Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellers there is safety. Proverbs 11:14
I love my students who ask basic why questions. The ones that do not take anything for granted. After teaching Western Civ and other medieval and Renaissance courses, I especially love it when someone asks about the “fools;” the figures who supposedly could speak truth to rulers. The class may roll their eyes when a classmate asks, “But why did they need a fool to tell them what was up?” I love it, because the question leads to an important realization: strong states do not rely on fools: they build institutions that force bad news upward and turn dissent into actionable counsel.
Weak regimes have to constantly project strength. Even when being dumb, very dumb. In such cases often only the unserious character of the fool, existing outside of the power structure, can speak the plain reality to the ruler because the fool is no threat, whereas an overly bold truth-telling aristocrat might be. Strong regimes can weather being wrong and strong leaders can be told they are wrong. Europe took a big step forward toward better government and stronger societies during the High Middle Ages when various kings began to rely on large councils, the ancestors of today’s democratic legislatures: representative institutions of the realms. A secret of England’s power after the reign of Edward I was that its medieval parliament could be described as unusually inclusive for its time, not because it was democratic in a modern sense, but because it developed a relatively stable habit of gathering multiple “estates” into one consulting assembly. You had the lords spiritual of the Church and the temporal lords of the nobility, and crucially Parliament included selected representatives from counties and boroughs. That broader composition mattered because it meant that politics at the national level received regular input from a forum in which the lords and a selection of commoners could consent, complain, and most importantly commit resources to an agenda. The crown’s agenda could become the national plan.
Kings with such a system received a great deal of respect and deference, but the system worked best because of argument and the sharing of concerns. The king also had to give respect. In return, the kings received more data and information about what was happening in their lands. Pulling everyone in and hearing their real concerns and issues was a major advantage to a smart ruler. By the 1500s, several countries across Europe had developed similar institutions. Castile had its Cortes, where representatives of the nobility, clergy, and towns gathered to advise the crown and approve taxation. The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation convened the Reichstag, a complex assembly reflecting the empire’s diverse and diffuse political structure where the process of negotiating was critical to maintaining the Empire’s potency despite its decentralized structure. France maintained the Estates General, though, yes it met irregularly in the centuries immediately before the Revolution of 1789, and that should be a lesson. Poland operated a Diet where the nobility exercised considerable influence over royal policy, sometimes too much. And finally Sweden’s Riksdag was unique in that it had the traditional three estates plus a fourth estate of the yeoman peasantry.
On its path to dominating the world, Western Europe underwent a representation revolution which allowed Europe to out-administer the world. Before the Europeans could dominate the world militarily it first needed better government. Those who doubled down on empowered representation — like Britain, and the Netherlands — revolutionized economics and became more than a match for their more absolutist competitors.
When a country is being subverted it is not being outfought; it is being out-administered. — Bernard Fall in “The Theory and Practice of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency,” Naval War College Review: Vol. 18: No. 3, Article 4.
The point is that in weaker states you need a fool to speak truth to power. In the best states, the truth tellers are incorporated into the state. Even an enlightened autocrat like Napoleon was empowered by the wide council he took during the First Empire, despite the final decision always resting with the emperor. Had he maintained even stronger institutions with some ability to check his impulses his descendants would likely reign in France to this day.
The United States is heading in the wrong direction. When an American president muses that he wishes his cabinet was scared and subservient like Communist Chinese officials, he demonstrates that his inclinations will only weaken the USA. China’s rise has as much to do with American institutional decline as it does with the leaders before Xi Jinping. Xi’s tenure is regressing China from its pragmatic consultative elite with generational turnover to a state that struggles to deal with corruption. Deng Xiaoping is widely seen as the greatest Chinese leader of the 20th century, in terms of positive influence on China’s rise he is greater than Mao whose ideological madness almost destroyed China. From Deng’s rise in 1978 until the decision of Xi to remain in office after 2022, China underwent a generational turnover in leadership roughly every decade, with real internal — though secret — debate that allowed for long term planning where the stakeholders bought in to the plan. China temporarily adopted something closer to representative consultation among stakeholders (the Party elite), which enabled its rise. Is it any wonder that America is declining just when the United States Congress, the oldest and most representative part of its national government, has stopped being a strong institution worthy of executive and judicial respect and deference?
As China, Russia, and the USA adopt strongman politics of thou shalt obey, flatter and never criticize the leader, they become less effective. These are courts that do not suffer fools. Who then shall speak the truth? If they continue along this path, the 21st century may actually belong to the power that realizes that open government is the secret to winning the future.
For by wise counsel thou shalt make thy war: and in multitude of counsellors there is safety. Proverbs 24:6
Perhaps our most insightful essay yet.