BadgerJelly » November 23rd, 2017, 3:41 pm wrote:This could be a good thing. It would be at least a more clear tyranny and I am all for tyranny if the tyrant is a good tyrant (using the the ancient Greek definition of "tyrant") This is good because rather than the people facing the puppet of the disassociated corporate interests they'll be faced with someone who is one of those interests. That may be the one thing that saves The US from dropping democracy completely.
Yes, it is interesting how all (what I call) 'discerning' societies seem to veer towards a democratized tyranny - whether through special interests for the wealthy or cadres vying for dominance. Ultimately the foundational political model does not matter so much, because any long-term imbalance it creates is addressed by those powerful parties that have long-term investments in the benefits of mass-cooperation -
in efficient civil stability.
We see this in America, for example, with the
Sherman Antitrust Act: "If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale of any of the necessaries of life."
Capitalism is 'reigned in' for the benefit of the national long-term vision when it needs to be. Pure Capitalists may call Sherman and his supporters 'economic tyrants' of sorts, but then Capitalists who 'get there first' and monopolise resources easily become another kind of tyrant - albeit most often a seemingly less prosocial one.
What we see operating below all of these models and systems, then, is the 'virtue' of cooperative ethics, ethics which are in turn governed by the raw economics of cooperative behaviour. And suddenly we are back to the work of Robert Axelrod and 'Tit for Tat' nicety that I have so often mentioned on this forum elsewhere. For there is just no arguing with the mathematics of efficient resource procurement.
Efficiency is not the be-all and end-all for survival, of course, but it tends to be when there are biological 'arms races' going on between competing cultures, as there is between neighbour, village, town, city, state, and nation across the whole of the world at present.
Thus, the more efficiently a product can be produced, stored, and not need to be replaced, then the 'fitter' a state can be economically on the competitive world stage, and thus weather global storms (such as a financial crisis.)
Another term one could use for social efficiency is
wisdom, but in the US, for example, wisdom can be hijacked by superstitious or ethnically-driven interests to the point that national efficiency is driven down to the point of dysfunction.
'Otherisation' of potential assets - business partners, military support, political sympathisers and so forth limits options and scares away greater cooperation benefits. The phrase 'many hands make light work' seems wasted on the likes of Trump - he seems to think people are better off broken into small competing factions. That is only a recipe for conflict and thus wasted energy.
Yes, many hands competing to please the boss all at the same time can possibly please the boss better than a team of cooperating lazy workers, but a team of
highly-motivated cooperating workers would be able to specialize and work together in intelligent ways that far supercede competing individuals. This is the true wisdom of all animal societies - including our bodies; communities of specialised cells.
The internal competition that Capitalism relies upon, then, is ALWAYS out-competed by highly-motivated cooperative external communities when available resources are equal. It is as simple as comparing a tumour-ridden human body (a closed community of competing cellular factions) with a healthy human body - a closed cellular community with a unified prosocial vision. The choice of 'body politic' therefore results in 'splinter cells', and thus inner turmoil and less efficiency, or not ;P . You see, the wisdom is latent in the very language we use - we know all of this in our hearts already, if we care to listen...