There has to be a way for society to function healthily for all, and to disable corruption at the same time. There HAS to… Like, if we can feel when something is bad, we can eventually articulate it, and if we can eventually articulate it, we should be able to design ways to make it better. The society programming will get more and more complex until we figure it out.
I think knowing what we want is key. And to want, you have to first know. We’ve simultaneously made so much progress in the past 100 years, but also so, so little. The human condition is slow-mode.
have you watch cgp Grey’s video called rules for rulers? I think therein lies a lot of answers. the TL;DW version is that rulers need to keep their other top ministers happy lest they revolt. they have no such strong incentive to cater to the common people.
I suspect while keeping the ministers happy they engage in either illegal or not entirely legal actions at least once in a while. indeed to rise as a ruler you probably can’t be too moral either.
so of course they don’t want to take away their tools that help them stay in power. I think the solution lies in what we accept from leaders in terms of amoral conduct. and there’s the conundrum. this needs to be a society wide thing where the vast majority recognize blamrnshifting, gaslighting, moving the goalposts and so on. and don’t accept to be manipulated and lied to that way. most people simply don’t care. and most people also use these exact same manipulation tools in their life as well. which in turn means they don’t want that taken away either.
that’s essentially exactly what we see play out in reddit too. most people can’t be bothered to act on spez’s selfishness. and the mods who by rights should be bothered cling to hard to their own little fiefdoms of absolute power.
It’s not knowing what we want, we all know what we WANT, it’s knowing what we NEED. We WANT to have more than anybody else (More money, more power, more … things)… But it’s not what we NEED. We need food, water, air, a safe place to sleep, love.
But we instead spend a bunch of time, resources and energy on things we don’t really need, and convince everyone else that THINGS define our worth, that we can only be good if others are worse off. We promote greed and hatred. We APPLAUD that shit and then try to emulate it. It’s not what we need though.
The man in power won’t be giving it up voluntarily. So you join the revolution, and follow a charismatic leader into a civil war. You win and in the end you find out, you have been backing Napoleon and now he’s the one chopping off heads.
It’s easy to say nice things about Napoleon now that he’s safely six feet under. He trashed a lot of Europe in ways that never healed. People moved on, as they always do, and now it is possible to say that certain things got better because of what Napoleon did. But that doesn’t mean it was all good at the time. A lot of people who followed Napoleon would have been looking around going, “Wait, why are there all these dead bodies everywhere? Are we the baddies?” And they would have been right to ask.
I don’t know if that was just a case of power corrupting, though, I think Napoleon was one of those people who just wakes up every morning and says “today, I’m going to conquer [insert random town],” and somehow manages to do it. And, sure, maybe he had a net positive effect in the long run, but at the time, anyone following him was wading through buckets of blood.
Napoléon certainly got a lot more people killed than Robespierre.
He was a military genius but the battle he fought still had a lot of blood from French and other. Millions of dead for nothing but some little man glory.
There has to be a way for society to function healthily for all, and to disable corruption at the same time. There HAS to… Like, if we can feel when something is bad, we can eventually articulate it, and if we can eventually articulate it, we should be able to design ways to make it better. The society programming will get more and more complex until we figure it out.
I think knowing what we want is key. And to want, you have to first know. We’ve simultaneously made so much progress in the past 100 years, but also so, so little. The human condition is slow-mode.
have you watch cgp Grey’s video called rules for rulers? I think therein lies a lot of answers. the TL;DW version is that rulers need to keep their other top ministers happy lest they revolt. they have no such strong incentive to cater to the common people. I suspect while keeping the ministers happy they engage in either illegal or not entirely legal actions at least once in a while. indeed to rise as a ruler you probably can’t be too moral either.
so of course they don’t want to take away their tools that help them stay in power. I think the solution lies in what we accept from leaders in terms of amoral conduct. and there’s the conundrum. this needs to be a society wide thing where the vast majority recognize blamrnshifting, gaslighting, moving the goalposts and so on. and don’t accept to be manipulated and lied to that way. most people simply don’t care. and most people also use these exact same manipulation tools in their life as well. which in turn means they don’t want that taken away either.
that’s essentially exactly what we see play out in reddit too. most people can’t be bothered to act on spez’s selfishness. and the mods who by rights should be bothered cling to hard to their own little fiefdoms of absolute power.
It’s not knowing what we want, we all know what we WANT, it’s knowing what we NEED. We WANT to have more than anybody else (More money, more power, more … things)… But it’s not what we NEED. We need food, water, air, a safe place to sleep, love.
But we instead spend a bunch of time, resources and energy on things we don’t really need, and convince everyone else that THINGS define our worth, that we can only be good if others are worse off. We promote greed and hatred. We APPLAUD that shit and then try to emulate it. It’s not what we need though.
Benevolent AI leader.
The issue is that power and money corrupt.
The man in power won’t be giving it up voluntarily. So you join the revolution, and follow a charismatic leader into a civil war. You win and in the end you find out, you have been backing Napoleon and now he’s the one chopping off heads.
Napoleon wasnt all that bad of a choice to back though. His decisions did a lot of lasting good.
Having backed Robespierre though must have made a lot of people feel really silly about themselves.
It’s easy to say nice things about Napoleon now that he’s safely six feet under. He trashed a lot of Europe in ways that never healed. People moved on, as they always do, and now it is possible to say that certain things got better because of what Napoleon did. But that doesn’t mean it was all good at the time. A lot of people who followed Napoleon would have been looking around going, “Wait, why are there all these dead bodies everywhere? Are we the baddies?” And they would have been right to ask.
I don’t know if that was just a case of power corrupting, though, I think Napoleon was one of those people who just wakes up every morning and says “today, I’m going to conquer [insert random town],” and somehow manages to do it. And, sure, maybe he had a net positive effect in the long run, but at the time, anyone following him was wading through buckets of blood.
Napoléon certainly got a lot more people killed than Robespierre.
He was a military genius but the battle he fought still had a lot of blood from French and other. Millions of dead for nothing but some little man glory.
Only 30 000 died because of the terror