4 ms·

The best thing about animal farm is that it tells you that it doesn't matter what someone tells you they want to do, once they have power, they are likely be co

by vasco 3y ago

The best thing about animal farm is that it tells you that it doesn't matter what someone tells you they want to do, once they have power, they are likely be corrupted by it. Therefore one should trust no system that depends on a few people being trustworthy, the system itself should have self defense mechanisms and limits both in scope and in time, for wielding power. Communism or at least the soviet flavor failed completely on this last count, and I'm generally not aware of how to make it work without significant centralized power. Social democracies seem to have a nice balance but in online discussion it's like people are either Milton Friedman or Marx apologists and nobody in the middle.

gonehome 3y ago
> The best thing about animal farm is that it tells you that it doesn't matter what someone tells you they want to do, once they have power, they are likely be corrupted by it. I think it was more that a system will abused by the extent to which abuse is possible. Someone benevolent (in the book snowball who was a stand in for Trotsky) will get out maneuvered by someone willing to weaponize all available power (Napolean in the book, Stalin). It’s possible to have someone good for a time (there are occasionally successful monarchs), but the system is not resilient to bad actors. Norms or good intentions are not enough, you have to look at incentives and what abuse is possible within the system. The US is a more resilient system (trump failed to hold onto power despite best efforts), but even so it has weaknesses in places governed primarily by norms. A political system needs to be evaluated by its outcomes in practice, not hypothetical “best case” implementations that ignore incentives.
- toyg 3y ago
  The US is not particularly resilient. FDR got 3 terms and would have probably got a 4th, GWB pre-Katrina had enough political capital to abolish the 2-terms limit had he dared to do so... GWB also widely abused his presidential powers, and never faced any consequences. Trump had to resort to violence simply because he was too weak.
  - mmmmmmtoes 3y ago
    FDR did not have to do any maneuvering whatsoever to get his 4 terms - Grant had already run for a 3rd before him, as had Teddy Roosevelt. There was no rule against it an the people wanted him in power, so he stayed in power. Similarly, GWB didn't run for a third term, regardless of what he "could have" done. Neither of your examples are very strong here.
    - toyg 3y ago
      The point is that the US system, by itself, has no really-strong guarantees against tyrannical rule. The overall political culture of US voters is what produced the results they got, not the system by itself. This is true in reverse too: for example, Italians have been tinkering with their electoral system for 30 years now, but one way or the other they continue to change their rulers almost every year. Systems can make some mechanisms more or less awkward, but in the end it's the shared political norms that make the real difference.
      - mmmmmmtoes 3y ago
        [dead]
  - dghf 3y ago
    FDR did get a fourth term. He died not quite three months into it.
  - gonehome 3y ago
    You can read a lot of the old discussions between the founders Madison, Hamilton, etc. and the type of abuse they were worried about and how they thought the structures they put in place would reduce risk. I think it’s been working ok, but there are issues (issues they often explicitly predicted), see: https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Washington%27s_Farewell_Address https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Washington%27s_Farewell_Add... There is also an element of culture required among the population too that’s necessary. > “I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the state, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally. “This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy. “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.”
- concordDance 3y ago
  I think you might be getting too caught up in people, rather than interests. Even if no individual retains power, you could still have a particular interest (a corporation, a guild, an industry body, an ethnicity) corrupting the legislative, executive or judicial functions of government in their favour.
  - XorNot 3y ago
    But that's just replacing one system in the consideration for another. An organization isn't a person, much like a government is. While it might have persistence, it's a gestalt of the individuals fulfilling different functions within it. The idea that an organization can corrupt a government is just expressing the same issue: the system gets exploited to the extent that exploitation is possible.
Gibbon1 3y ago
My take away is that how societies function is deeply deeply ingrained. Now were going to do things different runs head long in people expectation on whats legitimate. In particular effecting change by wholesale murdering people tends to just make things worse not better.
TotalCrackpot 3y ago
I'm an anarchist, but you can read on for example council communism, which too is a libertarian socialism, it's Marxist and it is against Marxism-Leninism.
brnaftr361 3y ago
"Industrialism" (I lack a better term) is the real bane here. But it's sort of more than that, right? At the macroscopic level I think it's fair to analogize humanity as a system searching for equilibrium. But we can also do work on ourselves through technical and cultural revolutions. My foray into the past, watching the present, and my projections of the future all paint the classic "monkeypaw" trope. We cure childhood disease and population booms, increases the breadth of the economy, consumes masses of fuel and component elements while jointly polluting everything... We destabilize the system, creating novel problems of various sclae, and it just repeats ad nauseum. It doesn't matter what system you use, as long as we're complicating things as such none of them will ever "succeed" because they require some ideal state approximation that we will never let arise. In engineering everything is a compromise, you can't have your cake and eat it too, etc... Neither Marx nor Friedman are really wrong, per se, but they can't be right, either. From there it's just a matter of moral convictions, at least in my opinion, which paints everything with an even less discernible gray.
- 2moreweeks 3y ago
  Quoting: "We cure childhood disease and population booms, increases the breadth of the economy, consumes masses of fuel and component elements while jointly polluting everything... We destabilize the system, creating novel problems of various sclae, and it just repeats ad nauseum. It doesn't matter what system you use, as long as we're complicating things as such none of them will ever "succeed" because they require some ideal state" Yesterday, i saw people disputing at the internet. I'd not read nor join their conflict, but made my jokes about. For today i intended to read, how and what they said. Quoting (another Topic on HN) some Posts more: "Further: progress will occur on real-world problems that can be solved by those methods, making those applications dominant throughout society." (especialy everything looks like its natural to someone) Jesssus! They need a pulling-horse, that dies... (-; "Taste was bitter at the time, but it was never going to be forever. In 2018 models had 100e6 parameters, and in 2013 GPT4 has (wild guess) 2e12 parameters [0]. Conservatively that's 500% per year. At it's peak, hardware never improved at that rate and has since slowed down dramatically. So it was always going to end, and further advancement was always going to revert being driven by a neural net of some sort." The interesting question when neural net will end up driving it. "Posits that making a huge model won't be a competitive strategy for long because it gets to expensive in terms of heavy quantization." # ...you may also like to read about: "KYBERNETIK", "Prozessablaufmaschinen", Bottleneck... (calms) regards...
randomdata 3y ago
> I'm generally not aware of how to make it work without significant centralized power. You get rid of the need for power entirely. Communism, by definition, is free of state. That hinges on achieving post-scarcity. The Communist Party’s primary tenant is achieving post-scarcity to one day usher in communism. The Soviet model failed, really, because they never got there. Probably not because of a poor power dynamic, but because post-scarcity was, and still is, beyond our grasp. It may not even be possible. When you think about it, the Soviet model is fundamentally designed to fail! If everything went according to plan, it would have fallen to communism. It was never meant to be sustainable.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- vasco 3y ago
  What I never understood about communism is what's the point of adding it if you already have post-scarcity? Say you got there, just keep using what got you there. And if to get there you need an oppressive "temporary" state, then I don't want it.
  - randomdata 3y ago
    What are you adding, exactly? Communism is just a thought experiment that imagines what the world will be like when post-scarcity is achieved. Star Trek is a more modern adaptation of the same thought experiment. Perhaps you are referring to actionable ideas we have come up with over the years to try and push us towards post-scarcity?
  - vidarh 3y ago
    The idea is that if that the capability to be post scarcity does not equal being actually post scarcity, and so bringing about actual post-scarcity means ensuring that what is produced actually gets into the hands of everyone one way or the other. One might imagine many different ways of achieving that, but it wouldn't magically happen.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
TotalCrackpot 3y ago
Where are these discussions? I'm an anarchist and could give anarchist lens to wherever is such a discussion happening.
- simonh 3y ago
  YouTube video comments, Reddit subs, Twitt…er I mean X. Probably Facebook. Occasionally Hacker News. In my experience mostly ad hoc rather than one big town hall on politics, though those may exist.
readthenotes1 3y ago
"once they have power, they are likely be corrupted by it." I believe Robert Caro was more insightful than Lord Acton: Power doesn't corrupt; it reveals.
- a1369209993 3y ago
  > Power doesn't corrupt; it reveals. That's true, but it's easy to misrepresent if you don't include another important insight: "I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides." -- Lord Vetinari (by way of Terry Pratchett)
  - dennis_jeeves1 3y ago
    That's a good way to put it. It's very accurate to the extent I understand most humans.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    Really? I call. There has to at least be a shade even though I think he was incorrect. Because otherwise all bosses would be equally shitty and you would not be able to foresee with uttermost certainty how bad people will become shitty bosses when promoted to power. It is equally obvious in the military how you know who will turn out to be really bad people once promoted to sergeants.
    - a1369209993 3y ago
      > would be equally shitty [emphasis added] It's "always bad", not "always equally bad". The upshot is that "Okay, we just need to find someone who power will reveal is not shitty." does not and cannot work in the general case (of amounts of power sufficently large to be worth abusing - your 'good' sergeants are still sergeants, not generals or absolute autocrats).
      - rightbyte 3y ago

by vasco 3y ago

gonehome 3y ago

> The best thing about animal farm is that it tells you that it doesn't matter what someone tells you they want to do, once they have power, they are likely be corrupted by it. I think it was more that a system will abused by the extent to which abuse is possible. Someone benevolent (in the book snowball who was a stand in for Trotsky) will get out maneuvered by someone willing to weaponize all available power (Napolean in the book, Stalin). It’s possible to have someone good for a time (there are occasionally successful monarchs), but the system is not resilient to bad actors. Norms or good intentions are not enough, you have to look at incentives and what abuse is possible within the system. The US is a more resilient system (trump failed to hold onto power despite best efforts), but even so it has weaknesses in places governed primarily by norms. A political system needs to be evaluated by its outcomes in practice, not hypothetical “best case” implementations that ignore incentives.

toyg 3y ago
The US is not particularly resilient. FDR got 3 terms and would have probably got a 4th, GWB pre-Katrina had enough political capital to abolish the 2-terms limit had he dared to do so... GWB also widely abused his presidential powers, and never faced any consequences. Trump had to resort to violence simply because he was too weak.
- mmmmmmtoes 3y ago
  FDR did not have to do any maneuvering whatsoever to get his 4 terms - Grant had already run for a 3rd before him, as had Teddy Roosevelt. There was no rule against it an the people wanted him in power, so he stayed in power. Similarly, GWB didn't run for a third term, regardless of what he "could have" done. Neither of your examples are very strong here.
  - toyg 3y ago
    The point is that the US system, by itself, has no really-strong guarantees against tyrannical rule. The overall political culture of US voters is what produced the results they got, not the system by itself. This is true in reverse too: for example, Italians have been tinkering with their electoral system for 30 years now, but one way or the other they continue to change their rulers almost every year. Systems can make some mechanisms more or less awkward, but in the end it's the shared political norms that make the real difference.
    - mmmmmmtoes 3y ago
      [dead]
- dghf 3y ago
  FDR did get a fourth term. He died not quite three months into it.
- gonehome 3y ago
  You can read a lot of the old discussions between the founders Madison, Hamilton, etc. and the type of abuse they were worried about and how they thought the structures they put in place would reduce risk. I think it’s been working ok, but there are issues (issues they often explicitly predicted), see: https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Washington%27s_Farewell_Address https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Washington%27s_Farewell_Add... There is also an element of culture required among the population too that’s necessary. > “I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the state, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally. “This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy. “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.”
concordDance 3y ago
I think you might be getting too caught up in people, rather than interests. Even if no individual retains power, you could still have a particular interest (a corporation, a guild, an industry body, an ethnicity) corrupting the legislative, executive or judicial functions of government in their favour.
- XorNot 3y ago
  But that's just replacing one system in the consideration for another. An organization isn't a person, much like a government is. While it might have persistence, it's a gestalt of the individuals fulfilling different functions within it. The idea that an organization can corrupt a government is just expressing the same issue: the system gets exploited to the extent that exploitation is possible.

Gibbon1 3y ago

My take away is that how societies function is deeply deeply ingrained. Now were going to do things different runs head long in people expectation on whats legitimate. In particular effecting change by wholesale murdering people tends to just make things worse not better.

TotalCrackpot 3y ago

I'm an anarchist, but you can read on for example council communism, which too is a libertarian socialism, it's Marxist and it is against Marxism-Leninism.

brnaftr361 3y ago

"Industrialism" (I lack a better term) is the real bane here. But it's sort of more than that, right? At the macroscopic level I think it's fair to analogize humanity as a system searching for equilibrium. But we can also do work on ourselves through technical and cultural revolutions. My foray into the past, watching the present, and my projections of the future all paint the classic "monkeypaw" trope. We cure childhood disease and population booms, increases the breadth of the economy, consumes masses of fuel and component elements while jointly polluting everything... We destabilize the system, creating novel problems of various sclae, and it just repeats ad nauseum. It doesn't matter what system you use, as long as we're complicating things as such none of them will ever "succeed" because they require some ideal state approximation that we will never let arise. In engineering everything is a compromise, you can't have your cake and eat it too, etc... Neither Marx nor Friedman are really wrong, per se, but they can't be right, either. From there it's just a matter of moral convictions, at least in my opinion, which paints everything with an even less discernible gray.

2moreweeks 3y ago
Quoting: "We cure childhood disease and population booms, increases the breadth of the economy, consumes masses of fuel and component elements while jointly polluting everything... We destabilize the system, creating novel problems of various sclae, and it just repeats ad nauseum. It doesn't matter what system you use, as long as we're complicating things as such none of them will ever "succeed" because they require some ideal state" Yesterday, i saw people disputing at the internet. I'd not read nor join their conflict, but made my jokes about. For today i intended to read, how and what they said. Quoting (another Topic on HN) some Posts more: "Further: progress will occur on real-world problems that can be solved by those methods, making those applications dominant throughout society." (especialy everything looks like its natural to someone) Jesssus! They need a pulling-horse, that dies... (-; "Taste was bitter at the time, but it was never going to be forever. In 2018 models had 100e6 parameters, and in 2013 GPT4 has (wild guess) 2e12 parameters [0]. Conservatively that's 500% per year. At it's peak, hardware never improved at that rate and has since slowed down dramatically. So it was always going to end, and further advancement was always going to revert being driven by a neural net of some sort." The interesting question when neural net will end up driving it. "Posits that making a huge model won't be a competitive strategy for long because it gets to expensive in terms of heavy quantization." # ...you may also like to read about: "KYBERNETIK", "Prozessablaufmaschinen", Bottleneck... (calms) regards...

randomdata 3y ago

> I'm generally not aware of how to make it work without significant centralized power. You get rid of the need for power entirely. Communism, by definition, is free of state. That hinges on achieving post-scarcity. The Communist Party’s primary tenant is achieving post-scarcity to one day usher in communism. The Soviet model failed, really, because they never got there. Probably not because of a poor power dynamic, but because post-scarcity was, and still is, beyond our grasp. It may not even be possible. When you think about it, the Soviet model is fundamentally designed to fail! If everything went according to plan, it would have fallen to communism. It was never meant to be sustainable.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
vasco 3y ago
What I never understood about communism is what's the point of adding it if you already have post-scarcity? Say you got there, just keep using what got you there. And if to get there you need an oppressive "temporary" state, then I don't want it.
- randomdata 3y ago
  What are you adding, exactly? Communism is just a thought experiment that imagines what the world will be like when post-scarcity is achieved. Star Trek is a more modern adaptation of the same thought experiment. Perhaps you are referring to actionable ideas we have come up with over the years to try and push us towards post-scarcity?
- vidarh 3y ago
  The idea is that if that the capability to be post scarcity does not equal being actually post scarcity, and so bringing about actual post-scarcity means ensuring that what is produced actually gets into the hands of everyone one way or the other. One might imagine many different ways of achieving that, but it wouldn't magically happen.
OfSanguineFire 3y ago

TotalCrackpot 3y ago

Where are these discussions? I'm an anarchist and could give anarchist lens to wherever is such a discussion happening.

simonh 3y ago
YouTube video comments, Reddit subs, Twitt…er I mean X. Probably Facebook. Occasionally Hacker News. In my experience mostly ad hoc rather than one big town hall on politics, though those may exist.

readthenotes1 3y ago

"once they have power, they are likely be corrupted by it." I believe Robert Caro was more insightful than Lord Acton: Power doesn't corrupt; it reveals.

a1369209993 3y ago
> Power doesn't corrupt; it reveals. That's true, but it's easy to misrepresent if you don't include another important insight: "I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides." -- Lord Vetinari (by way of Terry Pratchett)
- dennis_jeeves1 3y ago
  That's a good way to put it. It's very accurate to the extent I understand most humans.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  Really? I call. There has to at least be a shade even though I think he was incorrect. Because otherwise all bosses would be equally shitty and you would not be able to foresee with uttermost certainty how bad people will become shitty bosses when promoted to power. It is equally obvious in the military how you know who will turn out to be really bad people once promoted to sergeants.
  - a1369209993 3y ago
    > would be equally shitty [emphasis added] It's "always bad", not "always equally bad". The upshot is that "Okay, we just need to find someone who power will reveal is not shitty." does not and cannot work in the general case (of amounts of power sufficently large to be worth abusing - your 'good' sergeants are still sergeants, not generals or absolute autocrats).
    - rightbyte 3y ago