zlacker

How do you contend oligarchy. All countries seem to tend towards it. Past revolutions were localized, but this one needs a global one which seems impossible.

>>enligh+(OP)
I once had a discussion with one of my history teachers. In class, he had talked about how, in the waning hours of the Roman Republic, many of the intellectuals of the time wrote many books about the corruption of the government and pled for the preservation of what was. I asked him if this was a broader symptom of the failure of a governmental system. He thought for a moment and said "Yes," comparing several other periods with intense bursts of critical writing.

Then I asked him a question he didn't quite seem ready for. I observed that I was seeing the same thing, the writing of many books on the subject of preserving the Western traditions of freedom, and the subject of corruption and manipulation of the public. Then I asked him, "Has it ever worked?"

"What do you mean?" he said.

"Has the writing of these books, the sounding of the alarm bell, so to speak, ever worked to save them... to preserve them?"

The answer hung between us, and we paused for a moment, unwilling to continue the conversation to its logical conclusion. We moved on to discussing other topics. We did come back to the conversation a few weeks later. The small consolation was that future societies often used the criticism of the lessons learned in the past as guidance for forming new ones. Jefferson and Madison crafted the U.S. Constitution as much from the triumphs of Athens, Rome, and British Common Law, as from failures of these same institutions.

To answer your question more directly, I wish I knew. I only know of many ways that don't seem to work. Recording the fall as honestly as possible might help posterity, if the record survives.

Law code has some analogous structures to software programs, but the machines the law code executes on are made up of people, and it depends on the good intent and wisdom of the people executing the code. Good will, good intent, and especially wisdom seem to be in short supply, most especially among leaders beholden to the control of others. I think that's the underlying problem, the hardware of society, so to speak.

We've dismantled or corrupted most of the societal mechanisms that used to maintain the health of the said hardware, and we've failed to replace them with anything, or at least with anything anywhere near as effective. Mechanisms like education have been corrupted to steer our young people straight into the mob manipulation technologies of social media and ideologies of power maintenance for the new oligarchies. So we're back to "I wish I knew."

What do you think?

>>enligh+(OP)
Jefferson suggested that we just have another revolution every 200 years.

>>slowmo+R7
It does seem like we are approaching a critical point where a new baseline of rational knowledge is created, but not quite there. I think it is because there still not enough pain at a population level. There’s a section of people which has realized but can’t do much other than being mere spectators. Beyond that point, when it happens, we would probably have a new normal and perhaps a new experiment like USA, better than the previous one and humanity beyond a nation’s boundary can benefit. Now I’m confused if I’m a pessimist or an optimist.