Even accounting for the misquote (no hate :) I disagree. History furnishes us with examples aplenty of people who were powerful yet uncorrupted. I believe Frank Herbert was closer to the truth when he wrote:
> “All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.”
For all its many failings, I think this is one of the benefits that religion (an particularly the form of religion popular in Europe during the the last 2000 years) can provide. By having a notion of some god, and a cannon, you can have a list of ideas that everyone considers good, and it makes such demagoguery a little more difficult.
The US Constitution is a similar sort of cannon, but the ideas it proscribes are much more limited.
Europe was home to the most horrific religious violence in human history. From the pogrooms of the views to the spanish inquisition to the horrors of protestant and catholic rivalry. Even nazism drew upon centuries of european religious past.
> By having a notion of some god, and a cannon, you can have a list of ideas that everyone considers good, and it makes such demagoguery a little more difficult.
Actually it makes such demagoguery much easier as it makes it easier to demonize others - infidel, unbeliever, christ killers, apostate, etc. Religion does half the work for the demogogue.
I'm not sure this is true. There has been a lot of horrific religious violence in human history, most of it hasn't been well documented.
Even if it is true, it's not a useful fact. Pre-enlightenment Europe had more religious violence than post-enlightenment Europe because all official violence in per-enlightenment Europe had to be religious. I'm not a historian, but I'm pretty sure post-enlightenment wars in Europe were significantly more violent than the per-enlightenment wars.
Religion is perfectly exploitable for this and has been more often than not in history.
But that said, I agree that someone saying "God is on my side" is inherently problematic in a different way than just "I have the most power to enforce my will". Of course, I don't see that as a value judgement on the existence of religion; after all, regardless of my, or society's, beliefs, the power behind the individual is still there, or not, regardless of their claim of God's support.
I'm an agnostic whose beliefs wrt good and evil correspond much more closely to those of many of my Catholic or Jewish neighbors than those of my extended family who are Baptists or Evangelicals or whatever the hell it is they're doing.
I doubt this is unusual at all.
Where do events such as the Spanish Inquisition or the Crusades fit into that idea?
s/cannon/canon/g
Never seen this before. Simple, elegant, and doesn’t make the poster feel bad. I’m stealing it...
The Founding Fathers were patriots, because America is now the dominant world superpower. But there are a number of groups that attempted to do to America exactly what America did to the British. Daniel Shay, Tecumseh, Sitting Bull, the entire Confederacy, the Anarchist movement of the early 1900s, the Business Plot of 1933, McCarthy, Vietnamese nationalism, Osama bin Laden. How does history remember them now?
If the British Empire had the technology and infrastructure of today's intelligence agencies, the founding fathers would have been arrested as terrorists before they could get 10 people in a room together. There would have been some undercover agent of the Crown showing up to meetings trying to convince George Washington that they needed to go kill the king - and history would remember them all as nothing more than evil terrorists justly apprehended for plotting violence against the state.
> Entrapment is a practice whereby a law enforcement agent or agent of the state induces a person to commit a "crime" that the person would have otherwise been unlikely or unwilling to commit
> Depending on the law in the jurisdiction, the prosecution may be required to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was not entrapped or the defendant may be required to prove that they were entrapped as an affirmative defense.
You've picked a set of figures whose historical legacy spans a very wide spectrum. At one end (largely positive) are Tecumseh and Sitting Bull, and at the other are (largely negative) are Osama and the Confederacy. Shays sits somewhere in the middle, mostly because other than history buffs no one even knows who that is.
Tecumseh and Sitting Bull have positive legacies because Native Americans are not realistic threats to the United States at this point. They weren't always viewed as such: see for example the (fraudulent) Speech at Tuckabatchee, which indicates how people might've viewed Tecumseh in 1860:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tecumseh#Speech_at_Tuckaubatch...
Take the American Civil War, for example. If you (still) believe in the cause, it was a true positive. If you don't, then it was a false positive.
Or, to be less inflammatory, consider the French Revolution. Was that a true positive or false positive, especially considering the aftermath?
You will find absolutely nothing in "equality before the law" which falls victim to the paradox.
Perhaps not historically significant, yet, but clear as night and day when you have lived here over the course of that time.
What has happened in Sweden during this time? It was until very recently almost impossible to have any public, critical opinion about migration without risking being labeled racist. Why? Not sure. But seems to me, a reaction due to fear that Sweden could evolve to something like Nazi Germany. Which of course was not going to happen.
The full quote is worth repeating here.
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.
The problem is the road to hell and heaven are both paved with good intentions.
History is littered with so many warnings of false positives and false negatives, it's hard to be know what to resist and what to accept.
But power corrupts absolutely and I think it's safe to fear unchecked power and those who are loyal to people instead of loyal to ideas. Ideas don't change when they gain or lose power, but people always do.