There are so many ideas that sound good on paper but are bad in practice, and that happen to be convenient for the goals of unscrupulous powerful people.
The notion that society as a whole will at some point stop falling for such ideas seems very optimistic to me.
Centralization of power has so far made every society deeply flawed or even hellish. The three societies you mentioned are the only ones where power was purposefully decentralized, and that seems to be the most promising path forward that was never allowed to stretch its legs.
I don't think so. Pretty much all the negative things about Bolsheviks were already prominently there by 1919. Anti-democracy, mass terror, torture, concentration camps, you name it.
You get my point, though. It's one thing to propose an idyllic society. It's another thing to try to implement it. In all cases where there's been a serious attempt at implementation on any scale above local and short-lived, we view the results with horror.
Please don't give some tripe about medecine or something...sure we have some fancy new techniques and the like, but that doesn't matter if those systems aren't generally available or rejected on pseudo-religious grounds.
It might be true we have been living longer for a while, but that's a trend of the past 50 years in some areas, not some inexorable progress towards longer lives...
Maybe we have lots of food and entertainment. I suppose that is good, in theory. But again, not something of recent history, that has more to do with the availability of large shipping vessels and TV production...
The part people may find optimistic is continuing to improve in any appreciable manner, versus some gains made decades ago...
You can have personal improvement, and you can continue to reap the benefits of existing systems, this is not the same as general progress or, progress made by society, much less any sort of indication that progress will continue...
This points to what I think is the missing amendment to the US constitution, when a media company gets big enough to influence significant portions of the electorate it should not be allowed to be owned by a single billionaire or a small family. Large media ownership should be distributed as widely as possible across society so that one rich guy isn't able to force his opinions on everyone.
For a few brief years, it looked like we were there.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...
It was a realization that nothing, except technology, is changing. We're not entering into some scary unknown time, but just regressing to the mean. Humanity seems to be stuck on a perpetual loop, probably because we really suck at learning from the past and inevitably convince ourselves that 'this time it'll be different.' And even on those issues we do seem to have made progress on, like slavery - is it just a coincidence that slavery ended universally, after millennia of efforts, only just after the Industrial Revolution and mass urbanization which effectively obsoleted it?
On the theme of slavery, consider that we mostly don't even blink twice now a days when a country drags men off the street, separates them from their family, puts a gun in their hand, and throws them in a trench to kill and most likely die. Those that continue to refuse to kill not infrequently end up 'dying in training.' To say nothing of barrier troops. This is all much worse than even slavery, but we casually accept it, because it hasn't yet been obsoleted. If the role of humans in warfare is ever minimized, imagine what lovely things they'll write about our morality and hypocrisy, just as we are wont to do about the past today.
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As for the chapter referenced, Ctrl+F for "And democracy has her own good" and read from there. "Drone" is a term you'll see throughout classical writings. It's a reference to drone bees who contribute nothing to a hive, but exist solely to consume and mate if they can. So it's a term that refers to everything from beggars to criminals to corrupt politicians who prefer enriching themselves and special interests over broadly socially motivated politicking. So in modern times it would include practically all politicians.
Ukraine is doing both at an increasingly absurd scale, all the while people wave their flag-of-the-week in their social media profile, either aloof of what they support or seeing no problem with it.
The same was probably, more or less the same, during slavery. People adopting views based on tribe rather than any real thought or even knowledge of what they support. The overwhelming majority of everybody obviously never owned a slave and likely had an idealized view of the institution.
Russia doesn't give out passports to men until they've fulfilled military requirements. Please inform yourself.
Ukraine, by contrast, immediately after the war began they made it illegal for men of "fighting age", which they define as between the ages of 18 and 60, to leave the country. And they have been relying on forced conscription for an ever larger percent of their entire armed forces since then. This is why you can find countless highly disturbing videos of Ukrainian TCC (conscription) officers brutalizing and even killing civilians in efforts to conscript them and throw them on the front lines. Wiki has some sampling of incidents here [1] which I will not quote. In many cases they are, again, quite disturbing.
People really have no clue what they are supporting over there.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_Center_of_Recruitm...
Semyon* (name changed) was conscripted in Chelyabinsk, in the Urals, having served in the Pskov region of northwestern Russia for the first five months, where he was asked to sign a contract several times but refused. On 20 April, he was transferred to the Chebarkul garrison and signed up for professional service after just two and a half hours.
His mother says that on the way to the unit he complained of being actively pressured into signing a contract, after which Semyon was taken to a separate office, where a sergeant fired a gun next to him and showed him a video of dead and wounded people, threatening that the same thing would happen to him if he didn’t sign. Semyon broke under the pressure, his family says. On the same day, he applied to have the contract annulled, saying he had signed under duress, asking for it to be declared invalid as the commander had not yet signed it, but to no avail.
Not to mention authorities raiding places like gyms to get the conscripts in the first place:
Russian police are targeting migrants and draft-age men in a wave of raids on gyms and martial arts clubs across major cities, with activists describing them as part of a broader crackdown that intensified ahead of the country’s spring military draft. Lawyers in multiple regions told Sever Realii that gym raids now happen at least twice a month in major cities. Russian citizens are typically sent to enlistment offices, while foreign nationals are taken to temporary detention centers. Many are ultimately deported.
In one raid, a military officer reportedly accompanied police to hand out conscription notices directly. Activists say authorities are also targeting naturalized citizens who have obtained Russian passports but avoided military service, pressuring them to sign military contracts under threat of deportation or loss of citizenship.
"For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, 'Of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods.' If, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves." [1]
Of course society could have gotten by without slavery, but it wouldn't have been as convenient, particularly for the wealthy and political classes who were the exact sort that could afford to own slaves. And the exact same is true of conscription. If people are not willing to die for the political class of a country, who are the political class to insist they die for them? And the greatest irony is that the most 'brave' of the political class are often made up of cowards and draft dodgers themselves. But it's an entirely different game when it's not their life on the line anymore.
People, who live in a time when humans in warfare are obsoleted, will look back upon this as even more vile and barbaric than slavery. And they'll damn us all for it. Yet it's an issue that "we", the people without power, mostly do not even really think about one way or the other - because it's just how it is. We might speak out against it, those in affected regions might even start their own 'Underground Railroads' to escape tyranny, but everybody knows it won't end.
By contrast, others may see the fertility crisis as not even an issue, let alone a crisis. After all humanity's not going to go extinct anytime in the foreseeable future, and billions of people is a lot of people. There are even some who think it may be a good thing - fewer people could reduce the impact of human emissions for instance.
So this difference in worldview would lead to radically different perspectives on seemingly completely unrelated things, like LGB representation in childhood education. Add in a bit of a radicalism and these otherwise reasonable disagreements gradually breed extreme hostility.
And I don't think there's any real solution here. No side can ever win, because neither view is really wrong. The best solution is probably general decentralization. But most people don't realize their opinions are opinions, and think they are factually and objectively correct - and want to impose their views on everybody, which trends towards attempts at centralization, inevitable collapse, and repeat.
Our socioeconomic/political systems currently do not define any hard upper or lower limits on its primary driver (economic power) and does not address feedback loops (e.g. more capital availability -> larger scale -> more economies of scale -> more market share -> more capital -> more scale).
Some will always want much more than others. Some will always take paths that are easy. Some will have no problem taking advantage of the weak.
Keeping all those traits in check is a full time job. Its not free. It eats into limited time and energy. Sooner or later compromises are made.
Therefore parasites and predators always find space in any ecosystem you look at. You might be able to turn off/keep in check behavior of a few. But never all.
Or maybe you think we’ll destroy the world or something, in which case that’s “chicken little syndrome.”
It’s hard to imagine we will regress in any meaningful way. That’s basically never happened, and even when it did, during the “dark ages,” we recovered – on a long enough timeline (which isn’t even that long) we’ve made exponential progress in every facet of life. There’s a lot to look forward to. Or you can be pessimistic about it during the few brief years you have in this world…
Thought experiment - how many generations does it take to forget grandpa?
If Grandpa is the issue, their grandchildren may have falsely optimistic opinions of their corrupt roots. Their children (grand grand children) don't have the same rosy memories, and don't get why Mom and Dad are into their weird rituals. But it's Mom and Dad so it can't be so bad, right?
It's not till their grandchildren, normally, that (assuming they are decent people and the trait isn't genetic or somehow encouraged by society) people can maybe see what utter crappy people their grand grand grand grand parents were, and maybe do something about it.
There will always be reasons to oppose any current equilibrium for improvements, and that's ok.
(*) That's the proper term to denote a concept that justify the will of a group, regardless of its veracity.
Considering history, I see no signs of converging to some end state. I guess technical progress and knowledge accumulate somehow, but even this is not linear and history shows plenty of exemples of drastic step backs. But even assuming an ever increasing technical progress, in a world with infinite resources (that's a very big assumption), what would be the end state? I guess, given we are on HN, a state were humans program conscious machines which then do all the hard work? In other words, the ideology of bigtech?
I don’t want to live through any more historical times but I increasingly believe we’re on a precipice of incredible amounts of political violence, both against people who don’t deserve it, and people who do. And those people would be wise to pump the brakes a little.
Politicians don’t have this headship and from their behavior clearly don’t view themselves as stewards of their country and people (they do care about their own children though). An example of this would be Mike Lee’s attempt to sell off American public lands to foreign interests. The money raised from this would not make a dent in the deficit or debt, and it would take away beautiful fishing and hiking from Americans. Thankfully this was done away with, but a good king would never consider selling public land in the middle of his country to foreigners.
Now compare a good king to a good politician.
Media conglomerates manufacture consent far more subtly than the Church ever could. Student debt servitude, rent extraction, and opaque health insurance bureaucracy bind millions in ways that feel inescapable. Yet because it’s all cloaked in market-speak and "public interest" we barely notice our chains. Recognizing these illusions is painful, but it’s also the first step toward tearing them down. If we’re honest, the next century of political and economic evolution won’t be about perfecting the PR, it’ll be about building genuine checks on power, creating institutions that can’t be gamed, and demanding real accountability, even when the robes change.
All values and freedoms need to be fought for constantly and perpetually. They are not hard constants outside rare exceptions when it’s very clearly defined law. It’s simply the sum of the efforts of people currently on the planet. They are always under threat by people with good intentions or more overt bad ones.
What you may be seeing is a decline in people publicly pushing for them, especially in our institutions (politics, press, academia etc). But you can still find plenty of people fighting for them if you look deeper.
I agree with everything you said, but that's a rather odd conclusion. things are getting worse, not better.
But it seems we've only replaced those mechanisms with more refined versions (manufacturing consent through mass media, surveillance and indirect indentured servitude through student debt, rent and health insurance).
We probably have another century of socioeconomic and political evolution to go before we reach a decent end state.