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Everyone thinks when they have power, they’ll use it correctly, because they have (from their perspective) good intentions. An ideal government with total surv
by armchairhacker 1y ago
Everyone thinks when they have power, they’ll use it correctly, because they have (from their perspective) good intentions.
An ideal government with total surveillance is the best case. You get the benefits of low crime without the drawback of corruption and ideology.
The problem is in practice:
- Large institutions aren’t good at exercising fine control: even if the leaders have truly good intentions, corrupt mid-level employees and inaccurate data lead to bad outcomes.
- Good leaders seem to often pick bad successors, and unless they frequently pick better successors, someone will eventually pick a corrupt one.
- Corrupt leaders seem to be good at ousting or sidelining good leaders, more than vice versa, perhaps because good leaders are less passionate about gaining and keeping power.
Perhaps there are other reasons. Not just ideal governments, but even self-preserving governments don’t tend to last. Hence, although decentralization and privacy are never ideal, they should exist at least for backup, “just in case” (inevitably in practice) the centralized surveillance system goes rouge.
- bombdailer 1y agoThere's a reason Plato's Republic looks authoritarian to people, because it models a city in which justice is the highest good, and justice and freedom are ultimately opposed to each other. Since governments and laws exist to ensure justice, freedom will always be the price we pay.
- potato3732842 1y ago>governments and laws exist to ensure justice Governments mostly exist to coordinate resource usage to out compete other societies. Some amount of justice and welfare and roads, or whatever other things (varied by society and time period), are what they pay us so that our compliance is mostly voluntary and is therefore substantially more efficient. You can bicker over exact word choice and the minute, but this general form is how it's always been from the present all the way back into the ancient world.
- airstrike 1y agoGovernments exist to monopolize violence in the hands of a few so that we may have less violence and more order overall.
- churchill 1y ago>There's a reason Plato's Republic looks authoritarian to people, because it models a city in which justice is the highest good, and justice and freedom are ultimately opposed to each other. So, Singapore?
- martin-t 1y ago> Good leaders seem to often pick bad successors This whole way of thinking makes my skin crawl. Just like sex, any kind of power exchange needs consent. This whole idea that people are led or need to be led is wrong. Perhaps some people do but that's their problem, it shouldn't be mine. What politicians are is decision makers, not leaders. We don't have time to vote on every single law personally, so we appoint temporary assistants who do it for us, based on our preferences. That's how it should work. These assistants should work for us, not lead us. We should always have the power to override their decisions and to remove and replace them at any time. Of course, making this work in a practical manner, while satisfying constraints such as secrecy of votes, is difficult. I don't dispute that but we should be striving to find ways to get as close to this ideal as possible, not making politics into a career or treating it as a reality show. And most certainly, these assistants ("leaders" as you call them) should not be picking their successors without our consent.
- CobrastanJorji 1y agoVoting isn't necessarily a better system. The majority of people will very frequently give up rights in any given specific case that, in general, they hold dear. We're not rational actors. And there are a lot of really weird discussions to be had about "consent," too. If we allow unlimited speech, that means that we're all subject to marketing and propaganda, and that's another thing that people are quite vulnerable to. Being convinced to vote via propaganda isn't really a great example of consent. But banning any speech that resembles propaganda is rife with problems. Anyway, my point is that democracy/voting and free speech isn't necessarily the most free/consented-to form of government. I'm not sure what would take its place, though. I certainly wish I knew.
- hammock 1y agoDunno where parent said anything about democracy. Democracy and voting aren’t the same thing also they rejected the idea of voting on every law (democracy). It seems inherent in your worldview that you lack faith in people to self govern (that is, for a person to govern themselves. Which would explain why you are at odds with the parent. I suggest you read a bit of Jefferson’s ideas of self governance, education, etc. There are tradeoffs as with everything else, I do think based solely on your short commentary here that there may be an opportunity for your perspective to be enriched however
- immibis 1y ago> the benefits of low crime Note: An ideal government wouldn't define a bunch of victimless behaviour as a crime. Low crime would mean low murder, low car hijackings, etc - things that actually affect people.
- novia 1y agoWhich crimes do you think are victimless exactly?
- immibis 1y agoThink of smoking marijuana on your balcony at home. Society does not get better if we punish that more - or at all. That just shouldn't be a crime to begin with. You also shouldn't do it, because smoking is bad for you, but that's not a reason to make it a crime. Though it may be that a better society makes fewer people want to smoke.
- 1718627440 1y agoYou do pay people growing plants that don't provide a good to society and you do alter your state of mind which affects others and you do destroy your health a cost which also payed by others.
- xkcd-sucks 1y agoBasically these are the effects of a job in software management, minus the plants
- 1718627440 1y agoCare to elaborate that?
- immibis 1y agoWatching Netflix. You pay people streaming movies that don't provide a good to society and you do alter your state of mind which affects others and you do destroy your health a cost which also payed by others. The argument you used earlier could be applied to literally anything, so if it's valid, literally everything should be a crime. I don't think the argument is valid. You can't counter-argue that streaming movies is good for society, but growing plants isn't. I think it's the other way around, actually.
- 1718627440 1y agoEveryone has good intentions including the actual Nazis.
- tripzilch 1y agodon't try and tell me that some power can corrupt a person, you haven't had enough to know what it's like (Nine Inch Nails - Capital G)