10 ms·

I don’t even think most of it is deeply philosophical. They just got uberrich and now worry more about the concerns of the uberrich than the concerns they had

I don’t even think most of it is deeply philosophical. They just got uberrich and now worry more about the concerns of the uberrich than the concerns they had when they were normies. Rule of law, functioning government providing services, functioning public commons, free press, freedom of speech for all, any social safety net, etc don’t matter when they are so far removed from the public they can just go buy yourself an island/citizenship/president. Suddenly small differences in marginal tax brackets, antitrust enforcement & limits on the ability to simply buy the government they want are the biggest encroachments on freedom they feel.

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
jurgenburgen 2mo ago
> Rule of law, functioning government providing services Jokes on them, without rule of law and functioning government to enforce it there is no ownership.
- ygjb 2mo ago
  Jokes on you. When there isn't a functional system of government there is nothing to stop rich psychopaths from paying poor psychopaths killing those who get in there way and declaring themselves dictators. In the absence of effective laws to align people in the direction of the society they want, and constant effort to realign in response to pressure, we will fall back to tribalism and all of the attendant forms of feudalism and government that came before it. Ownership then reverts to might (or those with the resources to buy might) makes right.
  - yks 2mo ago
    In societies like that, Silicon Valley’s rich nerds might discover that they’re not the ones with the real might, see Putin’s Russia, which many of them adore. Money is but one of the facets of power.
    - jltsiren 2mo ago
      Russia is a country with a strong centralized government capable of enforcing laws whenever it wants. In the absence of effective laws, one of the biggest threats to rich people would be their own hired thugs. If the thugs decide that they don't respect you and they would make better rich assholes, they will kill you and take your property. Historically, societies like that were often ruled by the biggest and the most charismatic thugs, who could command the respect of lesser thugs. Or warrior nobility, if you want a fancier term. Today's billionaire nerds would not be among those.
      - TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
        If I was a semi-rich thug boss I'd hire out my thugs as security to all the nervous billionaire nerds. Including cybersecurity. Then I could make a move whenever.
      - steveBK123 2mo ago
        It’s no accident that the schmoozer media/real estate/car dealer/mining/energy guys in US wield more power than their wealth relative to SV VC bros would seem to merit.
      - yks 2mo ago
        Russian state is a final form of the thug-centric governance. The economic oligarchs maintain their riches at the behest of thugs, but they don’t have the power nor freedom.
        red-iron-pine 2mo ago
        that is the lesson of Khodorkovsky you can be the boyar and punch down, but you get uppity and challenge the Tsar you end up in a cage
      - AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
        > Russia is a country with a strong centralized government capable of enforcing laws whenever it wants. Russia is 15 slots lower than Nigeria on government corruption. Putin can easily have someone killed but the idea that if he needed money for the war he could get it by e.g. enforcing the law against taking kickbacks for misallocating public funds is so ridiculous that even attempting to do it might be one of the few things that could cause him to be removed from power. And for a similar reason he can't enforce laws that require any form of localized information, because everybody is just fabricating the numbers. The trouble with running a kleptocracy is that there's no honor among thieves.
  - swiftcoder 2mo ago
    > or those with the resources to buy might This feels a bit like those rich survivalists who think they are going to fix bomb-collars to their bodyguards to ensure loyalty in the apocalypse... stock certificates aren't worth a whole lot in a world where the rule of law has broken down
    - ygjb 2mo ago
      I said resources not money. Charisma, religion and promoting hate have empowered just as many psychopaths in history as wealth.
      - swiftcoder 2mo ago
        Well, right, but I'm not sure the tech elites actually own much in the way of resources in that sense. Is the Apple fandom strong enough to get Tim Cook his own private army of zealots when society breaks down?
        danans 2mo ago
        > Is the Apple fandom strong enough to get Tim Cook his own private army of zealots when society breaks down? Society won't break down (in the chaos sense) and resources will still be allocated. Power abhors a vacuum as they say. It's just that resources and power will controlled and distributed in an openly feudal way. Technology's egalitarian objectives will be replaced by overtly oligarchic ones. Tech fandom will be replaced with other identities constructed to gain access to real resources owned and controlled by the few.
        andsoitis 2mo ago
        > access to real resources owned and controlled by the few. What’s an example of such a real resource?
        danans 2mo ago
        Land, housing, water, energy, food, medicines, healthcare, security, and proximity to influence. I'm sure I forgot a few.
  - SoftTalker 2mo ago
    The problem for them is that in the US, "those who get in the way" are armed.
    - ygjb 2mo ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOSqCjMRXWA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOSqCjMRXWA Granted, the wealthy may not have the resources of the US military, but I am willing to bet that push comes to shove, the corporate security forces of companies like palantir and anduril, let alone actual mainstream military hardware providers would be a far greater threat than armed civilians in a fully deregulated or collapsed American state. I don't care much about the 2nd amendment absolutists, and the myth of the American heroes who will stand up to tyranny, because so far the only thing they appear to have stood up for in the last hundred years are gun rights, religious fundamentalism, and in 2020, a demagogue. American exceptionalism and gun culture are important to Americans, but are pretty much viewed as narcissism and with skepticism outside of the US. YMMV, but like another comment I made recently, this isn't an anti-American sentiment, it's just a perspective from one of your neighbours to the north who has lots of Canadian and American friends and family living in the US.
  - hibikir 2mo ago
    At which point, GDP growth sinks like a rock, and those rich people become poorer in absolute terms. It's the typical outcome in the vast majority of autocracies. It's all over development economics literature, based on purely empirical studies. There's little reason to believe that the US is somehow an outlier. Weaken trust in the system, go from a system of laws to a system of deals, and watch growth go away, with all the unrest that brings. A pity that so many people in SV only read what flatters them.
    - lovich 2mo ago
      > At which point, GDP growth sinks like a rock, and those rich people become poorer in absolute terms. While I think these guys have an addiction to wealth, I also think they are even more addicted to having more than anyone else. I’m like 80/20 on if these guys would take living in the medieval era but we’re the king or emperor vs being a regular citizen in a Star Trek level of technology and post scarcity society. Rather rules over ashes and all that.
      - Gud 2mo ago
        There is no way these individuals would want to be demoted to "regular citizen" in Star Trek compared to being a medieval feudal lord. You don't even have to make them emperors.
- wat10000 2mo ago
  That was my first reaction too. Did the ultra rich not need to concern themselves with these petty matters in 1917 Russia, for example? But thinking more, things are different today. Wealth is international on a qualitatively different level than it was a hundred years ago. If you’re the richest of the rich in revolutionary Russia a century ago, you'll probably lose all of your wealth if not your life. If you’re very lucky you might end up in exile, struggling to survive. Now imagine something similar happening today in the home country of people like Zuck and Musk. It’s unlikely there would be any threat to their life. They might lose a chunk of their wealth, but they’re sufficiently diversified that they’ll still be among the wealthiest people in the world no matter what happens.
Avicebron 2mo ago
I think part of the problem this go around is that the information landscape has changed so much in ~30 years, that we are still trying to grapple with how to navigate this new terrain. If information and technology is causing everything to accelerate, we need new democratic structures to properly counter the perverse incentives of capital to compound it's power endlessly.
lenerdenator 2mo ago
This is what happens when you have VCs putting on hackathons at NorCal universities and scooping people off the campuses before they ever get their degrees. If you take a guy under the age of 25, give him millions of dollars, and tell him he's a genius, he's going to develop a personality disorder.
- steveBK123 2mo ago
  And many start with a personality disorder already so it only compounds
- jimbob45 2mo ago
  Same with D1 NCAAF athletes. They’re getting millions starting at age 18 from NIL. There’s just no way that’s healthy even if we all agree NIL was the morally correct path forward.
  - tacomonstrous 2mo ago
    The true morally correct path would have been to take big money out of college sports (not to mention high school sport) entirely. Of course this is now essentially impossible without what I imagine will be extensive rioting countrywide.
    - jimbob45 2mo ago
      How? Charge stadium ticket prices and jerseys at cost?
      - Gud 2mo ago
        This is only a problem in the USA. In Sweden, we don't have enormous college stadiums.
      - labcomputer 2mo ago
        Sure, why not? The founding charter of every D1 football school claims that it is a non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of education. It is still a mystery to me how recruiting "student athletes", with well below-average academic qualifications and superior athletic qualifications, giving them full-ride scholarships (which can be revoked if they fail to perform on the field) and allowing them to take the easiest courses (with dedicated tutoring staff looking over their shoulders), all while paying coaches the highest salaries on campus and using ticket sales to fund ever-bigger stadiums, has anything at all to do with education. Perhaps the connection to education is that it is meant to be an object lesson (for the rest of the student body) in how to spot corruption and hypocrisy within power structures. So I see two paths forward: Admit that the whole thing is a sham and just pay the football players their due; or turn legit and take the big money out of college sports by having actual student-athletes (who are students first).
swiftcoder 2mo ago
> I don’t even think most of it is deeply philosophical. Part of the problem is that a lot of it is shallowly philosophical. I used to attend Zuckerberg town halls, and as smart as the guy may be, it's pretty evident that he dropped out of Harvard after 1st-year philosophy
- epgui 2mo ago
  A lot of “shallow philosophy” seems more like “pseudo-philosophy”. I feel like a lot of people just take “thoughts” and label that philosophy.
  - jfengel 2mo ago
    People really don't get how poorly freshman philosophy presents the field. It's not even a survey of an introduction to a prologue. So every passing thought feels like "philosophy".
    - lisper 2mo ago
      It doesn’t help that a lot of philosophy is actually bullshit.
      - demilicious 2mo ago
        mind defending that? I suspect that opinion would only come from one who took philosophy 101 and stopped there. If all you took was philosophy 101, this sounds a lot more reasonable and runs right into the point made by the pos you just responded to
        lisper 2mo ago
        How would you expect me to defend it? It's my opinion. I could give you a long list of things in philosophy that I consider BS, but what good would that do? Do you really doubt that I could provide such a list? The most likely outcome of that exercise would be for you to invoke the no-true-scotsman fallacy and say, "Oh, of course those things are bullshit, but that's not real philosophy." And the fact that I can make that prediction with confidence is my defense. If you really want my list, since this is HN, I'll start with Ayn Rand and the Austrian school. You can read this if you like: https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/03/murray-rothbard-was-idiot.html https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/03/murray-rothbard-was-idio... Oh, and since this is HN, I'll also invoke an argument from authority and cite: https://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html https://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html
gaigalas 2mo ago
Sci-fi works are surfaces in which you can project future realities allegorically. Every single person has the right to project what they want. The issue here is that people don't have the education to make those projections, so they borrow for meaning they can't derive for themselves. Wealthy people know this and abuse this effect. It is, however, a self-correcting mechanism (you can't actually conjure realities, opinions are very ephemeral things). Might take a couple of centuries, but reality will show itself.
petermcneeley 2mo ago
Clarification. None of the silicon valley elite were ever "normies". I would guess most of them come from the top > %1 of society. This is just a rival elite not a non-elite.
- crote 2mo ago
  They started with nothing, in a garage! An unused three-car garage next to their parents' mansion. While living at home, without having to pay for basic things like food. And with a $100k loan from the other guy's parents. And with daddy's business contacts being the first customers, and being the angel investors. Absolutely nothing, all their own hard work!
  - jocaal 2mo ago
    This is a naive take. Sure they had wealth, but multiplying wealth to the scale some of those people do is no easy feat. I am not defending them, just trying to state a fact.
    - petermcneeley 2mo ago
      Were did bill gates mother work?
techblueberry 2mo ago
I listened to a few Marc Andreesen interviews and occasioned some Thiel talks, and one thing I realized is the difference between philosophy as obligation or compass and philosophy as tool. I realized that when Marc Andreesen said things - specifically he was talking about the political realignment after the 2024 election. He wasn’t making an observation. He was manifesting - to borrow a new age term. It wasn’t propaganda in the way we think about it. He wasn’t strictly speaking trying to convince me the listener it was true. He was trying to make it true through the force of his influence.
- kraussvonespy 2mo ago
  Well said. Your last stanza is Orwellian.
- zombot 2mo ago
  The powerful don't need to convince. They simply command. They get used to it in their personal surroundings and then they expect it to work everywhere.
  - aiisjustanif 2mo ago
    If by command you mean by using coercion or compulsion. Then history has told multiple stories that show to sustain power you need more than just to command. Whether it be centuries ago like in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the Russian Revolution of 1917, or the more recent complex stories of power like Euromaiden in 2013. In my opinion history and modern time supports the theory of hegemony very well. Ironically one the top modern examples of the powerful understanding the need to convince and executing on those goals is the global dominance of Silicon Valley tech platforms and the billionaires that lead them. They shape what is "common sense," and political discourse worldwide without direct command.
  - gdilla 2mo ago
    they do to the extent they don't want to be eaten. Sure they can retire to their fortified bunkers but that's more insurance than it is a way of life they want to promote.
peterashford 2mo ago
I think the philosophy is post-hoc justification of their actions.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

jurgenburgen 2mo ago

> Rule of law, functioning government providing services Jokes on them, without rule of law and functioning government to enforce it there is no ownership.

ygjb 2mo ago
Jokes on you. When there isn't a functional system of government there is nothing to stop rich psychopaths from paying poor psychopaths killing those who get in there way and declaring themselves dictators. In the absence of effective laws to align people in the direction of the society they want, and constant effort to realign in response to pressure, we will fall back to tribalism and all of the attendant forms of feudalism and government that came before it. Ownership then reverts to might (or those with the resources to buy might) makes right.
- yks 2mo ago
  In societies like that, Silicon Valley’s rich nerds might discover that they’re not the ones with the real might, see Putin’s Russia, which many of them adore. Money is but one of the facets of power.
  - jltsiren 2mo ago
    Russia is a country with a strong centralized government capable of enforcing laws whenever it wants. In the absence of effective laws, one of the biggest threats to rich people would be their own hired thugs. If the thugs decide that they don't respect you and they would make better rich assholes, they will kill you and take your property. Historically, societies like that were often ruled by the biggest and the most charismatic thugs, who could command the respect of lesser thugs. Or warrior nobility, if you want a fancier term. Today's billionaire nerds would not be among those.
    - TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
      If I was a semi-rich thug boss I'd hire out my thugs as security to all the nervous billionaire nerds. Including cybersecurity. Then I could make a move whenever.
    - steveBK123 2mo ago
      It’s no accident that the schmoozer media/real estate/car dealer/mining/energy guys in US wield more power than their wealth relative to SV VC bros would seem to merit.
    - yks 2mo ago
      Russian state is a final form of the thug-centric governance. The economic oligarchs maintain their riches at the behest of thugs, but they don’t have the power nor freedom.
      - red-iron-pine 2mo ago
        that is the lesson of Khodorkovsky you can be the boyar and punch down, but you get uppity and challenge the Tsar you end up in a cage
    - AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
      > Russia is a country with a strong centralized government capable of enforcing laws whenever it wants. Russia is 15 slots lower than Nigeria on government corruption. Putin can easily have someone killed but the idea that if he needed money for the war he could get it by e.g. enforcing the law against taking kickbacks for misallocating public funds is so ridiculous that even attempting to do it might be one of the few things that could cause him to be removed from power. And for a similar reason he can't enforce laws that require any form of localized information, because everybody is just fabricating the numbers. The trouble with running a kleptocracy is that there's no honor among thieves.
- swiftcoder 2mo ago
  > or those with the resources to buy might This feels a bit like those rich survivalists who think they are going to fix bomb-collars to their bodyguards to ensure loyalty in the apocalypse... stock certificates aren't worth a whole lot in a world where the rule of law has broken down
  - ygjb 2mo ago
    I said resources not money. Charisma, religion and promoting hate have empowered just as many psychopaths in history as wealth.
    - swiftcoder 2mo ago
      Well, right, but I'm not sure the tech elites actually own much in the way of resources in that sense. Is the Apple fandom strong enough to get Tim Cook his own private army of zealots when society breaks down?
      - danans 2mo ago
        > Is the Apple fandom strong enough to get Tim Cook his own private army of zealots when society breaks down? Society won't break down (in the chaos sense) and resources will still be allocated. Power abhors a vacuum as they say. It's just that resources and power will controlled and distributed in an openly feudal way. Technology's egalitarian objectives will be replaced by overtly oligarchic ones. Tech fandom will be replaced with other identities constructed to gain access to real resources owned and controlled by the few.
        andsoitis 2mo ago
        > access to real resources owned and controlled by the few. What’s an example of such a real resource?
        danans 2mo ago
        Land, housing, water, energy, food, medicines, healthcare, security, and proximity to influence. I'm sure I forgot a few.
- SoftTalker 2mo ago
  The problem for them is that in the US, "those who get in the way" are armed.
  - ygjb 2mo ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOSqCjMRXWA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOSqCjMRXWA Granted, the wealthy may not have the resources of the US military, but I am willing to bet that push comes to shove, the corporate security forces of companies like palantir and anduril, let alone actual mainstream military hardware providers would be a far greater threat than armed civilians in a fully deregulated or collapsed American state. I don't care much about the 2nd amendment absolutists, and the myth of the American heroes who will stand up to tyranny, because so far the only thing they appear to have stood up for in the last hundred years are gun rights, religious fundamentalism, and in 2020, a demagogue. American exceptionalism and gun culture are important to Americans, but are pretty much viewed as narcissism and with skepticism outside of the US. YMMV, but like another comment I made recently, this isn't an anti-American sentiment, it's just a perspective from one of your neighbours to the north who has lots of Canadian and American friends and family living in the US.
- hibikir 2mo ago
  At which point, GDP growth sinks like a rock, and those rich people become poorer in absolute terms. It's the typical outcome in the vast majority of autocracies. It's all over development economics literature, based on purely empirical studies. There's little reason to believe that the US is somehow an outlier. Weaken trust in the system, go from a system of laws to a system of deals, and watch growth go away, with all the unrest that brings. A pity that so many people in SV only read what flatters them.
  - lovich 2mo ago
    > At which point, GDP growth sinks like a rock, and those rich people become poorer in absolute terms. While I think these guys have an addiction to wealth, I also think they are even more addicted to having more than anyone else. I’m like 80/20 on if these guys would take living in the medieval era but we’re the king or emperor vs being a regular citizen in a Star Trek level of technology and post scarcity society. Rather rules over ashes and all that.
    - Gud 2mo ago
      There is no way these individuals would want to be demoted to "regular citizen" in Star Trek compared to being a medieval feudal lord. You don't even have to make them emperors.
wat10000 2mo ago
That was my first reaction too. Did the ultra rich not need to concern themselves with these petty matters in 1917 Russia, for example? But thinking more, things are different today. Wealth is international on a qualitatively different level than it was a hundred years ago. If you’re the richest of the rich in revolutionary Russia a century ago, you'll probably lose all of your wealth if not your life. If you’re very lucky you might end up in exile, struggling to survive. Now imagine something similar happening today in the home country of people like Zuck and Musk. It’s unlikely there would be any threat to their life. They might lose a chunk of their wealth, but they’re sufficiently diversified that they’ll still be among the wealthiest people in the world no matter what happens.

Avicebron 2mo ago

I think part of the problem this go around is that the information landscape has changed so much in ~30 years, that we are still trying to grapple with how to navigate this new terrain. If information and technology is causing everything to accelerate, we need new democratic structures to properly counter the perverse incentives of capital to compound it's power endlessly.

lenerdenator 2mo ago

This is what happens when you have VCs putting on hackathons at NorCal universities and scooping people off the campuses before they ever get their degrees. If you take a guy under the age of 25, give him millions of dollars, and tell him he's a genius, he's going to develop a personality disorder.

steveBK123 2mo ago
And many start with a personality disorder already so it only compounds
jimbob45 2mo ago
Same with D1 NCAAF athletes. They’re getting millions starting at age 18 from NIL. There’s just no way that’s healthy even if we all agree NIL was the morally correct path forward.
- tacomonstrous 2mo ago
  The true morally correct path would have been to take big money out of college sports (not to mention high school sport) entirely. Of course this is now essentially impossible without what I imagine will be extensive rioting countrywide.
  - jimbob45 2mo ago
    How? Charge stadium ticket prices and jerseys at cost?
    - Gud 2mo ago
      This is only a problem in the USA. In Sweden, we don't have enormous college stadiums.
    - labcomputer 2mo ago
      Sure, why not? The founding charter of every D1 football school claims that it is a non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of education. It is still a mystery to me how recruiting "student athletes", with well below-average academic qualifications and superior athletic qualifications, giving them full-ride scholarships (which can be revoked if they fail to perform on the field) and allowing them to take the easiest courses (with dedicated tutoring staff looking over their shoulders), all while paying coaches the highest salaries on campus and using ticket sales to fund ever-bigger stadiums, has anything at all to do with education. Perhaps the connection to education is that it is meant to be an object lesson (for the rest of the student body) in how to spot corruption and hypocrisy within power structures. So I see two paths forward: Admit that the whole thing is a sham and just pay the football players their due; or turn legit and take the big money out of college sports by having actual student-athletes (who are students first).

swiftcoder 2mo ago

> I don’t even think most of it is deeply philosophical. Part of the problem is that a lot of it is shallowly philosophical. I used to attend Zuckerberg town halls, and as smart as the guy may be, it's pretty evident that he dropped out of Harvard after 1st-year philosophy

epgui 2mo ago
A lot of “shallow philosophy” seems more like “pseudo-philosophy”. I feel like a lot of people just take “thoughts” and label that philosophy.
- jfengel 2mo ago
  People really don't get how poorly freshman philosophy presents the field. It's not even a survey of an introduction to a prologue. So every passing thought feels like "philosophy".
  - lisper 2mo ago
    It doesn’t help that a lot of philosophy is actually bullshit.
    - demilicious 2mo ago
      mind defending that? I suspect that opinion would only come from one who took philosophy 101 and stopped there. If all you took was philosophy 101, this sounds a lot more reasonable and runs right into the point made by the pos you just responded to
      - lisper 2mo ago
        How would you expect me to defend it? It's my opinion. I could give you a long list of things in philosophy that I consider BS, but what good would that do? Do you really doubt that I could provide such a list? The most likely outcome of that exercise would be for you to invoke the no-true-scotsman fallacy and say, "Oh, of course those things are bullshit, but that's not real philosophy." And the fact that I can make that prediction with confidence is my defense. If you really want my list, since this is HN, I'll start with Ayn Rand and the Austrian school. You can read this if you like: https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/03/murray-rothbard-was-idiot.html https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/03/murray-rothbard-was-idio... Oh, and since this is HN, I'll also invoke an argument from authority and cite: https://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html https://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html

gaigalas 2mo ago

Sci-fi works are surfaces in which you can project future realities allegorically. Every single person has the right to project what they want. The issue here is that people don't have the education to make those projections, so they borrow for meaning they can't derive for themselves. Wealthy people know this and abuse this effect. It is, however, a self-correcting mechanism (you can't actually conjure realities, opinions are very ephemeral things). Might take a couple of centuries, but reality will show itself.

petermcneeley 2mo ago

Clarification. None of the silicon valley elite were ever "normies". I would guess most of them come from the top > %1 of society. This is just a rival elite not a non-elite.

crote 2mo ago
They started with nothing, in a garage! An unused three-car garage next to their parents' mansion. While living at home, without having to pay for basic things like food. And with a $100k loan from the other guy's parents. And with daddy's business contacts being the first customers, and being the angel investors. Absolutely nothing, all their own hard work!
- jocaal 2mo ago
  This is a naive take. Sure they had wealth, but multiplying wealth to the scale some of those people do is no easy feat. I am not defending them, just trying to state a fact.
  - petermcneeley 2mo ago
    Were did bill gates mother work?

techblueberry 2mo ago

I listened to a few Marc Andreesen interviews and occasioned some Thiel talks, and one thing I realized is the difference between philosophy as obligation or compass and philosophy as tool. I realized that when Marc Andreesen said things - specifically he was talking about the political realignment after the 2024 election. He wasn’t making an observation. He was manifesting - to borrow a new age term. It wasn’t propaganda in the way we think about it. He wasn’t strictly speaking trying to convince me the listener it was true. He was trying to make it true through the force of his influence.

kraussvonespy 2mo ago
Well said. Your last stanza is Orwellian.
zombot 2mo ago
The powerful don't need to convince. They simply command. They get used to it in their personal surroundings and then they expect it to work everywhere.
- aiisjustanif 2mo ago
  If by command you mean by using coercion or compulsion. Then history has told multiple stories that show to sustain power you need more than just to command. Whether it be centuries ago like in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the Russian Revolution of 1917, or the more recent complex stories of power like Euromaiden in 2013. In my opinion history and modern time supports the theory of hegemony very well. Ironically one the top modern examples of the powerful understanding the need to convince and executing on those goals is the global dominance of Silicon Valley tech platforms and the billionaires that lead them. They shape what is "common sense," and political discourse worldwide without direct command.
- gdilla 2mo ago
  they do to the extent they don't want to be eaten. Sure they can retire to their fortified bunkers but that's more insurance than it is a way of life they want to promote.

peterashford 2mo ago

I think the philosophy is post-hoc justification of their actions.