually obeyed but no one believes in it, whereas the next regime is powerless but everyone believes in it. In East Germany in 1989, everyone obeyed the DDR, but no one believed in it; no one obeyed West Germany, but everyone believed in it. The death of the faithless state is as natural and lovely as a melting snowflake.

There are four elements of stable government. The first is habitual obedience—the structure of who habitually obeys whom. Civilians habitually obey the police, who habitually obey judges. The second is interior legitimacy—the faith of the ruling class in its oiwn right to rule, or “political formula.” The third is exterior legitimacy—the faith of the ruled class in the political formula. The fourth is capacity—the objective competence of the regime.

Generally these four fall away in reverse. When a regime has capacity, legitimacy is easy—believing in the truth doesn’t take much faith. Once capacity is lost, exterior legitimacy is the next to follow, then interior legitimacy.

Then all the regime has left is habitual obedience—and at this point it is vulnerable. Under the rule of mere habitual obedience, revolution is just a coordination problem.

By this timeline, Western governments and governing classes are still quite strong—since their interior legitimacy is still quite sound. They are nowhere near the point that the USSR had reached by 1989—when even the General Secretary was a dissident, of sorts. Gorbachev did not mean to dissolve the USSR, but to reform it; what really mattered was that he no longer believed in it.

Once the ruling class stops believing in the regime, the regime will be ready to fall. This is why dissidents should play offense rather than defense—less convincing the hobbits to follow their own team, more convincing the elves to doubt their own team.

But in the special case in which the physical power of the ruling class is not great—perhaps they are a typical late-stage elite, Rome in 400AD or Baghdad in 1200AD—interior legitimacy can be overcome. The engineering is just more challenging—since changing the culture of a disaffected aristocracy is the first task of the new regime. History shows that this is one of the hardest challenges in monarchical governance.

Any coup against a regime which retains its interior legitimacy must be exceptionally fast, clean, and above all comprehensive. Interior legitimacy will map onto loyalty to prestigious institutions; all respected or philanthropic institutions must be dissolved, with extremely rare and well-scrutinized exceptions. No trace of the old regime must survive—not even a grave for pilgrims to gather. Does Hitler have a grave?

At the same time, any new regime must display unconditional respect for the old ruling class, and invite its members to compete fairly for offices in the new regime. This is not a way to surrender to the old ruling class, but a way to dominate and capture it. To mistreat the old elite would be to acknowledge a moral superiority it does not have, and grant it a sense of honor and purpose it does not deserve. Its institutions need to be utterly pulverized, by utterly respecting its individuals.

The geometry of restoration

The premodern geometry was the alliance of king and commons against nobility. No cause is more populist than the cause of absolute monarchy. 20th-century fascism, the alliance of people and dictator, is the closest contemporary relative; but the weakest king is stronger than the strongest dictator. The danger of dictatorship lies not in its strength, but its weakness.

A true monarchy is a legitimate dictatorship. Legitimacy—any unconditional theory of regime permanence, as opposed to the conditional “emergency” or “temporary” nature of a typical dictatorship—is an enormous force multiplier, making the regime stable and gentle. A legitimate king can peacefully achieve feats that no dictator could attempt, even with great violence. Resistance is not just useless, but unimaginable.

Monarchy beating oligarchy is an easy victory. Whether the nobility is a hereditary aristocracy or a meritocratic oligarchy makes no difference—the old oligarchy has no power of resistance. They can simply be retired, and their institutions dissolved. An atomized oligarchy is entirely impotent. Only if the vacuum of power is not properly filled will it reassemble itself.

In America, democracy can defeat oligarchy by electing a President with the powers of a king—a candidate who on the campaign asserts the mandate of chief executive of the executive branch, and on his inauguration acts decisively to claim these powers. In England, monarchy can defeat oligarchy by persuading the King to pull a Meiji. In either case, any physical resistance from the old oligarchy is unimaginable. Not that everyone can just be sent home—just that almost everyone can just be sent home.

The mandarins of Whitehall or even the students of Oxbridge, finding themselves angry on the streets, will not pull up the cobblestones and erect armed barricades like the Paris Commune. If old, they will sit at home and collect generous pensions, like ex-Stasi agents. If young, they will go on to new lives and new careers.

If old elites had no problem with echoing, believing, worshipping the old nonsense, how can they have any issues with echoing, believing, worshipping the new truths—leaving aside the obvious recovery in the condition of the renewed England, the renewed world, taking shape around them?

People often ask where the new elites will come from. They are just the old elites—or at least, the young ones. It is always easy to boot up a new administrative class, so long as the raw talent is there. This new administrative class will operate on the basis of rank, not the basis of prestige; yet rank will always deserve its prestige. Napoleon got this right 200 years ago.

Once the new monarchy is stable, physical resistance to it—regardless of headcount—is impossible. Headcount may find various uses in the King’s restoration, but this is only because of the various weaknesses on the old regime.

The burst of populism that overthrows the oligarchy will support the King; it will restore the King; it will die, as the need for it dies, in the restoration of the King. This is not weird. True democratic force across history is almost always a transient force.

For the mob to matter is rare enough; for any broad population to rule long, without collapsing into either monarchy or oligarchy, is historically unheard of. And it would have to be a broad population with energy and capacity unimaginable in modernity.

The future looks like the best eras of the Roman Empire, or the best aspects of today, either in the West, Japan or China: the regime is competent and the population takes no particular interest in the details of government. This is fine. You can get a burrito at Chipotle without obsessing about how they source their tortillas, or whatever.

By ending the anachronistic kabuki of democratic politics, and putting a functional management structure with an effective chief executive in charge of the bureaucracy, we are doing a very 21st-century thing—a sensible thing, not a dramatic thing.

The user experience of this regime change will not be anything like a civil war. It will be the opposite. Nothing bad will happen. Instead, very rapidly, everything will start to make sense. All the broken things will start to be fixed. And all the crazy things will go away, immediately. The user experience will make the fall of East Germany or the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia look scary, unpredictable and dangerous.

When this future becomes the present, that present will look obvious. It always does. And from that present, this past we are living in will look ridiculous. It always does—but especially when a golden age is looking back on its murky origins.

The embryo regime

A regime in the last stage of decay, the stage of mere habitual obedience, still remains secure if there is no alternate regime that can displace it. Sometimes this alternate regime is a foreign institution; sometimes it is a domestic institution.

To the extent that there exists a plausible alternate regime, there is a plausible path by which habitual obedience could switch discontinuously from old to new regime. This path is more plausible, therefore easier, the greater the capacity of the new regime.

The only possible process is for the new regime to grow within the body of the old. This will not happen by itself. In particular, this pregnancy will not be financially profitable—except inasmuch as it exchanges money now, for power later.

A legitimate but ceremonial king, with no operating power but with strong resources, is the ideal father of such a pregnancy. Investors with nothing but cash to contribute can assist; perhaps they can create their own prestige; the process will be much harder.

The process of change begins with building the embryo of a new regime. The mission of the embryo is to found the next regime within the context of the old regime. Such an embryo is a perfectly legal institution which does not even interfere in politics.

A proper embryo is not a classic 20th-century revolutionary party, like the NSDAP or CPSU, which is a vehicle for the party to become the government, and its leader the dictator. These parties existed to take power. The embryo can at most be given power.

At a minimum, the leadership team of the embryo retires upon the transition. Ideally, the whole staff can retire. In practice, ideals often must be compromised, and any new regime will be desperate for employees, especially an indoctrinated, organized cadre.

But the mission of the embryo is not even to receive power—merely to inform power. Its goal is to create historical intelligence—the knowledge of proper understanding and proper action from the perspective of an unconditional new regime in the present day.

If this intelligence is open—if it is in the hands of any possible regime—the embryo is as far as possible from the malign history of revolutionary democracy. Its mission is to pave a policy path for any absolute government—presuming that any such regime will share the same mission of salus populi suprema lex, repairing the condition of England.

From the outside, however, the embryo will look just like what it is: yet another think tank. No one can possibly be afraid of yet another think tank. And because the embryo does not agitate for policy or campaign for power, it does not strike the old regime as a power-seeking organism—minimizing immune activation.

Yet strategically, the goal of the embryo is to acquire the elements of government that the old regime has lost: the actual capacity to govern, the internal self-confidence to use that capacity, and the external charisma to make its enemies submit.

When the embryo is fully developed, it lacks only one of the four elements: habitual obedience. And the old regime has only this element. The transition in obedience, the regime change once it comes, will feel not like a breach but a restoration of order.

The homunculus of state

Absolute power is not power over the civil service alone. It is power across the whole society. The old regime had a definition of “public” and “private” which the new regime cannot respect. Absolute power means power over everything the old regime had power over—everything it regulated, plus everything it could have regulated but did not. Also, of course, the new regime will be doing things the old regime did not.

(For example, if there are any human rights that can overrule the royal prerogative, there is some human power above the royal prerogative; because some power, to enforce these rights, must overrule the king; so the king’s power is partial. Similarly, in the US, there are no human rights than can overrule a Supreme Court order.)

Therefore the embryo begins as a kind of fuzzy picture, or homunculus, of the whole next society. What will be the anatomy of this future society? What are its heart, its liver, its brain? What are the ministries of the new regime?

One way to characterize the next regime is a familiar list of attributes: intelligence, wisdom, strength, constitution, dexterity and charisma. If the state is a character, its attributes are ministries…

Intelligence: a ministry of truth

The most interesting parts of the embryo are the parts that can operate, quite safely, under the old regime. For example, the embryo itself is an intelligence agency; any regime will need an intelligence agency. Whether or not the embryo is absorbed intact by the next regime, that regime will be solving a problem its embryo first explored.

Intelligence here denotes the understanding and explanation of all true things. Not for nothing did Walter Lippmann, 100 years ago, describe intelligence and journalism as a continuum. An absolute regime has to know what is true and important, and tell its subjects what is true and important; for this it needs at least a state media outlet (like the USSR’s Tass), and at most—a full-on ministry of truth, which knows all the truths.

Nothing stops the next regime’s ministry of truth from operating as a private media outlet under the old regime. Or nothing in principle, at least—in principle, it is a free country. The ministry is just a publisher. One day it may be the king’s publisher. We have a “newspaper of record,” too—we just pretend it’s not part of the government.

A ministry of truth has to know and speak the truth about everything. In some cases, the truth about everything is widely known. In other cases, it is not. Under the old regime, a very educated regime, the matrix of accepted truth is very rich and deep. In most places, this matrix is sound. In some, it is full of falsity; in others, oddly thin.

The mission of a future ministry of truth, operating under the present regime, is to correct errors and omissions in the present record of reliable sources. The ministry must produce both a correct record of current events, and a corrected history of the past, including any scientific corrections that may be necessary.