Why You Have A Surname
State, power, and legibility
Hello there,
Today’s piece is about a profound idea I discovered recently.
It’s about the use of surnames.
Why do we have them? One can argue that we need them to separate one Akshay from another, so maybe they originated as a useful idea to mark people out.
But there’s a deeper logic behind the emergence of this tagging phenomenon.
Reading Seeing Like A State by James Scott revealed the origins of this idea. To understand it, we must first understand the goals of a state (the body that governs a set of people).
Any state, be it a king or a modern democratic government, has to ensure that it has the resources to survive: to defend itself from internal and external threats.
What does it need to ensure that? Money, men to fight, and the ability to maintain order internally.
So, the 3 main goals of a state are taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion. In simple words: to be able to extract money from its subjects, to be able to enlist them in the army as troops, and to be able to maintain internal order, and eliminate any threats to their rule.
Now, each of these goals requires a state’s subjects to be legible i.e. the state should have clear visibility into its people: personal details, where they live, their occupations, incomes, property, etc.
Why? Because if you have a populace that’s incognito and living in the jungle, you’d have very little info to achieve the 3 stated goals.
You don’t know where they live, so you can’t go to extract grains (the old version of tax). You also don’t know where to go if you urgently need to raise an army if a neighbor has waged a pointless war on your kingdom.
[This is also why it’s so hard to enforce law and order in hilly, mountainous regions like Afghanistan- which is also why every empire that tried conquering them walked out with a bloody nose]
So the entire game is about making people legible: to KYC the shit out of them and find out everything about them so you can tax them effectively, knock at their doors when you need them to fight, and go screw their lives if they took part in a revolt against the state.
This is where your surname comes in.
Surnames were a way to start ‘tagging’ people so the state could maintain an accurate database of every human within their jurisdiction.
This was accompanied by their home address, so now they are easily accessible and the police know where to go in case they’re not acting as per the state’s diktats.
Imagine what a nightmare it must’ve been to have no surnames in medieval England, where the vast majority of people had one of the 6 most popular names- like William, Richard, and John.
If every third person is a John, there are so many Johns who can escape the state’s database, and thus evade the scourge of taxation and conscription: a big win for them but a big L for the state.
This led to the rise of surnames for efficient tagging- and these surnames often came from occupations. Smiths were blacksmiths. Bakers were, well, bakers. I’m a Vaidya, so someone in my ancestral line most certainly was a doctor. Similarly, a Sonar was someone who dealt in gold.
Surnames also come from personal characteristics- Armstrong may have come from some dude who had 16” biceps. They come from the location of the person (Edgewood) or from relations to their parents (the son of William became Williamson, the son of Brian became O’Brian).
The funny/crude origins of these surnames hint at how they were concocted for very official purposes- just some additional tags that would enhance people’s legibility in the eyes of the surveillance State.
As Balaji Srinivasan says, a better word for surname is a “state-name”, because it originated to serve a specific purpose for them.
This concept had no social meaning for people.
Since they lived in small, local communities, the chances of 2 people having the same name (and thus causing inconvenience) must not have been a very high probability event. Life didn’t involve more than a few dozen people, so there was no social need for having a suffix for one’s name. Thus, the surname was just an administrative fiction, designed purely for fiscal legibility.
An official address, as you can now see, serves the same purpose. So does your age- the state must know when one turns 18 so they can begin the process of extraction (and also stop it once you reach 60).
The state cares deeply about having as much information about its people in front of it, to get a synoptic view.
Once you see how states see, it might make you very cynical.
It reveals how every individual is nothing but a unit for tax extraction, a body to be monitored and utilized for the maintenance of state power.
But that is the way it is. Better to be aware and wary, than ignorant and polyannaish.
The next time you do a KYC for a bank account, you’ll know why the government wants so much information about you.
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Is this why people say "Ignorance is bliss"? Becoming more aware also makes one more cynical in the medium term and apathetic in the long term.