How power is held, checked and lost — the systems, the doctrines, and the men who worked inside them.
In 458 BC Rome found a former consul ploughing a four-acre farm and made him master of the people — supreme commander for the emergency. Cincinnatus saved a trapped army and handed absolute power back after sixteen days, then went home. The seven kings before him, why Rome kept one-man command but took the permanence out, and how he became the model for Washington and the city of Cincinnati.
Read →Every throne stands on opinion, and every age has manufactured it — stone monuments, travelling singers, the printing press and the translated Bible, Bernays, false flags, psyops, nudge units. The evolution of the trade and its documented record. One standing contest: the art of deception against the search for truth.
Read →Part 2 of the series. Every group runs on a doctrine — the belief that says what it is for and the rules that enforce it; its source code. Same structure, different doctrine: capitalism, communism, a state religion. And why the great codes, from Hammurabi to the Bill of Rights, were all doctrine written into stone.
Read →Nearly every organised group that must act or decide as one builds the same top-down pyramid — a head, a council, an assembly, the members, a doctrine. It repeats at every level, from the family through community, council and state to the nation.
Read →The lawyer-humanist who wrote Utopia, schooled his daughters in Greek and Latin beside his son, and lost his head rather than swear Henry VIII head of the Church — and who also sent heretics to the fire. The stance, the conduct, and the contradiction, both halves on the table.
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