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Re: Part 2

Posted by Dissident on Friday, January 12 2018 at 0:15:20PM
In reply to reply to Part 2 posted by Baldur on Thursday, January 11 2018 at 7:31:32PM


You only see those who chose to be at the top.

I do not see large numbers of bureaucrats running for office and actually making it to the top because they didn't want to be at the top. Otherwise, their non-conformist positions keep them from receiving the campaign contributions that get them to the top.

You don't see the many who could be at the top but chose not to take on the burdens involved..

We do not see many people giving up power because of its burdens. The perks tend to be too high.

You don't see those at the top in their private lives when they discuss the difficulties involved.

Oh, I have. I just do not seem them concluding that the difficulties are not worth the rewards.

You see that type in their public life where they put on an appearance of strength to reassure those they are leading, or you see those who delight in accepting the benefits and displaying their power without ever taking on any of the responsibilities.

The majority of those in power have no responsibilities to anyone other than themselves. They do not care for those who are "under" them. If such was the case, as I said, you wouldn't see heaps of homeless, starving, and war-devastated people in the world. And you wouldn't see a lot of other bad things, too.

In former times, the latter were shunned by decent people as charlatans and con men.

Usually, because of the decisions they routinely made, not simply because they had power. Those in power have always been worshiped and revered far more than they have been loathed.

You broke this down into three parts to reply to it, but it is in fact a single thought: there are many people who are not smart and are unskilled and need guidance.

I am quite aware of the many necessary jobs performed by people who are less than geniuses. I recall working with one man - a very friendly, hard-working man who always tried to do right by others. One day we were given a repetitive task, and he had difficulty with one part of it:





Point is, this guy was actually useful, but he needed guidance.

Yet, there are many smart people in charge who make bad decisions because they are simply not good people, or simply not concerned for the welfare of others. Dictatorships do not tend to be benevolent for good reason.

(He was not even a hard case - this was just a particularly humorous incident that illustrates the point.)

Omg -- did you laugh at him then?

I would have been just as happy if he could have retained this know-how from one day to the next. I had no special desire to tell him how to perform a simple task that he had repeated hundreds of times the day before.

Yet many smart people in positions of power keep making the same errors over and over again, because their intelligence does not automatically equip them with enlightenment or concern for their fellow human.

Power does not so much corrupt, as power attracts the corruptible.

Which is why decent people tend to be reluctant to seek power in the first place.

They have been taking care of people for a long time. The problem is people moving the goalposts.

Meaning, people in power do not want to meet those goalposts, because then a few in power wouldn't be powerful, and thus wouldn't be "needed."

It wasn't so long ago that famines were fairly common (they still happen occasionally in especially mismanaged parts of the world). Just five generations ago central heat and plumbing was incredibly rare, and air conditioning unheard of. If we go back to Europe, just a few hundred years ago most people would never in their lifetime go more than five miles from their home. Doctors? more likely to kill you than cure you. Communications? You might not be able to understand the people in a town ten miles away, if you ever got a chance to meet them at all. Clothing? This is an important interview - borrow the good shirt from your cousin! (Actually heard that from a Belarussian, regarding the state of things only 40 years ago. He was part of the elite, so he had access to a dress shirt when it was needed! But a hundred years earlier it might have been a conversation in a moderately prosperous family in the U.S.) Meanwhile in Venezuela the ordinary folk sent the smart people packing ... and now they are killing rats for food, in a country with the biggest oil reserves in the world at a time when oil prices are high, in a country with plenty of fertile land and a year-round growing season.

Um, those "smart" people were well known for being vicious tyrants. Do not confuse intelligence with wealth and (yes) power. You do not need to be intelligent to have power. Ask the royal family of England.

Why do we live in such comparatively prosperous times? Because of a lot of smart people and a system that made it easy for them to help themselves by helping others.

And this lot of smart people were working at the bottom, not by making decisions from the "top."

And what would you be doing around a Belarussian in the first place?

A valid criticism. But that was discussing how that state of affairs came about, not saying we should return to it.

Though there comes a point at which a person is making such a mess of things, and if those who care about that person do not know a better way of protecting them.... Well, at what point is intervention ethical? That can be a very difficult call.


When it can be proven that serious demonstrable harm is resulting, and not just "harm" to the sensibilities of the person in "control." Or that the person in control can prove it, and is not just making assumptions.

What I do know is that the people who cannot make good decisions for themselves, should not be put in a position where they can dictate their demands to others.

The thing is, we can make that argument for just about anyone who makes a decision for themselves that we disagree with. And those who have power are often considered right by "default" whenever they make bad decisions, since the attitude has always been that obeying authority figures is always more important than doing the "right" thing. Hence, those who are considered apt to make bad decisions for themselves are most often simply those who do not have the legal power to exercise it. Hence, their decisions, both actual and pending, are always presumed to be "bad" unless they are in agreement with the authority figures.






Dissident






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