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Comment by gooseus | Hacker News Reader

I think Dickens and Elliot are somewhat right and Orwell even demonstrates it in Animal Farm... there was a "public-spirited pig" bending the revolution toward fairness and decency, but it only took one other pig with a monopoly on physical force to overthrow him in an instant. Without "good people", human nature will corrupt any system.

It's the structure of the political and legal systems that really determine how well and fairly those resources are distributed. If you have a political system without checks and balances writing laws, and/or a legal system that does not apply the law equally to all its citizens, then you're going to have a bad time, no matter the economic system you use.

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I think it also shows how tyranny manifests through a series of small pushes. Napoleon didn’t establish an autocracy as soon as old major died - it took him all the way until the end of the book to let the mask drop fully. There were dozens of small ways the other animals could have resisted his rise to power along the way - missed opportunities for good people, aka “the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.”

The Dickens/Elliot argument is simply the more acceptable form of an argument that in it's less acceptable form would be "slavery would be fine if slave-owners were just nicer to their slaves".

All are a from of argument that some people should be be placed in a position of irrevocable power over others (by accident of birth into a privileged race or class) ... and that's all OK if they treat their underlings well. Not that "well" should ever be as well as those on top treat themselves ...

No. The argument is not that some people should be placed in a position of power, let alone an irrevocable one.

The argument is that that you cannot organize a society without having some people in positions of power of some sort. And if you explicitly try to avoid that, you'll end up with someone grabbing it anyway.

So it's better to instead think of how you can set up your society to explicitly give the greatest power only for a limited time, with transparency and accountability, and ideally find a way to give it only to competent and well-meaning people.

A process can replace a position. We don't have Judge Dredd positions of power because we have a process of separating Executive actions from Judicial actions. I believe this line of reasoning allows that we generate our democratically-governed systems in such a manner that governing "positions" of power don't have effective power over the position of the free-willed individual. An example of this effect is how a US citizen has the right to own a firearm & defend themselves with it even though homicide and firing a gun in a city are illegal. The process allows for a person to govern themselves - self-organization occurs such that militias can rightfully exist, and there exists procedural allowances for these guns/militias (positions of power) to exist without being taken away by an official. The greatest power is the individual's, and if your reference is to power that can be given or taken away after some time, this is not the greatest power and it also cannot be given away. "God-given rights" means there are authorities (including the individual) who surpass the highest which any governing authority can claim or be given. This process only works when we recognize that nobody should ever be put in this position to supplant the power of "God".

>in it's less acceptable form would be "slavery would be fine if slave-owners were just nicer to their slaves".

Sure, if we're thinking in a vacuum. Even if we go religious, what's the difference between modern prison and the Garden of Eden? It's part of why we call tech environments with a lot of amenities a "walled garden".

Digression aside, we have millenia of knowledge to know that never ends well and millenia of knowledge to know that slavery is never about trying to treat people well to begin with.

>All are a from of argument that some people should be be placed in a position of irrevocable power over others (by accident of birth into a privileged race or class) ... and that's all OK if they treat their underlings well

In theory, yes. And like slavery we have millenia of knowledge on how NOT to run a country.

But unlike Slavery we have seen that the alternative to no government ends worse. So it's an unfortuante compromise needed for a society in that someone needs to make widespread decisions. The more modern (but not necessarily best) methods to prevent corruption is simply to make sure a person is never in that seat of power for too long.

Now I know this sounds way OT, but...

'Intentionally they create two different for a lack of better'?

P-:

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