ORDER AND POWER
Since the coherent organization of a system determines major properties of the system, integration is a rather important trait in social systems. The order or capacity of a system is a crucial component of its power. Order gives a system the needed foundation for its survival and forms the prerequisite for its wealth, internal peace and cultural development.
How does a system's order raise its power, whereby power is defined as the capacity of a system to do things and do them efficiently?
The order of a system increases the power of the system because order provides organisation, which is a fundamental ingredient of effective collective action, thereby improving the system's capacity to protect its members from the uncertainties and risks of the outside world.
Imagine a group consisting of powerful members, without order or the ability to steer the behaviour of the members, this group remains just a collection of aimlessly behaving individuals with a high probability that they will rather impede than motivate each other. This disordered group is incapable of producing a joint effect on its environment. On the other hand, a group with a high level of order will be able to bring about a considerable joint effect. This is exactly what renders states so powerful and productive as compared to most international systems.
Order renders the social, political and economic life more transparent and predictable, which limits the risks and hazards involved. It provides the information, which people simply need to know before they can commit themselves to more intimate and durable, and therefore also more productive, cooperative relationships.
Order contributes to the production of additional resources as well as of scientific or other information. Thus, the members of a highly ordered system will themselves become more powerful, because they are enabled to put the information and the resources that they possess to a profitable use.
Order represents the temporary outcome of the member's efforts to realise their interests, whereby the condition of the system as a whole is made as acceptable and beneficial to themselves as possible. This process outcome represents a situation of social or political equilibrium in which the members accept the current state of the system.
The process itself is initiated by changes in the relations of power or interdependence prevailing among the system's members. Such changes give some members the opportunity to improve their own position in the system, which will enable them to renounce what they had to accept under the previous equilibrium.
Accordingly, a system's order also implies the capability to deal with those changes in a productive and peaceful way.
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