Oath of Fealty

[jack]

Novel

Oath of Fealty by Niven and Pournelle is a pleasant and interesting but not especially innovative novel about an arcology, Todos Santos, built as a designed, self-contained city just outside Los Angles, designed as a notional prototype for space-ship.

Political ideology

What I found interesting was that in retrospect there's political ideology that I just didn't notice at the time. A company is formed to build the arcology, and the main characters running the arcology are mostly senior staff. And in fact, the benign dictatorship works very well, enough that I didn't notice anything wrong.

But now I feel like the authors were nudging me in the ribs, saying "You know, maybe corporate officers actually are a better way of choosing community leaders than the current democratic system, eh, eh?"

And I'm not sure that's a good idea. I'm not sure how much difference it makes what role they were in: the decisive factor seems to be competent and hard-working people in charge, with power, and with the trust of the people in the city. In fact, if everyone in the arcology is a shareholder[1], electing the corporate officers isn't much different from electing a mayor, except that it's restricted to "official" residents.

The authors are right that the society they present probably is a better city plan than a typical American city. And corporations totally can be run for societal benefit hand-in-hand with success. The trouble is, most of the benign companies seem to concentrate on one specific thing (searching, fixing windscreens, producing collapsible nylon rucksacks, etc, etc) -- when we give over control over our police, housing, utilities, free speech, food, building, infrastructure, etc, etc, all to the SAME company, that seems exactly when it starts being forced to exploit its monopolistic position to screw us over.

In other words, yes, yes, everyone knows benign dictatorship works great. The difficult bit that political systems wrangle over solving is choosing leaders who are competent and benign.

[1] I think they are, it's a big coop? Although maybe libertarians use a different term for "coop" so it sounds less communist?

Comments

[ptc24]

I'm reminded of Aristotle's somewhat cynical argument for democracy. He said there were six main forms of government:

Name        Ruler  Quality     Notes
Monarchy    One    Best
Aristocracy Few    Good
Polity      Many   Quite Good  Sort-of like a representative democracy
Democracy   Many   OKish
Oligarchy   Few    Bad         Plutocracy
Tyranny     One    Terrible    Differs from Monarchy only in goodness of ruler 

Given that governments tended to be bad, rule by the many was a safer bet than rule by the few or by the one.

[simont]

Other reasons why corporate organisation methods don't work in politics: because an important counterbalance to the authority wielded by the unelected figures at the top is that workers can resign and go elsewhere, and because in a corporation there's at least a generally accepted idea of what the whole organisation is trying to achieve, which reduces the scope for controversy over deciding who are the best people to be in charge of achieving it.

Of course neither of these things works admirably well even in corporations (workers often have less bargaining power than they ideally would, office-politics and personal empire-building play more of a role in high corporate appointments than one would hope) but they'd be even worse if a corporate structure were applied to a country: it would be even harder to leave and go somewhere else if managers started to abuse their power, and everybody would have a different opinion about what the whole shebang ought to be trying to achieve in the first place.

Also, the title confused me because I was convinced Oath of Fealty was a novel by Elizabeth Moon. (And indeed, there is one by her with the same name.)