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Pudutr0n@lemmy.world 1 week agoI don’t think there’s a system in place that gives resources, status and power to the most cruel beyond nature. The way i see it, power will always corrupt, with or without capital/money/stock/land ownership as a proxy to represent it. Even if we got rid of money. Look at any empire in human history, even before currency was invented (the same thing used to happen with cattle). You’ll see a bunch of ruthless assholes ruling over a few that are comfortable enough and a great majority that are just trying to survive. It’s been this way since we stopped living in tribal settings and invented the city (due to agriculture). And the kicker is decapitating rulers will only get you new ruthless asshole rulers.
Kindness is about how we treat people outside our own tribes, not within them. People learn by example. The ruthless leaders will always be there, but we can stop buying the poison when it’s sold to us and be kind to each other.
chortle_tortle@mander.xyz 1 week ago
I don’t think it’s a core feature of natural law that pedophile rings of rich people can get away without a single consequence, especially when we compare it to same legal system’s treatment of a random wayward low level suspect. Further with small petty theft or individual crimes we are incredibly harsh, leading to some of the hightest rates of imprisonment in the world, but the only amelioration for massive companies doing illegal things is expensive lawsuits that end with the guilty paying back a fraction of they made of the injustice to begin with. These aren’t core aspects of nature, these are how our systems have chosen they should be enforced.
I don’t know that I agree power inherently corrupts, it seems to me more likely that it attracts the corrupt, but in either of these cases the solution isn’t to throw up our hands and give the sword to those most ruthless in their desire to wield it. We build systems of accountability and transparency, keep them in check.
Our recent history is short, and I believe that like we evolve technologically, we evolve socially. We’ve left the idea of divine right as the basis for rule, but many of it’s remnants like white supremacy, patriarchy, and their results still decide the basis of our systems. I believe that if we break those systems and truly ask ourselves as a society, how can we best replicate our virtues in the systems we build, we can construct something more just.
I don’t propose we simply have utopia, but I think we can learn from the past and realize ways to build fairness, honesty, and kindness for others into the laws and ways that we govern. It requires upkeep and there will be disagreements, and the ruthless will always exist, but it doesn’t have to reward the ruthless with leadership. The way our current system rewards health insurance CEOs for finding new methods of rejecting insurance could be replaced with a democratic system that leaves no one enriched by the cruelty of the profits.
Pudutr0n@lemmy.world 1 week ago
ps i love your nickname btw
Pudutr0n@lemmy.world 1 week ago
well if what you’re describing is happening, what else could it be? supernatural law?
furthermore, if as you say the law itself is not followed for certain people, who are we to turn to defend it?
And yes, power attracts the corrupt, but If you don’t think power also inherently corrupts, you haven’t been paying attention. There are no heroes to be placed to rule. Only future dickheads.
We do evolve technologically, but socially i’d think there are cycles with no clear trendline. You speak of patriarchy as if someone decided it to happen. Just like capitalism or any oppresive regime of any color you want, they were not decided or planned. They are just orders that emerged from the multitude of forces and actors in play.
And yes, I’d like to see the world you want to see as well. I’m just not so hopeful for the whole “leadership for the just” thing cause I’ve seen that movie and it ends in “my country now has a dictator”.
chortle_tortle@mander.xyz 1 week ago
I mean to say that just because it’s happening doesn’t mean that it has to be the case. We have a society built off a terrible past, and with it we’ve taken many of it’s atrocious aspects rather than heal them.
Just as it is now, with those that have exclusive right to the legitimate use of violence. The difference being that the legitimate use of violence is built off transparency, accountability, and democracy. When those do not hold, just as it is now, the legitimate use of violence is lost for revolutionary violence by mandate.
If I can be completely frank I think this is a story places like America or the west more generally tells itself to justify the fact that it’s actively chosen to kill anyone that might be too disruptive to the systems that leave the corrupt in power. From the smaller scale with people like Fred Hampton, to entire democratically elected governments, what I have paid attention to is the ways that the US has, bombed, invaded, orchestrated coups, and waged war against those that would challenge their hegemony.
I don’t mean to say for certain any of those places would get it right, or that they didn’t have faults, but for many to look at where they came from and what they built is quite meaningful. And that the paranoia of the worlds largest military trying sabotage a fledgling project is not shocking.
I do find it fitting you refer to it as a movie, and not to demean, but I think it does touch against just how much America tells the story that anyone wanting to make things better is a dictator in disguise while working kill the democracy of nations that would decide against the US.
I don’t know that we much more to the disagreement than this core idea, but I will say I have paid attention to how the US/et al treat anti-capitalist nations, and it has left me unconvinced that it system of immense cruelty that is currently barreling towards ecological collapse is so definitely the only “working” structure of democracy.