'Code' made concrete alongside Rationality, Governance, and Social Order
First among my aims is to explain the action-guiding, system-guiding binary code that progressively characterises the later phases of political development. A new theory of the evolution of governance will be proposed in which coding emerges as the operational mechanism for building and maintaining the systems of state. Governance code is a simple cognitive key for choosing between two reactions to routine stimuli, one negative and the other positive. I will argue that code appears in the mind as a learned rule, perceived through repeated experiences of acting with the rule in the context of forming and performing state decisions. The coded rule is not necessarily obeyed. Indeed, often it is not obeyed. Nevertheless, conformity to the rule that is represented by the code is required during an in initial formative discontinuity in the system for exercising powers of state. It is also required in the aggregate, over time, so that the new system can consolidate, function, and endure. Fi…