Before this month’s second post, some news: my book Control Science: How Management Made the Modern World will be out with Verso on May 12th! You can pre-order it here (this is best) or via most major booksellers (if you prefer). Also, I have a big feature out in next month’s issue of Commonweal magazine. It’s on the history of neoliberalism and Christianity— gloomy but important stuff.

There is a trans-Atlantic tone of disbelieving fury in mid-18th-century British elite writing. Witnessing uprisings from dockyard strikes in England to proto-revolutionary riots in America, naval administrators and colonial officials went from scoffing they can’t do that to gasping, can they do that? The particulars of this tone were specific to the age, related to a particular vision of order prominent in the 18th-century British world. But you can find something similar in the gasps and wails of colonial officials as empires collapsed in the 20th century, and in the weeping and gnashing of teeth of early 20th-century executives in response to major strikes.

What these elites all confronted was the terrifying truth that history is all just people. Customs only matter as long as people respect them. Laws cannot be enforced when everyone breaks them at once, or when even their ostensible enforcers do not believe in them. When we say “controlling land” we practically mean controlling access to it, and more realistically usually mean having enough of an ability to punish occasional intruders that most people choose to respect relevant rules. The most violent advocates of hierarchy believe power is the final answer to everything. But “power” is made up of other things.

People break academics’ theoretical rules as well as institutions’ political ones. Historians, political theorists, and economists all have our own diverse and competing models for why things happen. All of these break down some of the time. Marxist theory predicted that as industrialization swelled the ranks of the proletariat– replaceable low-skilled industrial workers– this new social class would rise up and replace capitalism with a new economic order. This mostly did not happen, and where it did, under the wrong circumstances. The most successful Marxist revolutions were not in core industrial nations like Britain with a powerful bourgeois ruling class but in more agrarian and autocratic countries like Russia and China.

My point here isn’t that no theory or analysis is ever possible. On the contrary, few things irk me more than trying to handwave theory away as useless in favor of a purely particularist (everything is different always and forever; we can understand nothing and must always adopt ad hoc methods alone) approach to history, politics, or economics. Rather, we should understand any successful theory of human action as applying in a fuzzy-boundaried zone and not beyond it. Sometimes we understand this well: nobody would assume you can directly apply Keynesian macroeconomics to a silver-based pre-modern economy. Sometimes we don’t: the most egregious example of this is, as always, the insistence that cynical theories of material self-interest (“everyone is a greedy utility-maximizing individual” in economics, “realism,” or the view that all nation-states do is compete and protect their own survival, in international relations) apply universally when nothing else does. 

Domain-specific application is how many of our best tools in science work. We use Newtonian physics for big things and quantum mechanics for very small things. This is sometimes interpreted as evidence a theory is incomplete, that we have to push further and know deeper. In the physical sciences this is often true. Pre-Copernican orbital models really could describe the apparent orbits of the planets (with enough fudging) from Earth, but new observations demanded more accurate models. But human society is complex and always-changing, and probably too complex to ever fully reduce to a much simpler form. We will have to settle for something more like the Rayleigh-Jeans law in physics: an incomplete equation that fails in particular domains but describes behavior accurately enough elsewhere. 

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Can he do that? has to be one of the most asked questions of the last year. I’m speaking, of course, of the President. Donald Trump’s greatest (practical, not moral) strength is that he generally does not ask himself this; it’s also his greatest weakness. In an official letter written to Norway, the President has asserted that his threat to begin betray our allies in Europe and begin World War III in an act of naked imperialism for Greenland is, in part, motivated by… not getting a Nobel Peace Prize. Here’s the tone. He can do that? The Norwegian government insists, accurately, that the Nobel Committee is an independent institution it has no control over. This is true. It should be true. But it’s not completely true. 

Trump recognizes something important: everything is just people. Norway does not and should not take formal control of the committee just to give an undeserved accolade to a mad king. But they could. If the Norwegian Army marched on the Nobel Institute they could eventually force the prize to go to Donald Trump. This is what Trump would do; across the government it is often what he has done.

Rules can be broken. The Department of Justice is supposed to be independent of the Presidency, but it isn’t anymore. Legally speaking there are half a dozen reasons this Greenland threat should be impossible, like the North Atlantic Treaty, the War Powers Act, and the UN Charter. These all have legal force! But laws are only as good as their enforcement. American courts have long treated “national security” as a magic word that makes laws go away. And if courts didn’t rubber stamp Trump’s decisions, he could always raise the stakes: what armies do they control, exactly?

But “it’s all just people” goes both ways. Orders to attack our allies are only as good as American troops’ willingness to enforce them. Politically-motivated prosecutions fail if juries don’t comply, or when judges dismiss obvious hack work (something some federal courts remain willing to do at least). When federal agencies engage in warrantless searches and kill citizens, ordinary people like the residents of Minneapolis begin tailing their convoys and warning anyone they might kidnap with loud whistling. It’s all just people. This can’t be suspended, not even with force– because you need people to use force, but also because “people” are the end goal. 

It’s all just people isn’t merely a political statement about force; it’s also a summary of what we value. We’re social creatures. Once basic needs are met, social dynamics matter as much or more than anything else. We want respect, affirmation, reassurance. Other people alone can provide this. The wealthy like their large houses and fine foods and luxury yachts, but they like them above all because they are status symbols. Creature comforts don’t ascend you to a new level of satisfaction or new form of motivation (though wealth can certainly cause you to descend into a flat world where only money is real). Jeff Bezos’s money didn’t keep him from having the most obvious, mundane midlife crisis in the world, abandoning his wife, sending perfectly ordinary (which is to say, cringeworthy!) human expressions of infatuation to a woman who makes him feel young again, and getting re-married in an ill-fitting suit.

Consider the Peace Prize itself. Trump doesn’t need the money– he’s made far more than the prize money with crypto scams, for example. He wants what it means– whatever that is to him. Respect, or revenge, or prestige. Perhaps he wants it simply because he does not have it, or because Barack Obama does. My own sense is that the Peace Prize represents his own lingering doubts that the sycophancy of those around him is false– that he is not really loved, successful, making America Great Again, bringing about world peace. Projecting these doubts onto an object lets him vanquish them, if he can grasp that object, at least until he finds something else to project them onto. 

More generally, what makes status markers matter is… people. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, one of his earliest moves was to widely offer the much-coveted “blue checks” previously only available to verified public figures. Blue checks used to confer interest and respect. Giving them away for $8 did not democratize journalistic prestige, it destroyed the value of the checks altogether. Likewise for the Peace Prize. A Peace Prize that can be won by a man who promises to plunge the world into 19th-century imperialism is worthless. I don’t mean everything is just status competition or a desire for approval; all of this is another layer in a world also defined by economic competition, gender, race, nationalism, etc. But the medium in which all the theory-applicable zones are situated is the broader space of what people can do and want, our desires and goals just beyond our ability to explain them or instantiate them in rules and laws and theories. 

Our ability to make meaning for ourselves, individually and collectively, has historical force. “Self-interest” is a mirage, because we decide– not as individuals, but together– what our interests are. This means we can make nightmares real. Often we cause harm not as a means to an end but as an end in and of itself. ICE is rampaging through our cities because enough Americans hallucinated themselves into xenophobia, and if we ever succeeded in reducing immigration to the low levels many Americans want it would make all of us much poorer. But it’s all just people means we can also make dreams reality. We can risk everything for ideals like freedom and democracy and love. We can convince one more person to join a rally or stop working for ICE or refuse to comply with a politically-motivated investigation; we can be that person ourselves.