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Power might be hard to ignore, but wealth you literally just can.
by fastball 11mo ago
Power might be hard to ignore, but wealth you literally just can.
- subw00f 11mo agoWealth is power
- fastball 11mo agoThen surely GC would've only needed to say "power"?
- dpark 11mo agoIt’s naive to believe these are not connected. Wealth buys power.
- palmotea 11mo ago> It’s naive to believe these are not connected. Wealth buys power. Raw power > wealth (see Putin, Vladimir: he doesn't need wealth or even to "own" anything, his raw power gets him everything wealth can buy and more). But for weaker people who aren't so powerful to control the system itself, wealth can get you a lot of power within that system.
- fastball 11mo agoThey are not intrinsically connected. Not everyone who is wealthy is powerful, not everyone who is powerful is wealthy.
- b00ty4breakfast 11mo ago"lemme just jump in this swimming pool while ignoring the water"
- SimianSci 11mo agoWealth is allowing people to buy consent for their worldviews these days. this is an incredibly naiive take.
- IncreasePosts 11mo agoHow does one buy consent for a worldview? Buying and selling require two parties - the party who is selling their viewpoint to the highest bidder isn't blameless.
- lenkite 11mo agoThe party who accepts the bid generally wins the election.
- relaxing 11mo agoTraditionally, through personal networks in media and industry — placing talking heads and op-ed’s and editorial direction to repeat your message. More recently, purchasing a social network and then flooding it with your worldview.
- strictlymomo 11mo agoWhen you say “these days,” you mean the past 10,000 years, right? Power based on consent likely existed throughout the Holocene: “Big men” with their gift-giving and elaborate feasts, chiefdoms comprised of aristocratic lineages… the gameplan has always been to collect favors by promising future returns, religious blessings, and the like. You can see the parallels to present-day VC. These pre-historic admin dudes emerged alongside the steepening wealth inequality gradients and population growths of agrarian societies. Comforting to know their influence is limited and precarious, as the social following can always fragment. This is what anthropologists call segmentary structures. More interesting, if severely depressing, is the theory that power based on consent is arguably the precondition for scaling social cohesion beyond kin and villages to cities and civilizations, thereby serving as the foundation for more durable power structures.
- fastball 11mo agoIf you have bought consent, you have power.
- flag_fagger 11mo agoThey’re roughly proxies for each other. But I think land is a much more fundamental source of power. Makes sense that a lot of these types have started to invest in defense fortresses and opine about building new cities.
- forgetfreeman 11mo agoThat's a dangerously myopic take in a political landscape where money == speech and speech == influence.
- BugsJustFindMe 11mo agoIt's weird to not understand that wealth buys power.
- lenkite 11mo agoHow does a politician or his opponent ignore millions of dollars donated to political campaigns ?