"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."

That may be your experience. My experience - at least at the local level - is rather different. That is not to say that leaders are incredibly compassionate and caring people - those traits taken to the extreme make leaders ineffective, for one thing - but I have found leaders to desire the general health and well-being of their people. The reasons for homeless, starving, and war-devastated people in the world are a bit more complex than a lack of caring from the top, though that is sometimes present. Most persistently homeless people, in particular, have personal problems that are not easily addressed.

"Omg -- did you laugh at him then?"

Not out loud ... but, yes. I chuckled a little to myself.

"many smart people in positions of power keep making the same errors over and over again,"

True, in part because intelligence is not the same as wisdom, in part for ideological reasons that makes them resistant to believing a certain action can fix a problem even when they have seen it happen repeatedly. (For example, capitalism of either the free market sort or the neo-feudal sort best exemplified in Japan has consistently lifted people out of poverty and provided them with a decent standard of living and a fair amount of equality, while communism and socialism of every sort have consistently mired its victims in grinding poverty, even grinding relatively wealthy nations like Venezuela into horrors of starvation and wretchedness while a few politically favored people live in luxury, yet this has not prevented otherwise intelligent people from attacking capitalism and promoting communism or socialism as a way to eradicate poverty.)

But on the other hand, I can't think of any people in power (who are not mere puppets) who, after learning a simple three-step process and repeating it over a thousand times would come back the next day and ask "Now how did we do that again?"

"Um, those "smart" people were well known for being vicious tyrants."

If I were to agree that those smart people were vicious tyrants, would you agree with my point that they have done far more to improve the lives of the vast majority of humanity than all the well-meaning but incompetent people?

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

Granted. The chief, most important decision made at the top was to stay out of the way. That's what Laissez-faire means.

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

Why wouldn't I know a Belarussian? I know lots of people from all around the world.

"the attitude has always been that obeying authority figures is always more important than doing the "right" thing."

Are you sure you're American?




Baldur