The Rule of Three and the Evolution of Governance

The changing relationship between East and West, principally between China and America, has brought the whole matter of achieving peaceful and harmonious relations between nations to the fore - particularly with regard to China's recent ascendancy in world affairs. Competition among nations with different forms of governance raises important questions such as: What forms of governance work best to enable people to have harmonious and peaceful life together - both within and amongst nations? What principles can we discover in human history that might point us toward some answers to this fundamental governance question? What might the answers from the past suggest about the future? Where might the future lead? To find answers to these questions, we set out upon a discovery adventure, going back some 30,000 years in time - to trace the evolutionary progress in human governance from the hunter-gatherer period until today. We also adopted a framework provided by Dr Stephen Pinker's landmark study of the nature of violence over time entitled The Better Angels of Our Nature to provide context and contrast to our own discoveries. We discovered several basic principles: First, the forms of human governance made an evolutionary progress over the past 30,000 years. Second, the most basic driver for this progress was and still is technological change, which forces complementary changes in governance - or seals institutional failure. Third, we discovered that just three basic factors determined whether a particular form of governance succeeded in flourishing as a tribe, nation, empire or nation-state. Those fundamental factors are: boundaries, founding mythology, and the Rule of Three. Indeed, our most fundamental finding has been the Rule of Three itself: the principle that says that dyads have inherently unstable natures, whereas triads - like three-legged stools - possess inherent stability. Throughout time, the most successful human arrangements have been those with intricate hierarchies of governance that have the Rule of Three deeply woven into each level. As for the future, we claim that the best international structure would take the symbolic form of an archipelago of nations interconnected with a system of bridges - where each bridge consists of an intercourse route between two nations, and the nature of the intercourse is largely trade in goods and services followed by cultural exchanges of ideas. A Basic Principle: It is far easier to build bridges between nations than to rebuild nations in some other nation's image. Bad actors amongst nations may then get dealt with as villagers used to deal with nasty neighbors - through shunning and shaming, where shunning means the ceasing of trade intercourse.

Table of Contents:
Prologue: Queen Elizabeth and Her Three-Legged Stool; Introduction: 1979; The Deep Past: The Evolution of Human Governance and Humankind: The Evolutionary Forms of Human Governance; Schools of Thought and Human Evolution; The Three-Legged Stool and the Quest for Harmony; Conclusions: The Three Foundations for Comity; Cowboys and Dragons: Applying the Deep Past to the Modern Era: Revolutions in Intercourse/New Schools of Thought; The American Experiment; 1979: The Great Inflection Point; Conclusions: The Progeny of Information Intercourse; From Our Present Age to the Age to Come : What Happens Next; The Why for What Will Happen; The How for Peace and Plenty; Conclusions: Men Are No Angels: The Existential Rule of Three; Epilogue: The Fable of the Beavers and the Otters; Appendices: 1066: The Great Invasion; August 1914: Russians to the Rescue; Public Virtue, Private Vice; Bibliography: An Eclectic Choice in Readings;

About the Author :
Dr Charles Lee has had a lifelong interest and successful career in global Information Technology businesses. He has a proven track record as a successful venture capitalist, and a 40-year rolodex of cross-border business relationships. He authored Cowboys and Dragons (2003) and, The Code that Changes China (2012, 2014). He founded and chaired the Department of Management of Technology at Peking University (2006–2016). He also served as a visiting/adjunct Professor at National University of Singapore, Zhejiang University and University of Southern California (2002–2014). Dr Lee was a frequent speaker to many MBA/EMBA programs focusing on Entrepreneurship. Born in China (2/18/1940), raised in Taiwan, and educated in the United States, Dr Lee has more than forty years of experience in the Information Technology industry with operating expertise in venture capital, product development, and marketing and general business management on both sides of the Pacific. He has many years of experience in working with young technology entrepreneurs to help them optimize their companies' growth. Dr Lee became the first Asian American Venture capitalist in 1977 and founded Abacus Ventures in 1985 with investors from both domestic US and Far East sources. In 1979, he became the second investor in Steve Job's Apple Computer. Dr Lee attended National Taiwan University (BSCE, 1962) and the University of Minnesota (MSCE, 1965, MSAE, 1967 and PhD, 1969 in Applied Mathematics). Dr Peter Caldwell began a teaching and writing career a bit late, after several decades in business — including being a part of a team taking a high-tech start-up public in the early 1980s. He then began pursuing a long-term interest in Economic History, taking a PhD degree in Economics at the University of Connecticut that was quite interdisciplinary with a special interest in Scottish history, political economy, and philosophy. He completed degrees in English Literature at Dartmouth College (AB) and Tufts University (MA), and a Finance MBA at the Amos Tuck School. During a twenty-year teaching career, he filled assignments at Providence College and several other schools and authored several business books. He and co-author Charles Lee earlier teamed up in producing Cowboys and Dragons, a book on East-West cultural differences affecting business relations. The Rule of Three stands as their first lengthy book together — once more merging their Chinese and American knowledge and insights.