“Where, on the other hand, are Americans reminded that power is not exploitive by its very nature?” …and that’s where you diverge from me and Lord Acton.
An interesting topic indeed. My high level heuristic is that power should be decentralized until it breaks, then centralized until it works. But you will never break the human will to power because it is evolutionary. If you thus understand that humans will bite, as most parent learn raising their little apes, then it seems to me that you fall into three or four categories when it comes to a theory of rule.
The first three are Western {Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes} the others are not quite well understood by me. The distributed autonomous thing is Gengis Khan, Judaism and Islam have difficulties with seclularism. Buddhism can exist within empires, if it is not entirely codependent on them. The rest seem to be one-offs or broken Marxisms.
The trick is managing great power, which we've done a fairly good job when it comes to electricity, but not nuclear. It's not the existence of great power. Also how bad is 20% corruption?
Power is the ability to extinguish hope or life, to subjugate, and to not be held to temporal account for doing so. The exercise of power is always blunt. The passive poison or velvet glove is only used as an escalation / deescalation tactic if one is actually able to exert power.
Power corrupts. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.
“Where, on the other hand, are Americans reminded that power is not exploitive by its very nature?” …and that’s where you diverge from me and Lord Acton.
An interesting topic indeed. My high level heuristic is that power should be decentralized until it breaks, then centralized until it works. But you will never break the human will to power because it is evolutionary. If you thus understand that humans will bite, as most parent learn raising their little apes, then it seems to me that you fall into three or four categories when it comes to a theory of rule.
The first three are Western {Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes} the others are not quite well understood by me. The distributed autonomous thing is Gengis Khan, Judaism and Islam have difficulties with seclularism. Buddhism can exist within empires, if it is not entirely codependent on them. The rest seem to be one-offs or broken Marxisms.
The trick is managing great power, which we've done a fairly good job when it comes to electricity, but not nuclear. It's not the existence of great power. Also how bad is 20% corruption?
Power is the ability to extinguish hope or life, to subjugate, and to not be held to temporal account for doing so. The exercise of power is always blunt. The passive poison or velvet glove is only used as an escalation / deescalation tactic if one is actually able to exert power.
Power corrupts. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.
But I’d rather die than live a slave.
It's just a matter of choice.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/LLvqh6yzc60