A ruler can pacify society by draining each class’s institutions of political meaning.

Evidence

Thus the barony were given greater powers over their peasantry and encouraged to indulge in absurd and worthless pursuits, until finally, complained Doria, ‘there remained no other virtue (if they can be called virtues) than scrupulousness in duelling and skill in arms and horsemanship’ (1973: 32-3). The middle order, the populo civile, were fobbed off with university doctorates, and the populo minuto kept busy with public festivals. These things were emptied of all political significance and each order thus became enslaved to the one above, the whole society being easily subjected to the tyranny of the Spanish crown. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1811

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Saramago’s white blindness thesis—when civic institutions lose their meaning, society fragments into mutual predation, paralleling how lost observability empties honor and trust of content. — connects to: Governance vocabulary displaces the vocabulary of power from organized life. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 249; Regimes can dissolve the ruler-ruled divide by trading material comfort for acquiescence — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past: The…, 305; Rawls’s well-ordered society eliminates politics by relegating conflict to private life. — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 129