Meanings, including writing, do not arise and grow for the enlightenment or exploitation of humanity. They increase insofar as is necessary or sufficient for the self-reproduction of cultures-societies. Economy emerges in relation to technology, policy—in relation to organization: economic action means choosing technology, political action means choosing organization. Politics is the selection of institutions in the competition between people, their needs and motives. As Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson say, “politics is the process by which a society chooses the rules that will govern it” (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012, p. 79). The division and addition of technology goes hand in hand with the division and addition of order, with the emergence of new norms and the increasing complexity of order.
If technology is based on the use of effects, then organization is based on the regulation of relations between people, i.e. on command or disposal. Historically, the first form of economic organization was application or disposal in the process of use: if a thing is not used immediately, it can be taken by someone else. When the natives tried to take things from the ships of the Europeans in the Age of Discovery, they were thieves to the Europeans, although the natives themselves only wanted to use things that the Europeans were not using. Further division and addition of order lead to the second form—possession. Possession is the disposal of the user, not tied to the process of use. The possessor disposes of the thing on the basis that he uses it from time to time. Finally, the third form is property. The owner disposes of the thing, although he himself may not use it at all.
Political organization evolves hand in hand with economic organization. Command over people develops along with disposal over things. The first form of political organization (or polity) is a community in which activities are carried out more or less cooperatively. It is a common economy that grows in the context of application and administration based on experience. The second form of polity is chiefdom, in which application is complemented by possession, and the rule of the experienced is complemented by the domination of the strong. Mansur Olson’s concept of the “stationary bandit” can be applied to chiefdom. When a nomadic band becomes sedentary, it begins to take only a portion of the products of the population and provides protection from other bands, increasing production in the area it controls: