Pillars Of Support

A ruler signs an order. Now ask what has to happen next.

Somebody has to type it. Somebody has to carry it to the district. Police have to make arrests, and courts have to process them, and jailers have to hold the prisoners, and clerks have to record it, and drivers have to move the vans, and the state has to pay all these people, which requires tax collectors and bankers and a functioning payroll.

An order is a piece of paper until several thousand people decide to act on it.

No government rests on force. It rests on the daily cooperation of people who could stop cooperating.

This is the most useful idea in the module and it is almost never how change is discussed.

The Pillars

The standard way to picture this is a heavy roof held up by columns. Take out enough columns and the roof comes down no matter how solid it looks.

The usual columns: the security forces, the civil service, the courts, the media, business and the people who own things, organized labor, religious institutions, schools and universities, and whoever supplies the money from outside. Some places add others. A state that lives on one export has a pillar made of the people who load the ships.

Two things are true of every pillar.

It is made of people who have their own reasons. A pillar is not loyal. It is a large number of individuals calculating, most of them privately, about their salary, their family, their pension, their standing among colleagues, and their guess about who will be in charge in three years. That last one drives more behavior than belief does.

It can withdraw without confronting anyone. This is the part people miss. A civil servant does not have to give a speech. He can process things slowly, lose a file, take sick leave, apply the rule exactly as written to everybody including the powerful, or simply retire early. Withdrawal is usually quiet, deniable, and cumulative. By the time it is obvious, it is finished.

What This Looks Like

In the Philippines in 1986, hundreds of thousands of people put themselves between the government and a group of defecting officers. Church figures called them into the streets. The tanks did not fire. Within days the president had left the country.

In Poland, an independent trade union spent nearly a decade being banned, jailed, and driven underground before the government negotiated with it. The pillar it occupied was the industrial workforce, and a state built on a theory about workers had a specific problem with that.

In Serbia in 2000, a disputed election produced protests, and the decisive event was not a protest. It was a strike at the country's largest coal mine, which supplied the electricity. When police were sent to break it, many of them declined, and some of them joined it. The government fell within days.

In Chile in 1988, an opposition campaign contested a referendum that everyone expected to be a formality. When the result came in against the government and there was pressure to set it aside, the heads of the armed services would not go along.

Look at the shape. In none of these cases was the leader persuaded of anything. Nobody changed his mind. The people carrying out his decisions stopped carrying them out.

Which Means The Target Is Not The Leader

If you take this seriously, a great deal of ordinary political activity looks misdirected.

Trying to change the mind of the person at the top is aiming at the least reachable thing in the system, and the one thing that has almost never been the mechanism. The people in the pillars are far more reachable, because they are your neighbors, your relatives, your customers, and the parents at your child's school. Their calculation is about cost and about what everyone else is going to do.

That is also why movements that treat every person in a uniform as the enemy tend to lose. You are asking a pillar to withdraw while telling it that it will be punished either way.

The Complications

Two, and they are serious.

Pillars can be insulated. A regime that pays foreign fighters, or staffs its units with people from a different region who share nothing with the crowd, has bought itself protection against exactly this. Some states have deliberately built forces that cannot defect, and this is part of why the numbers in Lesson 7.1 have gotten worse.

And a fallen roof does not mean a good building. In 1979 a broad coalition in Iran, including strikes in the oil fields that starved the government of money, removed a monarchy. The coalition then lost control of what came after, and much of it was destroyed by the government it had helped install. Pillar withdrawal answers the question of how a regime falls. It says nothing whatever about what replaces it, and the people who do the removing are frequently not the people who do the replacing.