I've been saying this for years: the more power you have the higher standard you should be held in. In most societies on the planet it's the other way around.
I've been saying this for years: the more power you have the higher standard you should be held in. In most societies on the planet it's the other way around.
> In most societies on the planet it's the other way around.
Obviously, because the ones with power make the laws.
I've been saying this too but lately I think the fundamental notion of power is wrong. There's 2 perspectives which are 2 sides of the same coin:
---
All social relationships should be consensual.
This means based on _fully-informed_ consent which can be revoked at any time.
This already marks employment as exploitative because one side of the negotiation has more information and therefore more bargaining power. Not to mention having more money gives them more power in a myriad of other ways (can spend more on vetting you, can spend more on advertising the position than you can on advertising your skills). Just imagine if people actually had more power than corporations - you'd put up an ad listing your skills, companies would contact you with offers and you'd interview them.
Citizenship is also exploitative because you didn't willingly sign a contract exchanging money (taxes) for services (protection, healthcare, roads, ...), in most countries you can't even choose which services you want to pay for. And if you stop paying, they'll send people with guns to attack you. This sounds overdramatic (because it's so normalized) until you realize from first principles that is exactly what it is.
_If democracy is supposed to mean people rule themselves, than politicians should be servants which can be fired at any time._ In fact, in a real democracy, people would vote on important laws directly and only outsource the voting to their servants about laws which don't affect them much, or they'd simply abstain.
---
Power should come from the majority.
This should naturally be true because all real-world power comes from violence and more people can apply more violence (or threaten it, when violence is sufficiently probable to be effective, it usually does not need to be applied, the other side surrenders).
But people who are driven to power have been very good at putting together hierarchical power structures where at each level the power differential is sufficiently small that the lower side does not need to revolt against the upper side. But when you look at the ends, the power differential is huge.
Not just dictators, "presidents" or presidents but "owners" and "executives" too.
You don't truly own something you can't physically defend. When you as a worker finish a product, you literally have it in your hands. You could hand it over to a salesman and you'd both agree on how to split the money from selling it. But instead, you hand it over to the company (by proxy its owner) which sells it and gives you your monthly wage irrespective of how much the product made. The company being free to fire you or stop making the product obviously makes more money then you - it's an exploitative relationship.
But why do you hand it over? Because if you don't, they'll tell the state and it'll send people with guns to attack you.
---
Bottom line is if people had equal bargaining power ("equality"), then if they chose to temporarily give "power" to someone in one area, they'd obviously take away their "power" is some other area. Why? Because they'd know if they didn't, the more powerful person would use this power differential to get even more power, and so on, starting the runaway loop we have here now.
Fuck yeah preach.
If someone claims to be "representing" me (whatever the fuck that means)...
...even more so if they are "representing" me alongside millions of others, i.e. in a very abstract sense (what do a million people have in common? everything and nothing)...
...and especially if the "representation" is concluded in "winning" a ritual bureaucratic gauntlet which gives you the right to send organized murderers after exactly the people whom you fail to "represent"...
...then it sure sounds like we all deserve instant access to a real-time sub-second, molecular-level feed of your entire present existence before it's anywhere near a fair bargain and not a totalizing coercive arrangement.
Granted, this sounds a little unfeasible from a technical or security perspective.
Although if the global media capacity was redirected to doing primarily this, instead of inventing ever fancier narratives to distract people from paying attention to the circumstances of their own lives, it just might be able to handle the full surveillance of a few thousand global volunteers: the real exemplary humans who set the real standards in real dialog with the entirety of sovereign society. Governance by inverse big brother. Sure gonna be cheaper than all the effort that goes into convincing every subsequent generation that "democracy" is what's going on...
Alternatively, that entire exercise can be sidestepped by Dunbar-compliant representation, i.e. let's introduce a pervasive social norm that dictates the following: (1) nobody has the right to represent more than their 100 closest people in the world (2) representation doesn't stack to form multi-tiered institutions - representatives only connect horizontally in a territory-spanning mesh. so if N * 100 people vibe with your idea you'll have to either split your personality N-wise (doesn't go very far with current theories of mind) or give N-1 people the right to their own interpretation of your idea to communicate with 100 others.
[to the tune of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk4QLlV-WLQ :]
I think they tried that about 100 years ago and it worked well enough for organized metasubversive parasites to core it and wear its husk for the better part of a century. Maybe if it was started less overtly in the first place it would've worked better. But cosplaying German Idealistm to your pet serfs cosplaying worker's council doesn't really leave space for a whole lot of subtlety. If you're interested in the workings of power this is commendable, there is much to learn from just the last 150years (which are relatively well documented). They're such a cause-and-effect pinball; but like and subscribing to any of those ideologies just lets the ghost of the ball drag you along. Kinda sad that they're one of the things the Net died into, no?
I like the application of Dunbar's number, though I am torn on (2). The largest countries currently have over 1 billion citizens, that's still 10 million representatives. That's as much as some countries.
One solution is to say that no country should be so large anyway. And I'd like that, creating such huge power structures (hierarchical or not) is dangerous. But realistically, sometimes they are needed for defense. A lot of power structures are shaped by the necessity of organized defense (and can then be used for organized attack).
Everyone agrees with this obviously but it's like saying that we should be able to levitate or live in utopia. It's almost a law of nature that the types that become powerful are not your most savory individuals and will use the power to reinforce their positions.
> It's almost a law of nature
We have tons of different systems for accumulating power all over the world. Corporate structures, democracy vs autocracy, etc. In each of those societies, we see different types of leaders on a sliding scale of savoriness.
My point is that clearly there are some forms of governance which result in more savory people and so you can argue that it's the systems that define the outcomes rather than any "law of nature".
No, not everyone agrees. A LOT a people buy into "oh but they're a really important person, they should be made extra allowances".
It's a law of nature that they will _try_.[0] That's why people should always have ways of defending themselves, whether it's with courts or guns.
[0]: This is not a figure of speech - many anti-social traits which result in NPD, ASPD and their subclinical versions[1] are genetic. There is literal evolutionary pressure to exploit others.
[1]: Meaning the trait is sufficiently pronounced to be harmful to others but not enough to be harmful to the person having it so it's not diagnosed as a disorder.
You're talking like society hasn't changed power structures over the years. How things are is not some unchangeable physical law.
This is obviously true, but people will downvote it because they don't like it.