Oddbean

Generalization is one of the greatest threats to the human intellect and the human species. Worst among the various types of generalization are: - equalizing political rulers and state laws with the nations' peoples, - equalizing religious leaders and religious texts with the religions' followers, - equalizing nations' history with the present day nations' peoples' morals, and - equalizing the evil deeds of some men with a certain skin colour with the ethics of other men with the same skin colour. These narratives fuel all kinds of wars, all kinds of terror, and all kinds of evil actions at an individual level. Furthermore, I truly believe that ignoring these terrible forms of generalization is the greatest and most widespread sin committed by intellectuals throughout history. This intellectual bankruptcy has fuelled a hatred that political leaders all over the planet and throughout all of our history continually exploit in order to achieve their evil objectives. The war of ideas must be fought, and if we don't succeed with weeding out these false beliefs, we will never see an end to politicians' ambitions to steal our freedom.

I agree, but a nation's politics is generally a reflection of its culture. One can't have a state and then expect to be completely separated from the deeds of that state. Unfortunately, it is the case that bad culture (mostly collectivism from what I see) leads to even worse states over time that become incredibly difficult for people to change.

Peace! FWIW, I agree with both of you. History is a summation of human choices, but those choices are always limited; by culture, by available information, and by material circumstances. I see the French Revolution as the quintessential failure of courage and high ideals to overcome the deeply damaged culture of late-Bourbon France. The revolutionaries' rural great-grandparents had lived in largely self-governing villages with little exposure to bureaucracy and few positive experiences of hierarchy; but the revolutionaries either no longer had or did not value this cultural toolkit for organising human relations and instead expanded the Ancien Regime's hierarchical bureacracy into the model for their new State.

I just have a problem with this interpretation of society with the social contract idea and all of this generalization about "the people" brought X to power. Re. the revolution, you might find this book interesting https://image.nostr.build/df93c90b9d9edf5cc1e6852c479355208687a974feb4666945fd9f2dd4757cf0.jpg

Yes. The content of the book is interesting, I learned several things I didn't know. But I see that he has self published it and that the last chapter refers to the rest of the book as "this article". The chapters also almost look like separate articles, and they afe not very well tied together. So I kind of get the sense that he sat with gold but no publisher wanted to take it, and he might just have decided just to publish it without doing the last hard 10% of the work. Who knows, the book might have been seen as too dangerous.

They almost never 'take' power. Politicians are given power and you can see many historical examples of this. Many of the worst examples have simply abused power that never should have been given to government by the people in the first place. It was always going to happen and doesn't just pop into existence out of thin air. That isn't to say that there aren't individuals within these contexts who didn't consent, only that enough of the culture and population did. Otherwise, it never would happen. Hitler wouldn't happen. Mao wouldn't happen. Stalin wouldn't happen. People like that were given too much power because of bad dominant culture/philosophy and abused it.