The last summary you need about the 400-page thesis the U.S. Department of Defense didn’t want you to read
Throughout Part 1, we explored the foundation of Lowery’s Power Projection Theory — how physical power has governed survival and cooperation for billions of years, and how sapiens’ capacity for abstract thinking gave rise to belief systems that reshaped the way we assign power and resources.
Picking up where we left off, we now zoom in on this critical divergence — between abstract power and physical power. We’ll see how our reliance on inegalitarian, trust-based hierarchies introduces vulnerabilities, why these systems are destined to become corrupted over time, and why ignoring physical power altogether leaves us dangerously exposed. Understanding this dynamic is key to grasping the core dilemma Lowery lays out — and why humanity now finds itself at a crossroads.
Abstract Power vs Physical Power
When animals resolve disputes over ownership — whether it’s territory, food, or mates — they do so through physical-power-based resource control (PPB). For example, if two lions find themselves in conflict over a piece of meat, and there’s any ambiguity over ownership, they’ll resort to power projection — through growls, standoffs, or direct combat — to resolve it.
While this method is energy-intensive and carries the risk of injury, it is fundamentally a trustless protocol. It doesn’t require the lions to agree on a shared belief system or recognise external authorities. The outcome is clear: once the conflict is resolved, ownership becomes physically self-evident. The lion that holds the resource after the projection of physical power is, by definition, its rightful holder.
Humans, however, rarely settle disputes this way. Because sapiens are naturally disinclined toward direct violence — or, more accurately, have learned to outsource and obscure it (we are, after all, the only species that raise animals in cages only to slaughter them at industrial scale) — we tend to prefer to resolve disputes through non-physical means.
And so just as abstract thinking allows us to strategise and cooperate in hunting, it also enables us to construct stories — from which belief systems can be adopted. Belief systems are shared abstract realities that can be used to create abstract power hierarchies for assigning and enforcing ownership, rights, and obligations without requiring physical power projection.
We know them today as courts, governments, religious institutions, and bureaucracies. Abstract-power-based resource control (ABP) allows sapiens to resolve disputes without physical power. At first glance, this seems like a major evolutionary advantage: it’s more energy-efficient, less physically destructive (on the surface), and appears more “civilised”.
But as Lowery warns, this shift comes with a significant trade-off — one that arguably makes humans the most destructive species ever to have existed: it all hinges on trust. Trust that the abstract power hierarchy entrusted with resolving disputes will do so fairly — and, more importantly, that those in positions of authority will continue to do so over the long term. Because it’s not just about integrity today, but whether that integrity holds up over time, across generations, and under pressure.
And that’s precisely what makes abstract power so fragile — because it is, contrary to physical-power-based resource control, so easily corruptible.
Since abstract power is systemically endogenous — originating from within the belief system itself — it can be exploited from the inside. Those who hold it rarely need to prove their capability in any physical sense; they simply need to manipulate the belief structure that confers legitimacy. In other words, abstract power can be created out of thin air and costs little to sustain thermodynamically.
And that’s precisely the danger.
When misused, it’s hard to trace — and therefore hard to resist, let alone hold accountable. It is also non-inclusive and inegalitarian: a pecking order heuristic based on rank. Those with the right titles, social status, or ideological alignment are elevated within the abstract power hierarchy.
And while this doesn’t exclude genuinely well-meaning individuals, it also creates a breeding ground for those prepared to lie, cheat, and steal — because in these hierarchies, it’s often optics, not substance, that get rewarded.
“The bottom line is that logic [e.g. laws] is often the source of systemic exploitation, not the solution to systemic exploitation. The exploitation of the law keeps happening because people keep making the mistake of thinking that high-ranking people with imaginary power can be constrained by written logic. Logical constraints can’t prevent the exploitation of logical constraints, they just change the logic to be exploited.” (Softwar, p. 190)
Eventually, as Lowery points out, abstract power hierarchies always reaches a breaking point — because over time, they cannot avoid corruption. This is because the CA for lying, cheating, or manipulating the system is extremely low, while the BA can be immense — you could, in effect, end up ruling the entire world. In other words, the BCRA for exploiting abstract power starts off extraordinarily high, and typically grows over time as control over resources becomes increasingly centralised within these abstract power hierarchies.
Over time, bottled-up distrust, frustration, and disbelief in the prevailing belief structure begin to accumulate — often invisibly — until they reach unsustainable levels. It becomes increasingly obvious that those who have climbed the abstract power hierarchy have done so not to serve the shared values of the system, but to exploit the trust they’ve been granted for their own advantage.
Time and time again, when enough people recognise this imbalance, trust in the internal belief system collapses — or rather in the hierarchy tasked with upholding its stated values. And when that happens, sapiens do what they’ve always done when abstract coordination fails: they revert to base-layer physical power projection (just like animals) to resolve their disputes. They demand accountability and fairer resource distribution.
Only now, the conflict is no longer a matter of measured contest — it’s explosive, driven by long-suppressed resentment, and magnitudes more destructive than if the issue had been confronted earlier.
“War can be summarized as the act of domesticated sapiens rediscovering, time and time again, that there is no viable substitute for physical power (a.k.a. watts) as the basis for settling their disputes, establishing control authority over their resources, and achieving consensus on the legitimate state of ownership and chain of custody of their property in a systemically secure way.” (Softwar, p. 195)
Lowery goes on to say:
“If you ever feel like you’re being oppressed, then take a look around. There is a high probability that you either (1) have chosen to adopt an exploitable belief system, (2) you’re not strong enough or willing to physically fight to secure yourself against oppression, or (3) some combination of both.” (Softwar, p. 199)
When it comes to the idea of “voting systems” as a way to act as a check against abstract power, it’s not that the fundamental idea of having a mechanism to dynamically adapt power is inherently bad (dictatorships are far more centralised than democracies) — it’s that when we blindly trust our votes to automatically and perpetually represent our interests, the very system that was initially designed to protect us can be weaponised against us. As Lowery points out, the deeper problem lies in the nature of abstract power itself. He writes:
“Today, rank-based voting protocols are a core component of most modern democratic rules of law. Unfortunately, rank-based voting systems are vulnerable to systemic exploitation. A vote is another form of abstract power. Because abstract power is non-inclusive, bounded, and systemically endogenous (i.e. internal to a belief system with encoded logic that can be systemically exploited), that means votes are equally as non-inclusive, bounded, and systemically endogenous. People can (and have, many times) taken advantage of the systemically exploitable properties of voting systems to the detriment of the people who depend on them to secure their rights.” (Softwar, p. 191)
He gives a practical example:
“The United States is one of many presidential republics with a fully independent legislature supposedly capable of preventing the consolidation and abuse of abstract power. But with 535 members of Congress representing the will of 336 million Americans, it would only take 0.00008% of the US population (the president plus ~51% of its legislature) to be dishonest or incompetent with their imaginary power for the United States to degenerate into unimpeachable, population-scale exploitation and abuse of abstract power. The reader is invited to ask themselves: how responsible is it to entrust 0.00008% of the population with abstract power and control authority over the remaining 99.9999%?” (Softwar, p. 207)
The nuanced picture Lowery tries to paint is this: sapiens may believe they’ve evolved beyond physical power projection, but the historical record tells a different story. The real pattern, he argues, is that short periods of peace are consistently followed by long periods of conflict — not despite our reliance on abstract power hierarchies, but in large because of it.
By building pecking orders on increasingly reliant on trust, and empowering systems that are naturally resistant to accountability, sapiens create environments where the most psychopathic traits — deception, manipulation, and self-interest — are systematically rewarded. These individuals rise to the top of abstract dominance hierarchies, largely unchecked and often invisible, until the system eventually collapses under the weight of its own corruption — at the expense of ordinary people, animals, and the environment alike.
Self-domestication: trading physical power for abstract power
The only reason this dynamic can unfold is because sapiens are gradually tricked into a form of “self-domestication” by the belief systems they inhabit — systems that convince them to trade physical power for abstract power without realising it.
This isn’t necessarily about physical power as in brute force. It’s about agency.
One of the most widespread trades in modern history is the trade of physical money (such as gold) — something that cannot be arbitrarily created without significant physical effort (we can think of it as nature projecting physical power through the difficulty of its formation) — for abstract money in a bank account, which can be created at the discretion of those high up in the abstract power hierarchy. The result is a form of self-domestication, where ordinary people lose agency and are forced to work harder for less, as their savings are diluted by the continual creation of new abstract money.
To understand whether you’ve made this trade yourself in any shape or form, Lowery encourages the reader to ask a simple question: What actions in your life require permission?
If you need permission to access your own money, move across borders, publish an idea, refuse digital tracking, or opt out of terms and conditions — then you’ve ceded physical power to an abstract power hierarchy.
Here are some examples — not explicitly stated in the thesis, but helpful for illustrating the core dynamic Lowery describes:
Gold in your custody vs. gold in the bank
If you once held physical gold — a finite, irreproducible precious metal in objective physical reality — and you were encouraged to trade it for a paper receipt issued by a government or bank, you’ve exchanged physical power for abstract power. The gold was yours in a tangible, provable sense — requiring no trust from anyone. Now, the gold is yours only as long as the belief system around it holds. At any moment, the abstract hierarchy you’ve entrusted to hold your gold in a 1:1 ratio can exploit that trust by for example issuing more paper receipts, or giving your gold to someone else.
Cloud storage vs. physical possession
Once, your photos, files, and records lived in boxes, folders, or hard drives. Now they’re stored “in the cloud” (which, in reality, just means on someone else’s computer) — owned, managed, and accessed at the discretion of tech companies. The assumption that these companies won’t exploit, surveil, or repurpose your data rests entirely on trust. Even when they claim transparency, you have no concrete way to audit or verify what actually happens behind the scenes. And even if there are laws in place to regulate how your data is handled, how would you know if they’re being followed? What tools do you have to enforce them?
Speech vs. permission to speak
Once, speech happened in the village square. You said what you believed and bore the consequences. Today, most speech takes place on centralised digital platforms governed by terms of service. What you can and can’t say is dictated by unseen moderators, opaque algorithms, and ever-shifting government policies.
Formal schooling vs. learning
We often mistake schooling for learning — assuming that attending school is the same as being deeply educated. But formal schooling is just one framework among many for learning. Over time, many parents have come to rely entirely on ‘certified curricula’ to shape their children’s thinking, believing this alone will prepare them for the world. In doing so, the parent relinquishes direct influence over their child’s formation to an abstract authority (a bureaucratic structure).
Divine relationship vs. dogmatic intermediaries
In many traditions, people are taught they cannot access truth or the divine directly — they need priests, clergy, or religious institutions that act as gatekeepers. Individual maybe encouraged to trade their personal, sacred relationship with the divine for a hierarchical structure of belief and permission. Spiritual agency is outsourced to institutional abstract power.
Direct action vs. delegation of virtue
Instead of doing what is right with your own hands, many now may believe moral duty is completely fulfilled by voting, donating, or endorsing institutions that claim to act on their behalf. Justice, safety, and care are no longer personal responsibilities — they’re outsourced. This feels virtuous, but severs the link between intention and action, leaving real agency behind. Who is held accountable when these institutions fail to act on their behalf?
In each of these examples, physical power — your direct, embodied ability to act — is traded for abstract power. By making this trade, consciously or not, you’ve subscribed to a belief system and surrendered agency to an abstract power hierarchy.
In each case, your CA is lowered. As a result, your BCRA increases, making you more vulnerable to exploitation by those who reside at the top of the abstract power hierarchy. You no longer act freely; you act conditionally, within the limits of a framework you have very little oversight over — one that can change without your input, and often without your awareness.
At any moment, the abstract power hierarchy you’ve entrusted — whether a bank, government, or platform — can invent a new rule that strips you of access, ownership, or recourse. Or they can simply stop doing what they previously claimed to do — without warning, explanation, or accountability. And what can you realistically do? File a formal complaint to the very system that imposed the rule in the first place? Many times, as Lowery points out, you won’t even realise that the trust you’ve placed in the system is being quietly exploited — until it’s too late.
Lowery reminds the reader again and again about the mistake of believing that imaginary power can be kept in check with imaginary constraints:
“People have tried valiantly to design abstract power hierarchies which keep their populations secure from exploitation and abuse using nothing more than logic, but 5,000 years of written testimony prove that no combination of written logic has successfully prevented an abstract power hierarchy from becoming dysfunctional, exploited, vulnerable to foreign attack, or vulnerable to internal corruption. Physical power has always been needed to correct for these security vulnerabilities.” (Softwar, p. 282)
In this light, many modern humans resemble domesticated livestock — managed, conditioned, and extracted from, often without realising it, because the coercion is embedded in an abstract reality that they’re unable to distinguish from objective physical reality.
Creating abstract power: the playbook
Lowery makes one point again and again: abstract power and physical power are not the same — and yet, most sapiens consistently conflate the two.
Abstract power is derived from shared abstract reality — in other words, belief systems. It requires the ruled to be sympathetic to the legitimacy of those who claim authority. It’s rank-based, inegalitarian, and can scale rapidly through network effects, and just as easily, it can collapse when belief fades.
Physical power, by contrast, is rooted in objective physical reality. It is self-evident, requires no trust, and cannot be faked. It is egalitarian and non-discriminatory — anyone with the capacity to project it can do so, regardless of title, status, or belief.
So how is abstract power created, and why does people many times conflate it with physical power?
We can trace this logic back to metacognition and the process of cross-examination that humans use to determine what is real. As Lowery points out, most people don’t even realise they’re doing this — which is precisely why it bears repeating.
Imagine a scenario where a person — or group — claims to have king-like power. For a sapien, this immediately triggers the formation of an imaginary pattern representing that power. Now, to determine whether the claim is real, the sapien will instinctively attempt to validate it through physical sensory input — drawing from objective physical reality.
But here’s the thing: for the same reason a pile of branches can trigger a false positive and be mistaken for a snake, the king-like figure in this case doesn’t need to physically project all the power they claim to have. It’s enough to showcase just a strategic fraction of it — even an authentic threat might be enough — for the sapien to generate a false positive signal and begin believing and acting as if the king holds physical power.
In many cases, the sapien doesn’t even need firsthand experience of that objective physical power. They may have only seen it on social media, in a televised speech, or a military parade that — for all intents and purposes — could be staged (!)
Ask yourself: when it comes to the institutions, leaders, or organisations you treat as having physical power — how much of that power have you actually experienced firsthand? How much of it do you know, for a fact, is real, and how much is simply assumed to be real?
Lowery writes:
To better understand how vulnerable sapient belief systems are to psychological exploitation and abuse, we can use adversarial thinking to analyze how to create and codify abstract power. The reader is invited to assume you are a systemic predator who wants to psychologically exploit a human population’s belief system for your own personal advantage. What is the most important thing you need the population to believe in so that you can have extraordinary amounts of imaginary power and control authority over their valuable resources? One thing that you could do is convince them to believe that using physical power to establish their dominance hierarchy is morally “bad.” You could convince them there are ideological alternatives to physical power for establishing control authority over their resources and achieving consensus on the legitimate state of ownership and chain of custody of their property.
Perhaps the population might become concerned that you could abuse your abstract power to exploit them. If that’s the case, then you could convince them that imaginary logical constraints encoded into rules of law are fully sufficient at protecting them against systemic predators like you who can exploit imaginary power. Once the population has been convinced that imaginary power hierarchies encoded into rules of law are incontrovertibly better solutions than physical power, then you could simply place yourself at the top of that abstract power hierarchy by masquerading as the morally, ethically, ideologically, or theologically fit candidate for the job.
If you are successful, the population will bend to your will and do your bidding for you, labor for you, kill for you, give you their most valuable resources and worship you like a god — just like a domesticated animal would. (Softwar, p. 148–149)
Once you understand the playbook, it becomes surprisingly easy to spot. Lowery breaks down the process of creating abstract power hierarchies — and using them to domesticate humans for exploitation — into four distinct stages:
- Codify a set of rules which links control over resources to abstract power (rank) over physical power (watts).
- Assign the greatest amount of abstract power to those who write the code [e.g. lawmakers], and assign the least to those who must obey them.
- Convince the population to voluntarily surrender their physical power in exchange for abstract power — under the guise of morality:
→ If population is inclined to use kinetic power to resist the power transfer, call it “violent”.
→ If population is inclined to use electric power to resist the power transfer, call it “bad for the environment”. - Exploit the population’s rising BCRA, now that their CA has been artificially lowered and they’re easier to control.
“By not using physical power, members forfeit their ability to impose severe physical costs on their leaders if those leaders start to abuse their authority” (Softwar, figure 51, p. 187)
So the big question is: does the king have real power?
The answer is that the king has abstract power — but only for as long as people remain sympathetic to the belief system that grants him that power. While he may have access to a military with physical power, that power entirely depends on whether the members of that military subscribe to the same belief system that the king has the right to command it. The moment they stop believing that, the power dissolves. The king himself has no physical power. But for the person who can’t distinguish between the two, it makes no difference.
The following comment is my own, but building on Lowery’s insights using the Bowtie Notation framework, I think a helpful way to visualise this is by showing abstract power (imaginary) as a magnified distortion of physical power (real).
In the diagram above, the king’s actual physical power — the CA he can personally impose — is small. But his abstract power (the perceived BA and CA) has been inflated far beyond what his physical position alone could justify. The “king’s power”, then, exists in belief in the system that legitimises it. When this belief holds, the king’s CA appears vast. But once that belief collapses — when people (or the military acting on his behalf) stop subscribing to that belief system — his power can evaporate almost instantly.
The same parallel can be drawn in a modern context. Ask yourself: why do banks appear to wield such tremendous influence? It’s because their customers — namely, the majority of citizens — subscribe to the belief system in which fiat money holds value and banks are trusted custodians of that value. But if too many people attempt to withdraw their digital balances for real-world use at the same time, it could become abruptly clear that the bank doesn’t actually hold all the money it claims to. In that moment, a bank run could occur — and the bank’s abstract power could evaporate overnight.
Taking down abstract power hierarchies
As we’ve come to understand, sapiens rely in large on abstract-power-based resource control (belief systems) to reach consensus on ownership and the chain of custody of property — whether it’s land, money, data, or reputation.
So what can you do if you find yourself in a situation where the belief system you’ve subscribed to — knowingly or not — is being used to exploit you? Or if you just want to place yourself in a less vulnerable position? Lowery offers two options:
- Project Physical Power
This does not necessarily mean violence — that’s a last resort. It means physically signaling your refusal to comply with the illegitimacy of the system.
- Voicing your dissent publicly (e.g., writing op-eds, debate articles)
- Gathering people for protest or demonstration
- Withdrawing participation from the belief system altogether (e.g., not giving up your data).
Any visible, embodied act that says “I reject the way things are being run and I’m willing to fight for it” is a form of physical power projection. It doesn’t have to be offensive in nature — often, it’s purely defensive.
In many cases, the reason you feel exploited is because you’re awakening to the fact that resources you contributed to creating — whether economic, cultural, or social — have been misallocated by the abstract power hierarchy in place. Power projection is your way of reasserting your rightful claim. Depending on the response, you then decide how far you’re willing to go. If your act of resistance is met with coercion, your only option may be to demonstrate that you’re willing to escalate.
For example, if the abstract power hierarchy you’ve been conditioned to obey begins promoting or enforcing a fascist ideology, and that belief system gains enough traction, you may find yourself with no defensive route left. If voicing dissent is criminalised, protests are violently suppressed, and noncompliance is met with physical power, your only remaining option may be to project it back — with violence.
2. Stop valuing the resource they control
This is more subtle, but in many cases more powerful. Abstract hierarchies lose influence when people stop valuing what they control. While this is difficult with vital resources like water or food, most sophisticated abstract hierarchies — such as states and institutions — exert control through belief based resources.
- Fiat money only hold value because people collectively believe it does. If you choose to move your money into an asset that lies beyond the abstract hierarchy’s control — you’re withdrawing consent from the very foundation of their control.
- Stop following orders by the abstract power hierarchy (i.e., civil disobedience).
Simply put, the main reason abstract power hierarchies grow so quickly and become so encompassing is because people are sympathetic to their power — they believe and act as if it’s real. But the moment you, as an individual, become more skilled at distinguishing abstract reality from objective physical reality, the illusion begins to lose its grip. The power they hold exists only because you act as if they have it. Stop acting like they do — and their power diminishes.
Physical power, on the other hand, doesn’t require sympathy. It’s self-evident. It can’t be cheated, faked, or imagined into existence — it simply is.
“Why is physical power so useful? Because it’s real, not abstract. It is therefore not endogenous to a belief system which can be systematically exploited by storytellers, making it immune to the threat of god-kings. Physical power works the same regardless of rank and regardless of whether people sympathize with it. Physical power is objectively true, impossible to refute, and impossible to ignore. Physical power-based control authority predates abstract power-based control authority by four billion years. Since the first abstract power hierarchies emerged, physical power has always served as its antithesis. Physical power has always been used to remedy the dysfunctionality of abstract power.” (Softwar, p. 282–283)
Lowery goes on to make the following statement:
“As much as people hate to admit it, war has emergent benefits for society. A primary value-delivered function of warfare is to decentralize zero-trust and permissionless control over valuable resources in a systemically exogenous way that can’t be systemically exploited or manipulated by people in high positions of rank. Thanks to more than 10,000 years of agrarian warfare, no person or polity has ever been able to gain full and unimpeachable control over the world’s natural resources, no matter what they believe in and no matter how much abstract power they have consolidated. War has therefore acted as a great decentralizing force of human society that has successfully prevented the adoption of a single belief system which can be systemically exploited by an untrustworthy ruling class.” (Softwar, p. 283)
I note that Lowery deliberately uses the word warfare throughout his thesis to provoke and challenge deeply ingrained discomfort with that concept. But as we’ve already seen, this function of warfare could just as easily be framed as physical power projection — not necessarily in the form of violence, but as a way to preserve autonomy to resist systemic exploitation. The deeper insight, then, isn’t that we should aim to avoid physical power projection at all costs — but that it should remain ever-present in smaller, non-lethal forms. If it remains reinforced and embedded as a natural, ever-present check on abstract power — by reinforcing autonomy, for instance (and resisting the trade of physical power for abstract power at every turn) — we might prevent dysfunction from compounding by more frequently applying small-scale corrections, long before the only remaining avenue is lethal, large-scale conflict.
With all this in mind, the more accurate way to draw up the actual mechanics of resource control dynamics throughout human history — since the dawn of abstract thinking — is through Lowery’s diagram below. It may look complex at first glance, but all it really shows is this: when abstract-power-based resource control (ABP) becomes dysfunctional, exploitative, or unaccountable, the final check — our fallback — continues to be physical-power-based resource control (PBP). It functions as a reset mechanism. The problem now, as we’ll soon explore, is that this fallback is becoming increasingly unimaginable to use.
Nation state level
Lowery’s framework applies across all fractal levels of life — from sub-cellular particles, to individuals, families, organisations, and ultimately, nation-states and even the global order.
In the image below, we see how individual nations each have their own CA and BA, which together form their unique BCRA. But as with organisms, nations quickly learn that the most effective way to survive and thrive is through cooperation — by combining their CA and BA. This creates alliances that dramatically lower their BCRA.
As Lowery notes, this cooperative behavior forms a kind of Schelling point — a natural convergence where surviving organisations are compelled to cooperate simply because those who don’t are devoured by those who do.
Mutual Assured Destruction & the Prosperity Trap
What Lowery is ultimately building up to with these observations is that we’ve reached a point in human development where we’ve become too effective at projecting physical power at the nation-state level. So effective, in fact, that resorting to it to “reset” the system — should any single belief system become overly corrupted — is no longer viable, due to the presence of nuclear weapons.
The uncomfortable reality is that we don’t abstain from nuclear war out of moral principle, but because doing so would annihilate our own Resource Abundance (RA). The Cost of Attack (CA) is simply too great to justify any possible Benefit of Attack (BA).
This dynamic has locked us into what Lowery calls a “Prosperity Trap”.
“The author defines a bounded prosperity trap as a situation where the inability to sufficiently grow CA causes an organism to be unable to grow their prosperity margin any further, and they become trapped within either a fixed or shrinking margin of prosperity. Having a bounded prosperity margin means an organism can no longer grow its resource abundance without automatically causing its prosperity margin to shrink to the point of being devoured by the local CCCH environment. Bounded prosperity traps show that when organisms hit a ceiling on their ability to project power, it translates directly into a degradation in prosperity. The ability to countervail entropy is severely degraded or halted altogether, and progress plateaus.” (Softwar, p. 83–84)
Historically, human civilisations have followed a familiar cycle: abstract power hierarchies emerge, become corrupted, and are eventually overthrown through physical power projection — revolutions and conflict — after which a new belief system replaces the old. As destructive as that process may be, it has served as a reset mechanism for corrupted belief systems. As alluded to earlier, while we can debate the most effective way for physical power to act as a check on abstract power (which is precisely what the next part will explore), Lowery argues that it must work this way.
To illustrate why, here’s an analogy of my own, zoomed in to the level of the individual: In liberal democracies, people are generally presumed innocent until proven guilty — a framework built on trust [shared belief system] between the individual and society. This system functions as long as that trust holds. But if it’s violated by the individual, physical power is invoked [law enforcement] to physically constrain the individual [incarceration]. Without this fallback to physical power when trust is misused, accountability would be non-existent. Because if physical constraint were never realistically on the table, then anyone could exploit the system without consequence — and the rule of law, which functions precisely because people collectively subscribe to the belief system that it exists, would collapse — reverting everything back to the base layer of physical power, and thereby defeating the entire purpose of having a belief system in the first place(!)
So, in the end, physical power is always there — it’s just a matter of whether it’s integrated early and constructively, or withheld until it’s too late to do anything but clean up the wreckage.
But today, as Lowery clarifies, this reset mechanism — resorting to physical power projection — at the highest, nation-state level is no longer a viable option should it ever come to that. The use of modern physical power at scale — particularly nuclear — wouldn’t just disrupt hierarchies, it would end civilisation entirely. And so we find ourselves trapped: unable to resort to physical power projection without mutual destruction, yet increasingly bound to dysfunctional belief systems that no longer can self-correct.
We’re caught between two extremes: total destruction or total dysfunction.
Drawing from evolutionary history, Lowery shows that when life encounters a Prosperity Trap, it faces a binary outcome: innovate or die.
To make this concept concrete, Lowery points to early evolution. Around two billion years ago, life on Earth — then just a chaotic soup of single-celled organisms — was on the verge of extinction, constantly bombarded by deadly solar radiation. Yet, under this pressure, some bacteria stumbled upon a radical innovation: photosynthesis.
At first, it seemed like a breakthrough. These organisms had found a way to convert harmful solar energy into usable fuel. But there was an unexpected consequence — photosynthesis produced oxygen, which at the time was toxic to nearly all life. The result was catastrophic. This innovation triggered Earth’s first mass extinction event, as entire generations of life were burned alive by the oxygen-rich environment they had inadvertently created.
And yet, photosynthesis didn’t spell the end. Some organisms adapted by clustering together — forming networks that shared energy, exchanged protection, and distributed functions. Cooperation became the crucial innovation that allowed life to escape the Prosperity Trap it had created and survive within an increasingly CCCH environment.
Today, humanity faces a similar inflection point.
We’ve innovated ourselves into a corner. The physical power projection tools we’ve created are now too destructive to use without risking mutual annihilation. If trust breaks down globally and we’re forced to resolve disputes without shared belief systems, doing so could collapse humanity’s entire Resource Abundance (through extinction). Yet if we continue doubling down on abstract power hierarchies to avoid that outcome, we edge closer to a state of permanent dysfunction — as the BA for exploiting these power hierarchies will approach infinity, until trust erodes completely and cooperation ultimately breaks down completely.
Either way, the endpoint is the same. The only way out is innovation.
That’s why Lowery sees the urgent need for what he calls “human antlers” (as mentioned earlier) — a new form of physical-power-based dispute resolution protocol that requires no trust between participants, yet doesn’t risk mutual annihilation when used. As we’ll see in the next chapter, this is where Bitcoin — and more specifically, proof-of-work — enters the picture. Lowery believes it may represent the evolutionary leap needed to hard-fork humanity out of its Prosperity Trap and onto a more resilient path forward.
But unlike every other physical power projection protocol in evolutionary history — which has relied on kinetic (thus lethal) power projection — this one comes with an extraordinary update: it runs on electricity (thus non-lethal). It’s trustless power projection without blood. A contest of energy, not violence. For the first time, Lowery says, we may be on the cusps of embracing a new way to resolve disputes, assert autonomy, and decentralise power — without resorting to lethal war.
Lowery writes:
“Einstein theorized that matter is swappable with energy. If that’s true, then instead of fighting wars by blasting people with projectiles, we should be able blast them with energy in a non-kinetically destructive manner and get similar emergent properties (in this case, the emergent property is physical security). A watt of physical power is a watt of physical power regardless of whether it’s generated using forces displacing masses, or charges passing across resistors. It should therefore be possible to settle global-scale physical conflicts using an energy-based or “soft” form of global power competition rather than a mass-based or “hard” form of global power competition. The question is, how?” (Softwar, p. 243)
The “how” will be the topic of discussion in Chapter 5 of Lowery’s thesis, which will be explored in Part 3–4.
Two substrates, two emerging orders
At its core, the most distilled point Lowery wants to communicate through his Power Projection Theory in the opening chapters, beyond the framework of Primordial Economics, is that there are two fundamentally different emerging orders, each arising from two distinct substrates for resource control: one rooted in physical-power-based resource control (PPB), and the other in abstract-power-based resource control (ABP).
The “resource control” mechanism refer to the underlying logic by which resources, status, and survival are distributed. In simple terms: they describe how organisms — or entire civilisations — decide who gets what, and why.
The term “emerging order” refers to the patterns, structures, and behavioural systems that naturally arise from these two different substrates once their incentive structures are in motion. Each order follows its own internal logic, shaping the kind of behavior it rewards, the types of hierarchies it creates, and the specific vulnerabilities it leaves exposed.
We can therefore think of the resource control mechanism as the soil, and the emerging order as the tree that grows out of it. Different soils yield different growth — just as sandy soil produces one kind of plant and rich, dense soil another, each power substrate gives rise to its own distinct social structure. The substrate doesn’t dictate the exact form, but it sets the conditions that shape what can emerge. Thus, it’s not within the cards of a seed planted in a pot to grow into a sprawling forest.
In this light, Lowery leaves us with the following overarching insight:
The PPB order is ancient — with over 4 billion years of evolutionary precedent. It is the logic still followed by the natural world, where internal resource distribution is determined through direct, physical power projection. It is non-discriminatory and egalitarian in the sense that any organism capable of asserting itself can do so, regardless of belief, status, or hierarchy. It’s necessarily energy-intense, thus making it impossible to fake. These physical constraints naturally encourages organisms to strengthen their CA before increasing their BA (strategy option 3). In doing so, PPB fosters a decentralised order, where power is earned, not imagined.
By contrast, the ABP order is relatively novel, emerging only in the past few thousand years with the rise of sapiens and our capacity for abstract thinking. While it has enabled the emergence of humans as the dominant species, it has also resulted in massive suffering, systemic injustice, and widespread destruction, precisely because it is fragile and trust-dependent. The ABP order is energy-efficient, which makes it easier to scale — but also easier to fake. Over time, this has the effect of lowering individuals’ CA and increasing their BCRA, making them more vulnerable to exploitation by the very belief system they’ve entrusted. Lowery’s point is essentially that the adoption of ABP has gradually led sapiens into a Prosperity Trap — a civilisational dead end that, to return to the earlier analogy, resembles a tree outgrowing its pot.
Using these insights, Lowery points out three key points:
- Sapiens have an intrinsic tendency to conflate PBP and ABP because we’re chronic over-thinkers — we can’t perceive objective physical reality without abstracting it through our belief systems.
- This conflation allows abstract power to masquerade as physical power, leading sapiens to trade away their physical power for abstract power. The result is a kind of self-domestication — one that lowers our CA and increases our BCRA, making us increasingly more exploitable by those who control the given belief system as time passes.
- When abstract power becomes corrupted, history shows that we’ve always fallen back to physical power to resolve disputes. This fallback has been tremendously destructive, and in the nuclear age, it has reached a breaking point — resorting to physical conflict now risks total annihilation.
Prelude to Part 3
In the next chapter, Lowery will apply his theory to one of the most rapidly expanding and consequential domains of the modern age: cyberspace — a domain that exists entirely within abstract reality.
Unlike historical abstract power hierarchies which — despite their dominance — have typically been constrained by national borders, institutional boundaries, or physical limitations, cyberspace is truly borderless. It connects the entire world, allowing belief systems and control to flow instantly across all layers of society.
Because nearly every major system of resource control on Earth — from finance and governance to infrastructure and identity — runs through this abstract domain, cyberspace poses an unprecedented security risk where power can be concentrated in ways never before possible in human history.
But within that risk also lies a tremendous opportunity. If a new mechanism were introduced — one capable of rebalancing this immense concentration of abstract power by reintroducing a physical, trustless component — it could be as encompassing and liberating as the current systems are opaque and extractive.
Framed through the lens of Primordial Economics, the current landscape resembles a vast, digital savannah where most sapiens function like a passive flock of sheep — docile, surveilled, and systematically harvested by the god-kings of cyberspace. These elite actors — whether private corporations or state institutions — accumulate unimaginable Resource Abundance (RA) through access to our data — data which allows them to experiment on our behavior, influence political discourse, and shape the future to their desires. The Benefit of Attack (BA) on the population is effectively infinite, while the Capacity to Attack (CA) of the average individual is near zero. This imbalance makes everyday people sitting ducks — low-CA prey — surrounded by apex predators with total information awareness.
But what if the script flipped?
What if something were introduced that could raise the everyday individual’s CA to near-infinite levels — without violence, without bloodshed, and at virtually no cost for the individual currently being exploited? What kind of emergent order might arise in an environment where every participant could project physical power in a trustless way, backed not by rank or reputation, but by electricity?
As Lowery points out, this is just theoretical — it could be the foundation for a new kind of human order. He believes such an innovation — Bitcoin, and more specifically, proof-of-work — might unchain humanity from its Prosperity Trap and represent a kind of “hard-fork” for human civilisation to a more decentralised, anti-fragile, and cooperative world.
To find out how that may work, continue to Part 3.
Softwar by Jason Lowery: Abstract vs Physical Power, Part 2/5 was originally published in The Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.