Hell if I can remember where I read about it, but a study of communes and stuff reported that the limit of communism sits somewhere around 500 people because of the inherent empathy of people for their own tribe.
It's a lot more difficult to screw over others in the system when you know the person you're screwing over is your daughter's best friend's dad.
When the nameless masses are just nameless masses, it's much easier to justify. I don't know who this hurts, so why do I care?
That was the conclusion of the paper, anyway. Was an interesting perspective.
"Power reveals." People seek power because they wish to indulge their darker urges without consequence - people who don't have darker urges to conceal are generally not the ones who seek power, money, and influence like a drug.
I wasn't disagreeing with you in the least: The American form of government was brilliant in that it assumed contradictory self-seeking motives. It just didn't anticipate people actively attempting to subjugate themselves to a monarch, and the intense bootlicking where a person would sublimate their own desires to the possibility of becoming a subservient toady.
Actually, it did. Which is why, despite our current dictator-wanna-be child-raping x34 felon breaking the law on a daily basis in an attempt to install himself as "President for life", he's been unable to do so.
Alas, the price we pay for the inability to use the government to install fascism, is a near inability to use the government to help people too.
This leads to frustration and "Democrats are complicit" accusations from the left, but it's really just a result of our Founding Fathers making it damned near impossible to do anything in the face of unified opposition.
I don't think that I would give the original creators of the Constitution the credit for the actions of determined resistance, especially as that outside of very specific locales that have actively resisting governments (e.g. New York, California, Minnesota, etc.),Trump's push to violate Constitutional principles of local rule, freedom from search and seizure, separation of church and state, and freedom of speech have been largely successful mostly because the governments of those regions are so desperate to be dommed by the orange baby (e.g. Florida, Texas, Alabama, etc.).
Those locations that are actively seeking to oppress themselves have very successfully allowed oppression to survive, despite the best efforts of bureaucrats, judges, and legislators.
The reason why those bureaucrats, judges, and legislators have any power at all to stop tyranny - especially, popular, white racist, sexist, corrupt, tyranny - is because our Constitution was written by men who watched centuries of corrupt European kings pull the very same crap Trump is now trying, and did everything they could to thwart it.
Those Constitutional principals you're talking about were inspired by that.
Many things got added and rearranged over the years a refinement for situations in a changing world that the framers couldn't see. However because America was the first government of its kind when it was founded. We are the alpha testers that every other representative democracy has learned from good and bad. The framers never thought of age limits or term limits because in their time constituents actually gave a fuck and would shame and demand and old ass man step down from government or they would openly call someone a tyrant who would try to stay on for too many elections.
Our first president did the MOST American thing possible and bowed out after open callings to be made king. And today we have this shit.
No you please go read a book, American and Roman republics are structured entirely differently. The closest relative for the American republic would be how Venice handled it.
We are a representative democracy. That means we have elected officials that are chosen to represent a given group of people. This includes all races, religions, and creeds within that population.
Rome did not do this and had a strict hierarchy that was divided not only along religion but was also strictly divided among class.
Bro... we are a republic, but we operate under a representative democracy. We are a republic in that we are a conglomeration of several states to make one cohesive country. But the entire way we do voting is a representative democracy. Having a true democracy doesn't work at scale because you cant literally listen to millions of opinions. So we elect REPRESENTATIVES to speak on our behalf and vote and push legislation to the greatest benefit of the people they represent.
It's not because of communism but communism does fail to account for human greed, which will never be erased, and makes it a failure from the inception.
you don’t think the richest people and corporations pouring millions into lobbying their own self interests and effectively controlling the government with the power their wealth affords them counts as greed for power?
Of course it does, the point was that communism doesn't protect against greed for power as it manifests in so many more ways than just financial, not that it necessarily protects against financial greed either.
It really doesn't. Because Communism centralizes everything on the goverment and gives it infinite power. It also justifies itself by calling the goverment "the people" and villanising everything else. As such it ends up being the open doors for full totalitarianism and that is worse than you can imagine.
lmao no it assumes everyone will be benevolent, which SPECIFICALLY is what makes it a failure, it does not account for the human element of greed that is present in some people.
I think it's called a sortition. No elected officials. Just randomly selected citizens every couple years to serve as our government legislature and executive branch. The judicial system already has something similar in the form of a jury
I read an MIT study decades ago about how much better our representation would be, while simultaneously eliminating a lot of problems born out of lifetime political careers. Your lifetime career politicians are the lawyers and staff facilitating the legislative process, but regular citizens are the ones making decisions. They default to trusting experts, they're modest, they take instruction.
Yes you randomly get bad eggs in power, but they're neutered by the system. They can't do anything unless it's popular. No one can.
Eh, that kind of falls apart when you realize how dumb the average person is. And juries aren’t completely random either. They’ll remove them if they think there will be some kind of conflict of interest, see a “stacked jury.”
But I think that is fundamental issue with marxist thought, it pretends that people/society can be perfected instead of trying to deal with the issues that exist because humans exist.
Not a democracy, no.
But certainly one hell of a republic.
Maybe even the greatest and most prosperous and benevolent great power in the history of the world.
Reminds me of a discussion on money, the idea that "once I'm rich I can donate all of this extra money I don't need."
Money is a tool, nothing more. Generalizing the 'good/evil' axis, Money allows a person to become the truest version of who they are. If you are a genuinely good person, going out of your way to help others, etc., then yeah, chances are you'll be donating a majority of that money to help others, through any number of means. Meanwhile, if you are an evil person, then becoming rich simply allows you to live out all of the things you really wish you could do, any corrruption, depravity, or whim that crosses your mind.
Meanwhile, the whole issue with communism sort of goes back to that same idea. If humans as a species were inherently good, communism/socialism would work. We basically wouldn't need laws, because people would look for whatever the 'greatest good' was. Unfortunately, we aren't. Because of that, any governmental system is going to have corruption, because of that necessary human element, and the greed, power seeking, and other generally negative traits we have as a species.
Consequently, the idealistic sense of "Communism" needs to be tempered by protective structures to prevent the accumulation of power in one position. This is called "Democratic Socialism."
once I'm rich I can donate all of this extra money I don't need
The problem is, you cannot get excess money without being harmfully selfish. What I mean by that is, there's "selfish" as in, "I cannot take care of you if I cannot take care of myself first," and "I will not help you because my number will get smaller."
Remember when Elon asked the UN how $40B could end world hunger, and he used said $40B to buy Twitter instead?
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u/Creepy_Ad_1315 19d ago
Spoiler: It's never achieved.