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The leadership of nations requires you to put pressure on the thoughts and minds of your people, left to their own devices those minds will simply be shaped by
by colechristensen 2mo ago
The leadership of nations requires you to put pressure on the thoughts and minds of your people, left to their own devices those minds will simply be shaped by someone else.
The morality in it comes from your motivation and methods. Secretly giving piles of money to the weirdos you successfully identify as being the leaders of artistic movements to amplify those movements can't be all that bad.
The question of the day is if you were the CIA trying to do the same thing today, who and what would you fund?
- left-struck 2mo agoI would fund things which make people less susceptible to manipulation and more equipped to think for themselves. Because I believe in democracy not as a political tool but as a fundamental right. I don’t wish to use democracy to gain more power. But maybe that’s why I’ll never be in that position, to make that choice.
- verisimi 2mo ago> I would fund things which make people less susceptible to manipulation and more equipped to think for themselves. This also would be manipulative. If you think society can provide you freedom, you are looking in the wrong places.
- left-struck 2mo agoHow would that be manipulative?
- verisimi 2mo agoIf you alter people's natural behaviour so that they are less manipulative, do you think this is the same as having not taken that action? It is a (further) unnatural intervention. It would be like giving someone an emetic because they ate too much. The anti-manipulation training or the emetic could be beneficial, I agree. The 'proper' answer would be to address the manipulator, to prevent their interventions, so that they can live their lives naturally, if they are not harming anyone.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- electricboots 2mo agoI think we can work together and provide ourselves freedom/collective agency/ some amount of say in the order of things
- ninalanyon 2mo agoSo where should one look? It seems tome that society is very much what does provide freedom, just not all freedoms.
- verisimi 2mo agoOne should look to oneself, and act according to what you believe to be right. Internalising an externally provided morality is not it.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- ninalanyon 2mo agoSo you don't learn from other people's experience?
- derektank 2mo agoI wouldn’t because the CIA is explicitly barred by Congress (Title 50 U.S.C. § 3093) from conducting influence operations intended to affect American public opinion since the Intelligence Authorization Act of 1991.
- telotortium 2mo agoHence why USAID was (allegedly) co-opted to perform the same role. The right-wing areas of the internet, even now, say the decline of whatever progressive or left-wing phenomenon they’re talking about is because they ran out of money after USAID was defunded.