Stats for nerds
1recommend
3mentions
2people
2009–2025years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- you are basing this on your public school education in a democratic state. I am sick of democracy taking credit for the gains in the human condition due to free trade.
the best form of peaceful organization of humans in order to create wealth is the joint stock corporation. no other innovation in economic interaction can even touch it when it comes to boosting the human race out of subsistence living. the venetian republic which ran on roughly this model flourished through trade for 1000 years. how many other civilizations have lasted that long? and without enslaving their neighbors?
populism has ever been the ally of dictators, because dictators know exactly how easy it is to sway the opinions of the masses with propaganda. this is one of the few points I am in agreement with Chompsky about (manufacturing consent). you can trace this through hitler and napolean all the way back through the ages to caesar.
you see a non-democratic form of government and think "autocracy" because you have been programmed to. there is a huge space of possible governments, and technology is enabling more of them to be possible. democracy is shit, it is only efficient in value-homogeneous small populations.
you can downvote away but google books means there is no more excuse for being ignorant about the shitty democratic (not political label) historical narrative of good triumphing over evil.
I don't expect to clean out a lifetime of bad memes here and I doubt anyone is still reading but if you are I suggest On Power by Bertrand De Jouvenal: http://www.amazon.com/POWER-BERTRAND-JOUVENEL/dp/0865971137
- the escalation of war throughout modern history, culminating in the world wars, is a fascinating subject. the methodology of total war is so alien to the human psyche that it requires quite a bit of brain washing and careful planning, and even then you constantly have to maintain it via a strict hierarchy, lest you get the sort of unspoken agreements between sides as discussed extensively in the article. the escalation to total war was caused by at least three things:
1. the growth of government as a percentage of GDP (more efficient taxation and indoctrination) allowed ever greater a nation's economic output to be turned to aggression. see Bertrand de Jouvenal's excellent On Power for a lengthy dissertation on this subject.
2. the slow change from a multi-polar to bi-polar power arrangement. in the animal kingdom you will see "posture fighting" between contesting males where little actual damage is done. This is because a real fight is disastrous, even for the male who wins since he may be weakened so much that he can not now defend himself against a third male who will swoop in on this opportunity. Likewise with a multi-polar power arrangement. No one nation will devote tons of resources to a total war with another because doing so will weaken both with regards to other nations. what we see in pack animals (including primates) is that aggression generally only occurs when one side has overwhelming advantage (5 vs 1) and thus can act without reprisal. larger fights, while rarer, usually end when one side gets a kill. why doesn't the winning side press the advantage? again, the risk is large for an uncertain payoff.
3. of course, technology. this one is harped on by so many history channel shows that I feel no need to go into it.
- >My tentative theory is that the systems, incentives, and technologies in modern world have managed to slightly empower the individual, and massively empower large organizations, but at the significant expense of small organizations
This is basically the thesis of Bertrand de Jouvenal's "On Power" (1945).
