A Political Model for Fantasy

The Dark Lord and Politics

Political power is the most misunderstood force in worldbuilding. We often treat it like a static object—something you "seize" or "hold"—but power is actually more like electricity. It is dynamic, it flows through specific channels, and it can be directed, stored, or short-circuited.

My Sovereign Circuit Model treats political power as a flow of energy that can be pooled, siphoned, or even short-circuited. To see how this works, let’s look at one of history’s most extreme examples: Sparta and their dominance over the Helots.

To start with, we have to understand the basic power unit of the model.

The Power Unit (p): The Atom of Politics

The fundamental unit of political life is the Individual Power Unit (p). Every person in a polity (an area or organization where politics happens) has one unit of power that they can commit in part or in whole to various identities (or organizations if you prefer) they associate with. Some of those identities are sovereign, meaning they can effect the state's politics of that polity, and some are not, meaning they have no impact on the state. In order to understand the model, there's a few principles you have to understand.

Principles of Power:

• The Principle of Equality: Every human within a polity possesses exactly one unit.

• The Principle of Interaction: Building on Hannah Arendt, specifically with regard to Action in Concert, this power is latent in a vacuum; it only becomes active (and therefore usable) when it exists between two or more people.

• The Principle of Power-Movement: Power can be given from one person to another, or from a person into an identity. A person can also be forced to yield their power, they still make the choice to yield their power, but the other options open to them seems untenable, creating a perceived “no choice” situation. This is also called "stripping power" as discussed later in the blog.

• The Principle of Power-Split: Power can be split between people and identities, however, that results in fractions of power being given to each identity. We refer to this as the "committed power" of the individual, i.e. how much of their power they're willing to commit to a given identity or person.

Definitions to Remember:

1. Individual Power Unit (p): The power each individual holds when they interact with others.

2. Committed Power Units (cps): The power individuals have committed to an organization or identity or the leadership of another person.

The Flow of Power

Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan argued that in a state of nature, everyone has total power (and total chaos). To survive, people "alienate" (give up) their power to a Sovereign. Once given, the Sovereign holds it all to maintain order. 

In The Sovereign Circuit Theory, this same model still applies. So for example, in a democracy, those who can vote give their power through the ballot box, but the winner gets all the power of the electorate, regardless of who voted for them. Also, for those who can't vote, their power is stripped from them by the system. Mostly this is fairly benign, like non-citizens living in a country. Essentially, these people have yielded their power through implicit choice by living a country where they can’t vote.

By the same token, someone living in a non-rebellious state in a country that is a monarchy or even an authoritarian state, yields their power implicitly.

This kind of yielding of power is often the case with minorities living in a larger majority country, sometimes called the tyranny of the majority. However, this is different from facing a “no-choice” situation, as will discuss, but first, we must understand the multiplier effect that identities present.

The Identity Multiplier

The total effectiveness of a group’s power (P) is not just the sum of its members (n), but the product of their Identity Multiplier (M) multiplied by the power their members have committed to the identity, summed:

P = ∑ (nᵢ cᵢ) Mᵢ

Where:

• nᵢ = number of individuals in group i

• cᵢ = level of political commitment

• Mᵢ = cohesion multiplier

  
  

Not all identities are created equal and not all identities give the same multipliers:

• Hard Identities (Intensive Power): Groups like the Spartans have a high M. Because their identity is exclusive and rigid, their power is "coherent" (like a laser). A small number of people in this identity can overwhelm a massive number of people if the latter has a low identity multiplier.

• Soft Identities (Extensive Power): The "Confucian" or "Empire" model. This allows for a massive number of people to belong to the identity, but the multiplier is lower. It provides stability over a large area but is less effective for rapid, high-pressure force.

Ancient Warriors

Stripping Power and No-Choice

The state can strip individuals or all the people of a given identity of power through a range of mechanisms. While laws may provide the formal justification, it is the enforcement—often backed by physical coercion or systemic exclusion—where real political disempowerment occurs.

In cases like Spartan control over the Helots, a small ruling minority used concentrated institutional power to dominate a numerically superior population. The Spartans, though vastly outnumbered, maintained their dominance by building a militarized state whose sole function was state violence and that violence was used to oppress the Helots.

To understand this, we have to explore and understand the Spartan identity. There is a great video here which I used as the basis for understanding the Spartans along with some history reading:

In summary, the Spartans did not just have power because they were soldiers; they had power because their Identity Multiplier (M) was incredibly high:

• The "Similars" (Homoioi): Spartan citizens called themselves the Homoioi, meaning "similars" or "equals". This was a brand focused on uniformity—they wore the same undyed clothes, grew their hair long, and shunned the luxury seen in other Greek cities.

• The Agoge (State Education): At age seven, boys were separated from families for a state-organized upbringing designed to create a totalizing in-group identity.

• A Culture of Leisure: Because they enslaved the Helots to do all manual labor, the Spartan elite became "gentlemen of leisure" who spent their entire lives training, hunting, and dining in communal messes, which built both violence skills and in-group identity.

So, they had the in-group power to back-up their conquest. But how did they keep such a large portion of the population under control? Such power stripping occurs not only through legislation but through strategic use of state machinery. This is where technology (and magic in fantasy roleplaying) can play an outsized role. Common techniques of power stripping include:

• Symbolic punishments like solitary confinement, which isolate individuals physically and thus removes their actual power (remember, power only exists between people). Such confinement also function as Negative Multipliers (we'll get to them), which are public warnings that discourage collective resistance.

• Violence and executions, used not only to remove opposition but to generate fear, lowering the multiplier effect of opposition identities.

• Monopolization of economic, technological, and magical resources, where the tools of the state, developed through the pooled power of the dominant group, are deployed to enforce disenfranchisement, ensuring subordinate identities are cut off from both political agency and economic independence.

Ultimately, power is not simply withheld; it is extracted, and then reinvested into the mechanisms that sustain dominance.

In The Sovereign Circuit Theory, this process is a siphoning of Power Units from a suppressed identity into the enforcement infrastructure of the dominant group, transforming what appears to be passive obedience into an active source of state strength.

However, power doesn’t have to be aggressively stripped. It can also simply be forced into dormancy.

Forcing Power into Dormancy

A sovereign prevents rebellion not just through force, but through controlling the population before they even rebel, through shaping the culture of the polity. There are a few techniques used here.

• Hegemony: As Antonio Gramsci argued, the state maintains control by making its power seem "natural." We see examples of this during Feudal Europe, where the noble class were seen as “chosen by God” and thus rebellion was heresy. Spartans used the simple technique of claiming themselves to be better and denying the shared humanity of the helots.

• Propaganda can be also used effectively to create hopelessness in the oppressed population, and to encourage the sense that the state, the means of being ruled, is natural. This can be done through a few techniques:

  • Better the Devil You Know: This commonly manifests as “yes, I know the state is bad, but the other options are worse”. The Helots might believe they'd be treated worse by the Persians for example.

  • What-about-ism: “Well, what about the rebels stealing those farm implements, that’s bad too!” This is especially relevant when there is rebellion brewing as rebels often have to resort to less-than-heroic tactics in order to oppose the state, which inherently holds all the levers of power.

  • Everything is lies: When the state floods so many lies into society that people lose track of the truth and simply believe that all political actors lie, faith in the system breaks down and apathy sets in, resulting in political power going dormant.

• Power Sinks: The state (or the identity that holds the most power in the culture) can also encourages "Sink Identities"—high-intensity identities that are politically inert, that are non-sovereign. These identities "soak up" an individual's power units, leaving them with no energy to plug into a "Sovereign Identity" that could challenge the state. Examples of power sinks include:

  • Motherhood is a Woman’s Highest Calling: This identity, where women build a mystique identity of motherhood and remain in the home, creates an environment where women exercise no power. It’s a particularly strong sink identity because if women try to resist, they can be accused of denying their own biology etc.

  • The Loyal Servant: In some authoritarian or caste-based societies, entire social classes are trained to see obedience as virtue. These individuals may have access to information and tools, but their identity as loyal functionaries prevents them from exercising power autonomously. This creates the effect where loyalty to system is greater than loyalty to truth or justice and these servants becomes a firewall against rebellion from within.

  • The Warrior Without A Political Voice: In many hierarchical societies, especially empires or military states, warriors may be granted honor but denied political voice. Their identity centers around discipline and valor, but not decision-making. This creates a high-intensity identity that’s externally directed, preventing internal rebellion even when suffering under elites. Honor codes are often used to create this identity.

  • The Seeker of Purity: In some religious or spiritual traditions, power is redirected entirely toward transcendence, removing it from the political sphere. The identity focuses on personal purity, withdrawal, or martyrdom, absorbing otherwise potent political energy. In this identity, political injustice is reframed as a test of personal faith; encourages withdrawal over reform.

  • The Entertainer Identity: In states that use culture and spectacle to maintain control, individuals in entertainment roles can be elevated, admired, and even powerful—but only within apolitical boundaries. Their job is to maintain distraction, not disruption. This creates a situation where cultural influence is NOT equal to political agency and an entire class of visible, high-energy identities (the entertainers) remain inert politically.

  • The Ethnic Model Minority: Sometimes, a minority group is rewarded precisely because they do not resist. Their identity becomes tied to silence and docility, weaponized as a contrast to more rebellious groups. The same can be applied to a number of individuals within a group (“You guys are the good ones”), where docile members of a subjugated identity are elevated to success. This encourages internal policing of political expression, and siphons group cohesion into economic achievement or social assimilation. I would imagine that the Spartans almost certainly used this one.

Sink Identities are not powerless; rather, they are containers for redirected power, engineered to prevent that energy from flowing into sovereign or revolutionary channels.

One other note is important. Sink Identities do not require deliberate conspiracy to emerge or function.

A good sink identity often feels natural, intuitive, even virtuous to the people who hold it and the people who encourage it’s flourishing. Many women genuinely find meaning and joy in motherhood, for example — and that in itself is not the problem. The issue arises when an identity, however noble, becomes totalizing: when it is framed as the only legitimate path for an entire group, and when other forms of participation — especially political — are denied or devalued. In such cases, what began as a meaningful role becomes a mechanism of containment, absorbing individual energy and preventing power from flowing into more disruptive or sovereign identities. These identities can evolve gradually, shaped by culture, religion, economics, or media, without anyone needing to consciously design them. That is precisely what makes them so effective. There does not need to be a meeting in a dark room of a the dominant identity making a decision to create a sink identity. Indeed, I’d argue that such a sink identity would be less useful that subtly altering organic identities to ensure the continuation of power by the elite.

Feudal Identities

Important Definitions to Remember:

Power is never truly destroyed; it is moved.

• The Social Contract (The Pipe): Building on the thoughts of Hobbes and Locke, the the sovereign model, citizens "yield" their power to a central authority. This happens in all forms of government, be it democratic or otherwise. In a healthy democracy, power flows voluntarily through a "ballot box" conduit. In other forms of government, the yielding of power is more subtle, but still exists.

• The Stripping Mechanism: In oppressive regimes like the Spartans vs the Helots, the state uses the pooled power of an In-Group to forcibly siphon the units from an Out-Group, leaving the latter politically "inert." 

Losing Power

Sometimes that state does lose control of power however, or at least there are attempts to overthrow the state. A revolution occurs when a Counter-Identity emerges that is "Harder" (more cohesive) than the state’s current multiplier. A number of counter identity types exist:

• The Big Tent: The French Revolution used "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" to create a massive, wide-diameter pipe for power. This created a powerful and wide identity at the same time. It should be noted that it's very hard to create such an identity and even harder to maintain it, which is one of the reasons why revolutions frequently fail after successfully overthrowing the government.

• The Specific Wedge: The American Revolution used "No Taxation" to target a specific issue that was being used to strip the colonists of political power. They paid taxed, but had no agency in their polity and this could be used to create a multiplier for their identity. 

• The Primal Counter-Identity: The Finnish Independence used shared ethnicity to create a high-pressure multiplier that the state’s "pipes" could no longer contain and used this create a movement for independence.

However, it should also be noted that the dominant identity can simply lose power due to losing their cohesion. Let's return to the example of the Spartans. Sparta began as a normal city-state but transformed into a mega-polis through a specific Stripping Mechanism:

1. Conquest of the Neighbors: Sparta conquered the river valley of Laconia and the neighboring Messenians.

2. Systemic Enslavement: Rather than incorporating these people, they turned them into Helots—enslaved laborers who outnumbered the Spartans by as much as 20 to 1 (roughly 150,000 Helots to 8,000–9,000 citizens).

3. Institutionalized Terror: To keep the Helot Power Units (p) "inert," the Spartans created the Krypteia, where young men were sent to kill "threatening" Helots to maintain dominance through fear.

But such a model cannot last forever. In the Sovereign Circuit Model we know that a small group (n) can only dominate a massive group if their Multiplier (M) is high enough to compensate for the difference in numbers. But only within reason.

The Spartan identity was so exclusive that it became brittle. Over time, the number of full Spartan citizens shrank while the Helot population remained large. (The video discusses why, but basically you had to rich to be a Spartan citizen and it was too easy for families to fall into poverty and lose citizenship). As the citizens decreased, the amount of total power (P) the state could generate began to fall below the amount required to keep the "pipes" of suppression sealed.

Ultimately, the Spartans' insistence on an exclusive, elite identity meant they couldn't replenish their numbers, and they were eventually overwhelmed.

Conclusions

The story of Sparta is often told as a tragedy of martial pride, but through the lens of the Sovereign Circuit Model, it is a masterclass in political failure. The Spartans built a political system with an incredibly high voltage but almost no surge protection. By relying on a Hard Identity that was as exclusive as it was powerful, they guaranteed their own obsolescence. As their numbers (n) dwindled due to the rigid economic requirements of citizenship, the pressure from the massive pool of Helot power units eventually became too great for the Sparta to contain.

When you are worldbuilding your own empires, whether for a novel or a tabletop campaign, remember that political stability is rarely about the strength of a single Dark Lord or the sharpness of a legion’s spears. Instead, ask yourself: How is the power flowing?

• Is the regime a "Hard Identity" like Sparta? If so, it will be terrifyingly efficient in the short term but incredibly brittle. One bad harvest or a few decades of population decline, and the multiplier (M) can no longer compensate for the loss of individual units (n).

• Are there "Sink Identities" in place? If your peasants aren’t rebelling, is it because they are being stripped of power through violence, or because their energy is being safely grounded into non-sovereign roles like the "Pious Seeker" or the "Loyal Servant"?

• Is there a "Counter-Identity" forming? Watch for the "Specific Wedge" or the "Primal Identity." When the oppressed stop seeing themselves as inert and start building their own high-M circuit, the state’s monopoly on power begins to smoke.

If you really must have an all powerful dark lord (TM), then use them as a multiplier. Even Sauron needed orcs!

Political power is not a trophy to be kept in a vault. It is a live current that must be managed, redirected, and sometimes stolen. A kingdom doesn't fall because the bad guys lose a battle. It falls because the circuit breaks. As a worldbuilder, once you understand the plumbing of your world’s power, you’ll find that the stories—the revolutions, the golden ages, and the collapses—practically write themselves.