Resistant to what? I just gave you a clear and concise definition of power (the ability to bend others to your will). The social sciences did all of the required work as well, I'm just unable to write a whole sociology book in HN comments. There have been countless studies in sociology, history, anthropology and psychology examining the different forms of power and how it works. But bear in mind that these sciences are much more complicated than physics; in fact they're intractable. The simplest social mechanism is more complicated than the gravitational interactions of 1 million bodies.

Actually the example I’ve give of the electron is a rather weak one, as the electron is a very specific thing, while power is the most fundamental concept in all the social sciences except psychology (i.e. history, sociology, anthropology and political science). A better example — the obvious one, in fact — is energy. Energy can also only be measured through its effects, and yet it is a very fundamental concept. Describing it not as one thing but as disparate manifestations would take away its explaining power and many of our most useful models (I should really write a book called “social science for physicists”).

I’ve also given more thought to your focus on individual rights. Individual rights are an obvious “good thing”, but here’s where they get complicated: When I think of individual rights I imagine a universe composed of mass but no force. Such a universe will be no more than a cloud of plasma. But in our universe, mass gives rise to force, and force creates the interesting interactions that have, in turn, created our world. Likewise, human society is not made of humans, but of human interaction, interaction gives rise to power, and power, by definition, restricts freedom. Now, this is not a bad thing necessarily, as, if you think about it, all cooperation is basically the voluntary yielding of freedom in order to concentrate power for some common goal that wouldn’t have otherwise been achievable. But that doesn’t change the fact that whether they like it or not, just as mass-ful particles induce force, humans induce power, and both force and power take away freedom from others. So saying something like “everyone should be free” makes little sense, as that is only possible in a plasma cloud. In order to grant freedom, freedom has to be compromised — based on some values — and then managed somehow. Obviously, different people will prefer different compromises. Personally, I’d either like to see all power restricted and controlled, or all power unrestricted (including physical violence).

This is why I think that American libertarianism is either hypocritical or ignorant. It is either ignorant of the fact that there is no freedom without power (and hence, coercion), or hypocritical in calling for unrestrained use of certain forms of power alone (money) and not others (physical violence, preferably mediated by a democratic government that restrains the use of money).

I was therefore delighted (intellectually, that is) to learn recently of a fringe Silicon Valley movement called neoreactionism or “Dark Enlightenment”, funded by Peter Thiel. These guys (few women would join that openly sexist, openly autistic movement) are probably all former libertarians that have discovered that there is no such thing as freedom from power, and now openly call for a tyranny. As someone who’d studied medieval history in graduate school (though I have never obtained my doctorate) I was delighted to see the movement’s leader, a programmer by the name of Curtis Yarvin, analyze some historical document and call for the return of feudalism (he complains that those documents are not studied by historians, which is true for the simple reason that they are false accounts).

The problem with the return to feudalism — even if you were to believe the false accounts of how life was good then (it by no means was) — is that the power structure back then was at least held in check by technology, that is, lack thereof. With the invention of mass media and fast transportation, power can be more concentrated than ever before, which is why the greatest invention of Western civilization was the central government, which rose to contain and manage power (of course, this only made conflicts among those governments more violent than ever before, but that fear of annihilation reduced the number of conflicts considerably). BTW, the modern academic definition of politics is, not surprisingly, the management of power in society.

Feudalism combined with modern technology has only been tried — to the best of my knowledge — once, in nineteenth century America. The US at the time had a very weak federal government with almost no regulation. The result was a period of extremely fast economic expansion but at great social cost: a large portion of the American population was enslaved in all by name by a very small number of slave-owners-in-all-by-name known as the Robber Barons (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, Stanford, JP Morgan, Frick, et al.). All options were taken from them — they couldn’t migrate (they were sometimes paid in company-issued currency, that was useless anywhere else) and couldn’t organize to concentrate power to improve their lot (in fact, they did organize, but the robber barons had private armies that killed the rabble rousers and intimidated everyone else). The people cried for help, and Theodore Roosevelt rescued them by creating federal regulation.