Michael: Most of us think that to build a great country, you need democracy first. What if that’s completely backward? What if the secret to a stable, prosperous nation, like Denmark, actually starts with building a ruthless, efficient, and even despotic state machine? Kevin: That feels deeply wrong, but I'm intrigued. It’s like saying the first step to a healthy garden is a flamethrower. You’re suggesting that order, even brutal order, has to come before freedom. Michael: That's the explosive idea at the heart of The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama. Kevin: Right, this is the first volume of his massive two-part series. And Fukuyama is no stranger to big, controversial ideas—this is the same guy who famously wrote about 'The End of History' after the Cold War. He's a heavyweight thinker. Michael: Exactly. And this book, which was widely acclaimed but also sparked a lot of debate, is his attempt to build a grand theory of everything in political development. He's asking the biggest question of all: where does political order actually come from? Kevin: So, if you were building a new country from scratch, what's the first thing you'd install? A parliament? A constitution? Michael: Well, Fukuyama argues that before you can have any of that, you need to solve what he calls the 'getting to Denmark' problem.

Kevin: 'Getting to Denmark'? What does that mean? Is it about pastries and minimalist furniture? Michael: It's a metaphor for a stable, prosperous, peaceful, and uncorrupt country. The kind of place everyone wants to live. Fukuyama says to get there, you need three key institutions, three pillars: first, a strong, centralized State. Second, the Rule of Law. And third, Accountable Government, like a democracy. Kevin: Okay, a strong state, rule of law, and accountability. That sounds reasonable. But what’s the catch? Michael: The catch is that these three things are almost never found together. In fact, they're often in direct opposition. A strong state concentrates power, while the rule of law and accountability are designed to limit it. Getting them to balance is a historical miracle. Kevin: Hold on, a strong state and rule of law sound like they're in direct opposition. How can you have both? It feels like a paradox. Michael: It is a paradox! And to see what happens when you get the order wrong, Fukuyama tells this incredible story about post-colonial Melanesia, specifically Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. Kevin: I'm listening. This sounds like it's about to go sideways. Michael: Completely. In the 1970s, Australia and Britain basically gifted these brand-new nations a perfect, modern, Westminster-style parliamentary system. They got the third pillar, accountability, right out of the box. Elections, a parliament, the whole democratic package. Kevin: So they should have been on the fast track to Denmark, right? Michael: You'd think so. But the societies they dropped this system into were deeply tribal. People's primary loyalty wasn't to the nation of 'Papua New Guinea'; it was to their wantok—their kinship group, their clan. A wantok is a group of people who trace their descent to a common ancestor. We're talking about a society with over 900 languages. It's incredibly fragmented. Kevin: So when it came time to vote, they weren't thinking about national policy. Michael: Exactly. They voted for their 'Big Man,' the leader of their wantok. And what did that elected politician do once in parliament? He did what any good Big Man is supposed to do: he funneled government money, jobs, and resources back to his own wantok. Kevin: Wait, so the politicians weren't corrupt, they were just... being loyal to their tribe? That's a wild reframing. Michael: It is. From a Western perspective, it's corruption. From a tribal perspective, it's obligation. The result was chaos. The parliament had no coherent political parties, just a collection of Big Men fighting for scraps for their own people. There was no strong state identity to command loyalty, and no overarching rule of law to constrain them. They had accountability, but only to their tiny slice of society. Kevin: Wow. So they had the engine of democracy, but no chassis or steering wheel. The whole thing just spun in circles. Michael: Precisely. It shows that you can't just airdrop one pillar and expect it to work. The historical sequencing matters. And that brings us to the two great, divergent paths that history actually took.

Michael: That paradox you mentioned—a state that is both powerful and limited by law—is exactly what Fukuyama explores. And he argues history shows two completely different ways to solve it. Let's start with the 'state-first' model: ancient China. Kevin: Okay, so how did China do it? Michael: Through centuries of brutal, non-stop warfare. During the Warring States period, around the 4th century BC, China was a collection of feuding kingdoms. To survive, you had to be ruthlessly efficient. And no one was more ruthless than the state of Qin. Kevin: I've heard of them. The first emperor, terracotta warriors, that whole deal. Michael: That's the one. But before they unified China, they underwent a radical transformation under a minister named Shang Yang. He was a Legalist, a school of thought that believed morality and family were weaknesses. All that mattered was the power of the state. Kevin: That sounds... intense. What did he do? Michael: He basically invented the modern state, 2,000 years early. He abolished the aristocracy and their fiefdoms. He privatized land and taxed peasants directly, binding them to the state, not to a local lord. He created a bureaucracy based on merit, not birth. And he implemented a terrifyingly strict legal code. If you dropped ashes on the street, you could get your hand cut off. He even created a system where families were grouped into units of five or ten, and if one person broke the law, everyone in the group was punished. Kevin: Good lord. That's not a society; it's a high-stakes group project. So China basically built a modern state, but it was a soulless, terrifying machine. No wonder Confucians, with all their talk of family duty, hated it. Michael: They despised it. But it worked. Qin became an unstoppable military force and conquered all its rivals, unifying China. They built the first pillar, the State, to an unprecedented degree. But they had no rule of law to constrain it, and certainly no accountability. It was pure, unadulterated power. Kevin: So that's one path. What was the other? Michael: The other path is Europe's, and it's so much weirder. In Europe, the Rule of Law actually came before the strong state. And the institution responsible wasn't a king or an emperor. It was the Catholic Church. Kevin: The Church? How? Michael: Through a very peculiar and, frankly, self-serving obsession with marriage and inheritance. After the fall of Rome, Europe was a patchwork of Germanic tribes, very similar to the wantoks in Melanesia. Kinship was everything. But the Church, starting around the 6th century, began systematically dismantling it. Kevin: How on earth did they do that? Michael: They issued a series of prohibitions. You couldn't marry your cousin. You couldn't marry your dead brother's widow. You couldn't adopt a child to be your heir. All of these were common practices that kept property and power locked within the kin group. The Church banned them. Kevin: Why? What was their motive? Michael: Well, the Church had a very convenient solution for people who died without a direct heir: you could leave your property to the Church! By the 7th century, the Church owned a third of the productive land in France. They got incredibly wealthy by breaking up families. Kevin: You're telling me the foundation of Western rule of law is basically a side effect of the Church's complicated and very profitable family counseling? That's insane. Michael: It's absolutely wild. But the consequence was profound. By weakening kinship, the Church created a society of individuals. People no longer saw themselves primarily as members of a clan, but as individuals before God and, eventually, before the law. This created the social soil where the idea of a universal rule of law, one that applied to everyone, could take root, long before powerful kings and states emerged to enforce it. Kevin: So China gets a strong state with no law, and Europe gets law with no strong state. Two completely opposite starting points. Okay, so both China and Europe had to break the power of the family to build something bigger. This 'tyranny of cousins' seems to be the real final boss of political development. Michael: It is. It's the fundamental human default. Our biology programs us to favor our kin. Building a modern, impersonal state requires fighting against our deepest instincts. And some societies have gone to the most extreme lengths imaginable to win that fight.

Kevin: The 'tyranny of cousins'. I love that phrase. It perfectly captures that feeling of obligation to family that can sometimes feel... suffocating. Michael: Fukuyama argues it’s the central problem of politics. How do you get people to be loyal to an abstract concept like 'the state' when their natural instinct is to be loyal to their brother, their cousin, their clan? Rulers throughout history have struggled with this. If you give your cousin a job, that's nepotism that weakens the state. But if you don't, you're a bad relative. Kevin: It’s a classic dilemma. So what’s the most extreme solution anyone ever came up with? Michael: That would have to be the institution of military slavery, perfected by the Mamluks and later the Ottoman Empire. Kevin: Military slavery? That sounds like a contradiction in terms. Michael: It was a chillingly brilliant system. The Ottomans, for example, had a practice called the devshirme, or 'the levy'. Every few years, their officials would go to Christian villages in the Balkans, inspect all the young boys, and forcibly take the strongest and brightest of them. Kevin: They just... took them? Michael: They just took them. These boys were brought to Istanbul, converted to Islam, and put through the most rigorous education and military training imaginable. They were forbidden from contacting their birth families ever again. They were, in effect, made into orphans of the state. Kevin: Hold on. They created an entire government run by slaves who couldn't pass on their power? That is the most hardcore HR policy I've ever heard of. It's brilliant and terrifying. Michael: It's Plato's Republic made real. Plato argued that the ideal rulers, the Guardians, should have no private property and no family, so their loyalty would be purely to the city. The Ottomans actually did it. These slave-administrators, the Janissaries, had no family to favor, no land to pass on to their children. Their only loyalty was to the Sultan who owned them. They were the ultimate impersonal bureaucrats. Kevin: So they surgically removed the 'tyranny of cousins' from the system. Michael: Exactly. And for a time, it made the Ottoman Empire one of the most powerful and meritocratic states on earth. A shepherd's son from Bosnia could be taken in the devshirme and rise to become the Grand Vizier, the second most powerful man in the empire. European observers were stunned by it. Kevin: But it couldn't have lasted. A system that brutal has to have a flaw. Michael: It did. It was a developmental dead end. The system depended on constant expansion to capture new slaves and wealth. When the empire's borders stopped expanding, the system began to decay from within. The Janissaries started demanding the right to marry, to own property, to have their own sons enter the corps. They slowly transformed from loyal servants into an entrenched, self-serving interest group. Kevin: So, to escape the tyranny of cousins, they created a system that inevitably decayed back into a new form of it. Michael: That's the tragedy. It shows just how powerful that pull of kinship is. Even this incredibly elaborate and brutal system couldn't escape it forever.

Kevin: Wow. So we have Melanesia, where accountability without a state leads to tribal chaos. We have ancient China, which built a powerful state but no law, leading to despotism. And we have the Ottomans, who tried to build a state by literally enslaving the government to escape family ties. It really feels like there's no winning formula. Michael: And that's Fukuyama's ultimate point. The modern liberal democratic state, the 'Denmark' we all take for granted, is a historical accident. It's the result of getting those three pillars—a strong State, the Rule of Law, and Accountability—to emerge in a very specific sequence and then to fall into a stable, miraculous balance. Kevin: It’s not a blueprint you can just copy and paste. England, for example, got the rule of law and accountability first, and only later built a strong state. China did it in the opposite order and still hasn't achieved accountability. Michael: Right. There's no single path. And what's so powerful about Fukuyama's work, and why it's still so relevant today, is that it forces us to see that political order is not the natural state of humanity. Decay is the default. Kinship is the default. The 'tyranny of cousins' is always waiting to reassert itself. Kevin: So the big takeaway is that the stable, free societies we take for granted are incredibly fragile and rare. They're not the default; they're the exception. They are the result of a long, often violent, and highly improbable historical journey. Michael: Exactly. And it leaves us with a powerful question for today: As we see political systems around the world decaying, are we forgetting which pillars are crumbling and in what order? Are we taking for granted the delicate balance that holds it all together? Kevin: A sobering thought to end on. It makes you look at the daily news in a completely different light. We'd love to hear what you think. Is the state or the family the more powerful force in your life? Join the conversation on our social channels. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.