The Theory of Civilization Behind Bismarck Brief

There has never been an immortal society. Over a decade, I developed Great Founder Theory to explain why. This unique and predictive theory underpins our analysis in every Bismarck Brief.

You have likely recently heard of the concept of live players. A live player is the rare person or well-coordinated group that can do things differently from how they were approached in the past. Most individuals and institutions are dead players. They operate off social scripts handed down from previous generations of experts, superiors, and exceptional performers. These scripts can be explicit, like the procedures for handling unusual tax situations at the IRS. They can also be implicit, like the way an aspiring tech entrepreneur might imitate how Steve Jobs dressed or spoke. Live players are capable of going off-script, like Jobs, or perhaps Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, George Soros, or many other exceptional contemporary and historical figures.

This crisp and useful concept has seen increasing popularity in Silicon Valley and beyond. But did you know it is just one of many such analytical concepts and models from my unified theory of society, history, and civilization—Great Founder Theory?

What drives social change throughout history and the present? What are the origins of institutional health or sclerosis? How can we even begin to guess at the future of our world, let alone steer it? My answer is that a small number of functional institutions founded by exceptional individuals form the core of society. These institutions are imperfectly imitated by the rest of society, multiplying their effect. The original versions outperform their imitators, and are responsible for the creation and renewal of society and all the good things that come with it—whether we think of technology, wealth, or the preservation of a society’s values. Over time, functional institutions decay. As the landscape of founders and institutions changes, so does the landscape of society.

This answer forms the basis of the lens through which I and the whole team at Bismarck Analysis analyze current events, affairs, and figures. Though it may be intuitively compelling, deriving and substantiating this framework was no small task. I developed Great Founder Theory over a decade of research and theory before beginning to publish it in 2018. The latest edition of the full manuscript is 183 pages long. You can read or bookmark the entire manuscript at no cost here, or read and bookmark the individual essays I have hyperlinked throughout this email. The whole list is available here.

Great Founder Theory is a framework for understanding our present global society and the institutions within it—whether governments, companies, or anything else—by taking the previous 10,000 years of recorded human history as the data points from which we generate a comprehensive theory. Our beliefs concerning large-scale patterns of the present world carry predictions for the future and explanations of the past. Yet, when we think about society and the humans in it as a greater whole, it seems all too natural to consider these kinds of models separately. We change explanations of social phenomena to fit time periods without principled reasons for doing so. This divide is an artifact of our limited knowledge, not of reality itself. Whether we like it or not, attempting to evaluate reality on the scale of society is to implicitly claim an overall theory of history.

What is an institution? For our purposes, an institution is a zone of close coordination maintained by automated systems. There is a spectrum of automation, however, and the more automated something becomes, the more useful it is to call it an institution. The most automated of institutions can be understood as bureaucracies. We can understand the world as a landscape of functional and non-functional institutions. Functional institutions are the exception. Dysfunction is the norm. Creating functional institutions requires a founder who knows how to coordinate people to achieve the institution’s purpose, and who uses this knowledge to build new institutions or dismantle and rebuild existing ones.

The vast majority of institutions are non-functional. They inadequately imitate functional institutions, attempting to copy social technology and generate narratives of being goal-oriented and functional for consumption both internally and externally. This kind of imitation can bring you to an increasingly better approximation of a given set of social technology. However, since the social technology behind functional institutions wasn’t discovered through blind tinkering, it is ultimately grounded in an existing tradition of knowledge.

Once that tradition is lost, you are making photocopies of photocopies. Each subsequent copy loses information. A crucial difference between organisms and organizations is that organizations do not undergo natural selection. Since the fidelity of transmitting intricate social technologies is so low, complex adaptations cannot arise. There is no corporate equivalent to DNA. The positive copying errors do not propagate and overwhelm the negative copying errors as they would in millions of years of evolution in wasps or elephants. This means that institutions only arise through the process of imitation and invention carried out by the discrete and irreducible human minds of live players.

A society can make do with having some functional institutions and some dysfunctional institutions. You could argue that the Roman Empire, for century after century, succeeded in building armies that could win wars, but failed to maintain the intellectual life inherited from the Hellenistic era, for example. Even then, such a society pays a high and often invisible opportunity cost. They might believe their institutions are functional, because they have simply never seen the functions carried out well. There are no outliers that can be used to disprove the thesis that the status quo is the best that can be done.

No single institution is self-sufficient. Rather it is a part of an ecosystem, receiving and giving support in complex arrangements. Due to interdependency and the extreme differences in functionality among institutions, functional institutions subsidize all others. Consider the effects of OpenAI’s groundbreaking advances on the fortunes of every other company, old and new, not just in AI, but in software, computers, and semiconductors. Without ChatGPT, the valuations and future prospects for a great number of companies with no relation to OpenAI would be vastly reduced. Consider the effects of SpaceX on perceptions of future U.S. military power and even national prestige.

Great Founder Theory is as much a framework for affecting society as it is for understanding it, since to understand how something functions is also to be able to alter it. ​​People’s impact on the world follows a Pareto-like distribution, with the most impactful people having a far greater impact than the rest. The creation of functional institutions is the means by which people are hugely impactful. People who build institutions are far more impactful than people who don’t, and among those, people who build functional institutions are by far the most impactful.

Those who build these functional institutions mold society, outperforming all others by orders of magnitude. This dynamic holds true even among the founders of functional institutions themselves: within this set, those who build the very most functional institutions are much more impactful than the rest. As a further consequence, the founders of these institutions are responsible for the vast majority of social technology that we see in society. 

Like institutions, social technologies appear not evolutionarily, but in clear, discontinuous jumps, with several interlocking, interdependent complexes put into place in a short time span. They were not naturally selected, but were designed and then implemented by human hands. The Founding Fathers of the United States, who created Congress, the Presidency, the Supreme Court, and much more, all at once, serve as a clear example. They did not arrive at such surprisingly robust designs by accident, but in large part by careful, deliberate study of the political philosophy of the ancients.

I will call those who found the most functional institutions that contribute to the bedrock of their civilizations great founders. Through the creation of institutions, great founders become the primary force that shapes society. To examine a society, then, we should first look for functioning institutions. A simple way to do this is to identify businesses, religions, governments, and so forth that are radically outperforming their competitors. We then seek out the founders of these institutions. By looking at the distribution of founders across various domains, we can make predictions about the future of specific fields and industries. 

Even further, by investigating the plans and intentions of great founders, and evaluating how likely they are to succeed, we can make specific predictions about what the future holds. The actions and capabilities of great founders determine the future social and material landscape of civilization, and thus the future of the world. Societies with many great founders will innovate and flourish, while societies with few will stagnate and deteriorate. Read or bookmark the whole Great Founder Theory manuscript here.

Bismarck Brief, therefore, is not just a newsletter. It is the research-intensive project of actively applying the lens of Great Founder Theory to the most strategically relevant institutions, industries, and influential individuals of the present day, in order to identify the key live players shaping global events and map out the possible future courses of global civilization. 

When conducting case studies, it is this theory which informs our selection of topics and the course of our investigations. This can mean checking whether a company like Intel or Sony failed the succession problem, and if so, when and how. It can mean evaluating the lifespan and current health of the scientific traditions of knowledge behind companies like ASML or Novo Nordisk. Or it can mean assessing whether it is owned or borrowed power that is held by the top political leaders of Iran or the drug cartels of Mexico. Very often, it means searching for live players in business, technology, and government.

Our methodical, theory-driven approach is what makes it possible for Bismarck Brief to accomplish feats like outperforming the stock market. If you are not already a paid subscriber to Bismarck Brief, I warmly invite you to subscribe today and join us on this ongoing investigation into the global power landscape, with a new in-depth investigation of a key live player, institution, or industry in your inbox every Wednesday at 2pm GMT sharp:

There has never been an immortal society. No matter how technologically advanced our own society is, it is unlikely to be an exception. To achieve a positive future that defies these odds, we must understand the hidden forces that shape society.

Sincerely,

Samo Burja

Founder and President, Bismarck Analysis