http://www.intercollegiatereview.com/index.php/2013/07/25/out-of-the-antiworld/

But politics /= power. Politics is the means of ordering and organizing the civic culture.

That’s called a political myth or formula. In fact, this is the liberal misunderstanding of politics. Cf. Carl Schmitt, especially his The Concept of the Political.

If we determine a better method to ensure that the best man for the job gets it, this is politics, and is obviously a net gain.

It may be a net gain in terms of, say, how many ice cream cones each man gets. But not in terms of politics. Power still nets to zero.

I think this claim differs, however, from claiming that locals don’t often go along with what foreign managers want, for some other reason or set of reasons TBD. If they don’t have to act like proxies, but they do anyways, then we should ask what it is that makes them choose to act like foreign proxies, right?

Proxy conflicts are extremely complicated, because they depend on foreign military forces (regular or irregular) doing what you want. Usually, the alignment of interests this requires is limited, temporary, patchy, and unreliable.

Proxy conflicts aren’t extremely complicated. There doesn’t have to be some sophisticated alignment of interests. There rarely is. It’s more basic. There are always people willing to break things and go after the guys you don’t like for money and power and for the chance of even more money and power.

Asking about what the positive sum gains are is the wrong question. Power is zero-sum. Politics is a zero-sum game.

That there is a World order is quite obvious. To give two examples:

1) Say you are in rural Sichuan and you offer a stranger a refreshing glass of chicha, a drink sometimes made by chewing on corn meal and catalyzing with saliva. What is the likely reaction of your Sichuanren acquaintance to your kind offer of a beverage?

OK, now suppose you offer them a nice cool bottle of Coca-Cola. Note that a) While there is a chance the chicha has human spit in it, neither you nor your acquaintance has any clue whatsoever what actually goes into Coke (it’s a secret) and b) a culture quite close to China’s, Japan, has a long history of making alcoholic beverages out of chewed grains (rice).

2) How many places, with how many people, from how many different backgrounds, can you go in the world and, producing a paper from say the CDC or an Ivy research lab, that says that a drug has been proven safe and effective in double-blind trials, convince the people to take a shot of said drug to cure the appropriate ailment?

OK, now how many places, etc. can you go and say that you had a spiritual vision that a random biological compound is safe and effective, and convince people to try injecting it?

Of course some people think Coke is nasty and don’t mind a little clean spit in their alcohol, and some people don’t trust drug companies but will shoot up monkey turds in solution, or refuse to partake of any kind of material medicine at all, preferring to trust in the power of prayer. But are they normal? No. Thus we see that the order of the world is quite evident. That there is no cackling mastermind sitting in a tower giving the orders doesn’t mean that there is no order to be seen.