This is a very brief review of of Bichler and Nitzam paper.

Supreme God

The term Supreme God ^∇ refers to a hierarchical God with power above all the other Gods (first coined by Friedrich von Schelling, although I picked it up from the Bichler and Nitzam paper).

The Supreme God religions, in fact, has lasted to this day includingn Judaism, Christianity (Catholic and Protestant), and Islam.

Countries and businesses adopted this pattern from royalty and it has worked financially very well for them.

Private Armies

Their paper brings up the rise of private armed forces and the authors take a very dark view of it, as we all should. They write that private armies will keep getting more and more powerful and this may lead to oligarchic States.

This is a well researched paper and the data they analyzed certaily points to that conclusion. But the past is not a prediction of the future.

Private armed forces have been around forever. For example, US President Ronald Reagan had them and Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin has them. Some politicians (e.g., Donald Trump) may have aspirations of creating an authoritarian goverment in the US, but I am not betting on it (i.e., although I am expecting a big, BIG fight over it).

Let’s take that as a stern warning.

ENDNOTES

• Shimshon Bichler, Jonathan Nitzan. Working papers from Capital as Power. https://bnarchives.net/id/eprint/830/